>If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking.
What if you are looking, but an advertisement helps you find it faster?
As an example, I was shopping for a keyboard the other day. I spent several hours looking through different specs. It would be handy if a website would have popped up "hey, here are the 3 you are probably looking for, pick one!".
The benefit would have been for me (less time looking) and for three site (less server time serving pages to me)
When I am looking to buy something, ads actively get in the way of that. Ads are why we don't have websites that tell you "these are the 3 options you're probably looking for" any more because people figured out that they can make sites like that where the three choices are just ads rather than good recommendations. There's been times when I've simply given up on buying something because I got sick of wading through ads looking for any actual information.
> There's been times when I've simply given up on buying something because I got sick of wading through ads looking for any actual information.
It's happening more and more often to me. I've been caught on this spiral of mistrust ever more often, even when wading through what once was a good place for human reviews: reddit.
I can't tell anymore what's an honest review to a paid one, be it affiliate links bullshit all the way to astroturfing on social media, it's exhausting.
In my experience all three options are usually crap and I would have been better served doing my own research.
The only time advertising has been of use to me is advertising clothing. It's an extremely saturated market, so searching for "cool t shirt" or "nice jeans" is worthless. Before COVID I would go to a nice area in Tokyo, NYC, or some other major city and just load up when it was time to buy new clothes.
I block most ads, but a couple ads have gotten through over the years and I've learned about new brands or atleast new styles and had a jumping off point.
I still feel I am way better off blocking as many ads as I can, but can't say they've been completely worthless.
Most of the HN crowd can't fathom the idea of spending money on clothing outside of necessity. Shirts that will last ten years is more popular of a topic than shirts that actually look good.
You basically want an oracle. That's fine, but none of what you just described requires a push model - you have a specific query, "best keyboard for me", so what you want is a service where you can go and explicitly ask that question, and get an accurate answer.
OTOH if an ad popped up and said "here's the best keyboard for you" - or even "here's the top 3 choices for you" - would you seriously trust that?
The vast majority of the population, they don't even know there are solutions that would change their life.
E.g: In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know that there is Coursera which has top-level courses that can change their lives, improve productivity and make impact?.
"I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning (and prevents people from knowing about coursera). You are just advertising that personality to the rest of the world
> In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know that there is Coursera which has top-level courses that can change their lives, improve productivity and make impact?.
I would bet there are more people who know Coursera exists than people whose lives would literally change if they took a few Coursera courses (though that doesn't mean that there aren't some people whose lives could be changed by Coursera if they knew about it).
However, seeing an Ad for Coursera is not likely to help anyone find out whether Corusera can actually help them or not - since there is absolutely no way to tell from an ad whether the product being presented is going to be even close to fit for purpose. The only thing the ad tells you that can be trusted is "Coursera is a company that is trying to sell online courses" (note: that doesn't mean that they actually provide online courses, you can only trust that they are trying to sell them - see the myriads of ads for mobile puzzle games whose gameplay has literally no relation to the game play shown in the ad).
Note: I'm not trying to take potshots at Coursera here - they are a reputable business and have many good courses - which I know from my own and friends' personal experiences. I'm trying to look objectively of what an ad for a company you know nothing about can actually tell you.
> The vast majority of the population, they don't even know there are solutions that would change their life.
> I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning
This feels parental-- a version of mommy knows best. Why not let me, by default, decide if I want personalized advertisements? What if I want to be ignorant in regards to the new fad product? What if I don't want companies to mine my interests, location, prior searches, etc just to tell me that coursera exists? Advertisers are afraid of using an opt-in model because they know most people won't do it.
The best solution for the argument that “ads help people find stuff when they do go looking”, is an ad-directory.
Want to buy some new clothes and shoes soon? Go to an ad directory and browse the offerings - it’s beneficial for everyone. Users, because they’re getting what they want (when and how they want it) and for providers too: their audience are self-selecting their target, they have high intent to buy. This would make actual advertising cheaper, brands would get more creative freedom (have to stick out more, have to help your target market quickly identify you and you don’t need to spend oodles of time and money setting up complicated arms-race-sequence AI targeting run by a duopoly of “totally trustworthy companies”). Users are happy because they’re freed from the cognitive burden of constant harassment.
The thing is, the mass of advertising isn't about helping you know the unknown unknowns, it's about manipulating you into wanting things you know about, more, or wanting things you don't need / wouldn't really want in a fair evaluation.
The thing is, in our society, institutions mostly develop venues for advertising rather than for listing - since both the owners of the venue and the entities offering products/services have overarching profit motives, and advertising is more profitable.
Are you aware that advertising is explicitly defined in law, and already regulated, even in the USA?
In fact, the definition is extremely simple: if a company payed you (with money, free product, free trips etc) to say or show something about their product, that is advertising, regardless of what you are saying or of whether you believe it. No more, no less.
Note: some countries extend this to any display or mention of branding, whether payed for or not, at least in broadcast media. So, for example in my country, a TV show has to blur out brands on bottles of water or cars shown, or display an explicit "this is advertising" logo on the screen while the branding is shown.
