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Comment by vincnetas | Hacker News Reader

what is your preferred (ideal) way of being informed about possible beneficial proposals?

ps i also hate ads and attention economy.

Taking your question at face value, I would much prefer information be "pulled" rather than "pushed". In other words, I don't want to be informed - I want to search when I decide to search, get reviews when I decide to get reviews, etc. I don't want someone else deciding how my attention is diverted or what they would recommend for me. A notable exception is that I am happy to take unsolicited recommendations from friends and family, but that's because there is a critical distinction: they want to inform me of something for me, rather than for the product manufacturers.

This argument for the theoretical benefit of advertising (being informed about products/services) was probably true at the point in time when advertising genuinely consisted of a dispassionate listing of the features of a product, and maybe a picture of it. Take the commercial being highlighted here for example. It's 2.5 minutes of a very cool visual image of the toy balls bouncing en masse. But how does a zillion balls bouncing down a hill convey anything meaningful about the television model it's an ad for? How do sexy models in a commercial for beer, perfume, etc inform the consumer about the product in any actual sense?

It might benefit you to take some marketing courses to understand why these sort of ads are effective and useful. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean there's no rational explanation for it.

(In general, it's a good rule of thumb to assume that the widespread existence of something suggests there's a reason for it, and to be inquisitive as to what that reason might be.)

Effective and useful for Sony. They are detrimental to society as they increase consumption, waste, pollution etc.

He didn't ask how these sorts of ads are effective or useful. He asked how they inform consumers, which was the point someone else previously brought up as a defense.

At this point in my life, I've realized that anything they advertise that is actually a new thing (not a TV or a toaster with slightly better features) is just going to be some consumable or gadget that I don't want or need. Most advertising I see is just for some soda or electronics brand which I already know about and do not want to buy. I don't think I could name a single ad that I've seen that is for a genuinely new product or service that was useful enough to me that I thought, "thank god they showed me this ad!"

I've actually seen multiple such ads in the past year on Youtube. I found myself surprised to actually want to see it to the end while hovering over the Skip button. One was a bed Heater/Cooler gadget, another an ultrasonic cutter. There were also some doozies, like these "model v8 engines" that work very hard to hide the fact that they are powered by electric motors. We'll see how this year goes.

And for literal centuries, you could flip through magazines to look for those neat gadgets when you want to look for them, where they usually had a fairly simple ad that wasn't trying to trick you or play with your emotions or anything. Usually a spec sheet.

When I want to know what kind of neat electronics I can play with my raspberry Pi, I don't sit around and wait for Youtube to show me ads, I browse the fucking store.

When my dad wanted to start a pressure washing business in the early 2000s, he didn't wait for an ad on the radio, or see a billboard, he ordered a catalog from some pressure washing companies and browsed their offerings at his leisure

In the 60s, if you ran a electronics lab, and you needed a new instrument to calibrate your new atomic clock, you would order an HP catalog and flip through their offerings, which included a basic description, a picture sometimes, and some specs.

Notably, the old way primarily required you to start from a point of dissatisfaction, intentionally seek out information, and purchase a solution to an actual problem you have.

The current days, advertising is all about convincing us with evolutionary brain tricks that we actually have so many problems. I'm tired of it.

I would opt in.

If adverts were for my benefit I would be able to choose them, rather than have to block them.

I like informative ads. Like old newspaper or magazine ads that are just a picture of the item and a few bullet points about what it offers. Ads like this post are manipulative and they weaponize psychology to make people buy things they wouldn’t want otherwise

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