Businesses often make more rational decisions because they can assign someone to do research (like you did of your own volition) who will make comparisons and think about it.

Imagine the same process happening for shampoo. I'm sure there are some people that want "the best" shampoo, but most of the products are going to be nearly interchangeable and the marketing will try focus on various kinds of manipulation to dig that moat. These manipulations aren't what most people think of, like a sex symbol hypnotizing you. Instead they work to increase brand familiarity, social proof, and provide a life style narrative you can tell yourself and show off to other people with.

The capital hiding behind these campaigns funds newspapers, television, radio, and civic centers. It acts as a filter on the public discourse. If you're interested, look up Manufacturing Consent for more information.

Here's a clip from a documentary based on the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU

Even consumers love ads.

Did you know that they even pay money because they want ads? Those 900 pages of Vogue that they buy every September, do you think they're filled with articles? Because they're about 870 pages of fashion ads. People specifically buy them because of the advertising.

And did you know Sunday papers are a thing, filled with coupons, that are basically ads?

Sorry, but advertising serves a purpose that consumers actually pay money for.

Scam-like advertisement that use browser exploits to track you is not one of them. None would pay for that service, which is a good indication about which from of advertisement is wanted and which isn't.

I wish we had that in more fields. Would provide huge value, but it's a hard problem. But i suppose if with the right incentives(banning advertising ?), we could do it.

The other source of info for EE's is education and PR, some of it probably pretty unbiased(at distributors sites), due to incentives.

As for ads ? they exist, but they seem to play a relatively small role, and probably nothing major will change if they stopped existing.

Plus, it's extremely tedious to collate and filter all of the properties needed to make them work. Ebay and Amazon barely do it at all. Newegg and McMaster Carr do OK. Only EE components seem to be demonstrate the ideal parametric filter systems that negate the need for advertising.

But I'm still a sucker for buying Linear Tech or TI components before, say, Maxim or Toshiba because even if the parametric search say that both options fit my requirements, the former seem to be better documented and more user-friendly than the latter. That's the kind of advertising you only get through years of writing expensive and high-quality technical papers and producing high-quality parts, and I suppose there will always be value in advertising that fact (or suggesting that fact, regardless of whether it's true for other advertisers) to less experienced engineers.

Hah, reducing your BOM cost isn't a major factor in your decision making? ;)

https://www.edmunds.com/finder/car-finder-results.html

for example, for microcontrollers:

https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/...

One example of advertising that I think is acceptable are the ads on the slatestarcodex.com sidebar, which are manually placed there by the author and targeted directly at the niche he writes in. If a computer could achieve the same precision when choosing what ads to run, and based its choices on the publication rather than the user, I think it would also be acceptable to me.

Would you find such ads equally unpalatable?

When I want to buy something I go to a shop and being there I still don't want ads. I want accurate specs, relevant statistics, maybe pictures and honest reviews. Sometimes I could use a guide, when it's not my domain.

I never stopped in the middle of something to say "I'd so watch an ad right now".

Leaving aside the assumption that somebody has to pay just because you did something, selling my visual comfort for how much? a tenth of a cent? shows me how much you value your readers.

You can't have high quality content and not pay for it - with ads or otherwise.

If you want ad-free, keep your credit card ready every time you open your browser

I'm not necessarily speaking in favor of ads. I'm just pointing out the shallow analysis which characterizes these companies as greedy or bereft of common decency who want to shove ads down your throat. It's a really unfortunate and ill-considered narrative

Making money is hard but his way of doing it is nothing to admire.

I'm hopeful we can smooth this experience quite a bit. In the near future, we have (as the current best extant example) in-browser Apple Pay backed by an HSM (either the touch bar or an Apple Watch). Presumably other vendors could implement something similar since at least the payment part isn't proprietary.

In the slightly more distant future, we could improve efficiency/privacy/reliability by using Bitcoin micropayment channels instead of credit cards, but same idea.

Any decision we make is the result of a lot of stuff influencing our behaviours, and the border between researching information on a product and being targeted by an ad for this product is not really black and white.

If I had to chose, I'd rather be influenced by logical arguments than by a nude person taking a shower. Which only says so much about my personal values and is not really a good thing per se ^^

No, people research to make informed decisions.

If I invest two minutes of research into each ad, I get 10 hours of research, every day. Obviously, it's not practical for me to actually research ads.

Thus, to deal with the raging torrent of imagery being ejaculated at my face by advertising companies, I must fall back to some kind of heuristic. I have two immediate choices: I can assume ads are truthful, or I can assume they are lying.

I know /some/ ads are lying, because I see obvious bullshit like acai berry ads on a semi-regular basis. So if I'm not willing to invest 10 hours a day of research, it's best /for me/ to just assume that all ads are lying to me, and chose more focused research methods when I feel I need them.

Now, if that very simple heuristic wasn't working for me I might be pressed to spend some time making a more complex, less binary heuristic. However, the simple reality is that this heuristic /is/ working for me. It's working very well.