I saw a commentary on education - I think on HN actually - where the writer was suggesting that the prime directive for each student should be 'know thyself'. Advertisers know me in a shallow way only, and they aren't really served by knowing me in a deep way - they need to know me well enough to know if I might buy a given product, the why of that is immaterial to them (and they have no direct access to it anyway).
There is an ideal world where everyone spends a lot of time getting to know themselves on an intimate level and then broadcasts their very personal desires to an advertising industrial complex, which finds the solutions to these deep and difficult-to-articulate drives. But the advertiser can't realistically get that kind of information on anyone. I know that's not what advertisers claim, but I'm confident in calling bullshit on what they say about knowing their customers. They can't even tell when they're irritating someone to the point of installing an adblock, and they're supposed to know what self-actualization looks like to each of their many customers? I ain't even renting that.
I agree with the basic premise that advertising can be a force for good. But the advertisee has to be an active participant, else the advertiser will reliably determine that the target's telos is 'maximize shareholder value for <advertiser>'.
Seems obvious. I agree. However I think you're not going to get through to those with central planning biases. By which I mean, the notion that perfect planning can beat the market.
The Palace Economy central planner says, "give me wheat." The Soviet central planner says, "more steel comrades." The American style technocrat planner says, "we will tell you what you want and then deny market alternatives."
How, exactly, each person deciding on their own whether to look or not look for information on a particular subject matter translates to economic centralization? It's the other way around - the ads, with their push model, naturally produce centralization, which is why we have the duopoly this article is about.
We're talking about advertising, not monopolies. That's your first fail.
Second, you present a false binary that we have either the duopoly, or the self-starting individual.
Marketing is a subset of Influence. Influence is a subset of the Arts. Arts being defined as non-axiomatic symbolic ordering.
You want to ignore all these distinctions, so you can stop annoying advertisers.
In the process of doing that, you either push advertising into the arts, or you kill the arts. Both are stupid. And that shows so are you.
You would dispense with the market, because you don't like that it's a meany.
You conflate because that's the standard tech scumbag method: you interpret 'restrictions' as 'damage' and route around it. Like a virus that crashes the whole system.
How would you find a book that didn't try to influence you? How would you find information that did not exist to influence? You are asking for an invisible pink unicorn. It does not exist. Your whole argument is stupid, sloppy, and sophomoric.
The centralization has to do with cheap money. That appears to be a topic beyond your pay grade. Hacker News has a low skill base when it comes to economic understanding. VC funded enterprises all have a magic money aspect to them that proper entrepreneurs (bootstrappers) do not have. Your post reeks of it. That was not the issue.
You want to strawman my point, because...?
InCityDreams:
"In a funny kind of way, I'd rather have unsolvable problems than be advertised at.
If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking.
If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved)."
Summary: "If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved)."
Then Deltree replies:
"Newsflash: There are unknown, unknowns.
The vast majority of the population, they don't even know there are solutions that would change their life.
E.g: In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know that there is Coursera which has top-level courses that can change their lives, improve productivity and make impact?.
"I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning (and prevents people from knowing about coursera). You are just advertising that personality to the rest of the world"
Summary: ""I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning."
Me: "Seems obvious. I agree. However I think you're not going to get through to those with central planning biases. By which I mean, the notion that perfect planning can beat the market.
The Palace Economy central planner says, "give me wheat." The Soviet central planner says, "more steel comrades." The American style technocrat planner says, "we will tell you what you want and then deny market alternatives."
I think there's no reasoning with these people"
Summary: Yes, I know everything don't ask people can't be reasoned with. Same as Soviets or Palace economists. Same as American duopolies, which have gotten worse and stronger as government spending and share of national economy has increased. I took for granted that this is obvious, as others in the thread seemed to instinctively grasp this point.
Not you though.
Duopoly exists from too much government influence so solutions involving more government influence are doomed to failure.
Let's teach you to fish anyhow: the duopoly only mirrors the power structure of the government which allows it. More regulations to enforce what is advertising and what is art, means lawyers are then involved with case uses of the English language. An area that is a known incompetency for the trade.
Any individual who says, "I know everything. If I don't, I'll ask." How did they know anything in the first place? From the government schools? From their parents? Parents can't know everything. And AHA! Government schools are influencers and NOT AT ALL institutions of learning. Any learning done is incidental.
This is Kuhn's argument: you cannot revolutionize a flawed paradigm inside the flawed paradigm. If you prefer, you could say it's the Dunning-Kruger effect.
You're a jack@ss. I addressed my interlocutors arguments directly. You do not. Eff off, you MF.
EDIT: And as a concluding point, because you're so daft, this means that only influence from outside a power structure can possibly change the decision control flow. Ie Art, the child of which is applied symbol, the child of which is advertising.
You're not making any points, and your comments are written to be inflammatory (unlike deltree7's, who is clearly advancing the conversation, even if I don't agree with them).
If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking.
If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved).