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Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

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Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#171

Post by w-ll »

dheera wrote: post #143
wpietri wrote: post #23

He doesn't quite say it by name, but most advertising is a classic arms race. Especially given how the internet now makes information easily available, a great deal of advertising is about manipulating consumers to pick company A's products over those from competitors B, C, and D. This forces those other companies to spend to get and keep customers. It's pure waste. For example, everybody on the planet is now familia…

I'd really love to have an AR real-life ad blocker. Replace all billboards with works of art. Separately I think advertising will have to find new forms of expression that are less repulsive. I won't want to block ads if they are actually fun and interesting.

What makes you think the company that makes the best AR wouldn't put ads in it. The top 3 in the field Microsoft, Facebook, and Google to some extent, would never let you disable ads let alone override them with something you wish.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#172

Post by jknoepfler »

starpilot wrote: post #2

We get rid of it, Google/Facebook/etc. shut down. While social media is of arguable benefits, Google has provided incalculable value to the world. Ads are the magic money fountain that give them the power to organize all of human knowledge, a phenomenal resource anyone can tap.

Pegging the viability of a searchable index to ad revenue is a deeply perplexing move.

The technology to run and maintain a web index is not new. Paid indexes have existed in specialized domains (academia, law, news) for decades.

Wikipedia is a vast, self-indexed resource supported by donations. It's also indexed by Google, and it's availability over the public internet makes them (Google) an enormous amount of money. The labor of creating Wikipedia (the actual labor of organizing human knowledge) was done for free, and the maintenance of Wikipedia is funded by donation.

Every paid ISP prior to Google maintained its own index, which was paid for by user fees.

Expert communities (which often can't depend on commercial indexes) maintain encyclopedic curated sets of links.

The internet - a vast decentralized web of self-published information - is what people want. It drives people to the internet in droves. One strategy for capitalizing on that hunger is to index everything, offer a pretty good index for "free," then sell access to those eyeballs. It is far from the only way to make the internet more accessible.

The only thing I use google for right now is a glorified phone book, because I'm too stupid to remember urls and too lazy/forgetful to bookmark them. So sometimes (sadly), I'll google the twoplustwo forums for poker, or "hacker news" because I forgot news.ycombinator.com. But it's the expert communities that I want, not Google's inscrutible index.

No one has really succeeded in substituting attentional transactions with actual micro-payments, but it's certainly not impossible. There's obviously a demand.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#173

Post by philwelch »

cm2012 wrote: post #87
wpietri wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1% of products have [...] 99% of products and services [...] plumber productivity would go up 50% [...] Did know that 97% of statistics are made up on the spot? The problem with your fictions here is that they're based in a world with a lot of advertising. In your fantasy, people just sit around dying of thirst because there's nobody to advertise water at them. But in reality, people would still find ways to get wh…

My job is talking to start-ups and established companies that want to grow. It's not a fiction to say that most companies don't grow if they don't promote themselves.

Because they’re operating in an adversarial environment where every other business engages in advertising. It’s game theory.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#174

Post by sharpneli »

conception wrote: post #135
solipsism wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May we be allowed cake and ice cream or would you ban those as well? Maybe you can get a special license if it's a birthday?

Just tax sugar.

Small funny story about that.

In Finland we do (or did, it might have changed on 2017) tax sugar. Then they added artificial sweeteners and even mineral water under the tax because it’s ”fair” that way. Thus negating the original point.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#175

Post by anbop »

solipsism wrote: post #111
joshgel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a doctor, I'm all for banning soft drinks, recognizing that it probably will never happen. But, the health externalities associated with drinking such beverages should get priced in and be used to offset eventual health complications. This is not easy because no one likes taxes, but you get what you pay for.

May we be allowed cake and ice cream or would you ban those as well? Maybe you can get a special license if it's a birthday?

Eat all the sugar you want... just make sure your bank account is full when you have your heart attack.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#176

Post by Xixi »

I really have a dual view on advertising: as a person I hate being on the receiving end of ads (especially when the ads follow me through my browsing....), on the other hand as an entrepreneur I'm quite happy to have means of advertising my tea subscription service [1]. "Build it and they will come" doesn't quite work. People have to hear about your product somehow.

I don't do much advertising at all for Tomotcha as our churn is low and I am quite content with the number of subscribers right now. But from time to time we send a tea to an "influencer" or run an adword campaign. It helps.

[1] When I mention my tea subscription service (https://tomotcha.com) right here on HN, does it count as advertisement? It should, because it is, thankfully HN as a community of entrepreneurs is rather forgiving about self-promotion. Other communities (some subreddits) can be very hostile towards it...

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#177

Post by rabidrat »

FroshKiller wrote: post #70
wpietri wrote: post #23

He doesn't quite say it by name, but most advertising is a classic arms race. Especially given how the internet now makes information easily available, a great deal of advertising is about manipulating consumers to pick company A's products over those from competitors B, C, and D. This forces those other companies to spend to get and keep customers. It's pure waste. For example, everybody on the planet is now familia…

Every single day, new people are born who actually do not know what Coca-Cola is and thus have never bought a Coca-Cola.

The same is true of cocaine. Yet without advertising the people who 'need' cocaine manage to learn about it and acquire it, often at great personal cost.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#178

Post by TheCapn »

blodovnik wrote: post #8

This is a dogmatic viewpoint I think often seen in very technical people who are unwilling to see the interconnectedness of how our society works. I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising. It's a childish and immature opinion really. Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loa…

He doesn't directly call for the completely abolishment of marketing/advertising and actually recognizes the free markets have a place for advertising but is using that blog as a place to complain about the cancer it has become.

"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role."

Its definitely one of those pieces that merely points out the flaws without suggesting any solutions. You can take those articles how you will but I think its dishonest to take his overall message as being advertising is bad entirely and without exception.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#179

Post by homonculus1 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #137
ribosometronome wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't the same be said of any luxury?

No. Refined sugar is incredibly toxic. It doesn't just rot your teeth, make you obese, and eventually turns you into a Type 2 diabetic, but it also raises the risk of heart disease, strokes, Alzheimer's, and many other conditions. The direct economic costs - health care costs, lost productivity caused by illness - are immense, and the soda and junk food industries make no contribution towards them. There are also les…

It hasn't done any of those things to me, however, so kindly get your hands off mine and out of my business please.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#180

Post by robbrown451 »

I'd like to see solutions offered, that aren't just of the "do things that are against your own self interest" variety. Anything that requires you do something that individually hurts yourself in a tangible, measurable way, while not giving you benefit in a tangible, measurable way, falls under this. For example, if you boycott, you notice the impact on yourself because it is undiluted, but almost never will you notice the impact of your actions because it will be spread among everyone.

So here's a radical suggestion. Legislation that says: any web site or app that shows ads should offer an option to view the site without ads, by paying for access, and that is priced reasonably (approximately equal revenue as ads) and with options for "a la carte" vs. bundling. Any provider of ads (adSense, etc) has to provide this service as well.

It's complex legislation, I'm sure, and tricky to get right. But it's better than tilting at windmills, as this article leaves me feeling it is doing.

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