Hacker News Reader

> Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'. A popup chat bot or a survey form request (during or after using a website or software product) or anything not germane to the task that has a shadow or notification highlight has slowly but surely become a form of wart that elicits a deep, instinctual disgust from me. I'd even say an unhealthy and unreasonable level of disgust.

Same here. I've even setup a bunch of Firefox extensions just to keep the annoying ad-like stuff away from me.

Sometimes, when I open up a browser on a computer I don't own, I get surprised by how filled internet is with annoyances. It feels like I've put on the glasses from They Live and can suddenly see all the bullsh-t.

There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.

Anything that comes from the primary source is an automatic nope, I'll only take positive accounts from third-party sources. Unfortunately, not even that is enough, so I've become wary of HN comments praising any particular product.

What's even more unfortunate is that you have to apply the same skepticism to open source "products" these days as it has become common even for open source projects to exaggerate the project's capabilities and be dishonest about its limitations.

I used to be a bar manager 16 years ago and would often see the Anheuser-Busch marketing rep for our region out and about, and she would never fail to use her corporate credit card to buy me some free drinks. I liked that form of marketing.

TIL open-source beer… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Beer

I liked it when they took me to Nashville every year. I went exclusive.

I could have flown myself to Nashville every weekend. But they made me feel special with a plane ticket and a few bar bills.

I guess it's the difference between 'marketing' and 'sales'.

>There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.

For very high value software licensing agreements there's huge financial rewards for performing the marketing dance with the vendor. Paying list for enterprise software doesn't happen. Customers who even know what Oracle RAS is , or SQL SERVER Parallel, are numbered in the hundreds. The expenditure on manpower to design and commission a new major database installation is two to three orders of magnitude greater than the license costs. That's per database not enterprise wide. You embark upon a courtship from the outset.

This isn't what the article nor what most everyone's discussing, but I thought it worthwhile to offer a real illustration of a very viable means of sales and marketing that can be made to work if you have a high value application or service and can identify a small finite number of customers.

Edit: I probably should have said the number of customers who know what they're doing with the most sophisticated databases is very likely in the hundreds. Arguably the market is rather larger but if the behaviour F500 generally is any indication, there's a lot of nameplate and marquee buying driven by C suite egos. If you're selling a unique and expensive application this is where your margins are. And where tales of sales excess and bad reputation / hubris attaching to your product originate.

When I was younger, I sold turquoise jewelry at the Grand Canyon and I feel about the same towards sales and marketing, I mean they are the same with different levels of scale. I found an exception though, the way we sold in the shop I worked at would only teach people interesting things if they showed interest, explain the history, the nuances, give some background on the artist who made it, things like that. Even if there wasn't a sale the ones who took the time to listen still learned something interesting, and those who did buy now had something cool to tell to people who would ask them about it later.

So I guess I'm saying that tutorial style marketing is ok, but that's such a small amount of what passes for marketing nowadays, and marketing tends to always take anything and everything too far to the point of ruining it and whatever platform supports it.

So I am assuming you are putting Hacker News in the "fell for" category?

> There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.

You don't like Paul Graham's essays? Because they are marketing. One of the best I've ever seen I may add.

I would personally say that while marketing elements exist within the essays, they are more like an attempt to influence the industry he operates in (tech focused venture capital) to as much an extent as he is capable with words alone.

His essays strike me as appeals promoting a certain manner of thinking that he wishes to impart, while also naturally acting as marketing simply due to his own default mode of thought being deeply entrenched in entrepreneurship.

> or... I am already using it.

For something I am already using and actively repel (because I have to use it but hate it) I do the following: I click on every ad I can find, because they advertise a lot, to make them pay 1.30 usd per click for nothing. I'm only seeing this ad now, everywhere.

Why are you seeing ads?

It'd be very interesting to see the results of some A/B tests where they looked at the effectiveness of a marketing funnel with some of these distracting features on and off.

I mean, I think we all know what the results would be, but I think that a lot of bean-counter types will only listen to beans counted...

I think everyone would be surprised at the results. Humans are so good at thinking they are representative of other people.

The marketers would be surprised because they believe people need the shit they advertise.

Some devs would be surprised because this stuff is effective at getting a larger N - total sales funnel volume, not efficiency, is most of their goal.

Most devs would be surprised that it’s even something people talk about.

And the regular citizen like my mom would be surprised that such a thing even exists.

> Some devs would be surprised because this stuff is effective at getting a larger N - total sales funnel volume, not efficiency, is most of their goal.

This is a short-term/long-term tradeoff. If you have the choice between:

- N people into the funnel, 10% decide to join, the rest go away without a negative opinion, some of them even with a "not right now but maybe later" opinion

- 10*N people into the funnel, 2% decide to join, the rest go away with varying degrees of negative opinion

Short-term, the second choice will give you 2x the users joining. Long-term, the second choice will give your company a bad reputation.

Fortunately(?), most companies aren't expecting to survive long enough to see a bad reputation come back to bite them.

When it does, they can just buy good reputation for pittance. (Looking at you, Microsoft..)

A/B testing creative is pretty typical. I'm certain "flashy" ads that get your attention perform better. Of course, they change the style of your page, and if you don't like they way they make your site look, don't use them.

> Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'.

Exactly. If I see something like that I'll often add a custom ad-block rule so it never shows again.

> Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'.

Anything connected to ads or marketing triggers a visceral response of disgust in me.

Not just towards products or companies that try to show me an ad, but for the advertising/marketing industry itself, the very concept of ads, and all the professions staffed with people who make it their life's work to promulgate it all. It reeks to me of hot air and lies.

Any I don't trust any company (looking at you, Google and Facebook) whose revenue comes primarily from ads - such income poisons everything it touches.