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Comment by algoth1 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then marketers found out about it. They realized they could game the system by hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks to fill every single niche. Then they found out how to game the reviews, even going as far as paying people to leave 5 star reviews on competitors to get amazon to flag the competitors for buying reviews! Forward a few years, and no matter what you search for, there’s a million low quality books fir a couple high quality high effort books who get lost in the sea of garbage. AI just made that problem 100x worse. The same thing is happening with higher effort content creation. These same mindless marketers found out how to exploit video creation, social media marketing, etc. so, the appeal this article is making for people to stop the hype will not be listen to, because once marketers find about something where there’s money to be made, they will absolutely find a way to go scorched earth on it

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I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.

Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things.

You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.

Marketing is very often a dishonest attempt at persuasion. That's the whole issue. In the kindle example, the marketers aren't trying to persuade you to buy books by extolling their virtues, they're "gaming the system" to give themselves a leg up in ways that make the system worse and borderline unusable for good-faith actors.

Modern marketing frequently "rides the line" of what's legal and has little to no concern for ethics. Teach kids how to annoy their parents so they buy your toys? Sure![1] Prey on teenage girls' insecurities to sell them cosmetics? Of course![2] Lie to folks that they're going to "win big" with your gambling app? Why the hell not!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pester_power

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_advertising_on_teen...

Yes, of course, there's often dishonest or misleading or exploitative marketing.

But that's not really what the problem is, since marketing would still be annoying even with that solved. The problem is much more akin to a tragedy of the commons type of thing, where, when everyone is shouting, you can't hear what you want to hear. Usually, that's the thing that bothers people. Billboards, unsolicted emails, etc.

I think for people who really get annoyed at marketing it helps to take a couple of steps back and look at how we fit into the natural world, everything that frustrates you about human society is something you'll find an analog for.

Things like brightly colored frogs that are poisonous, fur spots that look like eyeballs looking backwards, peacocks, bugs that looks like sticks, etc.

All of these are what's called emergent behavior, and they're intrinsic to all complex adaptive systems, like natural ecosystems, and human society itself.

"We have this thing that's awesome that we can convince people to buy" eventually becomes "We can convince people to buy". It's unfortunate that "convince people to buy" can be successfully used independently of the quality or appropriateness of the item being sold.

By that definition, any form of philosophy or politics are subcategories of marketing. It's not marketing if they're not trying to sell you something for money.

To address your point - the flowery and innocent core promise of the field may have been true when it was first invented thousands of years ago. Exposing people who actually want to learn about goods and services to your offering in an attempt to establish a mutually productive relationship (they get something they want, you get money) is fine. But that stops short at about the 0.01% mark on the way to the beast that marketing became today. Modern marketing is about pure value extraction at any cost. Modern research and tech has enabled them to find loopholes in every relevant regulation, flood every empty crack of the internet with garbage if it means they get an extra cent out of it, study the flaws of the human mind to discover the best ways to abuse it into buying their thing, plaster every object in existence with screaming ads and audiovisual trash to force people to internalize their message. There is no natural cap on marketing, so we've long since moved past unobtrusive, good-natured promotion into full-blown insanity.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think it should be highly regulated.

I think billboards should be completely banned, or at most relegated to designated districts of dense urban areas. I'm in favor of banning products that are addictive or harmful to people, like gambling, tobacco, and the like. I think that conflicts of interest should be disclosed, and false claims should have consequences.

But I think it's helpful to start the discussion by recognizing that the state that we're in now is the natural state of affairs. It's not evil, and we all engage in elements of it most of our waking lives. But unchecked marketing and persuasion will flood every crack of everything if you let it. Which is why you have to decide what you are willing to permit as a society.

It has to be done coercively, though. The incentives are so unbelievably strong to cheat that shame or persuasion isn't a useful counterweight.

Marketing is human nature. I personally use adblockers to avoid it. But if we erased the memory of "marketing" from human consciousness it would soon be rediscovered independently anyhow.

The difference being that this site is built for this kind of exchange, and parent poster is engaging exactly in the way it is designed for.

A lot of outrage in marketing comes when it stands in the way of your product experience. Think TV ads that interrupt. Or fake ratings that abuse a platform.

it's true. persuasion is the immoral core of marketing. personally i believe everyone should hate persuasion too but nobody will listen to me when i try to compel them!

I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?

>I wonder how most of them sleep at night.

i hate marketing. but most everyday, 9-5 in a cubicle marketers are just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity.

or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide a la bill hicks. its fun to be edgy sometimes.

(edit: i find it so strange that suggesting a tiny bit of empathy for someone grinding away in a cubicle is so objectionable to the people on the venture capital marketing forum, but alas, i have much to learn about the quirks of HN)

8 hours a day, 5 days a week is a pretty significant chunk of your life. It is a part of your identity, if the word identity means anything.

