6 ms·

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

• 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
              Job ad Edit: Also consider that some definitions of advertisement might arguably include exit signs on the highway.
              • iamacyborg 5y ago
                Exit signs is an example I'd not thought of before. That's a good one.
              • JohnBooty 5y ago
                Exit signs on highways would very much be an example of "purchasing a bit of somebody's attention that was initially directed at something else" IMO.
                • 5y ago
    • tuatoru 5y ago
      I think the real problem here is the cowardice of commerce regulators. If they did their job properly so that no one organisation had more than (say) 10 percent of any market including social media advertising and search as markets, then we would not have as big a problem. In other words, advertising is tolerable when the whole chain is thoroughly competitive.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • bigfudge 5y ago
        What evidence is there for that though? It sounds to me as though it's free market dogma posing as reasonable common sense. In social media, for example, there is currently competition. Yes FB is big, but new players are entering the market and causing them to shrink precisely by making the web even more toxic and unpleasant. Perfecting this process and introducing more competition (read desperation among product managers in the losing firms) isn't something I want to witness.
  • 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.