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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

    Furthermore, the [online] advertiser gets astonishingly 
    precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people 
    have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with 
    the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one's 
    interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one which 
    catches people's attention will thrive.

He talks about this as a good thing - a meritocracy of "unwelcome" ads and ideas vs. "interesting" ones, with selection favoring the interesting ones, cutting out all of the "dead wood", and so on.

In a literal sense, that is indeed how it turned out. "Interesting" won.

Unfortunately the version of "interesting" that many people chose was simply toxic dreck: conspiracy theories, social media feeds literally designed to make us feel negative emotions, scammy ads that have been engineered to trick the maximum number of people, and so on.

So yeah, "interesting" won, but I'm not sure this is the future Adams was excited about.

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This stood out to me as well. There an impulse to think that once we have perfected something, it will be good. But then, we noticed that the "perfect" version of this thing is actually pretty bad. Which then makes you question the entire thing, fundamentally.

Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. It is a fundamentally bad thing. There are just different degrees of badness.

And since it's a fundamentally bad thing, perfecting it makes it worse.

I had a response to a comment of mine here on HN recently that effectively made this same argument-- that letting corporations influence our behavior is being slept on as one of the great problems in our society.

After thinking it through, I thoroughly agree. I'm not convinced of a proper course of action to correct it, but I do definitely think it's a problem as a whole.

A world where we just seek out and buy the things we need and that will actually enrich or lives sounds like a great improvement over the current system.

I think there was almost a good system in place: a variety of ad-supported sites that professionally reviewed new products, and a variety of ad-supported forums where you could get the advice of other people. Manufacturers win in both cases if they can make a good product that survives the professional review and doesn't fall apart or immediately break so the forums give it a pass.

The problem is tracking and dependence on ad networks. Corporations doggedly chasing the bottom line don't want to spend the time or the money to pick and choose specific forums and sites to advertise. They want to pretend to automate that process. Their laziness not only killed the old networks and communities around various product segments, but helped start the "listicle" de-evolution that has decreased content quality across the entire internet.

I used to be able to type in "product_name review" and get some useful, well-known sites. Now I get recycled garbage content, and I have to check all of those sites individually or restrict the domain in the search. It's ridiculous.

Your comment reminded me of the old AdSense model where the advertiser (Google in this case) would look at the content of the page the ad was on and decide what ad to display as a result. In a way, this is just like magazine advertising where the seller can pick a publication that they think will cater to buyers. Maybe they can even pick a specific article.

Personally, this is the model I long for again. If I’m looking at articles about bike maintenance, I’m getting ads for bike tools and supplies. Instead, I’m getting ads for USB power cords because I just purchased a new one to replace the one my dog chewed.

Apparent that’s how it was in the U.S. before the 20th century. People would buy a few things like molasses in bulk. And that was it.

It’s quite hard to imagine.

It also sounds quite inefficient. Like everybody running their own wood stove vs using centrally generated electricity. But I don’t know.

Anyone aware of books that talk of life in these times? For the early 1900s, I enjoyed “The World of Yesterday”. It would be great to get the same glimpses into the world of the 1800s.

I had the chance to ruminate about wood burning recently during a conversation.

The conclusion I came to was that when there's few people and they're all manually whacking at wood with axes you're (as a group) okay. When the wood collection is essentially strip mining a forest for millions of customers it just isn't the same thing. Not really comparable.

Manual labor and using an axe is an efficient system in the sense that it ultimately limits use and production of wood per person.

Yup, it's all about population density.

At the turn of the century, Canada was >70% rural or some such. Now, it's reversed. >70% urban.

When you live on a farm, in the county, and own 100 acres, a few extra acres for wood provides a long supply of wood, with time for more to grow.

Every farm tended to have rocky, unusable bits, but still ok for trees. Back then, before everyone had backhoes, removing large rocks, even small rocks, was work.

So some fields were best left for trees.

And one of your neighbours would likely own 1000 acres or more of bush land, ok for trees, but too rocky or swampy for farming. Or local crown land would be used for harvesting trees.

Back when people went in with sleighs in the winter, felled trees by hand with axe and hand saw, no one strip cut. Why would they?

(It is easier with horses to pull logs out on sleigh, in winter, than over uneven, soft ground. Especially in frozen swampy land. Even today, people will use snowmobiles and sleigh to get trees out for personal use.)

Anyhow back then, it was only people living in higher density locations, away from nature, which exceeded easy supply.