Unless you are severed, of course.

Of course, they're people. But no one finds themselves in this position unwillingly. At some point in their lives, every one of those people decided to spend years studying for this job, and then to dedicate a third of their lives in service of it. There's other jobs, they didn't have to pick this one. So what was going through their brains? This is the same question as the one I posed earlier - do they think they're doing a moral good, or is their mind just a nonstop stream of "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"?

I think the first thing you should learn about HN is that there's all sorts of individuals on it. Reducing all of us to "the people on the venture capital marketing forum" is not helping your ability to understand what goes on here.

huh, i thought it was just one person with multiple accounts, thanks

> its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity.

Of course not, because an identity is just an idea, a word. You lose sleep, or don't, over what you actually do. And you cannot do a job without doing it, by definition. Some jobs are kinda scummy, some scummy people enjoy them

I remember over 20 years ago when at a party this other kid suddenly started talking about his job in a call center, selling lottery tickets to grannies basically, and he grinned and told me he could imagine I could be good at that, that the money is good if you hit the quota and whatnot. I thought, what do I care, I'm also good at running real fast, so does that mean I snatch purses now? No, because I do not enjoy that, and would lose sleep over it.

> or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide

First off, there is a lot of grey area between "they're all poor victims" and "they're all demons". Secondly, why "all"? You're basically using the good people and poor saps to cover for the bad guys by waving your hands around a little.

They sleep very well, in a fully-paid off house, on a mattress filled with benjamins

Makes sense—what’s their address?

Marketing salaries are not high at all

Marketers are brought into a company to help bring awareness to the company’s services. Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers. There are good and bad marketers, just like anything else other profession.

Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.

People seek out services when a need arises. Marketers' job to invent new needs that didn't exist before

Exactly that. Their job is to manipulate me into believing I need something that has never missed in my life - enough for me to trade my own health (in the form of work hours, which I exchange for money) for it. Literally trying to convince me that a thing I never wanted or needed is worth dying a little in exchange for it.

A plumber puts an ad in the paper / Google for their services in your area. This makes you aware of their services. This is marketing their services to you. By seeing the ad, are you manipulated into using their services?

Scroll back up and notice most of these comments are distinguishing "marketing" from "marketers". I think a lot of people also wouldn't consider just an ad as marketing without some further details (such as the comment you replied to).

Ok. How do people find the required service when the need arises? Surely the company will need to have a website that displays what they offer? Or a physical storefront showing what goods they sell? That is marketing, and, I would say, not evil. The “evil” arises as a consequence of the market and medium where an infinite number of competitors are trying to survive. Marketers need to eat and feed their families, too, and so they try to market more efficiently.

I don’t like advertising, but I think calling the act of or working in marketing evil is really reductive vilification. Try to take their point of view, and realize almost nobody is trying to make the world a worse place.

> Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.

Yeah, this is just absurd. From the other side, probably marketers wonder how anyone implements these incredibly user hostile interfaces to make it hard for people to cancel, and how anyone could work on products such as Google and Facebook (even as they use them for work).

It's easy to scapegoat a group you're not part of, but it's generally not correct. Things are more complicated than you imagine.

> Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers.

I guess if "Being good enough that people recommend it to others" is marketing, then yeah I suppose I'd agree. But when people talk "marketing", they generally refer to outbound one, and we could easily live without that and still find products, just like we did before "marketing" was the pest it's identified as today.

With that said, everyone believes they're a good person, every single individual on the planet probably, within their reality and their perspective. Including marketers, unbelievable as it sounds.

Ever wondered about programmers working for example for all the social media companies tearing our society apart?

They sleep just fine. Probably because they believe they do just a small part that's not harmful by itself and if they were not doing it it would be someone else.

It strikes me as sort of civil society “arms dealer” type of role, like lawyers. In a utopia where everyone cooperated in good faith and behaved honorably we would not need them (or very few of them), but as soon as one group arms themselves, everyone must regardless of their feelings about it. Then the marketers become an interest group unto themselves and stoke the paranoia of everyone who might need their services, and the endless escalation eats away at the underlying system turning it into more noise than signal.

There’s a name for this right? Marketers that discredit free markets, lawyers that ruin the law, accountants w bank on loopholes, social services that thrive without a social safety net, the lobbyists of democracy, what else? Actual mercenaries and prostitutes kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame, but the others?

> Actual mercenaries and prostitutes kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame

Why single out sex workers here? I understand the other examples, but unless you're talking about sex workers tricking people/robbing them or something else, it seems like a service-profession like any other, like a cleaner or what not, but I'm guessing you wouldn't actually put 'Actual mercenaries and cleaners kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame'.

I think a mix match of perverse incentives, rent-seeking, cobra effect, regulatory capture and institutional corruption all together lead to the inevitable situation of institutions or professions whose incentives depend on the persistence (or even worsening of) the problem it claims to solve.

