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Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

On that specific quote -

I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads."

Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty.

The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you. What does it look like if we achieve 10% efficiency? 1%? How is this infringement on your agency and financial well-being a positive social good? What if we could achieve profitable returns even by flooding the zone at 0.001%? How many ads do you want to be subjected to per thing that somebody in your neighborhood buys?

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0. I want third-party advertising eliminated entirely and self-sdvertising advertising on one's own property more regulated than it currently is.

Be careful what you wish for. At least at the moment it is easy to use tools like uBlock to avoid ads but it gets more difficult if they are served as an integral part of the page from the same domain.

I think that'd be far less prolific than third party advertising currently is. And it'd be worth it to get rid of the big pile of perverse incentives, manipulation, and surveillance that is the current ad industry.

> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you.

I like the quote and despise advertising of any kind for mostly the same reason, but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.

> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect pharmaceutical is physically addictive. It is isomorphic to narcotics trafficking.

> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect medical system keeps you sick.

> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect food product induces constant cravings.

There’s arguments to be made that all of these things are true, but what we’re talking about is not essential to the activities themselves but the profit motive that underlies them. Profit motive in and of itself is not sufficient to cause this kind of behavior; it requires a disregard for the consequences that your actions will have upon others. A lot of marketers fall into this category, but I’m not convinced that marketing in and of itself can be reduced to this spherical-cow in a vacuum.

This is a good point. You could equally well argue that the spherical cow “ideal” 100% marketing shows you exactly the right product right as you need it. And then shuts the hell up!

Yea but "we waste the greatest minds of our generation on global economic information symmetry" just doesn't scratch the same itch

Ideal for whom?

Right.

Except when a company buys an ad it's to sell Their product , not just A product.

Sure. But there are different ways of selling. I've been lucky to avoid sales, but…

I think I could tolerate selling a product I truly believed was useful, and would improve the situation of those buying it, and where I felt free to recommend alternatives in situations where my product was a bad fit.

I couldn't tolerate selling a product where I had to trick people into buying it, knowing that there was a better alternative and a good chance they would regret the choice.

Running an ad to entice or trick people into buying your product in a massive avalanche of sales that ultimately leaves a bad taste is a strategy. Running an ad to accurately target people who would genuinely benefit from your product, and attempting to build credibility and trust over years is also a strategy. Of course, it's always somewhere between the two, but it's not clear which end the 100% spherical cow lives on :-)

100% efficient everything is an unimaginable dystopia. All that's nice, and good, all kindness and love and happiness, all that exists within economic inefficiencies. It's the slack that lets us be human.

That said, of the four examples you mentioned, only one has the distinction of being a metaphorical cancer on modern society, entrapping everything it touches in negative-sum games until it burns out all value and metastasizes to the next fertile ground. It's what ruined medium after medium, from phones through over-the-air TV, cable, web, video streaming, news, social media - and it just keeps going.

I wrote this over 5 years ago, and since then, the cancer analogy only felt ever more accurate to me: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

In the past few decades, hedge funds have had a significantly negative impact upon the following industries:

- Manufacturing - Retail - Local Journalism/Media - Private Prisons & Detention - For-Profit Education - Healthcare Services - Veterinary/Pet grooming Clinics - Mortuary/Funeral Homes - Pharmaceuticals - Housing/Real Estate, - Toll Roads - Hospitality - Restaurants - Addiction Treatment Centers - Daycares - Hospice

What's next?

Doh, I keep forgetting that this site doesn't do markdown.

I like where you're going with this - we do need an economic system that priorities people and not profits. So I hope you take this for the pedantry it is-

But the customer for an ad is the company. They are buying it, so a hypnotizing ad would be 100% effective for them.

In your version of the analogy, its what's effective for the seller- so the ad equivalent would be a situation where in order to get any sales, 100% of your margin goes towards advertising.

I'm actually convinced that "marketing", as such, can be completely orthogonal to profit altogether. Any sort of communication of a novel thing would fall under this banner, but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.

> Any sort of communication of a novel thing would fall under this banner

Yeah, that was what I was getting at. I believe it in theory, but in practice I find all advertising to be the sort of implicit-mugging the grandparent is describing.

> but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.

That’s an excellent counter-point. I’ve had the same experience.

I think the motivation is important. Many FOSS projects are sharing something the author considers useful to the world, as a way of making it better in a way that they know how. Its a lovely gift and I'm happy to know about it.

Others are there to promote lock in to some cloud service, or increase the authors rep as a 10x hacker and those are skeevy because the author is skeevy and did not have joy in their hearts.

All corporate ads ate the second kind.

> I find all advertising to be the sort of implicit-mugging the grandparent is describing.

Unfortunately, it's a useful thing that people have used to prey on our inquisitive simian brains.

