6 ms·

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware o

by colmvp 11y ago

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay for Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists (through Patreon). And that's good enough for me.

old-gregg 11y ago
They're already calling it a "disorder": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805733/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805733/ The question is, if advertisement leads to more consumption, and excessive shopping is now a disease, how long before we start seeing people suing ad agencies for infecting them with such illness?
seanwilson 11y ago
> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time. I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first. I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.
  - abrookewood 11y ago
    Well, my kids simply don't watch commercial TV. Everything used to be DVD based and now its all streamed, so they never see ads. I remember the first time they actually saw and advertisement - my son screamed! "Where did my show go??" "It's OK .. it's just an ad". A few seconds of silence passed and then he asked:"What's an ad?"
    - vog 11y ago
      Congrats! This is really a great step forward, and may improve their childhood a lot. Children should become used to consume media at their own pace, without distracting noise (ads). Also, their schedule should be determined by their parents, not the TV program. Moreover, it may help to make fun of the ads they still see. (on websites, outside at walls, etc.) This may improve their awareness, and hopefully later their critical thinking. BTW, when I started not to watch TV anymore, I expected that I would miss something, but I didn't miss anything at all! Friends told me about the few cool series I missed, and I simply bought the DVDs. It is a huge increase in comfort, watching those at my own pace, in their original length rather than the blown-up-with-ads length.
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        I have to wholeheartedly agree with everybsingle thing you've just said. This is why I love Netfix - there are lots of awesome shows my kids love like Hulk and the Agents of Smash, Spiderman and others I've forgotten. Otherwise, they watch Australua's State run kids channel, which sounds awful but actually tends to run somewhat subversive shows like Yoohoo and Friends (universally panned by those who watched the original Korean version, but not by me or my kids!) and Adventure Time. And not a single advertisement, except promos. Still have to find something for my daughter, who also loves those shows and we encourage her to watch them, but she is still into Shopkins (despite my best efforts of discouraging her) and other shows designed to appeal to her and her friends. But she said watches absolutely no commercial TV. This is more by happy accident than design, because commercial TV in Australia is so completely rubbish that there is literally no need to watch it - ever!
    - 11y ago
- WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 11y ago
  Are you doing peer reviewed reproductible research, with both open source code and data and tyying to disprobe your hypothesis? </s> Even researchers don't agree what are "acceptable" research findings [0]. I think that priming[1] would be an important factor to consider when doing "lot of" research. And, were someone going to dimiss it, they would need "extrordinary evidence" as the say goes. Here is a testimonial of one of these "ideas" supporter: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Attrib. Richard Feynman (|p| < 0.05) The fact that "[you] can't see how it would influence [you] much" is one of the features of biases. Regards [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29
  - seanwilson 11y ago
    Sure, but I'm saying I don't think the effect (which is non-zero) is manipulative enough to get annoyed about. I read people talking about ads as if you look at them and they compel you to buy something you never wanted.
- Estragon 11y ago
  > How much are you really worried by this? It's a very serious ethical issue. You might not have any exploitable weaknesses given the current technology, but other people do: alcoholism, pain medication, financial distress, loneliness, straight-up boredom...
- laotzu 11y ago
  >if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount If it is unconsciously influencing you how would you know if it is only doing so "a tiny amount"?
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  >How much are you really worried by this? I'm not much worried right now. I'm worried about where we are going, especially with machine learning. Take a look at the story of Target identifying when a girl was pregnant before her own father knew. Then apply this to any area where you have any reason at all to keep a secret. Maybe you are gay with parents who will rather you be homeless than living in their home. Maybe you have a mental illness but rather the rest of the world not know about it. Maybe you like democracy in a country where you aren't allowed to. Eventually they will find ways to tease this information out with all the data they have tracked about us.
chflags 11y ago
re: content There are some who believe that distribution channels are actually more valuable than any content that passes through them. That is, content distribution is potentially a higher value business than content creation. Assuming the Internet as a distribution channel, who owns or controls access to it? Rhetorical question. One view is that the price of internet access is the price of "content". If the internet was meant to be a medium for paid content, then why has so much content been shared through it "for free" beginning in the late 80's/early 90's and continuing even today? I certainly do not know. What I remember is that only a minority of the population were avid www users when the public www first appeared in 1993. So, in 1993, why upload "free content" that would otherwise be under paid subscription? For the novelty of it? To jumpstart the www? To entice people to use the www? Regardless of the reason, the end result is that the genie is out of the bottle. The sharing of content "for free" started early on and continued unabated, even as www usage grew. Today, if an internet subscriber seeks "content" she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone, except her access provider. Greeting users with a deluge of advertising is not going to change the facts: users are continually presented with free content that they once would have had to pay for. The deluge of ads is not a "cost" of the content. It's just a new source of revenue for those who want to play www middleman (who should be very thankful for all the money they have made without ever having had to create any real content). At the same time, as a result the signal to noise ratio has become a serious problem for many www users. (Users are also presented with enormous amounts of fake, garbage "content". That only highlights how open and inexpensive content distribution has become.) It is undeniable that users can block the ads and other garbage and keep the content. The content is not going away. And the www will still keep growing. With the barriers to distribution so low, it is no surprise that users should have to filter out some garbage. The only surprise is how long it's taken them to start doing it. What's nice is that filtering can be automated, in the same way the generation of ads and fake content have been automated. There was time in the history of email before the ubiquitous use of spam filters. And there is a time in the history of the www before the ubiquitous use of ad blockers. That time is coming to a close.
