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Furthermore, the [online] advertiser gets astonishingly precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people have chosen to look at their ad and f

• cyborgx7 5y ago
  This stood out to me as well. There an impulse to think that once we have perfected something, it will be good. But then, we noticed that the "perfect" version of this thing is actually pretty bad. Which then makes you question the entire thing, fundamentally. Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. It is a fundamentally bad thing. There are just different degrees of badness. And since it's a fundamentally bad thing, perfecting it makes it worse.
  • iamacyborg 5y ago
    > Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. I don’t know, I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad in a person or business wanting to facilitate the discovery of something they’ve created.
    • cyborgx7 5y ago
      That is a disingenuous definition of advertising.
      • iamacyborg 5y ago
        How would you define it?
        • cyborgx7 5y ago
          Purchasing a bit of attention generated by something else to try to manipulate people into purchasing your product.
          • iamacyborg 5y ago
            And you think I'm the one being disingenuous?
            • cyborgx7 5y ago
              Yes.
            • cyborgx7 5y ago
              You know what, I'm curious. Name a form of advertising that does not fall under my definition.
              • iamacyborg 5y ago
                Well, last week I discovered an entirely new category of product I didn't know existed (tag management assurance & compliance) via an advertorial piece posted on LinkedIn. Other than the modern RTB ecosystem I don't think any other form of advertising is inherently flawed.
                • cyborgx7 5y ago
                  I don't see how this doesn't fit my definition of advertising. Liking the advertisement or finding it interesting is not in contradiction with what I wrote.
              • rascul 5y ago
    • saagarjha 5y ago
      Ok, but the problem is that people or businesses inherently only really want to facilitate the discovery of what they've created, regardless of whether it's the best thing for the person. In a perfect world people would have wants and they would be advertised to by the best solution for those wants and everyone would be happy, but what inevitably happens is that people advertise their products to people who don't want them in an attempt to ply them into being interested, or advertise their less suitable product more loudly than their better competitor.
      • leobg 5y ago
        Same thing when you apply for a job or you try to catch the attention of some girl you like. What you’re most concerned with here are your own expectations. And, just like an advertising come up you showcase your best attributes and downplay the worst. (Which isn’t to say that, in a world where everybody does this, actual listening and radical honesty couldn’t be a much more profitable strategy.)
        • praptak 5y ago
          > Same thing when you apply for a job or you try to catch the attention of some girl you like. No, it is not the same thing. The scale matters. Much of what is wrong with the world comes from allowing huge corporations to do stuff because a single person is allowed to do "same" stuff and we see no bad effects.
          • iamacyborg 5y ago
            Right but scale is a technological problem, not an advertising one. Do you think glossy ads in niche magazines are a problem?
            • praptak 5y ago
              Scale is a social/political problem. A multibillion corporations can buy infinitely more bandwidth than a common man, regardless of the underlying technology. This isn't a critique of capitalism, or at least not only. I happen to live in a country where the government is abusing its power to spam the public with its propaganda.
    • matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Businesses are not entitled to discovery. If we want to know about stuff, we'll ask for it. They don't have an inherent right to our attention and forcing the issue is abuse.
    • analog31 5y ago
      I'd say there was nothing inherently bad until it was pushed to a predictable conclusion. There are some folk stories along these lines, such as "the goose that laid the golden egg," or "the golden touch of King Midas." Someone is given a technology that is good for them if they use it with restraint, which of course they can't do, and it ends up destroying them. A modern story is "we can pump this black liquid out of the ground and double the human population."
  • mod 5y ago
    I had a response to a comment of mine here on HN recently that effectively made this same argument-- that letting corporations influence our behavior is being slept on as one of the great problems in our society. After thinking it through, I thoroughly agree. I'm not convinced of a proper course of action to correct it, but I do definitely think it's a problem as a whole. A world where we just seek out and buy the things we need and that will actually enrich or lives sounds like a great improvement over the current system.
    • nicoffeine 5y ago
      I think there was almost a good system in place: a variety of ad-supported sites that professionally reviewed new products, and a variety of ad-supported forums where you could get the advice of other people. Manufacturers win in both cases if they can make a good product that survives the professional review and doesn't fall apart or immediately break so the forums give it a pass. The problem is tracking and dependence on ad networks. Corporations doggedly chasing the bottom line don't want to spend the time or the money to pick and choose specific forums and sites to advertise. They want to pretend to automate that process. Their laziness not only killed the old networks and communities around various product segments, but helped start the "listicle" de-evolution that has decreased content quality across the entire internet. I used to be able to type in "product_name review" and get some useful, well-known sites. Now I get recycled garbage content, and I have to check all of those sites individually or restrict the domain in the search. It's ridiculous.
