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Comment by gregsadetsky | Hacker News Reader

You're absolutely right! Here are some three points why:

- ...

I'm kidding :-)

Our library is open source, and we're very happy and proud that Idealist is using us to save a bit of cash. Is it marketing if you're proud of your work? :-) Cheers

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There's a tone issue.

Marketing should be marketing and clearly so. Tech blogs are about sharing information with the community (Netflix Tech blog is a good example) NOT selling something. Marketing masquerading as a tech blog is offputting to a lot of people. People don't like being fooled with embedded advertising and putting ad copy into such pieces is at best annoying.

https://netflixtechblog.com/

Nah, people are stupid. Including me. It's all marketing. Netflix's tech blog is marketing to engineers to want to go work there and to promote their product. If you want to see things though the lense that all advertising is bad, you'll make your life miserable because it's all advertising in one way or another.

Is it? Was this, your HN comment, marketing?

Mine isn't, unless you make the meaning of that term so broad that it essentially lost any meaningful meaning. (Intentionally meta.)

That's the problem with framing everything that way. This HN comment is marketing for my brand, my username, I sell t-shirts on my website! That's not why I'm commenting here, but the term is that broad because we're using it colloquially. It's a human psychology thing that I get entrapped into too. Calling it out doesn't make it not work. When you use the lens of marketing, your comment is marketing that you are not marketing, which is a specific category and advertising profile to be filed away in a database somewhere, if we go to the theoretical extremes.

What you've done is taken something I've written, redefined a core term in a way I obviously didn't mean, and then told me I'm wrong because of your redefinition.

When you put it that way, you make me sound like an ass. Is that how I'm coming across? What did I redefine? I'm refuting the fairytale where some content is pure and untainted by marketing. Netflix writes posts that make engineers want to work there and people think, "hey, that's smart!" That’s marketing.

I think a big difference is when someone is pretending to be all about something else and tries to sneakily market to you. One thing is getting a free water bottle with an ad, another thing is when someone is inviting you to a "party" with free food and drinks and it turns out to be a MLM "party".

Netflix is giving away free water bottles (I hate them, but I use their fast.com super often to test the speeds), another is pretending to be a blog post, but actually being an ad (if that was the case here). You just feel lied to. You cannot take anything seriously you read there, as it will probably be super biased and you cannot get your time back now.

Maybe not an ass, that's too strong, but it's a common online pattern where someone transforms your point into an entirely different meaning and then disagrees with that transformation. It's annoying.

I'm complaining about thinly veiled ad copy wearing the mask of shared technical notes. This is seen as a bad faith effort by the publisher of such notes and a dirty trick played on the reader. Advertising should announce itself for what it is.

I'm very clearly making a distinction, I like A, I don't like B.

You're taking that, saying I must actually hate both A and B, and by the way C through Z because nobody is 111% pure of heart and everybody must have at least some motivation for doing something and nobody is entirely altruistic.... which is just this crazy extreme that it's clear I don't believe at all.

I like the incentive structure that leads Netflix to produce objectively high quality articles sharing with the community in a way that really seems to be entirely untainted by the motivation.

Ad copy in tech notes does seem to taint the motivation and quality of them, it can be innocent but it doesn't seem like it and is generally irritating to a lot of people.

Dislike of a certain kind of advertising doesn't mean I'm sitting around miserable because nobody is truly altruistic as you suggest, and that the issue. My lines of thinking aren't taken to a silly extreme. A lot of disagreements these days are people reinterpreting their opposition as exclusively extremist and that's a problem.

You keep saying it's clear when it isn't. We don't know what's going on in your mind. Did you know there are people out there that won't eat anything that came from any animal products? That's crazy extreme! But there are tons of vegans out there. So what's seems extreme to one person is someone else's normal, and someone else's normal is extreme.

You say you like A and don't like B. You don't like B because it has X in it. But A also has X in it. So why do you like A but not B? It's not logically consistent. We disagree on how much X is in A. You want X to be clearly marked with red tape. It's not clear how reasonable and feasible that is or isn't. I'm saying if you're looking for X, you're going to find trace amounts of it everywhere once you start looking for it. X isn't some previously unheard of chemical that's gonna give you cancer or leaky gut though, it's other people making money. It's been chosen for us, that money is how the world works. It's not how I would do it, but I'm not in charge of the world, so it's a moot point. Everyone is weird about money in their own special way. I am no exception. What sticks in my craw is when people have problems with other people making money. How they make money is material. I'm not okay with making money off of sex trafficking or CSAM, for example, but advertising a product with an interesting bit of writing beforehand isn't that. So on the spectrum of your kid's painting that they made for you in school with crayon that were ethically sourced and drew on recycled paper, to the in your face red plastic Coca-Cola banner wrapped around the side of a bus that's gonna be fed to whales to choke and die on, where this particular blog post lies is for you to determine for yourself. Where I'm really getting at is that requiring X to be at a certain level has the unintended consequence that only big corporations with giant bags of money can create content that passes this purity test of yours, is, if we do some extrapolating, self-defeating.

I'm not sure you're functionally literate and you're beginning to ramble. So yes you're coming off as an asshole and just shouldn't respond like this. When I glance at your reply and you're bringing up sex trafficking somehow... yeah no thanks. This is the kind of reply definitely not worth engaging in.

rude.

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