The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.
> Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
> I find it deeply depressing
Please don't fulminate on HN.
It's amazing to be in a position where you can just create value and people will find and pay you solely based on that. But I don't think that path is available to just anyone without connections or quite a bit of luck. I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got. Somehow, that thought makes it all a bit less depressing to me.
If supplier A has a product of quality Q at price P, and supplier B has a competing product of quality 1.2Q or 0.9P, all else being equal, we would expect B to prevail in the market, or at least gain a superior market share. However, if A's marketing budget is superior, a larger percentage of the market will hear about their product sooner, and will gain traction earlier. Since all businesses have finite viability, B may go out of business before the market has time to correct the distortion brought on by A's marketing.
There was no solution to this in Adam Smith's time, but we now have something that points to a solution: aggregated reviews/ratings from verified purchasers, indexed or curated in such a a way that is uniformley accessible and conveniently query-able to all market participants. In an environment where such a mechanism is universal, theoretically, there should be no benefit to marketing.
Widely used and viewed is value; less and less does a product evaluation work in isolation. So very difficult to evaluate products fairly in that sense. Something may be better but it's only in so far that your review agragation / index is a fair market for attention.
Think GitHub stars and amazon reviews for products or product hunt for new startups, or YouTube or LinkedIn views; all have their game of gathering attention / marketing that plays into products visibility and viability.
In theory, you'd need consumers to fund such an organization only until they had so much sway that a review from them became essentially mandatory for anyone to consider your product, at which time they could charge a fee to review a product without becoming beholden to the companies paying the fees.
Many years ago, when it was still fairly new.
I'd never recommend Angie's List, these days, though. It's pure garbage.
She also used to rely on Amazon reviews.
Again, it's a dumpster fire, these days. Absolutely worthless.
I’ve since moved to Portland, OR, where Craigslist seems to get about 10% of the listings compared to FB marketplace.
I generally love Craigslist and want it to succeed, but it hasn’t been “thriving” anywhere I’ve lived in a loooooong time.
I don't use FB at all, so it doesn't matter to me.
They are a charity funded by subscribing consumers. They don't get paid by the sellers so the incentive structure benefits the consumer. I trust what they write.
This is yet another disproof of the nonsense belief that markets reward efficiency, which is good for consumers.
Markets are fundamentally about gaining advantage over others, and it's far easier and cheaper to gain advantage through manipulation and questionable forms of persuasion than by any other means.
Which is why everyone and everything is now drowning in toxic sludge.
Markets, lacking any sense of the collective good, inevitably produce a tragedy of the commons for the benefit of a small number of the most successful, persuasive, and least ethical predatory manipulators.
This is supposed to be "rational", but that framing is itself a manipulation.
There's nothing rational about drowning in toxic sludge. It's a specific moral policy choice, with predictably negative consequences that have played out over and over again.
This couldn’t be more incorrect. In Smith’s day your sources of information would be interpersonal, or one of your local newspapers. Newspapers in the 18th century wore their bias on their sleeves and had very particular world views, they were anything but neutral. You might also learn about commercial interests in coffee houses where stock markets first developed. This was a place where people were trying to sell you something, like shares in a commercial shipping business.
I’m always astonished that people make these claims about Smith’s work without having read his books or any relevant history.
I trust three things: Recommendations from competent acquaintances, actually good review sites, and brands I've been happy with in the past.
My acquaintances and the review sites I frequent are pretty niche. If they weren't so niche, they'd probably inevitably become corrupted and promote the offering of whoever pays the most. I think it would be amazing if this could be scaled without the corruption, but I don't know how.
That leaves the brand recognition as the one thing that scales. And that mostly happens through marketing. You hear about something and eventually build enough trust to invest, and if the offering is good, you found a good supplier and they found a potentially loyal customer. I think that mechanic isn't so bad, though far from ideal.
This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing, both the product/service they are pushing and their own marketing effort.
I've seen plenty of people in LinkedIn just generating absolutely worthless noise that can't possibly reflect positively on them.
What? No, it doesn't assume any such thing. The mere fact that marketing is necessary implies nothing about the skill of those attempting it.
No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.
It is contrived, but it’s usually contrived on behalf of the person who signs your checks, in my experience. Process exists to serve the owners not the worker bees.
Greed and psychological manipulation to me feels like they will always continue and I am a pessimist in that sense.
There is good, and then there is greed and greed creates psychological manipulation in most cases.
The most fundamental issues in our society stems from greed imo and this cycle will perpetuate like a cancer. Greed is cancerous. I don't know if I even can bring a change in this greedy world at a scale which can matter.
If people subscribe or follow it’s because they found some value in the content.
Developers often start with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset. They might get lucky with some early leads that make it feel like it’s working.
