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As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it di

• rayiner 11y ago
  The problem is that bullshit is a negative externality. It's cognitive pollution. Those who clutter the world with bullshit reap the rewards of nabbing the suckers who respond to it, but don't pay the costs of imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else. That leads to more bullshit than would be economically efficient. Take a simple example like billboards. If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard for a product they'd never buy, the equilibrium amount of billboard advertising would go way down.
  • noir_lord 11y ago
    That's an interesting concept, it makes the cumulative attention span of the people exposed something akin to tragedy of the commons.
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It's worse. In a typical tragedy of the commons scenario, common resource eventually get depleted and the responsible parties leave. Here, you can't really deplete the commons, you can only compete for the share in it. Which means there is no limit within the system for the negative feedback loop that occurs. Advertisers play a zero-sum game, committing more and more resources to one-up each other. They're wasting ever increasing amount of fuel, minerals and man hours on epsilon marginal benefit. Those are real, tangible costs for society.
  • sillysaurus3 11y ago
    Billboards are pretty helpful. They often tell me I can get food by taking the next exit. Someone might be pulling out their phone while driving instead, because the only alternative is to pull over first. Affecting the equilibrium might have obvious consequences. Are you sure the prevalence of bullshit isn't healthy? If there weren't so much bullshit, you'd be less immune to it when it matters. Seeing the wrong kind of doctor after being diagnosed with cancer, for example.
    • remarkEon 11y ago
      -> Billboards are pretty helpful. They often tell me I can get food by taking the next exit. Usually I find the state-made info signs on the sides of freeways more informative than the advertisement billboards because it displays everything I need in one quick glance. The tiles of each "food" or gas or whatever option partitioned left or right, denoting which way I need to turn after the exit. That's just me, though. And I'm a weirdo who sometimes drives with his phone in airplane mode and chases NPR on the dial. -> If there weren't so much bullshit, you'd be less immune to it when it matters. I don't think this is necessarily true. It's not like it's 2 alternatives of content we're talking about, one legitimate and one not. I think it's more that there's legitimate content that's constantly getting interference from this extraneous and meaningless noise.
      • sillysaurus3 11y ago
        It's not like it's 2 alternatives of content we're talking about, one legitimate and one not. I think it's more that there's legitimate content that's constantly getting interference from this extraneous and meaningless noise. It's important to remember that such abstractions enable you to reject the content you don't personally see as meritorious as unwholesome. And that's a sure way to fool oneself. Rewind the clock a hundred years and you might be arguing for prohibition. It's also classic no true Scottsman, for what it's worth. One's noise is another's music. Why is it there if no one finds it helpful? A better distinction is mistaken or not mistaken.
        • nileshtrivedi 11y ago
  • amelius 11y ago
    It's time for a tax on advertisements.
    • hebdo 11y ago
      You mean like the "Google tax"?
  • dang 11y ago
    Thanks for putting into words what I've felt inchoately for years.
    • shostack 11y ago
      Out of curiosity, how do you balance the negative feeling you have towards that stuff against the companies you consider investing in? Do you simply choose not to invest in companies that promote these practices?
  • mindcrime 11y ago
    If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard for a product they'd never buy I've never found my life "degraded" by a billboard, even if it was for a product I'd never buy. In fact, some of them are still useful, especially when driving long distances on the Interstate. They're something to break the monotony and give you something to think about, if only for a minute or two. Some are downright funny/amusing, and others at least provoke a "I wonder what that's supposed to mean" reaction. "cognitive pollution"? That smells suspiciously like bullshit to me.
    • Dylan16807 11y ago
      You may welcome the billboards, but "cognitive pollution" sounds like a perfectly good description to me. Something that disrupts your focus and is forced on you as part of the environment rather than asked for.
      • krapp 11y ago
        > Something that disrupts your focus and is forced on you as part of the environment rather than asked for. By that definition, anything outside of one's immediate focus and interests is "cognitive pollution." If that's the standard, then it's so vague and subjective as to be nearly useless. As forms of advertising go, I can't think of many which are less disruptive, or easier to simply ignore, than billboards.
        • sillysaurus3 11y ago
          I've been thinking it over. Dang left an agreement, so the premise is worth reconsidering. It seems like the problem was that billboards were a remarkably bad example. A better example might be alternative medicine. It's bullshit because it's mistaken. It's a negative externality because it costs nothing to imply that it works. And it's harmful because it can kill you. Most cases of bullshit aren't as extreme, and I'm trying to think of some better examples of bullshit that won't kill you but will degrade your life. TV comes to mind.
  • mikerichards 11y ago
    "negative externality".. "It's cognitive pollution".. "imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else", "life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard" I'm seeing some BS here..a lot of hyperbolic, pseudo-psychology BS.
