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I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it. A while ago I would say I agree 100

I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it. A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now. Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did not do a good job advertising: - I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it - It was that cheap on sale? Too bad I did not hear about it a week ago. - DeVaughn’s closed!? I completely forgot about that restaurant. They had great food. - Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier that there is a tool for easily finding a time for a meeting. Advertising can be valuable. When done right, it does not have to be intrusive or annoying. This does not mean that every job provides value, but not knowing about something can cause people to feel negatively. Marketing is telling people about things.

qcnguy 1y ago
This is a common problem with "your job is bullshit" rhetoric. It says a lot more about the speaker than the people whose jobs they're criticizing. The most famous example is David Graeber, an academic who wrote a whole book on what he called "bullshit jobs". He claimed over half of all jobs were bullshit. But of the jobs he identified as such, most of them were actually valuable (receptionist, lawyers, programmers doing maintenance work). He just didn't understand why other people valued them. And, he was an activist deploying flowery rhetoric to make an argument for far-left politics, which is why nearly all the jobs he identified were in the private sector. Ironically, the most obviously bullshit job revealed by his work was his own, but for some mysterious reason academic activists were not identified as people with bullshit jobs. Lots of people noticed this. Some even did studies on it! They found that the number of people who said in surveys their jobs were useless was only 20%, and of those 20% a lot of them had jobs that were objectively not useless. Instead it was cleaners, janitors, garbage collectors and similar who tended to feel their jobs were useless. Clearly "work is useless" is simply a proxy for "I feel like a loser" and not an objective evaluation of whether the work actually provides value to others. People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.
- Ukv 1y ago
  > People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have. It can be in people's/companies' rational self-interest to act in a way that is detrimental to society as a whole. We can recognize harmful behaviour and legislate such that it's no longer profitable, but it can take a while to get to that point if there's a lack of awareness or powerful interests pushing against it.
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else. The world isn't new and the obviously unacceptable behaviors have all been forbidden for thousands of years. That's why when people talk about stuff that's detrimental to "society", they are usually trying to claim that their personal preferences are more universal than they actually are. It's reminiscent of Thatcher's observation that there's no such thing as society in the sense the left use the word. There are families and coworkers and employers and so on, but there's not some monolithic unit called society that can be anthropomorphised and given preferences. Clearly, advertising is nowhere near detrimental to society, it's the opposite: a society without ads would be a planned communist dystopia well beyond anything seen even in the USSR (which had advertising!). Many, many people benefit from advertising, which is why it's such a big industry. People who don't believe this is true are typically in the "don't have information others do" bucket. But a few are just trying to dress up animalistic anti-capitalism in more respectable sounding clothes.
    - andrepd 1y ago
      > It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else. This is such a wild thing to say. I thought it was evident that people can be bastards and do terrible things entirely inside the law, yet here we are.
    - Ukv 1y ago
myrmidon 1y ago
I do not disagree with you entirely, but I feel this almost borders on self-delusion. The sole purpose of ads is to (probabilistically) shift the targets spending behavior in favor of the one buying the ads, nothing more, nothing less. While ads can have utility from the victims point of view (contain relevant information), this is entirely incidental. If you want product updates or information, getting that from dedicated, independent 3rd parties is preferable in literally every situation I can think of.
- koliber 1y ago
  I disagree that this is the sole purpose of ads. I can see how people arrive at that opinion, but I feel it is narrow and incomplete. With a little restrospection and introspection, anyone can see examples in their own life where marketing had another purpose. Marketing can take many forms. Many people narrowly define it as "spam emails" or "unsolicited phone calls." Those are also marketing, but there is so much more. Marketing first and foremost informs. It can inform you that the problem that you have has even has a ready solution. It can inform you about the name of the product that solves your problem. It can inform you about alternative products that also solve your problem. Or it can reinforce and expand your existing opinions and believes. What you call the sole purpose is only one of these broad purposes of advertising. Remember the time you learned of a particular programming library that does the thing that you wanted to do? Without marketing, you would not have learned about it. Have you ever gone on a trip to a new place? How did you decide how you will spend your time? It was either because you researched things online and found websites that told you about those things. Or you saw a brochure at your hotel. Or an ad at the airport. Think about how you learned about your favorite web framework. It was likely through word-of-mouth advertising. Why do you drink (coke / pepsi / fav. brand of tea / fav. brand of coffee)? What formed your opinion was some kind of marketing, either directly, or indirectly. Many things we do and believes we hold are because of one form of marketing or another.