Of course, population growth happens, and wood burning can be dirty, so now we warm homes with other methods typically.

Problem is of course that nobody threw a switch to go from one to another. Those two approaches to wood harvesting exist along a smooth spectrum and there was likely no point that you could easily identify as "the breaking point", even though each end is clearly distinct.

That is just wrong however. Europe outright depleted its forrest reserves in the age of sail, let alone farming uses. It took longer to reach but it was reached.

Little House on the Prairie has a few books where they live “in the city” which is a small whistle-stop.

Much of the supplies for day to day life came from your own work, money was spent on certain tools and other necessities- and sometimes on fancy foodstuffs.

It sounds like you're looking for The Rise and Fall of American Growth[1] by a gent named Robert Gordon.

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death[2] is also on-topic, he discusses how advertising has changed since the foundation of the United States.

[1]https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/th...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

These look great. Thanks for the recommendation!

> letting corporations influence our behavior

one of the foundational problems with this sort of analysis is that "corporation" isn't really very well defined for this context.

If I live in some imaginary small town 1800's western America, and the owner of the general store convinces me to stock up on something that they happen to have an excess of, is this "corporations influencing our behavior" ?

If I live in some imaginary mid-size town in 1950's USA, and the local Ford dealer is on the radio telling me all about how their latest cars are just the absolute best, and this persuades me to get a Ford for my next car, is that "corporations influencing our behavior" ?

If anyone says anything to me that changes the behavioral trajectory I might otherwise have been on, how do I know if that's corporations influencing my behavior, or "just what people do" ?

Huh? In the real world we're currently living in you can probably track 80% of advertising people are exposed to to like 20 fortune 50 companies. Doesn't get more concrete than that

Corporations are headless. A Sole Proprietorship like the one in your example is tied to a single human agent. The Corporation will swap out any human agent who gets out of line.

Although this definition, like all definitions, brings to light uncomfortable corner cases…

Like, is Facebook a corporation, or a Sole Proprietorship?

(I know legally it’s a Corp, but spiritually, is it just Mark Zuckerberg, since he has the controlling stake?)

OK, so let's take me as an example. For 21+ years, I've "run" a sole proprietorship (i.e. telling myself what to do). Soon, I may convert this into an LLC for various reasons. It's possible that after that, I might actually hire an employee.

At what point along the path from where I am now to being the next FAANG do I become "a corporation" in the sense of the comment under discussion? If I have an LLC and 1 employee, legally I'm certainly a corporation, but this seems to not be what the comment was describing?

Sure, there's basically a continuum of influential behavior. But scale and purposefulness tip over a line at some point. The general store owner may be a gifted salesman, but he doesn't have a marketing department full of graduate degrees. The car dealership may have a professional ad-maker, but their reach is local. And both of them live where they sell, too -- if they're sociopathic ass____s, their business will suffer. The contrast with the behavior and capabilities of a transnational business is large enough to maybe be a difference of kind, not just degree.

Right, and I'm noting that because it's a continuum of behavior, you have to draw an arbitrary line to demarcate corporate from non-corporate behavior, and that's always somewhat tricky to do.

I can agree with that, but I'd say insisting on "corporate/non-corporate" is sort of a red herring. People use "corporation" as shorthand -- and maybe you're right that it's misleading shorthand -- to talk about scale.

> Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising.

I don’t know, I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad in a person or business wanting to facilitate the discovery of something they’ve created.

That is a disingenuous definition of advertising.

How would you define it?

Purchasing a bit of attention generated by something else to try to manipulate people into purchasing your product.

And you think I'm the one being disingenuous?

Yes.

You know what, I'm curious. Name a form of advertising that does not fall under my definition.

Well, last week I discovered an entirely new category of product I didn't know existed (tag management assurance & compliance) via an advertorial piece posted on LinkedIn.

Other than the modern RTB ecosystem I don't think any other form of advertising is inherently flawed.

I don't see how this doesn't fit my definition of advertising. Liking the advertisement or finding it interesting is not in contradiction with what I wrote.

Job ad

Edit: Also consider that some definitions of advertisement might arguably include exit signs on the highway.

Exit signs is an example I'd not thought of before. That's a good one.

Exit signs on highways would very much be an example of "purchasing a bit of somebody's attention that was initially directed at something else" IMO.

It doesn't fit the rest of the definition:

> to try to manipulate people into purchasing your product.

Company logos on the company’s own products - I don’t see an opportunity cost here so it’s hard to argue that the real estate was “purchased.”

