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Comment by drawkward | Hacker News Reader

Advertising is a virus that will infect every ecosystem

There are still many mysteries to unravel about viruses, they may be more important to a functioning ecosystem than we realize, and there are useful tricks which only they can do.

I think it's more like lead poisoning.

lead poisoning does not evolve to fit into new ecosystems.

The industries that cause it do. I just think it's better to avoid equating it with a force of nature. We're doing this harm to ourselves. We could stop if we wanted. Viruses we're stuck with.

i did not ask for advertising on my TV home screen; it wasn't there when i bought it. my time on the web predates advertising. i have never once asked for a billboard to ruin a landscape, or an ad above my urinal.

It's more like the ideal vector for some nasty stuff. There's nothing inherently wrong with it but folks doing evil stuff love it.

Watch "the economics of happiness" if you think there's nothing wrong with advertising. Sure, maybe it can be done without manipulating people's self-image into thinking they're not good enough, not beautiful enough, not wealthy enough, but if you're into maximizing revenue you're not going to simply advertise "here's our invention, take it or leave it"

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1687905/

I believe there's nothing _inherently_ wrong with advertising.

> but if you're into maximizing revenue

In the space of ideas, there is a way for advertisement to exist without revenue. Even without money!

> manipulating people's self-image into thinking they're not good enough, not beautiful enough, not wealthy enough

You can do all of that _without_ advertising.

> You can do all of that _without_ advertising.

I want to double-emphasize this. Most advertising sucks, but the effect it has on people is not unique to advertising. Given your five senses, you are being consistently and constantly blasted with information people want to put in front of you in the hopes of effecting your future behavior in a way that makes you think that you’ve talked yourself into it.

But given a non-intrusive ad that isn’t trying to also surveil you and isn’t making demands on your attention, they can be informative. The problem is that non-intrusive ads that don’t make demands on your time and attention don’t support advertising-reliant companies with market caps as big as TV broadcasters, and if you want to also be as big as Google or Facebook, you also need the surveillance aspect of it, so if we ever get our shit together as a society and do something about that and they haven’t diversified their revenue streams sufficiently, they’re in for a very bad time.

I can’t think of any positives of advertising that are not solely to the benefit of the advertiser.

That knife you bought because it looked cool, not the sharpest or most suited for your tasks. Cheerios aren’t really good for your heart. Dentists don’t universally recommend your flavored grain-infused fluoride paste.

It’s legalized lying where high end marketing companies are so good at it you might as well not try with a small budget. It’s not just bad from any angle, it’s also entrenched.

> manipulating people's self-image into thinking they're not good enough, not beautiful enough, not wealthy enough

Unfortunately, social media is much more effective at ruining people's self-image and happiness than advertisers could ever dream to be

what is the type of social media you are citing but advertising by a different name?

I think it is reasonably well-documented that social media contributes to people feeling like they are less happy, less accomplished, less upwardly-mobile, less smart or influential than peers. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook all tend to show people succeeding at careers, relationships, investing, leisure, and non-stop exposure to all of that - despite lots of it being fake, staged, insincere - reduces the viewer's self image.

> Sure, maybe it can be done without manipulating people's self-image into thinking they're not good enough, not beautiful enough, not wealthy enough, but if you're into maximizing revenue you're not going to simply advertise "here's our invention, take it or leave it"

Well, yes, that's it exactly. The problem is not advertising, it's trying to maximize revenue. That is the virus that is killing our world.

> more like the ideal vector for some nasty stuff

Advertising is mosquitoes. Fits.

I think there's something inherently wrong with it. At it's core is a fundamental disregard for consent which harms people after prolonged exposure. The consequences of turning control of over our technology to people with an incentive to degrade our sense of dopamine hygiene have been very bad and continue to worsen.

Whatever legitimate needs ads can meet we can find better ways to meet. That is, if we could only get a break from life in a Skinner box.

Imagine there is a cause, mission, or vision that you care deeply about.

And you want larger numbers of people to care about it, too.

And you're willing to pay someone to help you distribute the message that will persuade those people to care.

That's advertising.

There's a tobacco lobby. There's also an anti-tobacco lobby.

Imagine you're a small burger place that opened somewhere other than the center of town and you want people to at least know there's a new option besides slop from McDonald's.

In our world, where the advertisers are already making so much noise that the only way to be heard is to pay an advertiser to shout louder than the others... yes, that's probably what you have to do.

But in the absence of all of that noise in the first place, I think we could design something that does a much better job than ads do. As it is you have to pit your bank account against McDonald's and compete for attention, but think about how much money you could save (or spend on tastier things) if it was instead the quality of your burger that determined how widely known you ended up being.

I don't have the game theoretic secret sauce that would make that happen, but I believe that it's out there and that it would be cheaper and more effective than what we're doing if we just collectively stopped tolerating ads of any kind and focused on solving the where-can-I-get-a-good-burger type problems directly.