  - wzdd 1y ago
    The original comment, and your initial response, talked about advertising. The examples you give, and this response in general, are marketing. They are very different, and marketing is much broader.
narmiouh 1y ago
The way ads are run these days is almost completely wrong! - Lies are ok - Thrusting your product in a users face, doesn't care if the user cares, Just because I like golfing, doesn't mean every new golf ball brand needs to hit me up all the time. - Product with Money wins, not necessarily the right product - Most people are oblivious to their psychological drivers, Ad makers have learnt to exploit those to drive sales. This is one area AI can be very helpful as it improves, I face a problem, I let my agent loose and it finds the right solution and thus right products, provides comparative data for me to choose without the products being thrust in my face everywhere I go (behavioral ads) or also when I don't need it.
- koliber 1y ago
  A lot of marketing is done badly. These bad ways are the most glaring and people sometimes think that all marketing is like that. In reality, there is a lot of marketing that is completely unnoticeable. Some people would not even consider those things marketing. That is marketing done well (or at least better).
  - kulahan 1y ago
    Unfortunately, when that makes up a trillionth of a percent of all ads, it appears to me as though the overall idea is terrible, with a few who got lucky here and there.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  One of the best examples of your second point is that tweet that went something like "I bought a toilet seat and now I'm getting ads for toilet seats everywhere I go". It's annoying and not even productive for the advertiser.
  - StilesCrisis 1y ago
    Apparently some of the very best-converting ads are repeat sales. Of course it helps if the product is obviously consumable, but I'm told that this counterintuitive strategy actually works well. Maybe it's because they can track conversions but not product returns, so maybe you're searching for a better one after returning the first purchase.
isoprophlex 1y ago
Advertising is already rich people begging for your money. Not free exchange of information to allow value discovery. Don't conflate the two.
- koliber 1y ago
  What about the ad for your kids' school fundraiser? Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love. Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall.
  - jawilson2 1y ago
    > What about the ad for your kids' school fundraiser? My kids should come home with a flyer for it. > Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love. I will actively seek out and research a car. > Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall. Presumably this physical paper poster doesn't give me malware/AIDS if I look at it or tear off a slip. My overriding personal objective is to be able to exist without being expected to consume and spend constantly every moment, waking or otherwise. In an ideal world, I should have to give consent to be advertised to, and should be able to operate in public without being bombarded with companies trying to take my money.
    - koliber 1y ago
      > My overriding personal objective is to be able to exist without being expected to consume and spend constantly every moment, waking or otherwise We're fully aligned. The original point I was trying to make is that advertising can be done well, in a way that is compatible with this objective. Unfortunately, in many cases they aren't. > In an ideal world, I should have to give consent to be advertised to I thought about this a while back, and I think being bombarded with requests for consent is worse than being bombarded with ads. Cookie consent banners convinced me. > My kids should come home with a flyer for it. Fliers are ads. > I will actively seek out and research a car. Probably in some classified ads.
wzdd 1y ago
Except that you also learnt about 10 concerts you didn't want to go to, 10 sales you don't care about, etc. And it's not even (necessarily) 10 good concerts or sales, it's just the ones that someone managed to thrust in front of your face. Filtering the barrage of information is mental effort and distracts you from other tasks. I'd certainly like to know when my favourite bands are playing or get an alert when something I'm after is on sale. There are better and more focused solutions to these than advertising. > When done right, [advertising] does not have to be intrusive or annoying Citation needed.
- koliber 1y ago
  I consistently see marketing and advertising where I learn about events, products, or services I did not know about before. While researching potential products, I read through marketing websites (a form of ad) of different offers. I buy things on Amazon, which requires me to read through product descriptions, which are also ads for what the seller is selling. Agreed that there is too much machine-gun advertising and you see more than you need. However, I learned to appreciate good advertising while at the same time not letting the irrelevant ads ruin my day. source: personal experience and sample size of 1. At the same time, I am not some weirdo and other people see the same ads and marketing materials, and it's not unreasonable to think that they also derive some value from them. > I'd certainly like to know when my favourite bands are playing or get an alert when something I'm after is on sale If you ever had this happen, that's another case to cite for non-intrusive and useful advertising.
barrkel 1y ago
