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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

You sound like someone who has never had to run an event, concert, protest, market a new product, or build reputation on an existing one. Your solution — rely on influencers who only review — is unscalable across industries, price points, and ultimately eye balls.

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I have taken one project to $3 billion and another to $700 million, and along the way we have run numerous events, marketed numerous products, and built many reputations. Many of the most successful products (including one that hit 2 million MAU) didn't use any form of paid promotion at all!

So, I do happen to have relevant experience. I haven't run a concert or a protest, but I've done the rest of the things you mentioned, some of which at considerable scale.

That’s impressive. Given that experience, how do you expect people to learn of products and events without any paid promotion in a scalable way? Here n=all businesses.

> in a scalable way

You continue to beg the question. "Without advertizing, companies would not be able to scale" is not a weakness of the push to ban advertizing - it is a virtue. The people advocating against advertizing _actively want_ businesses to have a smaller maximal size.

Why should it be scalable. I’m fine with forcing things to not be scalable. Let products be word of mouth in local communities first.

I have never attended an event, concert, protest, or volunteered my time based on ads. I have based on community event calendars, upcoming event calendars that while they may have taken money for placement (which they should have been required to disclose but probably didn't) had plenty of free listings. The main time I've used ads for 'things to do' is on vacation and have found the ad promoted stuff generally not a useful indicator and had just as good of luck with the service we randomly found on our own (thinking things like sailing/snorkeling excursions in Hawaii, Costa Rica).

Not everything has to scale, and we should be comfortable with some ideas just being bad and us not doing them.

We got here because of scaling. We can now efficiently tap into the mental space of billions of humans at the same time. And that’s not just a problem, that’s THE problem.

Meaning that “this doesn’t scale!” isn’t a side effect. It’s the main effect, it’s the solution.

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