The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs (2012)

I sometimes think, that marketing is one of the worst thing that happened to us. It is constantly destroying all things that worked really well for us.

There were times when checking my mailbox (I mean physical one) was either important - taxes, administration, bills or fun - postcards from family and friends. Now it’s 99% spam. It’s not worth checking.

Email - the same. Mostly spam and shitty newsletters that will 'Teach you to Be Rich...'.

Professional press - instead of interesting and novel ideas and research we get sponsored junk just to sell services. Instead of honest reviews we get paid test winners. All mixed with just plain old full page commercials.

TV shows - instead of good story we get some unbelievable plots that are built only to excuse showing a sponsor car, cooking pots or some other junk.

Phone - few years ago a call from unknown number meant your kid was sick or you have missed something in your taxes. Now it's always spam, many times per day. I've already disabled all notifications from numbers out of my contact list.

Blogs - they used to be interesting or personal, now it's either commercial spam, worthless review/comparisons or a personal brand spam. Mostly written by cheap contractors with no experience in the field. I hope it get's replaced by GPT-3 soon.

The list is pretty long: - city full of ugly banners - loading screens in cash machines so you can see a commercial - commercials in movie theaters before and after the film - worthless books just to build personal brand or promote products - sidewalks full of flyers - free games for kids on mobile - web pages with popups - addictive social media practices - spam comments underneath articles and in forums - reddit communities full of spam

The list goes on.

If we give them more time they will find a way to destroy everything that's worth while for us. Well paid psychologists, instead of helping people will find a way to get to your brain with next junk you don't need while data scientists prepare more reports from our personal data. After that engineers will work hard to circumvent your ad blocker instead of adding new features, fixing performance or improving user experience.

Sorry, for the long rant, but sometimes I simply think their mission in life is to make our lives worse.

In the end I'm just happy that clickthroughs are shitty. And that they stay this way.

I completely agree with you, but this is a straight up ancient problem, and if you don't believe me, you can ask Scaurus, maker of the best gaurum in Pompeii. The "get crowd's attention and monetize it" strategy has been around since the invention of begging. It's a fundamental strategy in any large group of people. The bigger the crowd, the better it is as a strategy. Sure, social psychologists and marketers are out there making better an better spam, but that's just tuning. As long as there are large groups of people and a way to communicate with them that's even slightly cheaper than the return, it'll never stop.

I suspect there is no solution, but it's interesting to consider some. What would a society look like if you somehow forcibly limited the number of people you could contact?

The one thing that I would like to stress to the HN community is that marketing != advertising.

Most complaints are about intrusive advertising. Product management, customer analysis, demand and financial modeling, and all similar aspects of market making is what marketing traditionally is.

Advertising and promotions is a small component that tars the broader industry.

>What would a society look like if you somehow forcibly limited the number of people you could contact?

You just need to look back into history and see. We've basically been increasing the reach of contact, being the end game: globalization.

So you'd have:

- several monopolies spread across many countries instead of Google for example;

- less massive companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple;

- less access to services and goods;

- less emigration and brain power leakage;

- less economic growth;

- and the list goes on

Like this board wouldn't exist if you forced that limit.

Is this bad? I don't think it has to be bad necessarily, it's a choice that wasn't made in the past and some countries/organizations have benefited from it more then others.

What if.. what if we made a spaceship, with cold-sleep capsules, and put them in there, sending them off, to another planet, like Golgafrincham