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Comment by radarsat1 | Hacker News Reader

I know this is a very minor point in the article, but reading the message next to the Doublespeed phone farm:

> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.

> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane

Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions? It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.

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Marketers have a term for this - "breaking through the noise".

I call it pissing in the pool.

I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.

Social animals do this too - even vampire bats ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4685829/ )

The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality. There's also the fact that so many make their living on it these days that it's tough to get them to believe they're doing something wrong.

But imagine all the distraction and labor we could avoid if we could agree that it is not right.

Advertising is the always hungry beast that even a post scarcity society would starve feeding.

You just nailed something for me, so I wanted to say "thank you." It's the _PAID_ advertising that's the issue. I've been struggling with hating advertising, yet having difficulties reconciling how I would know about anything I like if it wasn't advertised. But it's the PAID advertising that spurs the creation of advertisements with spectacle and cheap shit that ends up in landfills and the oceans.

You just realised people pay for advertising ?

I think they've realized there is a meaningful distinction between Google's search ads and someone recommending a product with no ulterior motives.

No, he's saying that unpaid advertising is fine. Thats basically what words of mouth is.

Advertising has a positive function - currently we don't have better (market based) was to make it working other than via paid advertising. The first step is to find the new business models.

Tragedy of the commons. The person that ruins a commons first takes all the supply.

This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.

Jokes on them - they poison the commons enough, and soon no one is going to trust anything they read on the internet.

Which is how it should have been from the get-go.

What makes you think that is not the intention?

Exactly. It will be great for the rich and powerful when common people are drowning in so much mis- and disinformation that the only way to get through a day is to disbelieve everything. There will be even less accountability then.

>Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?

The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.

You gotta remember that people with money have money. Money doesn’t make you smart, gives you the ability to hire the smartest people.

But, to paraphrase the Prussian general 2 x 2, the most dangerous person in power is a man who is both stupid and diligent. When people spend a lot of time smelling their own farts, they start believing that it’s perfume.

It depends on how well the messages are built, but 15 conversions out of 130 is not a number cold outbound produces. I run outbound in Japan and our reply rate sits around 1% - a hundred messages to get one person to write back at all, before anything converts. To land 15 you'd be sending thousands, not 130.

That's exactly what parent post is saying I believe, the conversion rate is huge, clearly, but it can't be sustainable. The point is, that even a small fraction of advertising will be moved over to this cold-DM strategy, the funnel will collapse to the usual rates as soon as people catch on, same as every other "trick". Now, whether there's enough time between today and that hypothetical point in the future to extract profit using it, that's the real question here. I fathom there is, at least for someone, until trust is thoroughly destroyed. Repeat ad nauseum as trust moves and gets expended over and over, until possibly when no one trusts anything on the internet (or really any other theoretical platform with cheap global reach) ever again.

I also wanted to point out, the big 10% rate they're seeing is not for actual conversions, but replies, which are likely correlated, but a reply does not a conversion make. The real rate is presumably lower.

It is bad for this guys business to admit it’s unethical and probably has a time limit, so he doesn’t. There’s no big mystery there. If he’s unethical to his victims/spam targets, why would you think his marketing of all things would be honest about the tradeoffs? Even “respectable” companies feel very little qualms about lying by omission in marketing.

I think that's a fair take, but it also just moves it up one layer. Why are the investors falling for this, then? Can they not see the holes in this immediately?

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