- betterturkey 11y ago
  "Today, if an internet subscriber seeks 'content' she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone." If anyone hasn't checked out Ethan Zuckerman's essays before, he was the inventor of the pop-up ad while he was at Tripod in the 90s. Today, he's sort of an anti-ads activist and points to that early trade (ads for free content) as a fundamental shift in our acceptance of advertising (as well as the extent to which we're okay, as a society, with advertisers knowing who we are). Good read here: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert... That "original sin," as you point out, is a pretty catastrophic barrier for most subscription models. There's enough competition in virtually every content industry that the user can go elsewhere.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cbhl 11y ago
Subscriptions lock out people without credit cards (children, less affluent) from the Internet. This makes me sad.
- erickhill 11y ago
  Subscriptions can mean an ad-free experience for those who pay, but content for all. Doesn't have to be a wall.
- id 11y ago
  It also locks out well-off people with credit cards - they can't possibly subscribe to everything.
- 2muchcoffeeman 11y ago
  I used to go to the library for this sort of thing. My mom works in a library and they are in the process of throwing all the books away, and creating 'social spaces'. As much as the Internet has made information easy to get, there are a lot of high quality publications that I can no longer access eg research papers, art and design books.
- kyrra 11y ago
  In the US, sure. But there are lots and lots of various forms of payment to handle things like subscriptions. See Boletos[0] in Brazil for example. Many other countries around the world have ways of paying for things online without credit cards. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boleto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boleto
JacobJans 11y ago
"Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists" all manipulate the thoughts you have. We don't live in a bubble; we're a product of our surroundings. No aspect of the world is benign. The fact that ads may "change you" is not an argument against advertising, because it doesn't distinguish advertising from anything else, at all. It seems to me there is a moral judgement happening here. But, what is the appropriate way to distinguish moral manipulation from immoral manipulation? Communication – even honest communication – is designed to influence other people. I'm trying to "change you" with this message. Should this message be blocked? Yes/no? What is the difference?
- vog 11y ago
  This line of argument is heavily flawed, due to wildly mixing the parent's specific term "manipulating" with the broader term "changing".
  - olegj 11y ago
    If it is you didn't explain why, you merely restated the core issue JacobJans has with fighting advertising. Where exactly is the line between "manipulating" and "changing view"? There are many associations and causalities studied with regards to human mind, should I be guilty of manipulation if I create a promotional poster using colours which are associated with some particular emotional response? In the end this is another of the cases where intent is everything, and for better or worse intent cannot be measured.
    - vog 11y ago
      There may be a grey area between "manipulating" and "changing view", but in the case of advertisement this this clearly on the "manipulation" side, almost by definition. Ads are fully paid by the seller, and exist by definition to serve solely the seller's purpose. In addition, ads are expected to "look and feel" like they were in the customer's interest, which makes it even more clear that this is all about manipulation.
      - 11y ago
iamphilrae 11y ago
Ironically, how did you find out about those services in the first place?
ddeck 11y ago
I think there's a distinction to be made between advertising and marketing, at least the way I define them. Advertising is about making consumers aware of a product or service that they may use if they were aware of it. This seems reasonable and generally beneficial. Marketing is about using psychological techniques to manipulate consumers preferences such that they want to consume products and services that they otherwise wouldn't. Unfortunately this segment of the industry had grown rapidly over the past few decades and techniques to exploit our cognitive deficiencies have improved tremendously.
- punee 11y ago
  Yeah, it's just too bad you're the only person in the world to define advertising and marketing that way, I guess? At least among people who know what they're talking about.
  - ddeck 11y ago
    Well the labels are unimportant. The point is that certain elements of advertising/marketing seem reasonable and it could be argued that they are value adding to consumers as well as the advertisers, while others are manipulative and outright unethical.
    - punee 11y ago
      That's not a claim that will meet much opposition. However, to claim that marketing is inherently "manipulative", or that manipulative tactics are even a significant part of it, seems a little ill-informed. Y Combinator's motto is "Make something people want". To the overwhelming majority of practitioners, this is exactly what marketing sets out to do.
- asr 11y ago
  This distinction is generally made when economists think about advertising too -- for example: http://economics.virginia.edu/sites/economics.virginia.edu/files/Information%20content%20of%20advertising.pdf http://economics.virginia.edu/sites/economics.virginia.edu/f... Though I've never heard "advertising" and "marketing" used to describe information content vs. persuasion, it would be a great shorthand.
ljk 11y ago
There are many other ways to advertise other than showing a commercial. I also try to protect myself by avoiding ads, but other tactics like product placements in tv shows and movies is making it hard to avoid everything..
konschubert 11y ago
The issue with subscriptions is that they get very expensive if you want to subscribe to all the blogs you're reading. Maybe micropayments are a better alternative, but the current implementations all rise the barrier of entry in a way that makes them undesirable. I have tried to think of a better system and I have written it down as a free "micropayment standard". You can find it here, I am looking forward to any comments. https://konstantinschubert.github.io/pennytoken-spec/ https://konstantinschubert.github.io/pennytoken-spec/ I am also working on a reference implementation over here: http://micropayment-service.boosted.science/ http://micropayment-service.boosted.science/ I'd be happy about some feedback.