    • voltagex_ 11y ago
      I guess, but I'd love to see some research into the effects of advertising. I know that some advertising on the web would create barriers to accessibility: http://webaim.org/articles/evaluatingcognitive/#focus http://webaim.org/articles/evaluatingcognitive/#focus
    • Spivak 11y ago
      I like the term "cognitive pollution" only as a metaphor but the rest is just economics. A negative externality is when one does something which imposes a cost or an 'economic bad' on someone else who is not being compensated for it. The noise from the neighbor who mows his lawn at 7:00 on a Sunday morning is a negative externality. The neighbors lives are slightly worse off because their sleep, which was interrupted, has value to them. When determining what should be done about this there are only a few ways this could go, the lawn-mower compensates his neighbors for the noise, the neighbors compensate the lawn-mower to mow his lawn at some other time, or the homeowner's association compels the lawn-mower to stop. But there's at least one solution with a problem. If the neighbors pay the lawn-mower to not mow his lawn then we've created a situation where someone can be paid for doing something annoying to others and then demanding compensation to stop. Hopefully you've seen how this metaphor translates to advertising, and specifically for the practice of paying to remove advertising. Based on the numbers of users of various ad blockers there are a huge amount of people who find ads in general as a negative externality. Although you might argue that they're being compensated on websites by receiving some desirable content in return this doesn't translate to billboards where the annoyed viewer is gaining no other value.
• jessaustin 11y ago
  ...I do digital media for a living mind you...I myself run at least NoScript at home and it is beautiful... Thank you for not echoing some of your colleagues' ridiculous "if you block ads there will never be any more art ever" arguments.
• twic 11y ago
  > this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work Really? People do do an awful lot of stuff which doesn't work. Is there good evidence that this stuff works?
  • edanm 11y ago
    Advertising? Yes, there is. I'm sure you can find numerous reports on its effectiveness.
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Personally I do suspect it's a multi-level, recursive scam. After all, convincing you that advertising works is itself advertising from the point of view of companies that you'll pay to advertise you (note: unless you are personally going door-to-door and telling people about your product, you're always paying someone; printshops that make your leaflets and posters are a big part of advertising industry). And since so many advertising is dishonest, it stands to reason that advertising of advertising will also often be dishonest. A corollary: I do believe that "metrics" in on-line advertising are a tool for people using them to bullshit themselves into believing their ads work. Even an average college-educated person has zero understanding of statistics, and without it, it's easy to draw any conclusion you like from any dataset.
      • cm2012 11y ago
        A high percentage of ad spend is direct, meaning there is measurable sales associated with every dollar spent on ads.
      • edanm 11y ago
        I don't know. It kind of sounds to me like you're saying that millions of people over hundreds of years are either running, or falling, for a huge scam. Whereas the alternative is that maybe you're just wrong or misunderstanding of how things work. I'd generally put higher odds on you being wrong, than of an entire field being so completely off base, at least a field as large and well researched as this.
• dmschulman 11y ago
  Bullshit doesn't work so much as it works slightly enough to see a better return on investment than other kinds of promotion (and certainly a better success rate than a complete lack of promotion, a strategy many small websites apparently employ). You know as well as I do that the myth of these strategies succeeding for every business cases and for every brand (and the propagation of that myth by the entire industry) is more of a strategy for bringing in clients than it is for helping them achieve more online success.
• resu_nimda 11y ago
  Simply put, we live in a world of bullshit. People are - by and large - bullshitters, or at least they don't care enough to figure out and implement non-bullshit solutions, because bullshit gets the job done so they can go do other things. I think one would be better served learning how to coexist with the bullshit than trying to put a stop to it, and I'm usually pretty idealistic. It's just too uphill of a battle to fight millions of years of inertia across our whole species (look at the advertising industry, how huge it is, you think we're going to put a stop to that by simply appealing to people's senses of beauty on the Internet or whatever? And that's just one piece of the bullshit).
  • a3n 11y ago
    Except the call to arms is two pronged: call out bullshit, but also don't create bullshit. Don't do it is always achievable, even if it might take some time to extricate yourself from a situation that demands it, and still take care of your family.
    • mindcrime 11y ago
      Except the call to arms is two pronged: call out bullshit, but also don't create bullshit. Never gonna happen. Human beings are born to bullshit. The fact that we compete for mates and the way the different genders have differing optimal mating strategies pretty much ensures that. We are always going to bullshit each other to a certain degree, as we try to achieve the ends we are innately wired to pursue. That doesn't mean we can't fight back against bullshit of the nature described in TFA, but we won't ever live in a world with no bullshit. Or if we do, it won't be recognizable as anything like human society as we know it. If anything, it'd probably look like the worst dystopian nightmare scenario we can think of.
