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Comment by harrigan | Hacker News Reader

We replace push advertising (unsolicited messages) with pull systems (discoverability on demand).

Discoverability is a very difficult challenge, especially for small niches. Many customers contact my employer, saying that they didn't know our products existed (and many products have existed in some form for >10 years). If you can find a way to improve discoverability, you would be a hero to many niche businesses.

I truly don't care. I would much rather miss out on hearing about a few genuinely-desirable products due to poor discoverability, if the payoff is that I don't have to suffer the deluge of imposed advertizing I never asked for.

Do you have any non-feeling based thoughts to contribute? I see your comment as being non-constructive, as you have not presented any new information or thinking.

On the contrary, you haven't explained why discoverability matters, or why any of us should care. You just take it as a given that it justifies the means. I believe that is what the poster above is pointing out.

They just gave you a potential customer's perspective. The fact you wrote this off as uninteresting is telling.

Thats like saying i dont care if i have to rub the product in your face as long as you buy it it is fine with me.

I've got mine jack!

lol

"non-feeling based thoughts"

Fake

I would agree, that I would rather not suffer imposed advertising I did not ask for even if missing out some products.

However, you can have e.g. a magazine that lists computer parts if you want to buy that (as mentioned by another comment), or in a restaurant that has a sign on the wall (or a printed menu) indicating new items, or a news paper might have a section relating to restaurants or movies or whatever else you might want to buy, or there might be publications that specialize in these things if you are deliberately trying to look for them. They should not need to put advertising anywhere, and they should not need to make it excessive or abusive or dishonest like they do, etc.

(Products that they advertise way too much often have some problems other than just the advertising, too.)

Okay, thw question then becomes: How do we get people to deliberatly look?

Say I have this stunning webshop with margins smaller than bezos toilet breaks. How do I survive out there in the jungle?

> Okay, thw question then becomes: How do we get people to deliberatly look?

You don't. Because you don't get to manipulate my attention. That simple.

Exactly this. You can put information in a place that motivated consumers can find it. Heck, you could _even_ pay for it to be there, or to be prioritized there, if you want (I don't love that, but I don't have a coherent way to prevent it). But you should _not_ get to inject your information into my life.

Obviously specifics make a huge difference here so it's hard to generalize, but generally, finding the market is not a new problem. In the current business environment, the entire ecosystem is rigged against you, forcing you to advertise. Consumers are so inundated with advertising that almost have no energy leftover, or any expectation that they need to go out and search. Worse, search is distorted in all the wrong ways because of the exact same incentives. Your competitors (or even poorly-fitting tangentially-related products) are stealing discovery from you by capturing searches through advertising. They can't even get to you because a wall of SEO stands between them and you.

I think I (mostly) agree with you, but it seems like SEO and search in general would be even more distorted if outright advertising were disallowed or penalized.

It's commercialization in general that distorts things, and you're probably right that SEO without advertising might actually have been worse? But then again, the online advertising market is a whole evolved thing that maybe...doesn't need to be...as big as it is? E.g. I don't see structurally how the economy requires spending hundreds of billions of dollars on advertising to function.

Yes, I agree that (on and off-line) advertising does seem to be unnecessarily expensive (across the economy), but valuable 'advertising placements' are scarce, and I'm not sure how else they could be allocated.

In the 90s I would spend my money buying a magazine called computer shopper when to wanted to shop for computer parts.

That’s opt in advertising.

But you as the advertiser is not happy with that

There is absolutely no reason to think that advertising makes discoverability of desirable trades more likely, and every reason to think it makes it worse. The people best equipped to spend a lot on ads are those who are offering the worst deal (giving them the best margins). That's without even getting into ads that are used to manipulate people into wanting to make obviously bad choices, e.g. ads for soda, candy, fast food, alcohol, gambling, pointless plastic garbage, etc.

Catalogs, the kind used in the '80s for electronic components. Yellow pages.

Today it should be online, but then, imagine having to curate Amazon where hundreds of sellers appear and dissapear each month selling the exact same product.

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