Ads are agents in a zero-sum war for your attention. If you have focus, if you're not aimlessly wandering around, ads try to distract you. They attack your personal agency and sovereignty, trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing. Because they're in a zero sum competition, the dynamics are to escalate. There's only so much inventory, and the winners of the bids for your attention need to have more and more effect on your behavior to justify the escalating costs. Text isn't enough, images are needed. Images aren't enough, videos are needed. Videos aren't enough, interstitials with tiny close buttons are needed, with mandatory pauses. If advertisers could reach out and physically grab you by the head, they would.
- koliber 1y ago
  All of this is true for a large portion of web ads. Then there is the ad for your kids' school fundraiser. Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love. Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall. These ads also are "trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing". Yet these feel ads differently despite also being "agents in a zero-sum war for your attention". I don't think people appreciate how much good and positive advertising exists because they are conditioned and on-guard for the kinds of ads that you describe.
  - randerson 1y ago
    If I wanted notices about fundraisers it should be because I signed up for them. If I want to know about concerts I would've subscribed to a feed. If I wanted to help my cousin find a used car I'd actively go searching for one. If I have a problem in need of a solution, I'll search for it.
  - mindslight 1y ago
    All of that is true for all web ads. The friendly types of ads you're describing only work as offline ads. If I am online I don't want any of that offline context following me around at the behest of a creepy surveillance industry. A web page knowing what is local to me or what I might be interested in is a bug. Frankly I categorize it in the realm of security vulnerabilities. And that's still putting aside the question of why I would want to spend time/attention looking at any online ads. The ad for the local concert stuck on a bulletin board can be read while waiting for a burrito if I would otherwise be spacing out, or it can be ignored if I'm thinking about something else or otherwise don't feel like taking new input on new topics. Whereas web page ads are interspersed with what I'm already trying to do - it's like if I went to grab my burrito and the guy gave me a 30 second elevator pitch before he'd hand it over. Whereas the alternative for online ads is blank 'white' space. If I am online, I'm positively engaged in doing something else. If I'm interested in local concert listings, then I will purposefully check out concert listings.
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
> I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it The best concert I ever saw was one that I only knew was coming to town because of a TV commercial. Ads are information. As long as you understand the source of the information is biased and treat it accordingly, information is useful.
bityard 1y ago
You are perfectly describing another extremely common advertising tactic: fear of missing out (FOMO). The reality is that 3/4 of these are things you did not actually need or want, which is exactly why advertising exists. There are many more products and services available for purchase than any of us can afford, and all of them are actively trying to convince you that _theirs_ should be the one you agree to part with your money for. Think of it this way: If you ACTUALLY wanted to go to that concert, you would have looked up the tour dates for the band six months ago. If you ACTUALLY needed the cheap item on sale, you would have already been looking for it at the time. If the food at that restaurant was ACTUALLY that good, you would have not forgotten about it. There are probably hundreds of tools for "easily finding a time for a meeting" that you can buy online, so if you are looking solely at advertising to make your decision, you are likely paying more because the one you picked has an advertising budget that must be recouped. (I personally would have just asked my friends and colleagues what they use.) These examples are firmly classified as "impulse purchases" which can be fine if your finances are in good enough shape that you have disposable income. Pretty common in the tech industry I guess, but vanishingly rare everywhere else in the world. Most middle class households in the US pretend they have lots of disposable income, but they are setting themselves up for working their entire lives by saving/investing nothing in their most productive years. These are VICTIMS of advertising because they are constantly told by television, radio, and social media that they need to spend their money on all these wonderful advertised products that will solve all their problems or else they are not _really_ living life. Which is of course total horseshit.
- koliber 1y ago
  > If you ACTUALLY wanted to go to that concert, you would have looked up the tour dates for the band six months ago I am lazy, am not a super-fan and don't follow any bands, but if someone who I kind of enjoy is playing in town, I appreciate hearing about it. > There are probably hundreds of tools for "easily finding a time for a meeting" that you can buy online Here's the rub: there was a time where I was not aware of the fact that this class of tools existed! I learned about it through an ad. The assumption that I see repeatedly is that we think that we know what we want. If we really strongly desire something, that might be more true. However, there are times where we are not even aware that we *can* want something. I did not know I can want a meeting scheduling assistant because I did not know that such software even existed. I did not know that I *can* want to attend a concert because I did not know the band was playing in town. Advertising enabled me to want something. It's humbling to realize how much I don't know. I appreciate all the ways that the world let's me know about things, even if it comes from a marketing department.