      • a3n 11y ago
        > The fact that we compete for mates and the way the different genders have differing optimal mating strategies pretty much ensures that. I think we've accumulated some nuance over the millenia. Killing the mating competition, or even lower level violence, is very relatively rare these days. And I'm pretty sure that significant numbers of people approach meeting and mating with more sincerity than bullshit.
• mojuba 11y ago
  Certain types of bullshit (if not all) are built on the phenomenon of Eternal September[1]. There are always those who are clueless enough to trust a spam/scam email or who'd believe that the hamburger on the billboard would be as beautiful in reality. The rest of us who already have the experience and skills for separating the seeds from the fluff, suffer only losses from the bullshit that surrounds us. But the profit made on the few clueless ones keeps the bullshit economy going. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  • qwtel 11y ago
    > But the profit made on the few clueless ones keeps the bullshit economy going You make it sound like the clueless ones are always the same people though. I certainly paid for my share of BS (and guilt-tripped my parents into paying before that) and now I feel like I'm not doing that any more (even though there was no point when I didn't feel this way..).
    • mojuba 11y ago
      The clueless ones are usually newcomers e.g. to the Internet. Everyone of us got caught up in a scam at least once.
      • qwtel 11y ago
        You could almost think of it as an entry ticket ;) I'd agree that the price of the ticket varies greatly by age, education, etc., though.
    • beagle3 11y ago
      It's considered common knowledge in internet advertising that these are, in fact, mostly the same people - that's why everyone tries to do as much retargeting as they can.
• gress 11y ago
  The fact that it works has nothing to do with people 'wanting' it or having a collective voice. It merely comes from a lack of alternatives.
• a3n 11y ago
  > As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work. > Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit, I don't think that's necessarily true. Just because deception is effective doesn't mean people want to be deceived. Just because alcoholism is "effective" in getting people to drink doesn't mean people want alcoholism. (A weird analogy, I know, but it logically parallels your conclusion, to an admitted extreme.)
• fredkbloggs 11y ago
  > As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work. Are we sure of that? It might depend on our definition of "work". A lot of the people responsible for doing this stuff may just be doing it because if they admit that none of it works, they'll have nothing else to offer and will be out of a job. It's not terribly hard to make up data showing some kind of effectiveness, or just to misinterpret real data in a way that can convince others to let you keep doing it. For every marketing or advertising craftsman out there who builds something that works, gathers useful data, and interprets that data honestly, there are probably 20 people who have no clue and just keep churning out the same stuff because they don't have anything else to offer. Whether it's profitable, or profitable enough to be worth doing, is anyone's guess. Given how cheap impressions are, especially the kind of ultra-low-value impressions that bullshit provides, it's pretty difficult to imagine this stuff paying for itself, even if most of it is autogenerated or written by the world's most desperate English-speakers. It might help more to come up with other jobs for the people who are putting the bullshit out there. Jobs they can do well, ideally. As it stands, I'm not sure the bullshit is serving their employers as much as it's just something for them to do so they keep getting a paycheck.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > It's not terribly hard to make up data showing some kind of effectiveness, or just to misinterpret real data in a way that can convince others to let you keep doing it. For every marketing or advertising craftsman out there who builds something that works, gathers useful data, and interprets that data honestly, there are probably 20 people who have no clue and just keep churning out the same stuff because they don't have anything else to offer. Let me share a personal anecdote from watching a social media marketing company at works. These marketing people got contracts to do brand/site/service promotion on everyone's favourite social networking and image collecting sites. They wrote many posts, made interesting graphics, etc. Generally did a good, honest work at that. Then every month they had to write reports detailing the effectiveness of their efforts. The way they did it was like this: 1) gather metrics provided by social media platforms they used 2) put them in a DOC file 3) start with the conclusion that they did their job well and helped the marketed company tremendously 4) invent some plausible-sounding reasons to connect the data from 1) to conclusion in 3) And mind you, this wasn't intentional dishonesty. They simply have no fucking clue about the meaning of the data, or what can (and can not) be reasonably inferred from it, so they don't even try. They don't even know what they don't know. But their clients don't know anything too; it's basically both sides not knowing what those colorful graphs and tables of numbers mean and bullshitting one another without even realizing it. I guess one can't generalize from one example, but mind this: social media marketing companies are not staffed by math PhDs, they're staffed by social sciences undergrads who decided that, given current state of the job market, learning Photoshop is better than working at McDonalds. They may be good at making interesting content, but they have zero necessary knowledge for getting right conclusions from data.
• simonebrunozzi 11y ago
  Exactly. Same reason why email spam still exists.