Personally, I'm in favor of doing things like banning billboards &c, but it's hard to draw a line on banning advertising in general.

I think I'd be willing to extend it to all forms paid advertising that you are forced to see in the course of doing something else.

Marketing is so rarely for a "novel" thing. The biggest spender is CocaCola, how much do we still need to know about them?

Did you know the invented modern santa branding? Prior to that he was more a vagabond/homeless type and much much less jolly.

Snopes has a classic extensive article on that

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-claus-that-refreshes/

I wasn't trying to say the contents of the ads aren't novel- just that what they're selling very often isn't.

Its also so very rarely factual - the idea is more for you to believe that 'Disney Land is an important milestone for all happy families'. Or 'Stella Artois is the type of beer a sexy intellectual orders - that's you right?'

I completely believe that ads are a huge part of our culture.

Rarely by dollar amount or by volume? Because I assume, by volume, it must be mostly novel things.

Volume of ads I see, or companies buying ads?

Volume of ads I see is proportional to dollar amount imo. Outside of movie trailers I don't think I've ever seen an ad and been happy to know about whatever it was.

Without ads there's no craving to be filled. Without food I still die of hunger. Without pharmaceuticals I still die of sickness.

The difference is all those other things you listed - food, drugs, etc provide value. An ad provides none.

I’m in a group chat for a language I am studying. It gets targeted for event flyers due to the group’s subject. These sorts of flyers are allowed where other advertising is not because they add value to the group, even though most of them are for-profit.

Ads provide information. An event you might be interested in is happening. A food you might like is available. A thing that will totally improve your life can be yours. etc

The information in most ads is things like: "Skinny beautiful people are worthy of love and use this brand of makeup". Or "good parents who love their children go to Disney World". Or "it's a rugged and cool type of person that buys a Jeep".

The type of ads that do what you're taking about are sought out. People willingly watch Nintendo Directs.

If that is all they were they wouldn't be a problem but this is obviously an over simplification.

> but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.

Exactly, it all starts to fall apart when common sense is applied - it's just that we've become horribly dependent, many even addicted to the dehumanizing grind of our beloved competition economy..

The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.

> The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.

Or, it's an invitation to plug us into the Entertainment-Marketting-Hyperstimulus-Feed that is eminently personalized and replace all our human culture with persuasive slop, until we cease to be of use, bankrupt husks with no friends and no avocations other than those that provide a reliable revenue return. Quite possibly with individualized radical ideologies because whatever hits your dopamine button, the Algorithm pumps more into you (See Neal Stephenson's "Dodge").

Yea, I think this is more likely the case for AI as we have it now or will have it, imo.

If somehow AI is better than all humans at everything idk if we get communism or what but I don't think I can really think about it but it sounds meaningless and bad and not going to happen anyways.

I'm willing to go along with this hypothesis. So first step is to end capitalism, then we can see if we still hate ads?

You don't need to "First, we end capitalism" to recognize a problem that has already gone out of bounds and promises to go further.

Hawaii bans billboards, and has, since 1927. Look into that. They manage to do so without some kind of slippery slope that ends in authoritarian oppression, or some kind of guillotine wielding anti-corporate mob. There are lots of ways to limit the harm without trying to completely erase our political economy.

We used to ban gambling. Gambling was regarded as slightly harmful. Now we have legalized gambling, and we've plugged it into modern marketting, and the harm has expanded to the point that some of us regret the entire idea; The gambling industry is in the process of consuming all of sports entertainment. "Decriminalization" of small gambling concerns and an almost total ban on paid advertising is probably, it turns out, a better outcome.

I agree we should do all that right now- but I will say a huge number of problems in our society right now are caused by a prioritization of profit over social stability which is inherent to capitalism.

One thing that convinced me is that we don't need to get rid of markets even- just make it so that its not a extremely small pool of unelected shareholders making all the major decisions affecting our lives.

> I will say a huge number of problems in our society right now are caused by a prioritization of profit over social stability which is inherent to capitalism.

I totally agree. I would prefer harnessing capitalism for our means and regulating it heavily, but I understand if you don't think our democracy could survive the conflict (or if you think that it isn't surviving the conflict already). I'm just very aware of all of the ways solutions to this problem have gone wrong in the past.

I disagree. The spherical cow of marketing is a system that connects consumers with EXACTLY what they are looking for. What you are describing is the capitalist spherical cow.

Helping customers find products and services to their needs is a good and worthwhile goal. Unfortunately, the typical role of marketing is to convince people that they have problems that only the marketed product can fix.

How many marketing professionals do you know that work for non-profit providers of goods and services? I'm sure they exist, but I imagine not many.

Marketing isn't just about connecting consumers to products, it's also about creating demand.

Along these lines, "it" most fundamentally refers to unrestrained capitalism.

(Or perhaps computing.)

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