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Sometimes I feel like throwing up when I hear more stories about advertising, advertising and more advertising. It's such a sad trend. Either people want to mak

Sometimes I feel like throwing up when I hear more stories about advertising, advertising and more advertising. It's such a sad trend. Either people want to make money advertising things directly or our best engineers work for companies that provide advertising. There is so much potential lost with all the effort going into advertising instead of producing products that make the world better.

GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y ago
And yet we have already sacrificed those babies to Moloch, because if you don't somebody else will.
- dougmwne 8y ago
  Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius!
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
> There is so much potential lost with all the effort going into advertising instead of producing products that make the world better. Devil's advocate / on the other hand: there's so much potential lost with all the effort going into producing products that make the world better, but which fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising.
- epicide 8y ago
  They fall flat because they aren't keeping up with poorly made products that have all their budgets put into advertising. We can keep flipping this as long as we want. At the end of the day, it sucks that companies get a bigger (short-term) reward by dumping more into advertising and marketing than into the product itself.
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    I agree. I’m curious about all these world changing wonder products that just aren’t popular because a marketing agency wasn’t involved in manipulating... I mean educating the public.
  - dec0dedab0de 8y ago
    While advocating the use of Open Source software at a fairly large corporation I used to work at, a common refrain was "You get what you paid for" I eventually started replying to that with "So we get marketing, and lunches with sales teams?" It actually worked a bit.
- dmwallin 8y ago
  I would suggest a minor adjustment, they fall flat due to a lack of visibility and public acceptance. Advertising is only one such way to achieve that. Unfortunately advertising is capital-driven and there is only partial overlap of products that make the world better and capital. There is also a significant amount of overlap between products that don't make the world better and capital. There are two ways to fix this problem, one is to find ways to drive more capital to products that make the world better, the other is to find better ways to drive visibility and acceptance that don't revolve around capital.
- yeutterg 8y ago
  I think this is because people do what's comfortable for them. A lot of technical founders don't want to go outside of their comfort zone when that's exactly what they need to do to help their product succeed AND grow as a person. Edit: This regards all forms of product promotion, not just paid ads.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  That wouldn't be so much a problem if there wasn't already such an extreme level of advertising of shitty products to begin with. It's like how advertisers often claim "the internet wouldn't exist without advertising". What they really mean is all the sites (composing the majority of the internet now it seems) which have such little or negative instrinsic value that they must rely on click baiting, psychological manipulation, and selling out to advertisers would die out -- leaving only those sites which provide enough value that people care to pay for themselves, like it used to be in the "good old days"
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  This is actually another reason why advertising is bad. The reason why those hypothetical products would "fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising" is because of the noise created by other advertisers. Cut that noise out, and suddenly very little would be needed to effectively communicate to people about new products.
kurthr 8y ago
Yeah, but I guess it could be worse... they could be working on "civilian control systems" in the "defense" industry. Now they just spy, FUD, astroturf, and Psyop for brands and corporations. Govts and lobbyists can hire them! It's probably best not to discuss crypto-coinage in this context.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "Yeah, but I guess it could be worse... they could be working on "civilian control systems" in the "defense" industry. " They are working very hard on building up the infrastructure and technology needed for total population control. The needs of an advertising company and an authoritarian government are very similar.
kakaorka 8y ago
I think online advertising is mostly a hoax, with very few exceptions. I usually dismiss anything that remotely resembles an ad and just shut it off, even if it was really interesting. So I tend to think that the companies that pay for ads online are the ones paying for the cost of browsing the Internet for free, so I hate ads a bit less after that :)
- greyfox 8y ago
  "browsing for free" >who's browsing for free?
  - alehul 8y ago
    Facebook and Google users, for instance.
- QuantumGood 8y ago
  I know this isn't what you mean to emphasize, but this reads a bit as "only products and services no one on the internet hears about are not a hoax". Of course you know it's more nuanced than that, but your comment makes your worldview seem narrower than you probably intended.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >I usually dismiss anything that remotely resembles an ad And if the targeted advertising isn’t detected? Isn’t the whole topic here to advertise in a way that doesn’t seem like a website banner ad?
deanCommie 8y ago
Counterpoint: How much innovation has been incentivized due to so many internet services being free while being subsidized by ads. It's definitely a nuisance, and left unchecked can become a Black Mirror or Maniac-esque nightmare. But in it's current format it still feels like a worthwhile exchange.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
  I don’t know. It would be difficult to quantify. But, personally, I don’t think, for example, the web has improved much in the Web 2.0 era. It might be worse.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I think so too. MySpace and Friendster already connected people and since the first version I don't think Gmail has improved much. Most current changes seem to be more about making products more addictive but not necessarily more useful.
- esotericn 8y ago
  It's very hard to unpick this. The internet services themselves are almost completely nonsense that we could do without. It's difficult for me to think of a single ad-based website or application that serves a purpose outside of its' own self propagation. The knock-on effects of circulating money for development work into new languages/libraries/frameworks might well be.
  - PJDK 8y ago
    Well I personally owe an entire career to the fact I could learn to code for free thanks to add supported services. I'm rather glad I could skype my brother in Japan even when I couldn't afford international call rates. And so on...
    - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
      >Well I personally owe an entire career to the fact I could learn to code for free thanks to add supported services. In my experience the sites which you pay a small monthly fee ($5-10) to are far superior
QuantumGood 8y ago
I know a lot of people working to make the world better, that have had to move onto other things because they lack an understanding of advertising. In fact most people I meet who strongly desire to serve others almost completely misunderstand how advertising works. Working to make the world better shouldn't be mutually exclusive to understanding advertising, but often seems to be.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >And I know a lot of people working to make the world better, that have had to move onto other things because they lack an understanding of advertising. Such as? I can’t seem to think of any examples.
  - QuantumGood 8y ago
    It would be fair to say this is tied pretty tightly to lack of business skills. I think most of us expect that on the "Most Admired/Least Admired Scale" marketers clump towards the bottom, not the top. There are plenty of failed KickStarters/GoFundMe's to peruse, but this is endemic among non-profits. While many do NOT offer services that could be self-supporting, many others could be, but there is insufficient business or advertising understanding to pursue being successfully self-supporting. Among inventors, many pursue licensing or finding large partners (a reasonable idea, as far as it goes), but I've seen some pretty ridiculous advertising attempts. But the real gold mine is from the files of marketing consultants working with teachers/service providers. Only some clients are in the "trying to make the world a better place" category, but many overlap that. Here's where you really find the greatest numbers of admirable folks very out of their depth at marketing.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Working to make the world better shouldn't be mutually exclusive to understanding advertising, but often seems to be. From what I've observed, working to make the world better isn't mutually exclusive with understanding advertising, but is strongly anticorrelated with wanting to do it. People who think about making the world better tend to understand that advertising is a cancer on society.
sh33mp 8y ago
To put a futurist spin on it: advertising is the commercialization around the information bottleneck in the information age.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Advertising is actively creating and perpetuating the information bottleneck.

GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y ago

And yet we have already sacrificed those babies to Moloch, because if you don't somebody else will.

dougmwne 8y ago
Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius!

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

> There is so much potential lost with all the effort going into advertising instead of producing products that make the world better. Devil's advocate / on the other hand: there's so much potential lost with all the effort going into producing products that make the world better, but which fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising.

epicide 8y ago
They fall flat because they aren't keeping up with poorly made products that have all their budgets put into advertising. We can keep flipping this as long as we want. At the end of the day, it sucks that companies get a bigger (short-term) reward by dumping more into advertising and marketing than into the product itself.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  I agree. I’m curious about all these world changing wonder products that just aren’t popular because a marketing agency wasn’t involved in manipulating... I mean educating the public.
- dec0dedab0de 8y ago
  While advocating the use of Open Source software at a fairly large corporation I used to work at, a common refrain was "You get what you paid for" I eventually started replying to that with "So we get marketing, and lunches with sales teams?" It actually worked a bit.
dmwallin 8y ago
I would suggest a minor adjustment, they fall flat due to a lack of visibility and public acceptance. Advertising is only one such way to achieve that. Unfortunately advertising is capital-driven and there is only partial overlap of products that make the world better and capital. There is also a significant amount of overlap between products that don't make the world better and capital. There are two ways to fix this problem, one is to find ways to drive more capital to products that make the world better, the other is to find better ways to drive visibility and acceptance that don't revolve around capital.
yeutterg 8y ago
I think this is because people do what's comfortable for them. A lot of technical founders don't want to go outside of their comfort zone when that's exactly what they need to do to help their product succeed AND grow as a person. Edit: This regards all forms of product promotion, not just paid ads.
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
That wouldn't be so much a problem if there wasn't already such an extreme level of advertising of shitty products to begin with. It's like how advertisers often claim "the internet wouldn't exist without advertising". What they really mean is all the sites (composing the majority of the internet now it seems) which have such little or negative instrinsic value that they must rely on click baiting, psychological manipulation, and selling out to advertisers would die out -- leaving only those sites which provide enough value that people care to pay for themselves, like it used to be in the "good old days"
TeMPOraL 8y ago
This is actually another reason why advertising is bad. The reason why those hypothetical products would "fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising" is because of the noise created by other advertisers. Cut that noise out, and suddenly very little would be needed to effectively communicate to people about new products.