But marketing works. It’s not “mind hacks” it’s getting your product out there in front of potential customers. The people seeing your content aren’t hypnotized into clicking.
Seriously, if being a slop machine in some sense (while mostly) sell slop itself to either other slop machine wannabe's etc and this cycle continues..
I am not saying that all linkedin is like this, but to me most do seem like this.
But is being a slop machine / being mediocre just to sell your product, itself net value creation though?
Convincing people to buy a bridge is value creation!
Convincing people to buy your Teflon pan that will seep into the environment for centuries is value creation!
Because after all, nothing else matters. Value creation. Value. Creation. Consequences ? Thoughtfulness ? That's for the dumbasses not creating _value_
"As long as greed is stronger than compassion, there will always be suffering"
I was just sharing something that I felt relevant to the discussion in the sense that greed is one of the most major causes of suffering, and it is our greed that we are ready to write linkedin mediocrity slop.
It’s not always like that and you are removing agency from the person purchasing the product.
Edit: I do agree you should have a google-findable website which lists the objective characteristics of your product. If you call that advertising (I call it a "release", and I reserve the word "ad" for anything that has emotional appeal and caters to the indifferent/uninformed), then I agree.
You need someway to get whatever your selling into a place where people buy things
The seller knows how much effort/resources were put into the product, knows (or has enough resources to figure out) how to nudge/mislead the consumer, has teams of brilliant people working on that - see the ad industry. I would definitely agree that the consumer has some responsibility, too, to stay informed, and if it weren't for the fact that this causes externalities to society, I wouldn't give a crap about the fact that some corporate director was duped into buying a terrible product. Unfortunately, that causes companies that particularly good in misleading people to outcompete companies who spend their money elsewhere.
No. _history has unequivocally proven_ that people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret. Or at least they should, if they were aware of the full extent of damage typical products cause.
Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency.
But in practice it is beneficial (for both parties) to sometimes bring the signal closer. If you truly believe in agency then you must trust that the person who buys it after being shown the advertisement was better off being shown the advertisement.
They can't. Your shit blogspam is all over the internet. You've been using LLMs to advertise it everywhere. You've been using bots to post fake reviews online. You've been selling them on platforms that don't give a shit about customers and will never take returns. Either by being first or having more money, or time to blow into it, you can easily drown out any potential threats. The only way another product comes out on top is by doing the same things as you are.
Which is fun and all, but there's external consequences to this behavior. The internet is worse, product reviews are worse, and overall, you're destroying trust in society.
But sure, "agency".
You can always exaggerate and cherry pick bad instances from anything. What you are doing is similar to this. There were a few Samsung phones that blew up and caused injury. You now characterise all phones as being harmful and dangerous to society.
I agree with you. Sometimes simply being the first mover businesses/solutions/software get name recognition and an unfair(?) advantage that greatly diminishes overall value by blocking better products from emerging.
To put if fairly, some things are so bad it'd be an improvement NOT to have them, so someone else could do a better job and everyone would be better off. Examples.. Emscripten, Python, Bluetooth, Chromecast, any IoT device so far created..
If I'm shown an advertisement for a watch from a well known company with some detailed specs I'm inclined to believe it based on the brand reputation. This signal (the specifications) is valuable to me but not necessarily completely accurate. I'm better off with the signal than without. The reason being there are more instances of truth than lies across all advertisements.. otherwise they wouldn't work.
Ads do work, yes. But not because they present true facts. It's because people tend to buy things that are from brands that they remember (a form of recency bias I guess, although not sure about that). So if you know nothing about which ice cream brand is best, you'll default to the one that had an ad saying "We sell ice cream!". That's, again, a well-studied effect. Consumers are not rational.
I don't remember seeing many tv commercials with a comparison table containing technical specs.
in what sense is an ad for hair products different from a person pretending to be a little old lady in South Africa who just wants to make sure her late husbands millions go to a random person on the internet - its not
I have made my choice to try to remove myself as far as possible from your 'product discovery', but that's one choice you're not willing to let me have. there are innumerable people in the world who just want a chance to make me listen to their pitch. what do I owe them that I should have to.
Additionally, essentially no marketing is a dry list of facts informing people of products to help them make rational choices. A great deal of marketing contains no explicit facts at all. A large amount of effort is spent getting people to buy things they don't even need (or worse: harms them) and/or throw out perfectly usable items they already have or otherwise participate in conspicuous consumption, which is frankly quite grim against the backdrop of climate change being a (the?) top problem being shouldered onto our successors.
Promote it, talk about it on social media, possibly contract some marketing services, find out who is more prone to purchasing it and focus on that group, etc etc.
Are you mind-hacking your friends when you text them “Good morning”?