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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Trade is not a zero-sum game. Advertising is.

The fact that advertising sometimes actually helps in discovering a product you actually needed is a coincidence. The main point of advertising is to convince people to prefer a product for reasons other than cost/benefit.

Even in your case - did you see the ad and immediately bought the product? Or did you see the ad and then actually went and looked for reviews, competitors, tried it out yourself etc? If you did the former, you almost certainly got scammed at least to some extent. If you did the latter, then it's not the ad that convinced you, it's the reviews/personal trial/price comparison. The ad happened to show you the product existed, but the same could have happened from a mention in a comment or anything else. The ad was not designed to show the product exists, it was designed to convince you it has certain characteristics that the product may or may not actually have.

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> The main point of advertising is to convince people to prefer a product for reasons other than cost/benefit.

This is false. If you've ever run ads before, the best way to get people to convert is to offer a higher cost/benefit than competitors.

How do you think Uber grew from 0 to a 90B market cap? Magical emotional trickery? No.

Uber advertised cheaper, faster, and more convenient rides. The definition of a better cost/benefit. Hence they grew fast. I could list a million examples.

Uber still calls itself "ride sharing" and is advertising extremely misleading profit numbers and lifestyle promises to drivers. They also advertise better service than taxis, which is very much hit or miss (and vastly different between locations). Their advertising always shows nice clean cars, and that is also dubious.

No, advertising isn’t zero sum.

There is no reason to assume that the negative effects outweigh the positive effects.

There are some forms of advertisement which are maybe bad.

I think we would be worse off if all advertising were banned.

Yes it is. Advertising is about convincing you to buy product A instead of product B (which may be no product/investing your money). That's the very definition of a zero-sum game.

Most forms of advertising are bad. There are maybe a few which are decent, but there are far better alternatives (such as business directories and non-paid review sites).

If you believe in the free market to any extent, you should be against advertising. The only thing advertising does is to distort the free market - by making market agents be less rational.

You're making a lot of statements across all your comments that are not backed up and easily disproven, and you double down with more of the same so it's not particularly valuable to engage.

I think with a little critical thinking you can take your "the only" or "is about" statements and ask yourself if you can think of exceptions. You can, and easily.

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