In my experience nearly every decent product ive ever wanted I either sought out myself first or found through word-of-mouth, almost none of it through marketing materials which these days I completely disregard because it is 99.99% bullshit. And I believe word-of-mouth would be even more effective and useful if mass advertising simply didn't exist to pollute peoples thoughts and preferences with a bunch of deceptive marketing garbage. I firmly believe over 99% of marketing could be easily replaced by simple word-of-mouth if it wasn't drowned out by marketing materials and advertisements.

Agreed. If anything, excessive ads are an indication of a product whose design or implementation was neglected because it's easier to paper over the deficit with ads.

Stand on a corner and approach some people holding a big plate with tasty things. If those things are tasty enough, you will have some free advertising to their friends (almost like influencers, but more organic).

as if we don't have the internet for that. at this stage of communications development, advertising should all be on a pull-based, rather than push-based model.

And that person you pay fakes the numbers on your invoice, because everyone else does.

I understand that, but what's your point? It doesn't get less sleazy when it happens to be a cause that I like. Maybe I have terrible taste. Why should I be allowed to subject people to my terrible taste without their consent? Why should being rich increase my ability to do so?

If it's actually such a good idea it should be possible to spread it consensually--that is, unless the intervening space was weaponized against us by advertisers.

Language offers the same risks. People can talk stuff to me without my consent. That alone doesn't make it evil.

The goal of separating, conceptually, the vector from the virus, is to better understand how the virus works.

The greed and manipulation that took over the advertisement industry was not born from it and will not die with it. It's a thing that uses it, I want to make this thing more visible.

Well you have to draw a line somewhere. It's not evil to share your opinion to somebody who hasn't asked for it but there's a certain degree of amplification beyond which it's a problem.

The circumstances of evolution and the laws of physics have placed limits on how many people you can influence without help, so there's a handy line already drawn. The simplest way forward is to just use that line to define advertising.

Sure, the willingness to coerce transcends advertising, and I agree that exposing it in all it's forms is worth doing, but I'm a hacker not a priest or a politician, so I'm just trying to direct my efforts where they have a shot at being effective.

> The circumstances of evolution and the laws of physics have placed limits on how many people you can influence without help, so there's a handy line already drawn.

That line drawn by "nature" also place limits on a lot more stuff humans do, good stuff. I wouldn't want to go back to the laws of the wilderness. Unless we're being selective on what can cross the line or not, but that's would be an arbitrary line as much as any other.

You can fight advertisement all you want, I encourage it. I sometimes do it too. However, I am fully aware that it won't solve the issue of systematic greed and manipulation.

If you allow me to be cheesy for a moment, I would say that the fight against advertisement does not work as previously advertised.

I too would not want to accept nature's constraints in all cases, it's just the "get the word out" case where I think it's a well placed boundary.

One could still put a lot of work into crafting their message, but if propagation beyond earshot could only be achieved with the unpaidfor consent of the propagator... I think we'd find that the human way of doing it for a million years actually outperforms the internet in most areas that matter (that is, supposing that once the issue authentically had your attention you could then use the internet to confirm/correct whatever memetic mutations accrued and get the story straight--word of mouth for notification, computers for replication).

I don't expect it to solve greed, I just want to be able to hear myself think so that I can more clearly think about how I'll interfere with greed in non-advertising dimensions.

advertising by its nature is intended to manipulate. language is not.

Illusionism is also intended to manipulate, but it is very explicit about it. "This is a trick", and we humans enjoy the trick very much. Not inherently evil. The same techniques can be evil, and we humans do not enjoy when that's the case.

I want some of the stuff from advertisement. I want healthy competition between producers, I want information, and I don't mind innocent tricks.

Yours is a very weak analogy:

Illusionism typically involves a tacit agreement between the the parties involved where one knows they are being manipulated and has asked to be.

Advertising typically does not involve that consent. Most people would rather not be exposed to it.

It is weak, but it was strong enough for you to change from an absolute claim to a more moderate "typically" claim. That's good enough for me.

They are different claims.

Still good enough for me.

What does healthy competition between producers have to do with advertising? If anything advertising is a way to withdraw from competition because building a great product is harder than telling stories to the market segment that your competition is ignoring.

I'm not against information, I just want to have gone looking for it rather than it having gone looking for me.

No, advertising is the nasty stuff. the vector is obviously our communications infrastructure. (of course, this doesn't mean that advertising itself cannot also be a vector.)

advertising is designed to manipulate without consent.

There is a difference in abstraction level between our discourses.

I am talking more abstractly, about a system and how it works. You're talking more specifically about one of the states of such system.

We both intend to change the state of that system, but we're going different ways about it.

I totally get your point. Maybe some day you'll get mine.

>I am talking more abstractly, about a system and how it works. You're talking more specifically about one of the states of such system.

Wao...such smart! Thank you for the mansplain!

>Maybe some day you'll get mine.

This made me barf in my mouth a little.

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