qcnguy 1y ago

This is a common problem with "your job is bullshit" rhetoric. It says a lot more about the speaker than the people whose jobs they're criticizing. The most famous example is David Graeber, an academic who wrote a whole book on what he called "bullshit jobs". He claimed over half of all jobs were bullshit. But of the jobs he identified as such, most of them were actually valuable (receptionist, lawyers, programmers doing maintenance work). He just didn't understand why other people valued them. And, he was an activist deploying flowery rhetoric to make an argument for far-left politics, which is why nearly all the jobs he identified were in the private sector. Ironically, the most obviously bullshit job revealed by his work was his own, but for some mysterious reason academic activists were not identified as people with bullshit jobs. Lots of people noticed this. Some even did studies on it! They found that the number of people who said in surveys their jobs were useless was only 20%, and of those 20% a lot of them had jobs that were objectively not useless. Instead it was cleaners, janitors, garbage collectors and similar who tended to feel their jobs were useless. Clearly "work is useless" is simply a proxy for "I feel like a loser" and not an objective evaluation of whether the work actually provides value to others. People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.

Ukv 1y ago
> People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have. It can be in people's/companies' rational self-interest to act in a way that is detrimental to society as a whole. We can recognize harmful behaviour and legislate such that it's no longer profitable, but it can take a while to get to that point if there's a lack of awareness or powerful interests pushing against it.
- qcnguy 1y ago
  It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else. The world isn't new and the obviously unacceptable behaviors have all been forbidden for thousands of years. That's why when people talk about stuff that's detrimental to "society", they are usually trying to claim that their personal preferences are more universal than they actually are. It's reminiscent of Thatcher's observation that there's no such thing as society in the sense the left use the word. There are families and coworkers and employers and so on, but there's not some monolithic unit called society that can be anthropomorphised and given preferences. Clearly, advertising is nowhere near detrimental to society, it's the opposite: a society without ads would be a planned communist dystopia well beyond anything seen even in the USSR (which had advertising!). Many, many people benefit from advertising, which is why it's such a big industry. People who don't believe this is true are typically in the "don't have information others do" bucket. But a few are just trying to dress up animalistic anti-capitalism in more respectable sounding clothes.
  - andrepd 1y ago
    > It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else. This is such a wild thing to say. I thought it was evident that people can be bastards and do terrible things entirely inside the law, yet here we are.
  - Ukv 1y ago

myrmidon 1y ago

I do not disagree with you entirely, but I feel this almost borders on self-delusion. The sole purpose of ads is to (probabilistically) shift the targets spending behavior in favor of the one buying the ads, nothing more, nothing less. While ads can have utility from the victims point of view (contain relevant information), this is entirely incidental. If you want product updates or information, getting that from dedicated, independent 3rd parties is preferable in literally every situation I can think of.

koliber 1y ago
I disagree that this is the sole purpose of ads. I can see how people arrive at that opinion, but I feel it is narrow and incomplete. With a little restrospection and introspection, anyone can see examples in their own life where marketing had another purpose. Marketing can take many forms. Many people narrowly define it as "spam emails" or "unsolicited phone calls." Those are also marketing, but there is so much more. Marketing first and foremost informs. It can inform you that the problem that you have has even has a ready solution. It can inform you about the name of the product that solves your problem. It can inform you about alternative products that also solve your problem. Or it can reinforce and expand your existing opinions and believes. What you call the sole purpose is only one of these broad purposes of advertising. Remember the time you learned of a particular programming library that does the thing that you wanted to do? Without marketing, you would not have learned about it. Have you ever gone on a trip to a new place? How did you decide how you will spend your time? It was either because you researched things online and found websites that told you about those things. Or you saw a brochure at your hotel. Or an ad at the airport. Think about how you learned about your favorite web framework. It was likely through word-of-mouth advertising. Why do you drink (coke / pepsi / fav. brand of tea / fav. brand of coffee)? What formed your opinion was some kind of marketing, either directly, or indirectly. Many things we do and believes we hold are because of one form of marketing or another.
- wzdd 1y ago
  The original comment, and your initial response, talked about advertising. The examples you give, and this response in general, are marketing. They are very different, and marketing is much broader.

