Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

Philosophically, that's still not convincing.

Lets take the most basic form of advertising as an example. If I put a couch in my yard with a price tag on it, I'm wanting people to notice and desire to buy it, but there's no malicious intent. I have a thing I want to get rid of, maybe someone wants to buy it. If I don't do that, no one will know it's for sale.

So I do think advertising is fundamentally benign, and despite what the original comment said, is absolutely part of supply and demand. People are supposed to generate supply and then sit around waiting for people to come see it?

Of course there's lots of bad stuff going on in advertising. Lies, inducing FOMO, unnecessary gathering of personal data, etc. But I'm not convinced that advertising is morally wrong in it's purest form.

View on HN

Can we perhaps draw a distinction between "selling" and "advertising"?

"Selling" is simply informing people of the availability of one half of an economic exchange. Putting a notice up that says "Sofa, $50 ONO" is no different than putting a notice up saying "will pay 50$ for sofa".

"Advertising", on the other hand, attempts to persuade. It endeavours to use psychology to create a transaction when one would otherwise not have taken place. It's a sign that says "Sofa, $50. Incredible value!!". This is not ethical because if we assume that the market would have converged on the correct price in the absence of advertising, then advertising distorts the market and makes it less efficient.

Note that unadorned "buying" and "selling" are mirror counterparts, but there's no buyer's counterpart to "advertising". This is because the value of money is well known and non-negotiable, while the value of the good or service is subject to influence. This is an inherent bias that always works in favor of the selling party.

>if we assume that the market would have converged on the correct price in the absence of advertising

>the value of money is well known and non-negotiable

I wouldn't start with these assumptions since prices fluctuate on their own for somewhat unpredictable reasons. Just because advertising is immoral in some ideal world, doesn't mean it's immoral in a real one.

The immorality is whether the product/service is any good.

Perversely, the more expensive a product the more perceived quality a product has, its perhaps why German cars are so popular. People like to show off their wealth which is what makes designer brands popular.

There is little point advertising monopoly products like fuel though, any advert is just going to be brand awareness maintenance in those situations, which also helps to keep the media/newspapers onboard for PR reasons to keep the bad press at bay!

I don't think this argument works. The acceptable price for a good is not actually clear cut. "True" market value is an equilibrium price between supply and demand. Both the supply and the demand will fluctuate and change over time, with many underlying factors influencing the aggregate number. The acceptable price is also different for different buyers, and in different regions. Advertising is just one of the factors that may affect demand alongside many others.

Additionally, you can argue there are many buyer's counterparts to advertising. At its most simple, the buyer has many tools to find items they want, i.e. search engines, etc. Additionally the buyer in many cases can inform the seller of an offer (generally below their desired pricing) and the seller can choose to accept or not. In some marketplaces, the buyer can effectively put out a request-to-buy, e.g. an open offer that many potential sellers can see and one may choose to fulfill.

The buyer often may not know a product even exists that would fill his need.

For example, my car's cooling system was leaking. I had a devil of a time trying to figure out where it was leaking.

It turns out there's a perfect product for it - a device that pumps air into the radiator. You spray some soapy water around, and where it bubbles is where the leak is.

So in 5 minutes I could have found the leak, rather than wasting a great deal of time because I did not know such a tool existed.

That's not a point in favor of advertising, it's a point for the lack of general education around maintenance or mechanical devices among the population. Using pressurized air and soapy water to find leaks in things is a well known technique among those who regularly have to find leaks in things.

I'm sure there was a point in the past where something like this would have been taught in school in a classroom that had all kinds of tools and machinery in it.

I took auto shop in high school.

I think that's hanging onto the example the OP gave a little too closely.

I found out about the company I've bought several sets of sheets from because they were a podcast sponsor, I happened to need sheets, and I liked their designs more than other ones I was seeing at comparable prices. If I hadn't heard that ad, would I have still found sheets I liked? Maybe! But is that really a convincing moral argument against those ads?

That’s the thing, there’s no line between what’s an ad and what’s just informational. Somewhere between “Joe’s Sheet Emporium down on Main sells Egyptian cotton sheets” and psychologist-engineered gambling ads there’sa boundary that’s crossed, but I don’t know how you can quantify that, but I know the latter end of the spectrum is wrong. Unfortunately it’s kind of a matter of “I’ll know it when I see it”.

I'm thinking of the classified ads that used to be in the back of gaming magazines. There would be pages of small print only black and white listings of everything from miniatures to game supplements that you could purchase by mailing the given address. You had to go looking for them.

