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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

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"

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