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Comment by fhd2 | Hacker News Reader

I think like that too, or at least used to. I got pretty far by just doing good work - or so I thought. Growing up in a rich country and getting a bit lucky to be found and promoted by the right people probably mattered as much, if not more, than my talents or skills. There's probably thousands of people better at anything I can do but less well off. I think the only reason I'm better off than them is that I had more (largely accidental) "sales" success.

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.

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The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels. However, the fact that influencing those channels is itself a commodity that is available on the market, paradoxically affects the operation of the market adversely.

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.

For an increasing set of product attracting attention and midshare is the product. Creator economy; open source projects that have many stars safer to use then ones that don't. AWS better to use than some small competitor because you know many others are in that same boat. "Not fired for using Microsoft" etc.

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.

The phrase was originally "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", which, ironically, did not save IBM once the cost effectiveness of alternatives was too overwhelming to ignore. The effect of mindshare isn't all it's cracked up to be.

The problem is that even reviews from verified purchasers get gamed in the real world, and aggregated reviews can only cover simple information because people don't have the expertise for a proper review (e.g. try to find basic information like idle power consumption for computers. Or whether some part has working or broken pcie power management). So the problem is that you need morally unassailable competent reviewers.

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.

My wife used Angie's List to find some really good, honest contractors.

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.

The whole Internet is like this now--it's a victim of its own success. "Dead Internet Theory" is correct, I believe. There must be some kind of sociological term for what happens with popular websites that become victims of their own success, like Craigslist, EBay, Facebook, all of them follow the same predictable pattern. When they are small and unknown, they are useless. Then they hit some critical mass and a wave of new adopters show up and it's amazing--for awhile--then as the inevitable grifters and thieves arrive, the whole thing becomes a turd of astronomical proportions. Then the good people disappear, leaving only the trash behind.

The problem of evil. The grifters and thieves always show up, late but inevitably, to the party. The game needs a patch to potentially fix though it's unclear what that patch would be and what could be it's unintended side effects

Craigslist hasn't sold out ever and eBay is still useful for its original purpose if you look for genuinely used things. You're confusing them with the Etsy dumpsterfire.

Craigslist never sold out, but it went through a big scammer phase (and largely lost me). Looking for an apartment in SF in 2016 was a mix of property management co spam and outright fraudulent listings trying to scam you. Not sure if they ever corrected this.

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.

Ironically, Facebook Marketplace is as or more useful than back-in-the-day Craigslist.

Most folks I know, use it, like they used to use CraigsList.

I don't use FB at all, so it doesn't matter to me.

Sounds like "enshittification" to me: During the growth phase the offering is good, but as growth inevitably slows, most companies will extract value by other means: Cutting costs/quality and raising prices are the most obvious and perhaps least nefarious tactics. There's companies that don't fall too far into this, but I think most successful ones do.

I use and pay for the professional review site https://www.which.co.uk/

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.

None of those work, because they inevitably become vectors of the problem they're supposed to solve.

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.

> The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels.

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.

This is a general phenomenon. People form associations through casual encounters with something or other without actually trying to understand what is actually the case.

I think it’s the certainty that’s bothers me. It also concerns me that people underpin a larger anticapitalist worldview based on ahistorical and incorrect understandings of capitalism.

Smith's book sits on my bedside stand as I write this. In the hypothetical society he uses in the book (the one with the butcher and the baker), the flow of market information is indeed interpersonal (though he never explicitly states this, to my recollection) and therefore not only carries some level of trust, but is generally peer-to-peer. The state of 18th century news papers and marketing actually supports my point, which is a point that applies to any society with a high level of economic power asymmetry, not just to the modern era.

My point about the news environment is exactly the opposite of what you were saying. Commercial news was everywhere in Smith’s day and very much not neutral or lacking bias.

I've thought about this quite a bit, and my conclusion is that the ultimate missing component here is trust. I don't trust star reviews, they can be bought, and platforms don't care about that too much as long as they're making good money.

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.

> 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.

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.

That's the thing with activities anyone can do - pretty much anyone does. And 90% of everything is... not great. I think a lot of those doofuses on LinkedIn just portray some level of success when in reality they're desperate for business, at least some folks I spoke to that are very active there were like that. But that's anecdotal evidence. Depressingly, just how some folks succeed with just a good offering, some folks just succeed with good marketing. But I suppose if you manage to be reasonably good at both, you have a good chance to succeed.

> This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing

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.

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