6 ms·

"I've changed my mind because my income depends on it and I don't want to feel like the bad guy"

williamtrask 5y ago
And he misses the point. Ask yourself what’s the difference between an ad engine and a recommender engine? In a recommender engine, the best recommendation for your quality of life is at the top. In an ad engine… that list gets resorted Advertising’s true cost is opportunity cost. It’s the lost opportunity of knowing the actual best option for your quality of life.
- quietbritishjim 5y ago
  I'm not trying to defend ads in general, but one problem that a recommender engine certainly suffers from is how to deal with a new entity. How do you make a new entrant gets into that list even though, while they may provide value, there's currently no evidence of that are far as the recommender is concerned?
  - cf 5y ago
    While often ignored, item-to-item similarity recommenders work really well for new items and have been the basis for Amazon's and YouTube's early recommendation algorithms https://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/02/youtube-uses-amazons-recommendation.html?m=1 https://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/02/youtube-uses-amazons-re...
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      I think you may be misunderstanding the parent (I may also be misunderstanding though) - they're saying that with a new user (not a new product), you have no information for providing recommendations to them; you have no idea what they're interested in.
      - quietbritishjim 5y ago
        I was talking about new products/movies/whatever, not users. Sorry, "new entity" was too vague in retrospect. My point was around the utility of marketing, at least in theory. If I release a new brand of baked beans, how would a recommender based on past sales (and combinations of sales) know to recommend it to anyone. Marketing allows it to go up the list (unfairly, according to the post I was replying to).
        lostcolony 5y ago
        Ah, okay. Then yeah, the original reply is valid. I assumed you meant a new user to a site, since you can't recommend anything then no matter what you've built (without user tracking that can maybe have built up some kind of profile from elsewhere).
  - williamtrask 5y ago
    This is also a problem ad engines face. Non-unique to recommenders.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  In a perfect market economy, those two lists are equal. Thats because the company who produces the product you are most interested in can afford to spend the most on ads. Products you aren't very interested in, either because they cost too much, or aren't up to your standards, you are unlikely to buy, and therefore those manufacturers won't be able to afford to get to the top ad spot. In reality, this doesn't work because the market is far from perfect, and the amount of margin a company has on a product to spend on advertising widely varies.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    "Perfect market" is a technical term meaning one where "buyers and sellers are so numerous and well informed that monopoly is absent and market prices cannot be manipulated". A perfect market would not help this problem. The notion that perfect realizations of Econ 101 concepts would produce outcomes everybody likes it both wrong and quasi-religious. It's like saying, "The perfect knife would never cut a human." Nope. If anything, the whole purpose of advertising is to create market distortions. Look at Coke vs Pepsi, for example. Billions are spent yearly to manipulate consumers to make choices that differ from whatever the natural marketplace outcome would be.
  - hnaccount141 5y ago
    What's more, even in a perfect market as you describe, advertising will only ever represent the subset of the solution space for any given problem that involves spending money. With how powerful a voice advertising has, we end up training people to deal with problems by buying rather than doing/learning/making. In a perfect market, the top ad would be for the best treadmill. You'd never see an ad for just going outside for a run.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      In a totally perfect market, the park charges runners a few cents to go for a run, and spends some of that revenue on advertising the park to runners, and then they would outcompete treadmill ads (for some users). The reason you don't see this is because free parks are themselves a market distortion.