Edit: Also, any advertisement for the advertising platform itself would be self-referential and thus violate your “generated by something else” clause.

Edit2: You could also take ads out to convince someone not to take an action even if there is no alternative. Still manipulation, but not to get someone to purchase a particular product.

I think the real problem here is the cowardice of commerce regulators. If they did their job properly so that no one organisation had more than (say) 10 percent of any market including social media advertising and search as markets, then we would not have as big a problem.

In other words, advertising is tolerable when the whole chain is thoroughly competitive.

What evidence is there for that though? It sounds to me as though it's free market dogma posing as reasonable common sense.

In social media, for example, there is currently competition. Yes FB is big, but new players are entering the market and causing them to shrink precisely by making the web even more toxic and unpleasant. Perfecting this process and introducing more competition (read desperation among product managers in the losing firms) isn't something I want to witness.

Ok, but the problem is that people or businesses inherently only really want to facilitate the discovery of what they've created, regardless of whether it's the best thing for the person. In a perfect world people would have wants and they would be advertised to by the best solution for those wants and everyone would be happy, but what inevitably happens is that people advertise their products to people who don't want them in an attempt to ply them into being interested, or advertise their less suitable product more loudly than their better competitor.

Same thing when you apply for a job or you try to catch the attention of some girl you like. What you’re most concerned with here are your own expectations. And, just like an advertising come up you showcase your best attributes and downplay the worst.

(Which isn’t to say that, in a world where everybody does this, actual listening and radical honesty couldn’t be a much more profitable strategy.)

> Same thing when you apply for a job or you try to catch the attention of some girl you like.

No, it is not the same thing. The scale matters. Much of what is wrong with the world comes from allowing huge corporations to do stuff because a single person is allowed to do "same" stuff and we see no bad effects.

Right but scale is a technological problem, not an advertising one.

Do you think glossy ads in niche magazines are a problem?

Scale is a social/political problem. A multibillion corporations can buy infinitely more bandwidth than a common man, regardless of the underlying technology.

This isn't a critique of capitalism, or at least not only. I happen to live in a country where the government is abusing its power to spam the public with its propaganda.

In the context of digital advertising, scale is a technological and financial problem.

What you're talking about it a whole other thing, I'd say, though still an interesting topic.

    Do you think glossy ads in niche magazines are a problem?

Yeah. That system is super flawed. Those magazines usually wind up totally beholden to the advertisers.

Citation needed

Sure. I agree with you on that. I also agree with the commenter who said that regulators should be a lot more proactive in enforcing the rules against false advertising and monopolies. It’s really quite amazing what companies can get away with.

Wouldn’t your “perfect world” just create monopolistic incumbents that are so entrenched in their segment that no other company could compete and it would ultimately stifle innovation since the “best” doesn’t have a reason to get better?

I mean, nobody is stopping you from making a better product right? You’d just have to advertise it “honestly”, which means that perhaps your thing would need to be better on some other axis like price or flexibility.

Businesses are not entitled to discovery. If we want to know about stuff, we'll ask for it. They don't have an inherent right to our attention and forcing the issue is abuse.

I'd say there was nothing inherently bad until it was pushed to a predictable conclusion. There are some folk stories along these lines, such as "the goose that laid the golden egg," or "the golden touch of King Midas." Someone is given a technology that is good for them if they use it with restraint, which of course they can't do, and it ends up destroying them. A modern story is "we can pump this black liquid out of the ground and double the human population."

If you look carefully you might notice that your argument is also a critique of capitalism. The market mechanism in general selects for these “perfect” states of affairs, which often turn out out to be not that great in practice (although in fairness they are also genuinely pretty good often enough).

I’m not quite sure what the solution is, but I suspect it involves taking our foot off the gas of the “marketise everything” bandwagon and pluralising our approach, but without throwing the baby out with the bath water and removing these market mechanisms entirely.

> If you look carefully you might notice that your argument is also a critique of capitalism.

It might be...

Isn’t that also a critique of all desire, period? Thinking the next shiny thing will improve your life. Then again, how much of life consists of reacting to a state of unease or to some desire?

Gate gate paragate parsamgate bodhi svaha!

> If you look carefully you might notice that your argument is also a critique of capitalism.

This, and also the modern era of mass-consumption of cheap goods.

Critiques of capitalism are moldy and artic frigid takes. Largely because they operate under blind imperatives of unchecked assumptions and assertions. Two important questions are held as unspeakably rude and impertinent questions in their circles.

