Hacker News Reader

Comment by geoduck14 | Hacker News Reader

People are so quick to dismiss advertisements as "always bad", but they are part of a legitimate ecosystem that IS BENEFICIAL TO YOU.

Sales people, recruiters, advertisements, marketing departments - they all help me understand what is being sold so I can buy things that I GENUINELY want or need

It is true that there are garbage advertisements out there, and they should be pruned. But if YOU write really awesome code at work and you want people to use it, ask yourself, how do other people know they should use it?

You tell them. You talk, you email, you set up Confluence pages with documentation. All of this is a part of the advertising ecosystem - and it helps the creator AND the consumer

View on HN

This statement is just a perfect illustration of how manipulation has been normalized in our everyday lives. Your attention constantly being undermined for the benefit of perpetual awareness of consumer goods is just how things should be apparently. I guess if you're in the business of writing "really awesome code" to force people's attention into spending money you have to believe in advertising as a civil right or something but society as a whole doesn't have to agree with you.

I personally believe the vast majority of advertisements are nothing more than mental pollution. While there is a place and time for promotion, I feel like there should be spaces specifically designed for advertisements. I have no problem whatsoever with businesses trying to get my attention when I specifically look for some relevant service. I’m not talking about peppering my search results with interstitial content, but rather, going to a website designed to find and purchase products or to find services/contractors for hire.

Spaces like ... search engines, where you go and search specifically for the business you want?

Are you arguing that only Google should be allowed to make money from advertising online?

That is not what he claimed at all, and you know that.

One does not go to google to get ads, one goes to google to get results, which ads subtract from.

GP was likely talking about a dedicated space, say ads or offers.com.

No, lots of people absolutely go to Google to get ads. How many people do you think are looking for Wikipedia when they search for something like "flowers" and it's February 14th?

This idea people seem to have here that nobody likes or ever needs/uses ads is just plain wrong. These businesses aren't the size they are because ads are useless noise.

Is it big deal to specify in your search what you want to do with the "flowers"?

Yes! Getting rid of the need to learn special syntaxes and awkward commands is a big part of why people use search so much. Again, I really cannot stress this enough. Nobody outside of the HN bubble thinks the way this works is a problem.

I welcome them when I am on the Shopping tab of a search engine. Not so much in general queries.

Lots of ads are for things that aren't appropriate for Shopping, e.g. most service businesses. So that wouldn't work. Universal search is a ship that sailed long ago my friend. People find it useful and Google has tons of metrics to back it up. It's not going away. Mixed mode search is just so much easier to use.

Society as a whole is employed by either the government, or companies that use advertising to generate cash and pay salaries; not sure which other system you are advocating.

It's interesting that employment is the only framing you're able to perceive this argument through.

Even so, a total loss of privacy isn't a given within advertising itself (it's a fairly new phenomenon).

Lots of software I use on a daily basis has no marketing team and became dominant on its merits alone. I would rather all software competed on its merits.

As for you main point about advertising helping me find products I genuinely want/need, this couldn't be further from the truth in my experience. Recently I wanted a new laptop, and one of my criteria was that said laptop should not have pre-installed nonsense like mcafee/Norton(I mean I would be wiping the drive and installing Linux anyway but this is on principle). Anyway it turns out that all large laptop companies install some kind bloatware and also advertise aggressively, so it's quite difficult to search for a laptop without bloatware, since all the ads/seo are for laptops by companies with large advertising budgets and therefore have bloatware. More generally if I'm looking for a product I want there are generally multiple competing providers/manufacturers of said product, and I therefore must figure out which is better, and often there is a clear winner. However the other sides advertising team are incentivized to muddy the waters in this situation making it less obvious which products are best.

Also can you please not yell random words it's actually kind of jarring to read.

> has no marketing team

"has no marketing team" is different than "has no marketing".

the stars on github are part of marketing.

good docs are part of marketing.

that tweet from a 3rd party is marketing.

if a project isn't exposed anywhere and has no website (i.e. is completely private), then yes, it has no marketing. everything else has degrees of marketing baked in.

Sorry to respond to such an old thread.