- naasking 5y ago
  > In a recommender engine, the best recommendation for your quality of life is at the top. In an ad engine… that list gets resorted A recommender engine in principle could avoid recommending things that are unhealthy. Advertising has no such guardrails. It recommends things that reflect someone else's economic incentives, and not what's actually best for me.
  - abakker 5y ago
    Exactly - there are many ads for products which are unhealthy, dangerous, or just very low quality. All of us have probably bought some in each category and regretted it.
- danShumway 5y ago
  One (partial) way of looking at it is that modern advertising is a recommendation engine, but just reworked to be adversarial. Because consumers know that advertising is an adversarial recommendation engine, restricting ads to a single place (like Google searches) isn't really feasible for the entire industry -- comparatively fewer people would visit that recommendation list because a large portion of them know that the recommendation list is adversarial. So, modern advertisers are left with two options: 1. Insert their recommendation engine into other activities that users want to engage with (ads inside of or alongside other content). 2. Try to convince users that a portal for doing searches on their recommendation engine is actually a non-adversarial recommendation engine (recommendation engines where it's not always immediately obvious that advertisers can pay to influence results). Closely related to 2 is in pairing their adversarial recommendation engine with a non-adversarial engine making it somewhat adversarial, but not so adversarial that users are willing to leave. For example, Google Maps does legitimately tell you about businesses nearby. It also combines ads into that system that are adversarial and that try to get you to buy things against your own best interest. But it's not so adversarial that the average user views it as useless, it still sort of works as a search engine. It's still food, it's just a little bit more poisonous than normal: enough to harm you a little bit, but not enough to kill you or to prompt you to stop eating it.
it_does_follow 5y ago
> my slightly-less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month in revenue... from ads. It doesn't take much to convert him either! Initially I thought his argument was "I thought using ads doesn't bring any revenue, but now I'm paying for ads and making a net $900" which at least would argue some evidence that using advertising is not useless. However it seems like he's just getting paid $900/month to run ads... so in this case he could have been correct in the beginning and just changed his mind because he's on the winning end of a scam. Not saying that advertising doesn't work, just that his position provides no evidence for that.
nnamtr 5y ago
Probably true, but I suppose it's some sort of cognitive bias rather than a conscious thought out of greed or similar motives.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  If you ask people pointed enough questions, you'll soon find that their "subconscious" reasoning is just conscious reasoning that they don't attribute to themselves.
  - NateEag 5y ago
    s/don't attribute to/aren't aware of/
    - wpietri 5y ago
      Or have chosen to not be aware of. We live in an age of abundant information with many opportunities for pursuing self-awareness. But people are very good at avoiding thinking about things that would make them feel cognitive dissonance. E.g., look at religion. They can't all be correct. Fully rational people would surely want to get something so important right, so they'd work hard to discover the sources of confusion and sort things out. Instead we see religions and religious factions multiply. Thanks to fMRIs, we can even see that "what god wants" is just people "unconsciously" reading their own preferences: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-in-ones-own-image https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-i...
      - NateEag 5y ago
        Sure, makes sense, and fits cleanly into the substitution I proposed.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      Not even. If you don't take the roundabout route, they will definitely often use what Wikipedia calls "weasel words" to directly explain their thinking, in "plenty of" other anonymous people's mouths, in the passive voice.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

