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Comment by bhseo | Hacker News Reader

"Spam" exists in most communication channels.

Telemarketers in call centers. Automated voice messages. Bulk SMS messages. Bluetooth spam. Junk mail. Email spam. Usenet spam. IRC spam. Web spam. Word-of-mouth spam. Celebrity “endorsements”. Street peddlers. Classifieds spam. Flyer spam. Sky writing, flying banners etc. Huge billboards with blinking fucking lights.

I could go on for a while.

Are all of those people evil opportunistic bastard cockroaches?

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Yep, pretty much.

Just because preying on ignorance is easy and lucrative does not make it okay.

I'm not very fond of advertising as a practice in general. I'm not trying to say all those practices are ok, just because a lot of people carry them out.

Is the pilot with the flying banner evil?

Is my low-volume, efficient, targeted, semi-automated marketing evil?

How many of you have cold called people? Are you evil?

Is Google evil, trying to cut into every online (and offline) publisher's profit?

Not necessarily evil or bastards, but opportunistic parasites who make their living by making the world worse rather than better. That doesn't make them evil; perhaps they don't see the harm in what they're doing, or perhaps the only alternative is starvation. But it does mean that the world would be better off without what they do.

So essentially advertising is parasitic? Perhaps it is, in a way, but without it your chance of getting noticed is slim to none. In other words, success is parasitic.

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