by colmvp 11y ago

old-gregg 11y ago

They're already calling it a "disorder": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805733/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805733/ The question is, if advertisement leads to more consumption, and excessive shopping is now a disease, how long before we start seeing people suing ad agencies for infecting them with such illness?

seanwilson 11y ago

> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time. I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first. I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.

tracker1 11y ago
Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.
- abrookewood 11y ago
  Well, my kids simply don't watch commercial TV. Everything used to be DVD based and now its all streamed, so they never see ads. I remember the first time they actually saw and advertisement - my son screamed! "Where did my show go??" "It's OK .. it's just an ad". A few seconds of silence passed and then he asked:"What's an ad?"
  - vog 11y ago
    Congrats! This is really a great step forward, and may improve their childhood a lot. Children should become used to consume media at their own pace, without distracting noise (ads). Also, their schedule should be determined by their parents, not the TV program. Moreover, it may help to make fun of the ads they still see. (on websites, outside at walls, etc.) This may improve their awareness, and hopefully later their critical thinking. BTW, when I started not to watch TV anymore, I expected that I would miss something, but I didn't miss anything at all! Friends told me about the few cool series I missed, and I simply bought the DVDs. It is a huge increase in comfort, watching those at my own pace, in their original length rather than the blown-up-with-ads length.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      I have to wholeheartedly agree with everybsingle thing you've just said. This is why I love Netfix - there are lots of awesome shows my kids love like Hulk and the Agents of Smash, Spiderman and others I've forgotten. Otherwise, they watch Australua's State run kids channel, which sounds awful but actually tends to run somewhat subversive shows like Yoohoo and Friends (universally panned by those who watched the original Korean version, but not by me or my kids!) and Adventure Time. And not a single advertisement, except promos. Still have to find something for my daughter, who also loves those shows and we encourage her to watch them, but she is still into Shopkins (despite my best efforts of discouraging her) and other shows designed to appeal to her and her friends. But she said watches absolutely no commercial TV. This is more by happy accident than design, because commercial TV in Australia is so completely rubbish that there is literally no need to watch it - ever!
  - 11y ago
WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 11y ago
Are you doing peer reviewed reproductible research, with both open source code and data and tyying to disprobe your hypothesis? </s> Even researchers don't agree what are "acceptable" research findings [0]. I think that priming[1] would be an important factor to consider when doing "lot of" research. And, were someone going to dimiss it, they would need "extrordinary evidence" as the say goes. Here is a testimonial of one of these "ideas" supporter: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Attrib. Richard Feynman (|p| < 0.05) The fact that "[you] can't see how it would influence [you] much" is one of the features of biases. Regards [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29
- seanwilson 11y ago
  Sure, but I'm saying I don't think the effect (which is non-zero) is manipulative enough to get annoyed about. I read people talking about ads as if you look at them and they compel you to buy something you never wanted.
Estragon 11y ago
> How much are you really worried by this? It's a very serious ethical issue. You might not have any exploitable weaknesses given the current technology, but other people do: alcoholism, pain medication, financial distress, loneliness, straight-up boredom...
laotzu 11y ago
>if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount If it is unconsciously influencing you how would you know if it is only doing so "a tiny amount"?
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>How much are you really worried by this? I'm not much worried right now. I'm worried about where we are going, especially with machine learning. Take a look at the story of Target identifying when a girl was pregnant before her own father knew. Then apply this to any area where you have any reason at all to keep a secret. Maybe you are gay with parents who will rather you be homeless than living in their home. Maybe you have a mental illness but rather the rest of the world not know about it. Maybe you like democracy in a country where you aren't allowed to. Eventually they will find ways to tease this information out with all the data they have tracked about us.