Of course pretty much all communication is advertising in some way, but the topic here is the corporate kind with teams of people trying to optimize click through rates and the like. I don't think they are really comparable and I don't think its particularly difficult to tell the difference in most cases.

Before advertising was as widespread and exploited as it is today, people build businesses around service, quality, worth of mouth and recommendations. That resulted in some truly great things, and it seems that with advertising we've lost a lot of that. Ultimately it's probably to do with people being cheap and advertisements just exploit that.

At least for me personally, it has come to the point where I don't believe advertisements anymore.

The reason we've lost that, fundamentally, seems to be the outsourcing and centralization of manufacturing.

A brand used to mean something.

Now, it's a sticker covering the "Made in X" label, to arbitrage the difference between customer goodwill and actual manufacturing costs.

It's pervasive throughout the grocery store and department stores, but to me McDonald's is the poster child. Ostensibly you're getting a "McDonald's meal", but what that fundamentally means is you're getting minimal-cost food, manufactured as centrally as possible, with a bare minimum of prep done in the store.

Drop shipping and popup social media brands are the ultimate realization of this. If a brand means nothing, why shouldn't I just fabricate one, leverage the same supply chain, and compete on advertising alone?

At what point has media not been supported by advertising in the last 100+ years?

How would I have heard about anything computer related in the 80s in the small town south about computer products?

Even today I would have never heard about Backblaze, Linode etc if it weren’t for podcast ads.

I wouldn’t hear about local concerts, events etc either.

Quite the opposite for me. As a child I grew up in a "small" town of 30-40.000 I think, I would go to the store to see what was new including computers, I would swing by the local cinema to see what was coming. I don't recall advertising was in paid newspapers either. I would know about books from the library. It was far less advertisement driven and all about reputation and recommendations from experts, professionals and store owners.

In the 80s when I grew up. The library had two books on AppleSoft Basic. I learned the intricacies of the //e from InCider and buying books and software based on sending in a card in the back of the magazine where you could circle the products you were interested in.

The store owners were far from “experts”. They were either minimum wage workers at Sears who were in school or sales people selling to businesses.

> they all help me understand what is being sold

Do they? SEO spam sites, review spam on Amazon and the like, review kickback schemes, buying off of "influencers" on Youtube/Instagram/etc: these all add noise when I'm trying to understand what is being sold. In fact, many companies benefit (or think they benefit) from keeping me in the dark about what is being sold and many marketing departments make a living helping them keep me in the dark.

Seeing an ad for a product or service makes me less likely to buy/use it. Luckily for advertisers I block as much advertising as I can so I may still accidentally become their customer.

I don't think any of those roles you mention help me understand what is being sold. It's true they're bringing it to my attention but they'll also be lying about it to the maximum extent permitted by local laws.

While not all advertising is bad, most of it is. Like the ratio is more 95% bad - 5% good, not 50-50.

I might be on board if this infrastructure was mostly used by local businesses. However that has not been my experience. Most advertisers are National brands and politicians. So we have this tool which could maybe used by local businesses but more often is used by National brands to push consumerism.

I would also like to flip the perspective a bit. It’s more important to allow people to have a private and consensual relationship with the internet than it is for small businesses to advertise their services.

If useful ads designed to genuinely inform consumers were the norm it'd be one thing, but I don't think that's the case. The norm is deception and manipulation.

The majority of advertising boils down to this fundamental assertion: your life isn't as good as it could be and the solution is to buy <product>. It's plainly manipulative, and the effect this mindset has on society is hard to understate. It fosters feelings of inadequacy and stokes the fire of consumerism that's destroying the environment.

This isn't something Apple "did" to Facebook. Apple let people opt out of tracking. People chose privacy. Facebook's business model is not compatible with privacy.

> they all help me understand what is being sold so I can buy things that I GENUINELY want or need

Advertising literally undermines the understanding of what’s on offer, by trying to manipulate people into buying whatever was paid to be advertised, regardless of needs and wants.

In theory that is true.

In practice there is a direct correlation between adspend and sucky products and I don't use ads to find interesting things. I use tech tubers and reviewers for that.

I haven't seen an informative ad in ages. So they being beneficial to me in this sense is basically entirely bollocks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com