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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

That's spot on.

And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.

I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.

We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.

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As an aside, marketing isn’t bullshitting.

Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.

But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.

Marketing is lying. Convincing someone to buy something they don’t actually need? Thats a drain on society. It’s become so pervasive we go to great lengths to justify it. But at its core its fundamentally dishonest.

“1000 songs in your pocket.”

Was that a lie when Apple said it about the iPod?

no,thats true and honest marketing. If the iPod stopped working after a year (low quality), or was easily hackable (low effort) - and they didn't include that in the marketing - then it would be lying (Windows).

Classic zero accountability take.

Why are you getting suckered into buying something you don't need because a commercials says so?

Because a megacorporation hires psychologists (in the form of marketers) to gin up scenarios where class mobility is implied as a subtext in the acquisition of their goods? I mean, who doesn't want to have the fun/get the girls/get the money because they bought {insert product here}?

How is one to defend one's self against the constant onslaught of bullshit meant to part fools with their money? How is an individual supposed to have any defenses against that? When they're raised in an endless din of lying noise?

Yours is the classic _abusers take_. "If only you were a better person you could stand up for yourself"

People still have agency. It's like when you were a kid and your mother asked you - "would you jump off a cliff too?"

You'd be surprised how many people could be convinced to jump off the cliff, if billions of dollars were spent on manipulating them into jumping.

What? What does it mean for a comment on the internet to be non-zero accountability?

I took it to mean my take an implied lack of agency when evaluating advertisements in one's life and if one should act on it.

My take would be that one does indeed lack the agency to be able to evaluate ads that way. The environment itself makes it impossible. SNR is way too low to find valid signals to evaluate. The number being purely honest and informative with zero spin must be close to zero.

Because you are a generally honest and trusting person and so you believe them when they lie to you.

So what are the people with worthwhile products and services supposed to do then? Just not engage in marketing? Sincere question.

Yes, that's my take. I'm of the opinion we should outlaw advertising. If your product is good, word will spread via word-of-mouth.

But then, I don't exist to do business. Acquiring profit isn't my goal. Acquiring status, rank, or advantage over my fellows isn't my goal. Its the goal of those we let run roughshod over the rest of us justified by phrases like "well its just human nature to be greedy; nothing to be done!" or "If I don't do it someone else will!"

This is how low we've sunk: lying is so normalized that we can't envison a world without it.

I mean I don't disagree. One of my favorite quotes I've been saying for years is "Advertising shits in your brain."

But at the same time I think only relying on word of mouth is a bit biased against people who aren't starting with an advantage of a pre-existing network for whatever worthwhile service they could be offering.

That being said, plenty of successful service based freelancers will tell you most of their business is from referrals at a certain point. It's just hard to get to that point. (I say this as someone who only gets business from referrals right now, but wants that to not be the case.)

Yea idk, I totally agree with you in spirit. But I care about practicality and I have found worthwhile services from solo-freelancers via marketing.

Good marketing doesn't have to equal garbage. But I feel ya. Most marketing is mind numbing.

> If your product is good, word will spread via word-of-mouth.

Not necessarily. First, you somehow need to reach the initial batch of customers - whether by free samples or talking to power users, you're already engaging in marketing. Then, even when they like your product, they have no obligation to do the advertising for you, for free.

And it's possible the company folds before the product reaches the critical mass to rely just on word-of-mouth.

Lets say you're a freelancer, why is a company supposed to hire you then.

You are the product, how do you suggest to sell yourself?

Companies aren't going to waste time looking into Github, if that is your take.

The book SELLING THE WHEEL by Jeff Cox and Howard Stevens is quite good in explaining the lifecycle of every product (not sure about services). Must-read for every product owner/seller/developer.

I think if we strengthened fraud provision we eliminate many societal problems, including marketing. If marketers were required to be completely honest and transparent, a lot of this goes away.

you can lie (advertise) by omission... I see no way one can legislate all the things that marketing campaign must tell you about the product/service

This is part of fraud (from Wikipedia):

> While the precise definitions and requirements of proof vary among jurisdictions, the requisite elements of fraud as a tort generally are the intentional misrepresentation or concealment of an important fact upon which the victim is meant to rely, and in fact does rely, to the detriment of the victim.

You can market products that people need. A big part of this is explaining and educating someone about what your product does, another part is just getting the word out there. Every website homepage is more-or-less a marketing page.

If no one is marketing a product, then nobody knows about it.

It can be this, but there are a lot of things that people actually do need, and they have choices in what to buy. Good marketing will catch their interest and convert it to sales.

> pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example

Pricing can definitely be marketing and is crucial to the company. The rest sounds more like operations and customer relations to me.

Otherwise I agree bullshitting can be interesting and analytical, when looking at a full campaign promoting a life style or solely aimed at imprinting the brand, it's full on the fuzzy side but it is all extremely thought out, and grounded in relatively solid research when it comes to the bigger players.

> The rest sounds more like operations and customer relations to me.

Marketing is not advertisement.

It definitely has a significant overlap with operations. I mean it’s in the name really: it’s about how you go to the market.

Every time someone wonders if they would make more by going for a subscription or a lump sum payment and how they should structure their pricing tiers and what should be put in them, they are unknowingly doing marketing.

Correction, developers that only work on software products, because those of us doing freelancing, consulting or working in non-software companies, really get it.

We have to, if we want to stay in business.

> Many devs don't like "bullshitting”

In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.

I have noticed that, at least in the Java world, people lie a lot about stuff going "faster", and I think it's just justification to not fix their terrible code.

I have written a lot of JMH benchmarks in the last year to test out claims from developers (some are on my blog, a lot I haven't written about yet), and so much shit that's supposedly "faster" simply isn't.

For example, I had a coworker who would write all this logic into tons of nested and sequential `for` loops, and the logic was disgusting but lent itself well enough to the Java streams API. I brought this up to this coworker, and he said he wouldn't do that because the streams are "slower" and that he "benchmarked to check". I wrote my own JMH benchmark to check and it turns out that the streams (at least for an application like this) are not actually slower than the loops; the two versions ran within about 3% of each other's. I don't think he actually wrote benchmarks, I think he was just lying and wanted me to stop interrogating.

All technical fields sure have their bullshit, wrapped in a layer of something else.

Another one pretty common backing decisions with bullshit or misleading numbers. Like A/B tests that don't cover the whole behavior spectrum or metrics that don't match the point we're making but sound close enough.

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