chflags 11y ago

re: content There are some who believe that distribution channels are actually more valuable than any content that passes through them. That is, content distribution is potentially a higher value business than content creation. Assuming the Internet as a distribution channel, who owns or controls access to it? Rhetorical question. One view is that the price of internet access is the price of "content". If the internet was meant to be a medium for paid content, then why has so much content been shared through it "for free" beginning in the late 80's/early 90's and continuing even today? I certainly do not know. What I remember is that only a minority of the population were avid www users when the public www first appeared in 1993. So, in 1993, why upload "free content" that would otherwise be under paid subscription? For the novelty of it? To jumpstart the www? To entice people to use the www? Regardless of the reason, the end result is that the genie is out of the bottle. The sharing of content "for free" started early on and continued unabated, even as www usage grew. Today, if an internet subscriber seeks "content" she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone, except her access provider. Greeting users with a deluge of advertising is not going to change the facts: users are continually presented with free content that they once would have had to pay for. The deluge of ads is not a "cost" of the content. It's just a new source of revenue for those who want to play www middleman (who should be very thankful for all the money they have made without ever having had to create any real content). At the same time, as a result the signal to noise ratio has become a serious problem for many www users. (Users are also presented with enormous amounts of fake, garbage "content". That only highlights how open and inexpensive content distribution has become.) It is undeniable that users can block the ads and other garbage and keep the content. The content is not going away. And the www will still keep growing. With the barriers to distribution so low, it is no surprise that users should have to filter out some garbage. The only surprise is how long it's taken them to start doing it. What's nice is that filtering can be automated, in the same way the generation of ads and fake content have been automated. There was time in the history of email before the ubiquitous use of spam filters. And there is a time in the history of the www before the ubiquitous use of ad blockers. That time is coming to a close.

betterturkey 11y ago
"Today, if an internet subscriber seeks 'content' she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone." If anyone hasn't checked out Ethan Zuckerman's essays before, he was the inventor of the pop-up ad while he was at Tripod in the 90s. Today, he's sort of an anti-ads activist and points to that early trade (ads for free content) as a fundamental shift in our acceptance of advertising (as well as the extent to which we're okay, as a society, with advertisers knowing who we are). Good read here: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert... That "original sin," as you point out, is a pretty catastrophic barrier for most subscription models. There's enough competition in virtually every content industry that the user can go elsewhere.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

cbhl 11y ago

Subscriptions lock out people without credit cards (children, less affluent) from the Internet. This makes me sad.

