91–100 of 286 posts
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my local food bank has lines every week
Now imagine that but with everyone in that line except the leaders.
The US can afford to feed everyone and still not be 'Socialist'.
I think you are confusing 'Capitalism' with 'Cruelty'. What if I were to tell you, you don't have to be cruel in order to virtue-signal your faith in 'Capitalism'.
This is how I teach it: an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door.
That is literally all you are doing when you buy an advert. All business activity you experience today is an abstraction of business we have already done, I'm sure back in the day people thought door to door sales people were annoying, and I'm sure sometimes they were not.
From a founders perspective, you can take this door knock framework and use it for anything, want to do product research? knock on a door. Want to test a marketing message? Knock on a door. Want to boost sales? Knock on a door.
Adverting done wrong can be very annoying. Thankfully people who advertise incorrectly don't usually last very long, and sadly there are indeed a lot of not great marketing folks out there, but cancer on society... hmmm. This article conflates every kind of commercial outreach with malware, psychological abuse, or brand brainwashing... “zero-sum” and purely wasteful. Ok, but in practice competition drives improvement, and customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation.
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Just like you can demand that corporations provide correct product information on the packaging, you can easily demand that they only communicate in that way around their products. The difference between advertising and product information is that the former is deceitful.
Communicate in what way? And at what point are you going to differentiate between "art" and "not art"? These are rhetorical questions, because their implementation is a pipe dream. Getting rid of "advertising" would require the most draconian anti-speech laws imaginable.
You can go ahead with a career in Warhol simulacras if you want.
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> while ignoring all the good advertising does. What good?
Informing potential customers of products that might be useful to them. Let's say you are the inventor of the chainsaw, you need to tell lumberjacks that chainsaws exist, that's advertising. Otherwise you won't sell any and your invention will be lost, while lumberjacks will continue struggling with inefficient tools.
Isn't there an insurmountable conflict of interest when the person doing the informing is also the person who directly benefits from the product being 'useful' to as many people as possible?
This analogy seems weak. In general, this post argues one way while ignoring all the good advertising does. Do cancers typically do good things at their baseline?
Maybe its just a function of growing up during the transition of physical software to advert/subscription software, but i love the advertising model. What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail/gsuite, chromium/v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free. Thats amazing. Its a huge gift to society that the a fantastic knowledge and productivity suite is…
It's not a gift. It's a transaction, but you pay with your attention and data about yourself so that someone can more effectively try to sell you something you might not really need. Upside: people who don't have money can now participate in knowledge pool. Downside: thousands of other people try to make sure that those people don't ever have more money because they spend them on marketers that were the best in marketing.
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> Solutions to this would be much welcome. Most forums such as this have a 'mute' button so you can choose not to see certain topics and posts by certain people. Not sure why HN doesnt have this, but it solves your 'problem' of forum posts being 'advertising' whilst at the same time explaining the difference between the two, choice. EDIT: Oh I see youve edited your post. I wont be changing mine to address your new po…
To be fair I didn't see your reply but to answer your original point. It would be great for HN to not only "hide" the jobs all the time but an account level "hide ads" or "hide YC ads" function in the account so that I don't have to see the woven job ads on the site that act like HN posts. This shouldn't be limited to forums, but should also be extended to other sites.
What about advertising for cancer screening? That type of advertising is shown to be cost effective and saves lives [1]. So advertising can be a good thing and a literal cancer-preventer to society. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4018507/
However all “good” ADs are less effective than they could be when the population experiences a nearly unavoidable torrent of “not good” ADs.
People are savvy and broadly know the difference but on a subconscious level likely begin to perceive PSAs with more skepticism than is warranted when so much advertising masks itself as helpful advice when in reality it is selling a service based on nonsense statistics or bad faith argument.
I think some kind of pushback from society against the worst forms of advertising is needed.
Maybe its just a function of growing up during the transition of physical software to advert/subscription software, but i love the advertising model. What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail/gsuite, chromium/v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free. Thats amazing. Its a huge gift to society that the a fantastic knowledge and productivity suite is…
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Communicate in what way? And at what point are you going to differentiate between "art" and "not art"? These are rhetorical questions, because their implementation is a pipe dream. Getting rid of "advertising" would require the most draconian anti-speech laws imaginable.
Corporations aren't people, they have no right to speech. You can go ahead with a career in Warhol simulacras if you want.
Regardless, this isn't really an answer. What metrics are you using to determine if an ad is misleading? Take for example the early 2000s BMW ads which were short films with various celebrities and actors. Are these "misleading" and not allowed?
Again, these aren't even remotely implementable ideas without complete state control over the media.