narmiouh 1y ago

The way ads are run these days is almost completely wrong! - Lies are ok - Thrusting your product in a users face, doesn't care if the user cares, Just because I like golfing, doesn't mean every new golf ball brand needs to hit me up all the time. - Product with Money wins, not necessarily the right product - Most people are oblivious to their psychological drivers, Ad makers have learnt to exploit those to drive sales. This is one area AI can be very helpful as it improves, I face a problem, I let my agent loose and it finds the right solution and thus right products, provides comparative data for me to choose without the products being thrust in my face everywhere I go (behavioral ads) or also when I don't need it.

koliber 1y ago
A lot of marketing is done badly. These bad ways are the most glaring and people sometimes think that all marketing is like that. In reality, there is a lot of marketing that is completely unnoticeable. Some people would not even consider those things marketing. That is marketing done well (or at least better).
- kulahan 1y ago
  Unfortunately, when that makes up a trillionth of a percent of all ads, it appears to me as though the overall idea is terrible, with a few who got lucky here and there.
rkomorn 1y ago
One of the best examples of your second point is that tweet that went something like "I bought a toilet seat and now I'm getting ads for toilet seats everywhere I go". It's annoying and not even productive for the advertiser.
- StilesCrisis 1y ago
  Apparently some of the very best-converting ads are repeat sales. Of course it helps if the product is obviously consumable, but I'm told that this counterintuitive strategy actually works well. Maybe it's because they can track conversions but not product returns, so maybe you're searching for a better one after returning the first purchase.

isoprophlex 1y ago

Advertising is already rich people begging for your money. Not free exchange of information to allow value discovery. Don't conflate the two.

koliber 1y ago
What about the ad for your kids' school fundraiser? Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love. Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall.
- jawilson2 1y ago
  > What about the ad for your kids' school fundraiser? My kids should come home with a flyer for it. > Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love. I will actively seek out and research a car. > Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall. Presumably this physical paper poster doesn't give me malware/AIDS if I look at it or tear off a slip. My overriding personal objective is to be able to exist without being expected to consume and spend constantly every moment, waking or otherwise. In an ideal world, I should have to give consent to be advertised to, and should be able to operate in public without being bombarded with companies trying to take my money.
  - koliber 1y ago
    > My overriding personal objective is to be able to exist without being expected to consume and spend constantly every moment, waking or otherwise We're fully aligned. The original point I was trying to make is that advertising can be done well, in a way that is compatible with this objective. Unfortunately, in many cases they aren't. > In an ideal world, I should have to give consent to be advertised to I thought about this a while back, and I think being bombarded with requests for consent is worse than being bombarded with ads. Cookie consent banners convinced me. > My kids should come home with a flyer for it. Fliers are ads. > I will actively seek out and research a car. Probably in some classified ads.

wzdd 1y ago

Except that you also learnt about 10 concerts you didn't want to go to, 10 sales you don't care about, etc. And it's not even (necessarily) 10 good concerts or sales, it's just the ones that someone managed to thrust in front of your face. Filtering the barrage of information is mental effort and distracts you from other tasks. I'd certainly like to know when my favourite bands are playing or get an alert when something I'm after is on sale. There are better and more focused solutions to these than advertising. > When done right, [advertising] does not have to be intrusive or annoying Citation needed.

koliber 1y ago
I consistently see marketing and advertising where I learn about events, products, or services I did not know about before. While researching potential products, I read through marketing websites (a form of ad) of different offers. I buy things on Amazon, which requires me to read through product descriptions, which are also ads for what the seller is selling. Agreed that there is too much machine-gun advertising and you see more than you need. However, I learned to appreciate good advertising while at the same time not letting the irrelevant ads ruin my day. source: personal experience and sample size of 1. At the same time, I am not some weirdo and other people see the same ads and marketing materials, and it's not unreasonable to think that they also derive some value from them. > I'd certainly like to know when my favourite bands are playing or get an alert when something I'm after is on sale If you ever had this happen, that's another case to cite for non-intrusive and useful advertising.

