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Comment by karmarepellent | Hacker News Reader

Well there is marketing and then there is marketing. Given the fact most of us would be out of a job without advertising of some kind, I cannot condemn it the way you do.

However I despise deceitful marketing as well. I am also not a big fan of the way my company markets itself. It is neither deceitful nor misleading, but just ... irrelevant to people working in the space and thus hard to align with.

But I also know companies (that we have worked with) who spend their marketing budget on hosting small-ish conferences and choose to post content from their (technical) blog in their LinkedIn. For me personally, that way of marketing themselves just inspires more confidence than ... overconfident salespeople.

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> Given the fact most of us would be out of a job without advertising of some kind, I cannot condemn it the way you do.

the same way cars brought the end of many professions. If there were no advertising we would all still have jobs and they would be much better too

Do you think revenue just magically appears in your company’s accounts receivable? do your customers cold call your sales reps?

OP mentioned that people have jobs because of advertising. sabbaticaldev mentioned that this wouldn't be true for more than a few hours because humans need jobs, advertising existing or not.

Exactly as the sibling said, you would have nothing to program for because nobody would no you exist. You don't randomly search for Reggy, the product I made. But now you know about it because I just told you. All advertising is, is telling people you exist. You can do that by posting your spec manuals, making memes, making a landing page or a website, whatever you want.

FYI I know about "reggy" and would never visit it because it was "advertised" by a random guy wanting to use a place for technical discussions to sell their product which is lame.

I would be very surprised if you, or anyone on this message board, had a use case for it. It was a niche example that I knew you wouldn’t know. But you made my point that advertising is about awareness first.

Maybe we wouldn’t even exist, nobody would use this mostly-for-webdevs website, because we’d all be busy programming machines in factories that make things.

> All advertising is, is telling people you exist.

If that is all advertising was, I don't believe this conversation would be happening. People (ITT) dislike advertising because of the other parts (tracking, subtle manipulation, etc). There's a side to it that has obvious benefit: Knowing you reach your target market with truthful and engaging content is something ad targeting, seo, etc, enable. The problem is they also enable deceit, manipulation, spam, etc. When I see the impact that has on people I know, I start to wonder if maybe it is worth throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Programming also enables hackers, viruses, etc. Advertising enables good things like knowing there is a cure for your rare cancer (even if you search, there has to be information, which is advertising). It also enables the bad stuff you mentioned.

It is literally impossible to do anything without ads. You go to the store and it says peaches on a can of peaches. That’s an ad.

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