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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

Convincing people to buy your product _is_ value creation.

Unless there was a better alternative that you drowned out, in which case it was value destruction.

The whole point of advertising is making the "free market agents" less rational. The most popular product is rarely the best.

No its about product discovery. It is in fact essential to a rational market. Imagine you create a really good product. You actually believe in it and you think people would want to buy it. Please tell me how you will practically get it noticed? I would like actual practical advice.

Product discovery is one facet of it, certainly. It’s also about pursuading people to buy a product / service they don’t really need, creating demand where none (or not as much) existed previously, of convincing people that their product / service is better than that of others when this might not in fact be the case.

In the exact same way as if you had a godawful product and you want to sell it.

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.

I think you are agreeing with me. This process is valuable - it brings your product to people who benefit from it. It does not diminish just for the reason that there might be godawful products some times.

This is actually a pretty solid example of a flaw in free market economics. Marketing can increase and decrease knowledge and there's not a strong market force pushing things the right direction.

I thought about what you said and I think you are correct. But since we don't live in an ideal rational world do you agree that without advertisements the market can fail? How would new products even enter the limelight?

Without advertisements? Word of mouth, neutral databases of information (these are hard to create in practice without at least some gaming, but i think things like the yellow pages or government operated lists of services get close)

I'm not anti-marketing but it does point to a clear example of how consumer protection laws are needed for efficient markets.

That’s like saying your product is good unless it is bad and there are other alternatives

Almost, but that's the gist. Letting people know about your product creates value if and only if the product itself brings them positive net utility for buying it and there were no other even better products that you distracted them from. Convincing someone to buy your product doesn't show that it's actually good (surely you have regretted a purchase before).

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.

What? Your project might be good or bad, if it's bad/low quality/low effort and you take sales away from a better option by abusing human biases (such as recency bias), then you're destroying (potential, not actual) value.

What if your product is good and you want people to purchase it?

Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency.

The point of marketing is to remove and subvert that agency, disconnect buying decisions from real value, and to limit the consequences of flaws and underperformance.

The point of marketing is to provide the signal - you can use your agency and decide whether that signal is valuable or not.

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.

Couldn't agree more with part of your comment, but only because of the fact that you used the word "specs". Assuming the specs are objective, thats the only true form of useful ad.

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.

The specs are not objective in the correct sense. They are just signals that you can later verify.. like all things. Everything has an accuracy number beside it - what makes you think the specs are to be believed?

True, agreed. But thats besides the point. For the purposes of this thread, if an ad contains text/information thats well defined enough to be verifiable/falsifiable in principle, thats better than 98% of the “ads” I see on Linkedin (or anywhere else for that matter). “We focus on building reliable, trustworthy AI” is not an example of that unless the CEO finds a way to, or makes an effort towards, providing a method for us to verify that.

How would they even discover that though? Every single customer would have to buy both products and test for themselves. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Then they wouldn't need convincing?

Its bringing the signals closer to me than I would have otherwise had. The agency part is for me buying it but not necessarily for me to do the research so in that case you are right.

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.

where is the concern for my agency when an advertiser steals my time and attention. when they call me on the phone, send texts, prisesopen my email account, and plaster ads all over the streets.

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.

>Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency.

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 are completely exaggerating and pointing out edge cases. Sure sometimes advertising can be harmful and there are laws against false advertising. But in general it is helpful and provides value. For instance I personally like it when I 'm shown a relevant advertisement which actually convinces me to purchase it. Just recently I saw some advertisement on Instagram related to some concert near where I live. It was actually relevant and I considered purchasing a ticket.

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.

Not an edge case at all - phones blowing up is not what we're talking about. The absence of "we spent less than 10% of our budget on cyber security (in fact, we proud ourselves in having less than 5 cyber security experts on the team, and our release cycle is very quick - we don't really listen to the nerds when they say they need more time!), so unless you'd rather avoid a 15 year old kid from Russia completely owning all of your personal data, our product is the most cost effective option! Also, we used existing circuit boards, so our phone's innovation is mostly on the cost side - we managed to make it dirty cheap for you. What are you waiting for?" is what we're talking about.