kurthr 8y ago

Yeah, but I guess it could be worse... they could be working on "civilian control systems" in the "defense" industry. Now they just spy, FUD, astroturf, and Psyop for brands and corporations. Govts and lobbyists can hire them! It's probably best not to discuss crypto-coinage in this context.

maxxxxx 8y ago
"Yeah, but I guess it could be worse... they could be working on "civilian control systems" in the "defense" industry. " They are working very hard on building up the infrastructure and technology needed for total population control. The needs of an advertising company and an authoritarian government are very similar.

kakaorka 8y ago

I think online advertising is mostly a hoax, with very few exceptions. I usually dismiss anything that remotely resembles an ad and just shut it off, even if it was really interesting. So I tend to think that the companies that pay for ads online are the ones paying for the cost of browsing the Internet for free, so I hate ads a bit less after that :)

greyfox 8y ago
"browsing for free" >who's browsing for free?
- alehul 8y ago
  Facebook and Google users, for instance.
QuantumGood 8y ago
I know this isn't what you mean to emphasize, but this reads a bit as "only products and services no one on the internet hears about are not a hoax". Of course you know it's more nuanced than that, but your comment makes your worldview seem narrower than you probably intended.
SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
>I usually dismiss anything that remotely resembles an ad And if the targeted advertising isn’t detected? Isn’t the whole topic here to advertise in a way that doesn’t seem like a website banner ad?

deanCommie 8y ago

Counterpoint: How much innovation has been incentivized due to so many internet services being free while being subsidized by ads. It's definitely a nuisance, and left unchecked can become a Black Mirror or Maniac-esque nightmare. But in it's current format it still feels like a worthwhile exchange.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
I don’t know. It would be difficult to quantify. But, personally, I don’t think, for example, the web has improved much in the Web 2.0 era. It might be worse.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I think so too. MySpace and Friendster already connected people and since the first version I don't think Gmail has improved much. Most current changes seem to be more about making products more addictive but not necessarily more useful.
esotericn 8y ago
It's very hard to unpick this. The internet services themselves are almost completely nonsense that we could do without. It's difficult for me to think of a single ad-based website or application that serves a purpose outside of its' own self propagation. The knock-on effects of circulating money for development work into new languages/libraries/frameworks might well be.
- PJDK 8y ago
  Well I personally owe an entire career to the fact I could learn to code for free thanks to add supported services. I'm rather glad I could skype my brother in Japan even when I couldn't afford international call rates. And so on...
  - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
    >Well I personally owe an entire career to the fact I could learn to code for free thanks to add supported services. In my experience the sites which you pay a small monthly fee ($5-10) to are far superior

QuantumGood 8y ago

I know a lot of people working to make the world better, that have had to move onto other things because they lack an understanding of advertising. In fact most people I meet who strongly desire to serve others almost completely misunderstand how advertising works. Working to make the world better shouldn't be mutually exclusive to understanding advertising, but often seems to be.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
>And I know a lot of people working to make the world better, that have had to move onto other things because they lack an understanding of advertising. Such as? I can’t seem to think of any examples.
- QuantumGood 8y ago
  It would be fair to say this is tied pretty tightly to lack of business skills. I think most of us expect that on the "Most Admired/Least Admired Scale" marketers clump towards the bottom, not the top. There are plenty of failed KickStarters/GoFundMe's to peruse, but this is endemic among non-profits. While many do NOT offer services that could be self-supporting, many others could be, but there is insufficient business or advertising understanding to pursue being successfully self-supporting. Among inventors, many pursue licensing or finding large partners (a reasonable idea, as far as it goes), but I've seen some pretty ridiculous advertising attempts. But the real gold mine is from the files of marketing consultants working with teachers/service providers. Only some clients are in the "trying to make the world a better place" category, but many overlap that. Here's where you really find the greatest numbers of admirable folks very out of their depth at marketing.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Working to make the world better shouldn't be mutually exclusive to understanding advertising, but often seems to be. From what I've observed, working to make the world better isn't mutually exclusive with understanding advertising, but is strongly anticorrelated with wanting to do it. People who think about making the world better tend to understand that advertising is a cancer on society.

sh33mp 8y ago

To put a futurist spin on it: advertising is the commercialization around the information bottleneck in the information age.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Advertising is actively creating and perpetuating the information bottleneck.