erickhill 11y ago
Subscriptions can mean an ad-free experience for those who pay, but content for all. Doesn't have to be a wall.
id 11y ago
It also locks out well-off people with credit cards - they can't possibly subscribe to everything.
2muchcoffeeman 11y ago
I used to go to the library for this sort of thing. My mom works in a library and they are in the process of throwing all the books away, and creating 'social spaces'. As much as the Internet has made information easy to get, there are a lot of high quality publications that I can no longer access eg research papers, art and design books.
kyrra 11y ago
In the US, sure. But there are lots and lots of various forms of payment to handle things like subscriptions. See Boletos[0] in Brazil for example. Many other countries around the world have ways of paying for things online without credit cards. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boleto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boleto

JacobJans 11y ago

"Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists" all manipulate the thoughts you have. We don't live in a bubble; we're a product of our surroundings. No aspect of the world is benign. The fact that ads may "change you" is not an argument against advertising, because it doesn't distinguish advertising from anything else, at all. It seems to me there is a moral judgement happening here. But, what is the appropriate way to distinguish moral manipulation from immoral manipulation? Communication – even honest communication – is designed to influence other people. I'm trying to "change you" with this message. Should this message be blocked? Yes/no? What is the difference?

vog 11y ago
This line of argument is heavily flawed, due to wildly mixing the parent's specific term "manipulating" with the broader term "changing".
- olegj 11y ago
  If it is you didn't explain why, you merely restated the core issue JacobJans has with fighting advertising. Where exactly is the line between "manipulating" and "changing view"? There are many associations and causalities studied with regards to human mind, should I be guilty of manipulation if I create a promotional poster using colours which are associated with some particular emotional response? In the end this is another of the cases where intent is everything, and for better or worse intent cannot be measured.
  - vog 11y ago
    There may be a grey area between "manipulating" and "changing view", but in the case of advertisement this this clearly on the "manipulation" side, almost by definition. Ads are fully paid by the seller, and exist by definition to serve solely the seller's purpose. In addition, ads are expected to "look and feel" like they were in the customer's interest, which makes it even more clear that this is all about manipulation.
    - 11y ago

iamphilrae 11y ago

Ironically, how did you find out about those services in the first place?

ddeck 11y ago

I think there's a distinction to be made between advertising and marketing, at least the way I define them. Advertising is about making consumers aware of a product or service that they may use if they were aware of it. This seems reasonable and generally beneficial. Marketing is about using psychological techniques to manipulate consumers preferences such that they want to consume products and services that they otherwise wouldn't. Unfortunately this segment of the industry had grown rapidly over the past few decades and techniques to exploit our cognitive deficiencies have improved tremendously.

punee 11y ago
Yeah, it's just too bad you're the only person in the world to define advertising and marketing that way, I guess? At least among people who know what they're talking about.
- ddeck 11y ago
  Well the labels are unimportant. The point is that certain elements of advertising/marketing seem reasonable and it could be argued that they are value adding to consumers as well as the advertisers, while others are manipulative and outright unethical.
  - punee 11y ago
    That's not a claim that will meet much opposition. However, to claim that marketing is inherently "manipulative", or that manipulative tactics are even a significant part of it, seems a little ill-informed. Y Combinator's motto is "Make something people want". To the overwhelming majority of practitioners, this is exactly what marketing sets out to do.
asr 11y ago
This distinction is generally made when economists think about advertising too -- for example: http://economics.virginia.edu/sites/economics.virginia.edu/files/Information%20content%20of%20advertising.pdf http://economics.virginia.edu/sites/economics.virginia.edu/f... Though I've never heard "advertising" and "marketing" used to describe information content vs. persuasion, it would be a great shorthand.

ljk 11y ago

There are many other ways to advertise other than showing a commercial. I also try to protect myself by avoiding ads, but other tactics like product placements in tv shows and movies is making it hard to avoid everything..

konschubert 11y ago

The issue with subscriptions is that they get very expensive if you want to subscribe to all the blogs you're reading. Maybe micropayments are a better alternative, but the current implementations all rise the barrier of entry in a way that makes them undesirable. I have tried to think of a better system and I have written it down as a free "micropayment standard". You can find it here, I am looking forward to any comments. https://konstantinschubert.github.io/pennytoken-spec/ https://konstantinschubert.github.io/pennytoken-spec/ I am also working on a reference implementation over here: http://micropayment-service.boosted.science/ http://micropayment-service.boosted.science/ I'd be happy about some feedback.