So no single term, for something so widespread, must be taboo to talk about, or too risky to address, and threaten the social status of someone connected to the uglier side of a profession.

Of course I didn’t “single out” anyone, but you got that.

I wish every product everywhere was evaluated based on merit, efficacy, etc alone...but...i bet most of us lean towards products in a grocery store with more appealing labels. The unfortunate reality is that customer psychology matters and your great product can die because of it.

I wish the performance , achievements , honour , praise , and disdain we hold for people would be evaluated based on this instead of PR and Puff pieces.

Sure there will always be subjective differences , but a lot of negative impacts on this planet can be attributed to the distortion of actual merit and the distorted proportion of what should be correctly attributed to one individual .

I'm always curious if people who think like this have ever owned a business and had to convince people to actually give them money for what they do.

I literally do own a business and my profits are held back by the mere fact that I don’t actively try to manipulate people into giving me their money.

you just replied to a comment with an unsolicited advert of your website less than 2 weeks ago. you are running a banner with a discount on your website where you also solicit testimonials. you have a dedicated youtube channel and facebook for your company. you advertise yourself on gearspace. your HN username is even an advertisement for your company.

outreach, discount sales, testimonials, business pages are all marketing. "purest form of evil" unless you're doing it i guess.

(or, perhaps, there's some nuance to be had instead of proclaiming marketing in general to be one of the "purest forms of evil in existence"...? )

Just to be clear I think there is a difference between saying "there are systemic issues in the way some businesses market and sell that sometimes are harmful to the public good, violate ethical and moral boundaries, and we should try to fix perverse incentives and regulate bad behavior" and "marketing is evil and we think it's funny to post videos suggesting they all commit suicide."

Why does your username contain “APU”?

It’s part of my identity? Nobody is going to see those letters, google them, find my products, figure out wtf they even are and buy them. To call it marketing is stretching the definition to the point of absurdity.

The idea that you can’t even in passing mention something you spend all day every day working on, because then it’s “marketing” is exactly the sort of consequence which leads to so many of us loathing marketing as an industry.

I love this observation and this thread in general.

Marketing is just a proxy for the underlying goal: growing profit. So any evil done by marketing is driven by the pursuit of wealth. Greed underlies anything marketing does as a purer form of evil.

There’s plenty of marketing out there that just tries to make information about a product and service available without focusing on driving home higher revenue at any cost. That’s usually advertising, not marketing though, but it does exist.

100% agree. It is the source of so much waste and so many ills.

It’s the old lifecycle of a scene.

1) cool people do cool things, start a scene

2) chill people who enjoy watching cool people do cool things spread the word

3) posers get wind and show up, the scene loses its vibe but reaches critical mass

4) advertisers show up looking to monetize the scene, driving out the cool and chill people who are allergic to advertisers.

5) the scene is now dead, filled with posers and ad execs

Burning Man?

sort of, the same people that ruined tech also ruined burning man.

There's an old Bill Hicks bit where during his already awkward standup, he takes a moment to somehow dial the awkwardness up further: If you're of a certain age, you'll know the bit:

https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...

It's awkward because you can feel how much he means every word. Of course it's part of the act and you're supposed to find it funny, but at the same time, he very much means what he's saying.

Drink Coke

Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

One of the few times the video is easier to digest than text is comedy like this.

Funny, the video is on a service of the biggest advertiser in the world.

there would be nobody in his audience without some sort of marketing ...

Ah, the plea for sanity dollar! Huge Market!

Sadly, he was never able to rid the world of all these fevered egos tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.

Incredible, Bill Hicks on HN. My life has come full circle.

Ironically Bill smoked like a chimney and for that we can also largely thank marketers.

Sounds very much like the South Park bit when they call the guy selling jewellery to the elderly via teleshopping!

The same thing is happening in YouTube right now. My feed is filled with AI generated never ending rambling videos about simple topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 mins, but it keeps on dragging up to 10-30 mins to milk the maximum from monetisation

Youtube channels are also getting hyper-monetized now. Private equity firms finally learned that some of these informational channels draw a huge crowd of loyal viewers with a very specific kind of technical interest and have built high levels of trustworthiness. Ideal targets for running ads. Now they buy all these channels and have their marketers optimize every corner for generating easy money.

There is a guy on YouTube who did very thorough and well-done presentations on airliner crashes and mishaps and one of the reasons they were so good was that he was a very experienced pilot himself. He was able to give deep insight into the technical details, the industry, and the challenges that pilots face. He always talked at length about those in the context of the incident he was covering, which was how his videos were so much more interesting compared to your typical "accident documentaries" thrown together by outside amateurs which are frankly the majority of videos in this space on YouTube.