"How would that even work?" and in response. "Why (the hell) would anybody do that?". Those two questions are what make entreprise work, period. If a solution fails to address those two questions it is a guaranteed pipe dream or scam.

"Someone will repair my roof." "How would that even work?" "They show up with tools, climb onto the roof and inspect for damage before patching or replacing it." "Why (the hell) would they do that?" "Because it will get them paid a hefty bill."

Simple but there is still ample space pie in the sky thinking and outright lunacy in the heuristic. An example below to show what a thoroughly unconvincing answer would look like.

"Aliens will come out of the sky and fix my flat tire!" "How the hell would that even work?" "The electromagnetic emissions of our brain echo out into space of other dimensions unless retroreflected with a tinfoil hat. Then they'll ride space unicorns and laser fix my tire." "Why the hell would do that?" "For clicks on their alien equivalent of youtube."

The question to ask is: perfect for whom?

>> I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising.

We should really have a beer. I started in advertising when I was 15. (My dad said "sell shoes or find another job"). I was in and out of agencies through my twenties. Advertising is a fundamentally bad thing. But if your clients trust you, you can sometimes use it for good. You just have to actually twist the hell out of their message to do that, use their money in ways they didn't anticipate, and always have a really concrete idea of what you want to accomplish. All while making it seem like you're just having fun.

One thing it taught me is that there's no "system" in capitalist america. Not the way people talk about it. "The system" / "the man". The system is us. Just people in offices deciding how to frame something that will reach 100 million people. I was hated by teachers in art school for arguing my case in fine art crits. But arguing for showing something they don't like is the same skill that lets me argue the minority case for putting out controversial, socially meaningful ads that might get us in trouble, instead of inoffensive corporate pap.

You can always do good in advertising, simply because you have more power than almost anyone else. The temptation, and the easy thing, and the thing that pays, is to perpetuate little evils. But it's surprisingly easy to do good. It ain't "art". It's arguably more important, though. You're in the trenches where the battle for minds takes place.

I'd join you both for beers.

I like this point of view. The system isn’t some permanent static game erected by Bezos and Schmidt for us to play out endlessly like Phil Connors in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

We can shape things in limited ways. With some effort, we could see interesting results.

Do you have any examples of advertising that does good?

Insiders tend to deny that “the system” exists. Perhaps because they can’t imagine themselves being a cog in the machine. And judging by how much agency you give yourself that seems about right.

> One thing it taught me is that there's no "system" in capitalist america. Not the way people talk about it.

Right; it exists, it's just emergent rather than planned. Our intuition and education are still poorly-adapted to recognize this kind of phenomenon.

Interesting just means "properly aligned with incentive", which in this case is to make money

Century of the Self claims that marketing in the naive old days prior to Bernays was like how the ad idealists picture it: if you want A, B, C, then our X can provide that for you. But people like Bernays realized that it was better to manipulate people’s wants rather than to simply respond to what people wanted. One example being “freedom sticks”, i.e. marketing smoking to women as a form of emancipation.

And arguably this form of marketing is necessary under consumer capitalism since you need people to use a lot of their income on consumption in order to keep the economy going.

This form of marketing and advertisement has been around for over a century and there is no going back.

And Adams even knew better. Earlier in his life he described the end result of optimizing elections for the candidate who best "catches people's attention". And that being that anyone capable of getting himself elected under those circumstances should in no way be given the power of holding office.

The media that is most "interesting" by web metrics is the least worth learning, and in many cases has negative informative value. Social media today is a million Zaphod Beeblebroxes saturating our senses.

Adams wrote absurdist satire, e.g. earth being destroyed for an intergalactic bypass.

Everyone back then had a fundamental belief that the internet would make things better just like the printing press had made things better. E.g. the nets elevating political discourse in Enders Game.

Back in the day, the web actually had to be sold to people and businesses. They were reticent to pony up money to "get online". They didn't understand the benefits. It was pretty common to make these kinds of pitches to businesses as part of a broader idea of getting everyone online where we would all enjoy the benefits of a free and open society.

Businesses were the last to take it up, and the first to destroy it. But no one saw that coming.

I heard this kind of pitch made a dozens times by 1999, to hundreds of businessmen who are now probably dead. No one thought for a moment that getting more metrics on people would mean the death of privacy. Everyone was worried about the government spying on us, and no one had an idea it would be through scrolling and click tracking. At the time this was written, I had a palm pilot and mobile web; but I never would have predicted what a combination of smart phones and social media would do to scramble the average American consumers' brains.

