Ads are no more psychological manipulation at scale than words in general. Your entire post is FUD. What form is communication that is disseminated at scale not "psychological manipulation at scale?"
Words in general don't go through endless focus grouping and internal company debate to ensure the exact choice of words, tone of voice and cadence in uttering them, elicit the correct emotional response. Advertisements do.
You are being disingenuous in your response to me and trying to set up a strawman.
I realize a lot of highly paid tech workers on HN work in adtech or adtech-adjacent. It's even helped to pay my salary at different points in my career. It doesn't change the fact of the matter. The /entire point/ of advertisements is to psychologically manipulate the person viewing the ad. That is immoral, full stop.
If you cannot articulate an actual point in response to me, I'd advise barking up another tree.
> Words in general are not specifically crafted by teams of sociologists, psychologists, and marketing professionals to elicit a particular feeling at a particular moment in time to make me more psychologically susceptible to a particular belief or outcome
I have presented something, journalism, that does the same things. You claim that some journalism is not immoral which is true. It must follow for the same reason that some advertisements are not immoral either.
Seems like you don't have an actual argument - posting on a Y Combinator MARKETING page, no less.
Disclosure: I've done about a decade of freelancing, and during that time was trained by old-school practitioners on how to structure my writing.
People are so used to being inundated with commercial attempts at manipulation that it's just part of their day.
Do you use an adblocker?
Car ads selling sex appeal, power, status and freedom are provable features of the car? Same goes for influencers pushing products, submarine marketing, etc... It is all psychology and it is manipulation at scale. Words at scale designed to manipulate people into doing something is psychological.
The idea occurred to me after someone here proclaimed that they're simply unaffected by ads, reasoning they don't make rash purchases. Someone naturally countered with the extreme subconscious effect of ads.
This list thing is imperfect (I mean look how omnipresent car logos are for example) but it's an improvement from thinking you're immune to ads. Memory is fickle, and why Memento is my favorite movie.
"no more" in your sentence implies the impact is roughly the same (not that I agree with your premise that all communication is manipulation, unless your definition of "manipulation" is so vast as to be useless).
If the subject was propaganda, instead of advertising, then sure.
What do you think advertising is? It's propaganda for a product.
> Ads are no more psychological manipulation at scale than words in general.
This is a statement about magnitudes and in my estimation the statement is mostly wrong.
is paid poster in a college dorm hall - an advertisement - more or less manipulative than Trump's January 6th tweets?
If you have evidence to suggest that advertisements are inherently more manipulative than other types of communication feel free to share.