> When trying to make an informed choice on a purchase, I'll typically look for enthusiast communities or unsponsored reviews. Marketing actually tends to actively get in the way.

Right but where do they get their info? If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered? How would they know a new company existed? Would there be an online enthusiast group for toilet brushes and tape and granite blocks for curbs? How would you know if there was a new store to buy those things? Would that store having a sign that included what they sold constitute advertising? Could your local fish shop put a sign in the window advertising the weekly special? Could they post a picture of it online? Obviously circulars would be advertisements— would catalogs constitute advertisements? What would inspire any innovation at all if there was no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed? How would stores know that manufacturers and distributors existed? Is packaging advertising? Is there a limit to where you can place packages? Show them on the Internet? Do you really think those enthusiast communities wouldn’t be chock full of industry voices? Do you think they aren’t already? Do you really think your process is totally objective?

There are a lot of shitty practices in marketing and advertising. Especially with data-driven marketing, I might be the harshest critic I’ve encountered. But advertising at its core is just telling people that products exist. That’s it. Capitalist societies don’t function without being able to communicate that products exist, but even communist countries have (and always had) advertising to tell people that things existed.

I abhor many practices in marketing and advertising, but at some level, companies must be able to tell people that they have a product to sell. I have never encountered anybody that suggested a reasonable replacement that would work for everything from computers to condoms to lettuce to bars to bakeries to cars to cleaning services to email hosts to edge network caching to hobbyist clubs to camp grounds.

> Right but where do they get their info?

Hopefully from first-hand experience with the product, and not just from ads.

> If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered?

Searching product listings on a website is more common than a phone call, and if you're a reviewer you might want to sign up to industry mailing lists and press releases to get notified of new offerings. Generally speaking I believe this is what reviewers are doing already, opposed to just waiting to randomly get a targeted Facebook ad for products to review.

I wouldn't typically consider cases where you solicit information and receive it to be an ad. You give a broad definition of ad ("just telling people that products exist", which would seemingly include even independent reviews and word of mouth) - and while it's up to you if you want to hold that definition, you should note that nobody's suggesting eliminating all that.

> Would there be an online enthusiast group for toilet brushes and tape and granite blocks for curbs?

There are online enthusiast groups for, say, DIY, that'll likely have advice on tape and edging stones. Doesn't need to be hyper-specific to one product.

> Do you really think your process is totally objective?

For determining what product to buy? No, it'll never be. But I do think it's better to at least try to get information from sources with well-aligned incentives, and I do think that companies spending billions on manipulation campaigns often makes doing so more difficult, despite increased informedness being the supposed benefit we get in return for the colossal waste of resources and time.

> What would inspire any innovation at all if there was no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed?

My argument wasn't that there should be "no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed" - my argument was that incentives are largely in the wrong place for ads to work as an effective means to inform consumers, since the company producing the ads has no reason to give unbiased information (and only really has reason to avoid outright lying because of restrictions already placed on advertising). Compare to an independent reviewer, where the incentive is hopefully (albeit not always) to give a relatively unbiased review to attract a readership. There can also be incentive there to review new/niche products that others are not yet reviewing.

> There are a lot of shitty practices in marketing and advertising. Especially with data-driven marketing [...] I abhor many practices in marketing and advertising, but at some level [...]

I'd claim that the problematic practices have not just arisen by coincidence - they stem from misaligned incentives. Also, while it'd certainly be beneficial to stamp out those practices, there'd still be the issue that resources are being wasted on what is largely a zero-sum game, instead of competing through more preoductive work (steal market share back and forth by improving the product, not just by repeatedly convincing people).

All company's incentive is fundamentally to sell more product and advertising and marketing are the ways to do that. Advertising is nothing more than a company communicating about their product. Like any form of visual communication, has two fundamental components: medium and message. (there are other important things that go further into marketing like context, intended audience, timing, etc. but I don't have the time to dig into those.) Independent reviews and word of mouth aren't advertisements because they don't originate from the company. If they pay someone to review their product then it is an advertisement.

Some mediums are: banners, paid testimonials, email mailing lists, video spots, catalogs, flyers, packaging, sponsorships, signs, car wraps, phone tree preamble or hold messages, etc. Even something that just displays a brand name or logo can be advertisements. You did not solicit any one of those exposures. They are ALL being put in front of your face by someone that wants to sell you something. Who sees those messages and how (TV spot vs YouTube spot vs Disney+ spot) is more of a marketing concern than advertising itself but it's all related enough for this discussion.

Messages are anything about the product or company, beginning with the name of the model "TACTIKILL XTERMINATOR 4000" or "NatureStop Gentle Reducer Premium" to statistics about the product to product descriptions to claims of efficacy or quality or usage recommendations, or sexy models smiling and enjoying their incredible life thanks to that laundry soap.

Both the medium and the message, independently, can be entirely benign or manipulative. There are laws in most countries that are pretty barebones about what they can't do-- e.g. spam for medium, and making false claims for messaging. A ultra-targeted Facebook Ad or sneaky TikTok influencer sponsorship can include completely unbiased data about the product. A catalog listing or sponsored whitepaper can include absolute bullshit and manipulative plays on emotion.

Ads don't just target end-consumers. Distributors, parts manufacturers, manufacturing machine manufacturers, packaging companies, suppliers of raw materials and intermediaries, transportation and logistics companies, warehouses, etc etc etc all have to explain why their product is worth buying over another. A lot of that is subjective.

For some entities, using an app container on DO or Heroku is a great solution because they don't have to manage some things themselves. Even if it doesn't save them money, it might be a QoL increase that makes sense in the context of the person using it. Their simply stating that their product is easier to use could be construed as biased-- if you need granular control over static files, those solutions are not easier to use by many people's estimation. For a lot of people whether or not they're easier to use depends on how comfortable someone is with deployments. Someone less familiar with coding than deployments probably would find heroku more irritating than useful.

If you think people exclusively want a bullet list of features rather than a TL/DR about why that company thinks it's a better choice, you're wrong. Especially with the bazillion things in our lives less consequential than web hosting. Straws. Contact lens solution. Gum. Candles. Wine. Shirts. If Red Kap is saying that their industrial work shirts are extremely durable, I want to know that rather than having a list of materials in the blend, the fabric weight, the composition of the thread, whether or not the armpits are gusseted, etc. Then I can take a look and decide myself if the company has the same idea of durable that I do. My life would be measurably worse if they could not give their subjective take on why those facts matter, and if I need to buy a shirt quickly before a camping trip, I don't want to go looking for a shirt forum and deciding whether or not those people are full of shit. Groupthink is a huge problems in online enthusiast communities as it is. It's just a different source of people trying to push their perspective except now the reward is their feeling like a know-it-all. Is it more objective? Yeah. Is it so much more objective that I want to look

Targeting can be good to a very limited extent, or bad to a great extent. I'm glad I get advertisements for a new local coffee roaster pop up in some social media feed. The chance of me driving down that little side street in that neighborhood is slight, and the same is probably true for my friends. The local newspaper is a shitty clone of USA Today and expensive so I don't subscribe to it, and they probably wouldn't even cover it anyway. The local food reviewer social media accounts, I know for a fact, are essentially hawking places for money without disclosing it. The local food forums/blogs/etc are full of cranks and blowhards and it's impossible to know if anything is really good or bad. I'm glad I see that instead of advertisements for stethoscopes and scrap metal recycling services which also target industries common in my area. I am not glad companies are trying to sneakily inject advertising into everywhere I go and that data brokers are doing their best to build the creepiest psychological profile possible. I'm happy to see a video of someone talking about something they like. I'm not happy about seeing a video where someone was paid to say they like it without disclosing that.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to sell something if you live in a capitalist society. That's the way capitalist societies function. (Even then, communist countries have and always did have advertisements to just let people know that things existed. Even if there was less manipulation involved in them, they still had to show people why something was worth buying instead of just giving them statistics and hoping people's nerdy friends would explain it to them.)

The problem is not advertising, or wanting to sell something, or even marketing. The problem is manipulation, unfair business practices, and lying. Trying to address those things by criticizing advertising itself would be like trying to reduce junk mail by banning mail. There are fundamental problems that need to be addressed but saying advertisements can just go away a) completely ignores what advertisements actually do in our society and why they exist, and b) completely ignores the guarantee that greedy people will still use greedy and manipulative business practices to get an unfair advantage because advertisements aren't the source of greed or the only way people can be greedy.

* Is it so much more objective that I want to look to them exclusively for info? No.

> All company's incentive is fundamentally to sell more product and advertising and marketing are the ways to do that. [...] There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to sell something if you live in a capitalist society. That's the way capitalist societies function.

Sure - but many actions are economically logical yet wasteful or destructive, and as a society we can adjust fines/tax rates/tariffs/subsidies/etc. such that the more constructive choice becomes the one that's also in the best financial self-interest of the company. Encourage improving the actual product with R&D instead.

That's not to say marketing spend should necessarily drop to $0, but I do believe it'd optimally be a tiny fraction of what it is now. There's no good societal reason for the Monopoly Go mobile app to have a $500M marketing budget, for instance.

> Advertising is nothing more than a company communicating about their product [...] Independent reviews and word of mouth aren't advertisements because they don't originate from the company. If they pay someone to review their product then it is an advertisement.

This has improved in precision over "just telling people that products exist", though I'd still claim that there are ways companies can communicate about their product that I wouldn't consider an ad - like an ingredients list label, for instance.

No bright line, but I'd consider the distinction of "receiving information I solicited" (like with the reviewer signing up to an industry mailing list) vs "someone is paid to shove this in my face" to be an important factor.

> If you think people exclusively want a bullet list of features rather than a TL/DR about why that company thinks it's a better choice, you're wrong. Especially with the bazillion things in our lives less consequential than web hosting. Straws. [...]

Not sure where the idea that it should be exclusively bullet point lists comes from - an independent review can just as easily have a TL;DR or a numeric rating, and online stores typically aggregate customer reviews.

> I am not glad companies are trying to sneakily inject advertising into everywhere I go and that data brokers are doing their best to build the creepiest psychological profile possible. I'm happy to see a video of someone talking about something they like. I'm not happy about seeing a video where someone was paid to say they like it without disclosing that.

Agree.

> The problem is not advertising, or wanting to sell something, or even marketing. The problem is manipulation, unfair business practices, and lying.

I'd claim the problem advertising has is analogous to bitcoin mining. In theory there's probably some small fraction we could reduce it to where it'd have net-positive impact, by using some resources but providing value in facilitating payments. But unfortunately, there's a zero-sum game aspect to it where the "economically sensible" choice can be to effectively throw vast resources into a black hole - "competition" not directed towards achieving a useful end and growing out-of-control disproportionate to any value it might provide. There's also, piled on top of that, bad practices like restarting coal-fired plants - but critically the issue persists even if it was wasting renewable energy instead.

I think you see the bad practices of ads, but not really the zero-sum game aspect. Monopoly Go's $500M marketing spend remains enormously wasteful even without any deceptive or obnoxious practices.