The things they talked about are so common that I think it’s disingenuous to call them edge cases.

"When an incompetent developer stumbles onto a successful idea an infinity of shit is created."

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..

You don't need to drag Python into this now :P

What? No, it's obviously not the same statement.

Convincing people to buy your rotten meat is value creation!

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_

I searched some greed quotes and here's one I'd like to share

"As long as greed is stronger than compassion, there will always be suffering"

"Can you make a sentence look more intelligent if you surround it with quotes?"

I didn't want it to sound intelligent but I mean I was mentioning a quote so we do need to place a quote inside quotes afterall lol.

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.

This was more an humorous side comment than a critic, I’m sorry if it looked like this.

Not sure what you mean. You think people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret.

It’s not always like that and you are removing agency from the person purchasing the product.

'You think people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret.'

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.

Its about the numbers. Sure sometimes they are stupid and make stupid decisions but the extent matters. Take your own example - if I ~reach~ read your purchase history can I characterise you as inherently stupid?

No so much "stupid", just full of biases and somewhat lazy. This is a well-researched and documented fact. Knowingly abusing these biases to get them to buy or use something that they either don't need - or, worse, buying a low quality/low effort product when better alternatives exist - that's extremely detrimental. That's how we end up with the enshittification of everything.

Yes there are biases sometimes and it can get exploited and this is an exception that proves the rule. But the rule is that people know what they want to buy and know what they are getting into. You are trying to get in between by suggesting you know more than the buyer and seller.

They mostly don't know what they are getting into though. You can't trust advertising, obviously. You can't trust reviews. You have no way to tell if there is actually a better product than the one you are seeing the ad for. You better hope there is a good return policy.

You can't trust advertising completely nor can you trust reviews completely but they are signals. Treating things as binary will not get you anywhere. Signals exist and are useful if not 100% accurate.

This is... an understatement. I would agree advertising is a useful signal, but I would say that not only can you not trust advertising, you should put negative weight on advertising - i.e. whenever you see an ad, that means the company is putting some amount of money into trying to convince you by means other than an honest comparison/spec table, and therefore is likely to have an inferior product. So personally, I generally avoid any companies/people whose presentations contains no information about the objective characteristics of their work.

You have to advertise to some degree otherwise no one will even know what your product is

Id like to believe people have enough agency to do a google search to at least figure out their options, but granted, I might be wrong about that.

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.

Hoping people stumble on to page 3 of Google to find your thing isn't sustainable so you need some kind of advertising.

You need someway to get whatever your selling into a place where people buy things

exception? I couldn't disagree more. I can think of one or two specific examples "fair" or even "useful" advertising, and that's being generous, among thousands or tens of thousands of examples. I'm not claiming I know more than the buyer or seller, I'm claiming the seller "knows" much more than the buyer, and has vastly more resources and vested interest in the transaction than the buyer (because of the scale, and the fact that people are mostly very similar to each other - economies of scale, essentially). Note I'm restricting my argument to the case of big companies selling to consumers, or big companies buying from other big companies, although the latter is comparatively less damaging to society overall, still pretty bad tho.

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.

Why do you accuse me of things I've not said, and drift away from the extremely stupid thing you said ? Value creation is not the only thing that matters, and has extremely harmful results if taken to its extremes. Trying to put the blame on "people" and their "agency" is such a destructive behavior that it shouldn't be tolerated. People buying things does not absolve you of the responsibility of creating said product, or of the process used to make them buy your crap. If your marketing process actively makes society worse, you're responsible for it. If your product has consequences for centuries, you're responsible for it. If your advertisement for a gun is "hey it makes really nice holes in your shooting target. And the neighbor you don't like", you're not off the hook when it gets used to shoot someone. In the same way, if your advertisement technique results in hundreds of thousands of people reading your shitty content that actively makes them dumber, you're not off the hook for making society dumber, even if it "creates value"

Convincing people to buy your product by hijacking the algorithm to just gather their attention thousand times and not meaningfully providing any justifiable content in return all in order to somehow sell your product is net negative for society.

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?

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