But since the last year or so, I can't watch him anymore. He sold his channel (and his brand, literally himself) to some kind of YouTube content company and the videos he puts out now are just not watchable. From what I can tell, he mainly does only the presentation now, with only a minor amount of editorializing. Other people seem to do everything else. The visualizations are impressive but the video title/thumbnails are pure click-bait (to the point of being factually false), the videos are WAY longer than they need to be, and he'll repeat the SAME information multiple times just to stretch the time out to 45 minutes to an hour.

I like a good story, but it's really hard to pad out most disaster videos into that amount of time unless you have something more to offer than say, "well, the official crash investigation said this and that." His videos now feel a lot more like those old Discovery Channel documentaries that were basically surface-level filler content in between the ads.

“But first, we need to understand how we got here.”

In which they put a bold faced text overlay across the thumbnail and make sure to include at least one algospeak self-censorship asterisk („sh*t“). Bonus points if the word wasn’t even a curse word.

I mean, many channels like CNBC already looked like that before ChatGPT was invented, stretching a 3min "explainer" video with unnecessary background story and "expert interviews" that serve no purpose, so much that I just go through comments in hope that someone has summarized it for me.

The good thing is that it's steadily ruining shorts.

I have just been looking for a book on O'Reilly, of an existing tech, but I am not sure that tech really matters because AI has taken over in ways that do not interest me.

With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+.

The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ.

Dunning Kruger springs to mind.

Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere.

Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up.

This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them.

After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy.

In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.

I’m fine with old books. Just bought a bunch including “The TCP/IP Guide” and “The Linux Programming Interface”, which are more than a decade old. The oldest is “ The Design and Implementation of the 4.4Bsd Operating System” (30 years).

It’s better starting from an old books and retrace the updates from that. And with the benefits of hindsight, you can get truly good ones cheaply.

I like your reading material. I do think the foundations are to be found in the old texts too, but there are limits to it. Take web development, I honestly think that what Tim Berners-Lee conceived has to be understood because the design goals are in there, however, nothing from the era of IE6 hacks should ever be learned because all of it has to be unlearned if you are to understand the newer toys such as the grid layout that we somehow lived without for so long. That too has fundamentals, design goals and specifications that need to be understood if you are to truly get it.

But now you would have 'how to do grid layout with Claude' or something equally daft. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the book would itself be written with AI.

I separate my learning into “understanding/” and “skill”, the latter being the applied form of the former. I don’t really buy books for the latter, and the former may not be always in book form.

IE6 hacks are skills. The real understanding is how CSS helps with layout. Grid may not be in an old book, but the old will give you enough foundation to easily grasp it. So something like “CSS in Depth”[0] (which talks about grid BTW) is a good candidate to buy.

I think you can get good materials if you focus on getting books that talks about a system (design, theory, implementation), not techniques(skills, how to). Systems evolve and are build on top of each other, or influence each other. Skills come and go.

[0] https://www.manning.com/books/css-in-depth

Unironically UBI or something similar could eliminate the need for -most- people to resort to petty scams.

Probably not, it just re-baselines. Now the scams aren't for bread money but are for entertainment money. If the time resource isn't changing and the effort isn't changing but the needs fulfilled become wants fulfilled you're getting more joy from each dollar scammed instead of just substance.

It may make pity scams less effective though so I'd expect the implementation to change to focus more on creating urgency and less on altruism.

> Now the scams aren't for bread money but are for entertainment money.

The prospect of not being able to pay for food or rent carries a desperation that isn't there when just wanting to buy a video game or hire a Hooker :)

Maybe with hard drug addiction, but that's a different societal problem to tackle.

> it just re-baselines

If fewer people are chronically -desperate- for money, it could leave a smaller workforce pool available to professional scammers for "hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks" or "paying people to leave 5 star reviews" etc

You should have just said quick example: Windows

Gametheorys all defectors.. they are real. And that is why we must have lynch mobs ocassionally to regenerate the allmende

I value both great devs and great marketers because I’ve seen dev teams build awesome tech that never found its audience.

It’s the culture of the org and that decides how the ammo is used. What you want is good devs AND good marketers building and promoting great product.

Anyone in any role who works at facebook holds culpability. Marketers aren’t building all those user hostile features.

let’s not forget the marketers who work for the same companies we do.

how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built?

it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departments are outright lying about the capabilities.”

at which point they’ve often twisted and bastardized the product opposite of the reasons we built it to begin with.

> how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies [..]

Trigger warning. Could not finish that sentence.

Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.

Marketeers for venture capitalists? Does that beat vc’s?

Marketeers sounds like a great word for the worst of them. The ones that take over a functioning market and burn it for profit

Sorry to break it to you, but those aren’t marketers. Marketers can’t build shit. Those are all savvy developers who realized that they can take their talents to less competitive markets and harvest at scale all the low hanging fruits.

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