5 ms·

Let me ask you this then. I clicked your HN profile for clues about what your interests might be, and you mention your public key on keybase.io. For this exam

Let me ask you this then. I clicked your HN profile for clues about what your interests might be, and you mention your public key on keybase.io. For this example (I am writing this before I did this search) I will search Google for keybase.io and copy here one of the top ads. Unfortunately keybase.io and keybase as search terms don't show me any ads. Let me try "public key". Still no ad. (On Google's homepage.) Let me try keybase public key. Still no ad. Let me try public key server. No ad. I clicked around on some related queries, until I finally saw an ad. (The query I ended up under was: sks keyserver setup). Now here is the ad that I saw: OpenPGP Library for .NET‎ Adwww.didisoft.com/‎ Pure .NET OpenPGP Library Easy API Online examplesPurchaseProduct page (How it appeared to me, at the bottom of the search page: https://imgur.com/a/n76d3 https://imgur.com/a/n76d3) Now let me ask you. If you are a .NET developer and you're trying to work with PGP, would you rather see what I just showed you - or would you rather see an ad for cat food (even though you don't own a cat)? Please be honest here.

tzahola 9y ago
I would rather see the cat food. Software products that need advertisement to succeed are either underperforming (because they’ve spent their money on ads instead of devs) or scams.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  To be fair, I don't know of a single successful software product that doesn't advertise in some fashion.
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    Depends what you consider an advertisement - advertising on something like Read The Docs or sponsoring conferences is one thing and I feel that's acceptable, but buying keywords on Google is just spam. I would not trust any software product (especially a low-level one like a library, as opposed to an out-of-the-box SaaS) that advertises on Google keywords or similar.
    - logicallee 9y ago
      so you love conferences they sponsor. would you ever pay some minimal amount to go to a conference? If so isn't an adword (in your gmail or in your search results) an appropriate place to see you, in the clearly labelled advertising section? Wouldn't you be quite likely to click it, and also be happy that it was served to you?
      - Rjevski 9y ago
        > would you ever pay some minimal amount to go to a conference Yes. My issues with Adwords are the following: 1) they're abused by spam and garbage, so seeing a (potentially good) software product in there immediately turns me off and is actually a red flag. 2) it shows that the developer has no idea of the target market for their product - anyone that has the brains to use a software library would be blocking the Adwords anyway. 3) the above could mean they're instead targeting managers/CTOs as opposed to the actual people who will be using the library (developers), which is also a huge red flag.
        logicallee 9y ago
        I have no problem at all with your logic for the specific case you mentioned. (In fact it's easy for me to agree with it.) In fact we're arguing/discussing better targeting now! As a developer you don't want to see an open source product advertised. On the other hand, if you're a manager who can't deliver a feature that your customer is begging for because there is no out of the box solution/library for it, and you don't have the personpower - but lo, you can license one for $100/month that's worth tens of thousands to your customer, you'll be thrilled if you can learn about the existence of it. (Just a hypothetical, use a different one if you want: again, we're talking about better targeting.) You didn't answer my question about if you want to see ads for a conference (I took two long sentences to ask you super explicitly) - is it because that's a resounding yes? I get that you don't want to answer the question because it's counter to your philosophy that targeted ads are bad. That philosophy, as we're seeing, is wrong.
        9y ago
danpalmer 9y ago
As I tried to explain in my comment, if the relevance of adverts depends on tracking me, I'd much rather have irrelevant ads. If the relevance can be done entirely through similarity or link to the content I'm consuming then I am much more ok with it.

tzahola 9y ago

I would rather see the cat food. Software products that need advertisement to succeed are either underperforming (because they’ve spent their money on ads instead of devs) or scams.

jasonlotito 9y ago
To be fair, I don't know of a single successful software product that doesn't advertise in some fashion.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  Depends what you consider an advertisement - advertising on something like Read The Docs or sponsoring conferences is one thing and I feel that's acceptable, but buying keywords on Google is just spam. I would not trust any software product (especially a low-level one like a library, as opposed to an out-of-the-box SaaS) that advertises on Google keywords or similar.
  - logicallee 9y ago
    so you love conferences they sponsor. would you ever pay some minimal amount to go to a conference? If so isn't an adword (in your gmail or in your search results) an appropriate place to see you, in the clearly labelled advertising section? Wouldn't you be quite likely to click it, and also be happy that it was served to you?
    - Rjevski 9y ago
      > would you ever pay some minimal amount to go to a conference Yes. My issues with Adwords are the following: 1) they're abused by spam and garbage, so seeing a (potentially good) software product in there immediately turns me off and is actually a red flag. 2) it shows that the developer has no idea of the target market for their product - anyone that has the brains to use a software library would be blocking the Adwords anyway. 3) the above could mean they're instead targeting managers/CTOs as opposed to the actual people who will be using the library (developers), which is also a huge red flag.
      - logicallee 9y ago
        I have no problem at all with your logic for the specific case you mentioned. (In fact it's easy for me to agree with it.) In fact we're arguing/discussing better targeting now! As a developer you don't want to see an open source product advertised. On the other hand, if you're a manager who can't deliver a feature that your customer is begging for because there is no out of the box solution/library for it, and you don't have the personpower - but lo, you can license one for $100/month that's worth tens of thousands to your customer, you'll be thrilled if you can learn about the existence of it. (Just a hypothetical, use a different one if you want: again, we're talking about better targeting.) You didn't answer my question about if you want to see ads for a conference (I took two long sentences to ask you super explicitly) - is it because that's a resounding yes? I get that you don't want to answer the question because it's counter to your philosophy that targeted ads are bad. That philosophy, as we're seeing, is wrong.
        9y ago

danpalmer 9y ago

As I tried to explain in my comment, if the relevance of adverts depends on tracking me, I'd much rather have irrelevant ads. If the relevance can be done entirely through similarity or link to the content I'm consuming then I am much more ok with it.