      • codazoda 5y ago
        Your comment reminded me of the old AdSense model where the advertiser (Google in this case) would look at the content of the page the ad was on and decide what ad to display as a result. In a way, this is just like magazine advertising where the seller can pick a publication that they think will cater to buyers. Maybe they can even pick a specific article. Personally, this is the model I long for again. If I’m looking at articles about bike maintenance, I’m getting ads for bike tools and supplies. Instead, I’m getting ads for USB power cords because I just purchased a new one to replace the one my dog chewed.
  • nicoburns 5y ago
    If you look carefully you might notice that your argument is also a critique of capitalism. The market mechanism in general selects for these “perfect” states of affairs, which often turn out out to be not that great in practice (although in fairness they are also genuinely pretty good often enough). I’m not quite sure what the solution is, but I suspect it involves taking our foot off the gas of the “marketise everything” bandwagon and pluralising our approach, but without throwing the baby out with the bath water and removing these market mechanisms entirely.
    • cyborgx7 5y ago
      > If you look carefully you might notice that your argument is also a critique of capitalism. It might be...
    • leobg 5y ago
      Isn’t that also a critique of all desire, period? Thinking the next shiny thing will improve your life. Then again, how much of life consists of reacting to a state of unease or to some desire?
      • prionassembly 5y ago
        Gate gate paragate parsamgate bodhi svaha!
    • iamacyborg 5y ago
      > If you look carefully you might notice that your argument is also a critique of capitalism. This, and also the modern era of mass-consumption of cheap goods.
    • Nasrudith 5y ago
      Critiques of capitalism are moldy and artic frigid takes. Largely because they operate under blind imperatives of unchecked assumptions and assertions. Two important questions are held as unspeakably rude and impertinent questions in their circles. "How would that even work?" and in response. "Why (the hell) would anybody do that?". Those two questions are what make entreprise work, period. If a solution fails to address those two questions it is a guaranteed pipe dream or scam. "Someone will repair my roof." "How would that even work?" "They show up with tools, climb onto the roof and inspect for damage before patching or replacing it." "Why (the hell) would they do that?" "Because it will get them paid a hefty bill." Simple but there is still ample space pie in the sky thinking and outright lunacy in the heuristic. An example below to show what a thoroughly unconvincing answer would look like. "Aliens will come out of the sky and fix my flat tire!" "How the hell would that even work?" "The electromagnetic emissions of our brain echo out into space of other dimensions unless retroreflected with a tinfoil hat. Then they'll ride space unicorns and laser fix my tire." "Why the hell would do that?" "For clicks on their alien equivalent of youtube."
  • jl6 5y ago
    The question to ask is: perfect for whom?
  • noduerme 5y ago
    >> I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. We should really have a beer. I started in advertising when I was 15. (My dad said "sell shoes or find another job"). I was in and out of agencies through my twenties. Advertising is a fundamentally bad thing. But if your clients trust you, you can sometimes use it for good. You just have to actually twist the hell out of their message to do that, use their money in ways they didn't anticipate, and always have a really concrete idea of what you want to accomplish. All while making it seem like you're just having fun. One thing it taught me is that there's no "system" in capitalist america. Not the way people talk about it. "The system" / "the man". The system is us. Just people in offices deciding how to frame something that will reach 100 million people. I was hated by teachers in art school for arguing my case in fine art crits. But arguing for showing something they don't like is the same skill that lets me argue the minority case for putting out controversial, socially meaningful ads that might get us in trouble, instead of inoffensive corporate pap. You can always do good in advertising, simply because you have more power than almost anyone else. The temptation, and the easy thing, and the thing that pays, is to perpetuate little evils. But it's surprisingly easy to do good. It ain't "art". It's arguably more important, though. You're in the trenches where the battle for minds takes place.
    • MrLeap 5y ago
      I'd join you both for beers.
    • nuclearnice1 5y ago
      I like this point of view. The system isn’t some permanent static game erected by Bezos and Schmidt for us to play out endlessly like Phil Connors in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. We can shape things in limited ways. With some effort, we could see interesting results. Do you have any examples of advertising that does good?
    • avgcorrection 5y ago
      Insiders tend to deny that “the system” exists. Perhaps because they can’t imagine themselves being a cog in the machine. And judging by how much agency you give yourself that seems about right.
  • nebulous_two 5y ago
    Interesting just means "properly aligned with incentive", which in this case is to make money
  • avgcorrection 5y ago
    Century of the Self claims that marketing in the naive old days prior to Bernays was like how the ad idealists picture it: if you want A, B, C, then our X can provide that for you. But people like Bernays realized that it was better to manipulate people’s wants rather than to simply respond to what people wanted. One example being “freedom sticks”, i.e. marketing smoking to women as a form of emancipation. And arguably this form of marketing is necessary under consumer capitalism since you need people to use a lot of their income on consumption in order to keep the economy going. This form of marketing and advertisement has been around for over a century and there is no going back.