This is anecdotal but when I started as a CS freshmen a few years after this article was written online ”intelligent” advertisement, was, viewed as both interesting and positive in a lot of circles most people probably wouldn’t believe.

This was a time where advertising companies had to contact the owners of popular webpages, and then try to sell the idea of putting their advertisements on the webpage. Where in the modern world, it’s mostly the other way around, or at least easy because influential people on the internet typically leave their contact information. It was a time where “computer-clusters” were considered a revolutionary idea that might just topple mainframes. It was long before Linus stepped up and fixed version control because he was still working to make Linux great. It was at a time where the absolutely top anti-virus software couldn’t detect a cult-of-the-dead-cow Trojan in an image file.

I know this might not have been the case in California or other tech centrals but it sure was the reality of the CS department at the university of Aalborg in Denmark.

I remember these things because some of the first really interesting projects I got to hack at was creating spam-filters. Because most importantly of all, this was a time where Google had only just emerged, and years before g-mail became a thing.

Given how hard it was to sell advertisements, just think about how hard it is to find the Danish teenager who runs some popular website. Then how hard it is to get the business contract with a minor going, if you mange to convince him/her to put a huge ugly banner on their site. Coca Cola would obviously do it, but for a lot of smaller companies it was only natural to go for much easier (and cheaper) solutions, such as spamming e-mails.

So it was actually a time where an alternative to the most common advertisement practices was something everyone almost everyone wanted to help create. Most of us never even thought about the downsides, unlike the author.

This is one of those HN comments where I don't have anything to add, but I would like to say that I really appreciated reading it.

What a negative view of the web and the world, and with the wrong interpretation. What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads.

What won was videos of cats, your aunt being able to get video instructions of how to replace a car tire, open-source software, and an explosion of tools that are getting more sophisticated by the minute, to the point that during a global pandemic, a lot of office jobs almost seamlessly moved fully remote, even if for a while.

Yes, someone needs to tackle those issues you've mentioned, but by and large your description of the internet is not accurate to global use we get from it.

Isn't it more like an arms race between the two? It's hard to watch a cat video these days without having auto-play show you a conspiracy theory, one or two videos later...

You ignore sock puppets, troll farms, social manipulation by malicious actors, CP, literally wasting the energy consumption of Argentina to hash transactions to make money, the anti-vax insanity enabled by echo chambers, and god knows what else.

With the exception of hash energy waste you ignore their preexistence in society. Seriously, the people who find the internet the well of all sorrows keep on forgetting history beyond the remmit of their personal nostalgia.

Disturbingly look at netherlands in the 1971-1987 child pornography was outright legal and had Lolita magazine openly existing. Look up Joop Wilhelmus, the infamous proprietor of it. Somehow it remained legal for 55 magazine issues.

I believe that you ignore the scale of the things that are happening. To achieve the same "harm" then, as now, one needed significantly more money, and resources than they need today, and it was significantly more obvious.

We should also not forget everything that's happening on 4chan (/b/, /x/, /pol/), and the like. Countless trolling that resulted in suicides with zero repercussions, doxxing, incidents like the one that lead us to "we did it reddit", QAnon, and so on.

To ignore the scale and claim that it was happening then so nothing changes is dishonest.

If the idea of happiness is never having to leave the house then the past 25 years have been great.

    What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads.

    What won was videos of cats

Totally orthogonal. Your statement is about as insightful as stating, "no... pants didn't win. shoes won!"

There were always multiple things that were going to "win," right? The web/internet was always going to be some mixture of entertainment (cat GIFs, etc), commerce, communication, and information. They do not compete with each other in meaningful ways.

As you say, yes, there is a lot of great utility out there. I can look up how to fix anything in my house on YouTube. That's super cool, and it has made my life tangibly better.

But as for advertisements and other sorts of information, the outcome is a lot darker. From the article:

     Now I regard magazine advertising as a big problem. 
     I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text, 
     which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little 
     stream trickling its way through enormous glaring 
     billboard-like pages all of which are clamoring to 
     draw your attention to stuff you don't want; and the 
     first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine 
     is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the 
     coupons, sachets, packets, CDs and free labrador puppies 
     which make them as fat an unwieldy as a grandmother's 
     scrapbook.

Tell me, with a straight face, that the overwhelming majority of the modern web isn't the digital form of exactly that.

And we all helped build it…

You say that like we're not still helping :)

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