barrkel 1y ago

Ads are agents in a zero-sum war for your attention. If you have focus, if you're not aimlessly wandering around, ads try to distract you. They attack your personal agency and sovereignty, trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing. Because they're in a zero sum competition, the dynamics are to escalate. There's only so much inventory, and the winners of the bids for your attention need to have more and more effect on your behavior to justify the escalating costs. Text isn't enough, images are needed. Images aren't enough, videos are needed. Videos aren't enough, interstitials with tiny close buttons are needed, with mandatory pauses. If advertisers could reach out and physically grab you by the head, they would.

koliber 1y ago
All of this is true for a large portion of web ads. Then there is the ad for your kids' school fundraiser. Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love. Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall. These ads also are "trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing". Yet these feel ads differently despite also being "agents in a zero-sum war for your attention". I don't think people appreciate how much good and positive advertising exists because they are conditioned and on-guard for the kinds of ads that you describe.
- randerson 1y ago
  If I wanted notices about fundraisers it should be because I signed up for them. If I want to know about concerts I would've subscribed to a feed. If I wanted to help my cousin find a used car I'd actively go searching for one. If I have a problem in need of a solution, I'll search for it.
- mindslight 1y ago
  All of that is true for all web ads. The friendly types of ads you're describing only work as offline ads. If I am online I don't want any of that offline context following me around at the behest of a creepy surveillance industry. A web page knowing what is local to me or what I might be interested in is a bug. Frankly I categorize it in the realm of security vulnerabilities. And that's still putting aside the question of why I would want to spend time/attention looking at any online ads. The ad for the local concert stuck on a bulletin board can be read while waiting for a burrito if I would otherwise be spacing out, or it can be ignored if I'm thinking about something else or otherwise don't feel like taking new input on new topics. Whereas web page ads are interspersed with what I'm already trying to do - it's like if I went to grab my burrito and the guy gave me a 30 second elevator pitch before he'd hand it over. Whereas the alternative for online ads is blank 'white' space. If I am online, I'm positively engaged in doing something else. If I'm interested in local concert listings, then I will purposefully check out concert listings.

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago

> I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it The best concert I ever saw was one that I only knew was coming to town because of a TV commercial. Ads are information. As long as you understand the source of the information is biased and treat it accordingly, information is useful.

bityard 1y ago

You are perfectly describing another extremely common advertising tactic: fear of missing out (FOMO). The reality is that 3/4 of these are things you did not actually need or want, which is exactly why advertising exists. There are many more products and services available for purchase than any of us can afford, and all of them are actively trying to convince you that _theirs_ should be the one you agree to part with your money for. Think of it this way: If you ACTUALLY wanted to go to that concert, you would have looked up the tour dates for the band six months ago. If you ACTUALLY needed the cheap item on sale, you would have already been looking for it at the time. If the food at that restaurant was ACTUALLY that good, you would have not forgotten about it. There are probably hundreds of tools for "easily finding a time for a meeting" that you can buy online, so if you are looking solely at advertising to make your decision, you are likely paying more because the one you picked has an advertising budget that must be recouped. (I personally would have just asked my friends and colleagues what they use.) These examples are firmly classified as "impulse purchases" which can be fine if your finances are in good enough shape that you have disposable income. Pretty common in the tech industry I guess, but vanishingly rare everywhere else in the world. Most middle class households in the US pretend they have lots of disposable income, but they are setting themselves up for working their entire lives by saving/investing nothing in their most productive years. These are VICTIMS of advertising because they are constantly told by television, radio, and social media that they need to spend their money on all these wonderful advertised products that will solve all their problems or else they are not _really_ living life. Which is of course total horseshit.

koliber 1y ago
> If you ACTUALLY wanted to go to that concert, you would have looked up the tour dates for the band six months ago I am lazy, am not a super-fan and don't follow any bands, but if someone who I kind of enjoy is playing in town, I appreciate hearing about it. > There are probably hundreds of tools for "easily finding a time for a meeting" that you can buy online Here's the rub: there was a time where I was not aware of the fact that this class of tools existed! I learned about it through an ad. The assumption that I see repeatedly is that we think that we know what we want. If we really strongly desire something, that might be more true. However, there are times where we are not even aware that we *can* want something. I did not know I can want a meeting scheduling assistant because I did not know that such software even existed. I did not know that I *can* want to attend a concert because I did not know the band was playing in town. Advertising enabled me to want something. It's humbling to realize how much I don't know. I appreciate all the ways that the world let's me know about things, even if it comes from a marketing department.