And he misses the point. Ask yourself what’s the difference between an ad engine and a recommender engine? In a recommender engine, the best recommendation for your quality of life is at the top. In an ad engine… that list gets resorted Advertising’s true cost is opportunity cost. It’s the lost opportunity of knowing the actual best option for your quality of life.

quietbritishjim 5y ago
I'm not trying to defend ads in general, but one problem that a recommender engine certainly suffers from is how to deal with a new entity. How do you make a new entrant gets into that list even though, while they may provide value, there's currently no evidence of that are far as the recommender is concerned?
- cf 5y ago
  While often ignored, item-to-item similarity recommenders work really well for new items and have been the basis for Amazon's and YouTube's early recommendation algorithms https://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/02/youtube-uses-amazons-recommendation.html?m=1 https://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/02/youtube-uses-amazons-re...
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    I think you may be misunderstanding the parent (I may also be misunderstanding though) - they're saying that with a new user (not a new product), you have no information for providing recommendations to them; you have no idea what they're interested in.
    - quietbritishjim 5y ago
      I was talking about new products/movies/whatever, not users. Sorry, "new entity" was too vague in retrospect. My point was around the utility of marketing, at least in theory. If I release a new brand of baked beans, how would a recommender based on past sales (and combinations of sales) know to recommend it to anyone. Marketing allows it to go up the list (unfairly, according to the post I was replying to).
      - lostcolony 5y ago
        Ah, okay. Then yeah, the original reply is valid. I assumed you meant a new user to a site, since you can't recommend anything then no matter what you've built (without user tracking that can maybe have built up some kind of profile from elsewhere).
- williamtrask 5y ago
  This is also a problem ad engines face. Non-unique to recommenders.
londons_explore 5y ago
In a perfect market economy, those two lists are equal. Thats because the company who produces the product you are most interested in can afford to spend the most on ads. Products you aren't very interested in, either because they cost too much, or aren't up to your standards, you are unlikely to buy, and therefore those manufacturers won't be able to afford to get to the top ad spot. In reality, this doesn't work because the market is far from perfect, and the amount of margin a company has on a product to spend on advertising widely varies.
- wpietri 5y ago
  "Perfect market" is a technical term meaning one where "buyers and sellers are so numerous and well informed that monopoly is absent and market prices cannot be manipulated". A perfect market would not help this problem. The notion that perfect realizations of Econ 101 concepts would produce outcomes everybody likes it both wrong and quasi-religious. It's like saying, "The perfect knife would never cut a human." Nope. If anything, the whole purpose of advertising is to create market distortions. Look at Coke vs Pepsi, for example. Billions are spent yearly to manipulate consumers to make choices that differ from whatever the natural marketplace outcome would be.
- hnaccount141 5y ago
  What's more, even in a perfect market as you describe, advertising will only ever represent the subset of the solution space for any given problem that involves spending money. With how powerful a voice advertising has, we end up training people to deal with problems by buying rather than doing/learning/making. In a perfect market, the top ad would be for the best treadmill. You'd never see an ad for just going outside for a run.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    In a totally perfect market, the park charges runners a few cents to go for a run, and spends some of that revenue on advertising the park to runners, and then they would outcompete treadmill ads (for some users). The reason you don't see this is because free parks are themselves a market distortion.
naasking 5y ago
> In a recommender engine, the best recommendation for your quality of life is at the top. In an ad engine… that list gets resorted A recommender engine in principle could avoid recommending things that are unhealthy. Advertising has no such guardrails. It recommends things that reflect someone else's economic incentives, and not what's actually best for me.
- abakker 5y ago
  Exactly - there are many ads for products which are unhealthy, dangerous, or just very low quality. All of us have probably bought some in each category and regretted it.
danShumway 5y ago
One (partial) way of looking at it is that modern advertising is a recommendation engine, but just reworked to be adversarial. Because consumers know that advertising is an adversarial recommendation engine, restricting ads to a single place (like Google searches) isn't really feasible for the entire industry -- comparatively fewer people would visit that recommendation list because a large portion of them know that the recommendation list is adversarial. So, modern advertisers are left with two options: 1. Insert their recommendation engine into other activities that users want to engage with (ads inside of or alongside other content). 2. Try to convince users that a portal for doing searches on their recommendation engine is actually a non-adversarial recommendation engine (recommendation engines where it's not always immediately obvious that advertisers can pay to influence results). Closely related to 2 is in pairing their adversarial recommendation engine with a non-adversarial engine making it somewhat adversarial, but not so adversarial that users are willing to leave. For example, Google Maps does legitimately tell you about businesses nearby. It also combines ads into that system that are adversarial and that try to get you to buy things against your own best interest. But it's not so adversarial that the average user views it as useless, it still sort of works as a search engine. It's still food, it's just a little bit more poisonous than normal: enough to harm you a little bit, but not enough to kill you or to prompt you to stop eating it.

it_does_follow 5y ago

> my slightly-less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month in revenue... from ads. It doesn't take much to convert him either! Initially I thought his argument was "I thought using ads doesn't bring any revenue, but now I'm paying for ads and making a net $900" which at least would argue some evidence that using advertising is not useless. However it seems like he's just getting paid $900/month to run ads... so in this case he could have been correct in the beginning and just changed his mind because he's on the winning end of a scam. Not saying that advertising doesn't work, just that his position provides no evidence for that.

nnamtr 5y ago

Probably true, but I suppose it's some sort of cognitive bias rather than a conscious thought out of greed or similar motives.

pessimizer 5y ago
If you ask people pointed enough questions, you'll soon find that their "subconscious" reasoning is just conscious reasoning that they don't attribute to themselves.
- NateEag 5y ago
  s/don't attribute to/aren't aware of/
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Or have chosen to not be aware of. We live in an age of abundant information with many opportunities for pursuing self-awareness. But people are very good at avoiding thinking about things that would make them feel cognitive dissonance. E.g., look at religion. They can't all be correct. Fully rational people would surely want to get something so important right, so they'd work hard to discover the sources of confusion and sort things out. Instead we see religions and religious factions multiply. Thanks to fMRIs, we can even see that "what god wants" is just people "unconsciously" reading their own preferences: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-in-ones-own-image https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-i...
    - NateEag 5y ago
      Sure, makes sense, and fits cleanly into the substitution I proposed.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Not even. If you don't take the roundabout route, they will definitely often use what Wikipedia calls "weasel words" to directly explain their thinking, in "plenty of" other anonymous people's mouths, in the passive voice.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]