In the front of the Mag between the articles you would have full page colour ads, some with skimpily dressed women selling boxed games, computer games etc.

In some of the mags, some of the articles were reviews of products, some of these reviews were obviously promotions, very much trying to sell the product. Very few were critical of the product under review.

There is a continuum in advertising from simple "this product exists" to "Will change your life". Far to many of the adverts we see today tend to the targeted "change your life" category.

Add to that that many of the ads on the internet have there own tracking built in that allows your existence to become a product that is sold without your knowledge or consent and you have a situation that has a bunch of moral questions to answer.

[edit spelling]

Eh, there is a wide area here. For example there is abusive vs non-abusive advertising.

Selling = Sofa is $999 and that is a good price for a good couch.

Abusive advertising = This sofa is so wonderful that hot women are going to seek you out to have sex with you.

When advertizging starts selling lifestyles is where it becomes abuse.

Advertising is informing people that you've got a solution to their needs. The most effective salesmen are people who figure out what the customer needs and provides it to them.

> The most effective salesmen

Can you cite that? I would like to test it against lies, manipulation and coercion.

Have you given repeat business to salesmen who lied to you? Do you recommend them to your family & friends?

Yes of course. I just have to find out they lied after I do all the recommending.

If what you were saying were true, then it would not be economically profitable to lie to customers. However we see that lying to customers is more or less rife. Therefore we must conclude that it is profitable to do so.

Note I said "the most effective".

The guy who taught my accounting class was a former used car salesman. We were talking once, and I asked him how to tell an honest dealership from a scam one. He said it's easy, the honest ones have been in business for more than 5 years. In 5 years, one runs out of suckers, and goes bust. An honest dealership makes bank by selling again and again to the same people.

These days, with Yelp and such, it's even harder to get by by defrauding your customers.

The reciprocal to advertising is education. Not like professional training, but general citizenry that develops self-awareness and critical thinking skills.

This is relying on the assumption that it's unethical to distort the market, which I don't think is a given. Unless you're an anarco-capitalist, and I'm pretty sure they're cool with advertising.

I like to look at this through the lens of push vs pull.

I don't want people pushing things at me that I'm 100% uninterested in in the off chance that 1% of those ads is actually interesting to me and I otherwise wouldn't know it exists. I do want to be able to search a database of vendors (with degrees of trust associated with them) with objective descriptions of available goods and services at known costs, either one-time or recurring. If I'm looking for something that's completely new, I should still be able to find it by using relevant terms and weightings (cost, materials, origin of materials, shipping distance, labor chain, etc.)

So, no, I do think someone using their front yard to sell a couch is bad provided we have the internet and a good marketplace built on top of it. Who wants to see human junk covering nature solely so it can impinge on others' field-of-view in order to be sold? I don't think it's bad for them to register the availability of said couch in the hypothetical regulated marketplace.

And, for those who consent, they can ask to have relevant categories of ads pushed at them. But leave people like me out of it. No such consent can be obtained when you just e.g. put it on a billboard.

Yes, I know what I'm saying is probably naive and would never work, or something, or that's where governance is supposed to come in, but it's a nice dream.

>I do want to be able to search a database of vendors (with degrees of trust associated with them) with objective descriptions of available goods and services at known costs, either one-time or recurring. If I'm looking for something that's completely new, I should still be able to find it by using relevant terms and weightings (cost, materials, origin of materials, shipping distance, labor chain, etc.)

Exactly this. It's not necessarily wrong that advertising is justified on the grounds that it serves the interests of advertisers. But the attempt to justify it as beneficial to the consumer, well, every case where advertising is serving such a pro-consumer purpose is a case where a general purpose information directory would serve that same purpose better.

It's not convincing if you look at it through the lense of a one-off cartesian hypothetical. But that is not a systematic understanding of what advertising is that makes clear the underlying interests and incentives that drive the process.

It's a process that by its nature perpetually transforming in the never ending race to compete for your attention, and the "bad stuff" is a reflection of the interests and incentives essential to the nature of what advertising is.

The anti-advertising stance taken to reasonable conclusion is indeed absurd. You couldn't even mention your sofa to a friend without risk of "inciting" unnatural demand in them for a sofa.

And you couldn't even allow third party mentions either as are fundamentally indistinguishable in terms of effects on artificial demands.

But hope isn't lost. A natural limit on advertising is completely eliminating surveillance capitalism. Even the kind enable by credit cards selling your purchase history. Or stores issuing loyalty cards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com