> After all, marketing is little more than paid, thoughtful, intentional opinion-sharing. Y’all are just marketing your anti-marketing sentiments for free. Yea

> After all, marketing is little more than paid, thoughtful, intentional opinion-sharing. Y’all are just marketing your anti-marketing sentiments for free. Yeah, it'd be evil for a spammer to push posts without legitimate reason to believe that doing so would be beneficial to readers. I'd rather block anyone who'd so selfishly try to waste my time; their messages wouldn't be worth reading. But that's not what a lot of folks do. Many try to make helpful comments that they suspect will help benefit readers. Maybe sometimes they're wrong, but on the whole, a competent community-member ought to generally write things that'd tend to be worth it for others to read. Which is to say that, sure, we can frame discussions like this in terms of marketing -- even describing criticisms of marketing-practice as themselves being instances of marketing. But the moral there would be the observation that marketing CAN be good; not that much of it isn't evil. To be fair to your position though: yes, if marketing's thoughtful enough to act in the target's best-interests, including not bothering people when it wouldn't be worth their time to consider a proposal and up-front about information that might steer consumers elsewhere, then, sure, it can be good. However, the concern's that marketers are often pushing products/services whenever they can, attempting to skew consumers' perceptions toward the decision to buy rather than attempting to help consumers make optimal decisions.