• fennecs 5y ago
  And we all helped build it…
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • PickledHotdog 5y ago
    You say that like we're not still helping :)
• vasco 5y ago
  What a negative view of the web and the world, and with the wrong interpretation. What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads. What won was videos of cats, your aunt being able to get video instructions of how to replace a car tire, open-source software, and an explosion of tools that are getting more sophisticated by the minute, to the point that during a global pandemic, a lot of office jobs almost seamlessly moved fully remote, even if for a while. Yes, someone needs to tackle those issues you've mentioned, but by and large your description of the internet is not accurate to global use we get from it.
  • PartiallyTyped 5y ago
    You ignore sock puppets, troll farms, social manipulation by malicious actors, CP, literally wasting the energy consumption of Argentina to hash transactions to make money, the anti-vax insanity enabled by echo chambers, and god knows what else.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • Nasrudith 5y ago
      With the exception of hash energy waste you ignore their preexistence in society. Seriously, the people who find the internet the well of all sorrows keep on forgetting history beyond the remmit of their personal nostalgia. Disturbingly look at netherlands in the 1971-1987 child pornography was outright legal and had Lolita magazine openly existing. Look up Joop Wilhelmus, the infamous proprietor of it. Somehow it remained legal for 55 magazine issues.
      • PartiallyTyped 5y ago
        I believe that you ignore the scale of the things that are happening. To achieve the same "harm" then, as now, one needed significantly more money, and resources than they need today, and it was significantly more obvious. We should also not forget everything that's happening on 4chan (/b/, /x/, /pol/), and the like. Countless trolling that resulted in suicides with zero repercussions, doxxing, incidents like the one that lead us to "we did it reddit", QAnon, and so on. To ignore the scale and claim that it was happening then so nothing changes is dishonest.
• noduerme 5y ago
  Back in the day, the web actually had to be sold to people and businesses. They were reticent to pony up money to "get online". They didn't understand the benefits. It was pretty common to make these kinds of pitches to businesses as part of a broader idea of getting everyone online where we would all enjoy the benefits of a free and open society. Businesses were the last to take it up, and the first to destroy it. But no one saw that coming. I heard this kind of pitch made a dozens times by 1999, to hundreds of businessmen who are now probably dead. No one thought for a moment that getting more metrics on people would mean the death of privacy. Everyone was worried about the government spying on us, and no one had an idea it would be through scrolling and click tracking. At the time this was written, I had a palm pilot and mobile web; but I never would have predicted what a combination of smart phones and social media would do to scramble the average American consumers' brains.
• whoopdedo 5y ago
  And Adams even knew better. Earlier in his life he described the end result of optimizing elections for the candidate who best "catches people's attention". And that being that anyone capable of getting himself elected under those circumstances should in no way be given the power of holding office. The media that is most "interesting" by web metrics is the least worth learning, and in many cases has negative informative value. Social media today is a million Zaphod Beeblebroxes saturating our senses.
  • nzealand 5y ago
    Adams wrote absurdist satire, e.g. earth being destroyed for an intergalactic bypass. Everyone back then had a fundamental belief that the internet would make things better just like the printing press had made things better. E.g. the nets elevating political discourse in Enders Game.
• EnKopVand 5y ago
  This is anecdotal but when I started as a CS freshmen a few years after this article was written online ”intelligent” advertisement, was, viewed as both interesting and positive in a lot of circles most people probably wouldn’t believe. This was a time where advertising companies had to contact the owners of popular webpages, and then try to sell the idea of putting their advertisements on the webpage. Where in the modern world, it’s mostly the other way around, or at least easy because influential people on the internet typically leave their contact information. It was a time where “computer-clusters” were considered a revolutionary idea that might just topple mainframes. It was long before Linus stepped up and fixed version control because he was still working to make Linux great. It was at a time where the absolutely top anti-virus software couldn’t detect a cult-of-the-dead-cow Trojan in an image file. I know this might not have been the case in California or other tech centrals but it sure was the reality of the CS department at the university of Aalborg in Denmark. I remember these things because some of the first really interesting projects I got to hack at was creating spam-filters. Because most importantly of all, this was a time where Google had only just emerged, and years before g-mail became a thing. Given how hard it was to sell advertisements, just think about how hard it is to find the Danish teenager who runs some popular website. Then how hard it is to get the business contract with a minor going, if you mange to convince him/her to put a huge ugly banner on their site. Coca Cola would obviously do it, but for a lot of smaller companies it was only natural to go for much easier (and cheaper) solutions, such as spamming e-mails. So it was actually a time where an alternative to the most common advertisement practices was something everyone almost everyone wanted to help create. Most of us never even thought about the downsides, unlike the author.
  • JohnBooty 5y ago
    This is one of those HN comments where I don't have anything to add, but I would like to say that I really appreciated reading it.