If the advertising industry had standards, and required products to prove out their value before being advertised, then this would not be a problem, and they would actually be performing a valuable service to society. Unfortunately, they will shill for anyone with money, and do so at such scale that the best results-for-effort approach is to ignore the entire content source.

[1] http://blog.telesian.com/how-many-advertisements-do-we-see-e...

For example, whenever I need a new product, be it anything from a spoon to a car seat for a child, I’ll check Stiftung Warentest for full tests of that category.

I’ll take the top 2 or 3, enter them on idealo or preispiraten or günstiger.de or hardwareschotte, and then I’ll take the cheapest of those.

At no point in this purchasing process come ads into play, and I get the best results.

For me, that example actually serves as an extra argument against ads.

I bought a piano course from Udemy because of advertising on FB (and then spent an additional £150 on a keyboard). I'm really enjoying it. Please tell me what a horrible human being I am.

In fact, in my post I explicitly assumed that nobody was made responsible for the task, exactly because I assume the poster is not incompetent.

The idea we couldn't find good products without advertising seems pretty moot with internet search available. The greater problem is seeing through the advertising to assess the product - there's a lot of things like market segmentation based only on different packaging (more wasteful, 'oppulent'). The Capitalist notion of value optimisation might work with false representation and coercion removed from the equation.

That said, I think there should be restrictions put on the methods that advertisers are allowed to use. What currently happens in online advertising hurts everybody, including those who rely on ad funded business models.

Another issue is aonymity. In a world without advertising, you'd have to pay for everything directly. Making anonymous payments is extremely difficult and easily outlawed entirely.

You're voluntarily consuming ad-based content, no one's forcing you. If you don't like their ad-supported content, shouldn't you use only content which paid for in different ways? Why should anyone be restricted in their actions because of your opinions?

Because the rights and protections under the law that advertisers rely on only exist because of my opinion and the opinion of other citizens.

Without the law, the concept of private property would be largely undefined. Corporations would not exist. There would be no limited liability, no chapter 11, no enforceable contracts, no trademarks, no patents, no copyrights, no courts, no police, nothing of the sort.

If we want to enjoy the protection that the rule of law affords us, we will have to accept that there needs to be some sort of social process that determines what our laws should be. It's a negotiation.

And no, using ad-supported services is not voluntary in any realistic sense of the word. There are many essential necessities of modern life that are ad-supported and have no real alternatives.

Also, voluntary is a rather ill defined term when it comes to things that most people cannot even know or understand.

I have seen this sentiment a lot on HN as a counter to libertarian arguments, but really it's a straw man. The argument you are making is essentially: as a society we make rules, therefore we can enact rule x. Whereas the libertarian argument is (phrased in the vernacular of your counter-argument): society should only have rules which protect private property and prevent aggression.

> And no, using ad-supported services is not voluntary in any realistic sense of the word. There are many essential necessities of modern life that are ad-supported and have no real alternatives.

So? Just because person A depends upon the services of person B doesn't mean that person A can make outlandish demands on the way person B provides said services. Let A and B negotiate and determine the most agreeable terms for their cooperative exchange, sure. Alternatively, A can choose to deal with person C instead.

No, I was responding to this very general question by thecrazyone: "Why should anyone be restricted in their actions because of your opinions?".

I was interpreting this question in the sense in which libertarians are often framing it: "What gives society the right to get involved in voluntary agreements between individuals?"

So I was merely explaining my reasoning on why society has a legitimate role to play and why my opinion as a citizen counts for something.

Once that is out of the way, we can go on arguing about what specific rules are good or bad.

And on that point I have one key disagreement with some libertarians. I do not accept the absolute priority of private property over all other interests and freedoms that people value.

I find this primacy extremely contradictory given that there can never be a level playing field and libertarians keep arguing against levelling the playing field where that would be possible to some degree (inheritance tax)

I also question whether private property is sufficiently well defined or definable without taking into account other considerations of what it means to be human.

>Just because person A depends upon the services of person B doesn't mean that person A can make outlandish demands on the way person B provides said services.

I don't know what outlandish demands you are talking about.

> I also question whether private property is sufficiently well defined or definable without taking into account other considerations of what it means to be human.

I'm sure we could have a very interesting discussion on these objections but I'd hate to go completely off topic. But I'll easily bite :)

> I don't know what outlandish demands you are talking about.

In the context of the thread, clearly the outlandish demand would be regulating the advertising that B uses in providing A a service.

OK :-)

>In the context of the thread, clearly the outlandish demand would be regulating the advertising that B uses in providing A a service.

I don't want to regulate against annoying ads either. That's not what I'm talking about at all because this is something consumers can see with their own eyes, install an ad-blocker or stop using the service where there are alternatives.

But some of the things that ad networks are doing behind the scenes are so unexpected, complex or even malicious that consumers cannot be expected to understand them or to have voluntarily agreed to them. That's an area where I think something should be done.

We already have a lot of rules on the legality of contracts, on transparency, on duty of care, on liability for damage, etc. Not all of these rules have caught up to digital services yet.

Why should we be restricted in our actions in order to allow product placement in every cultural artefact, advertising on your museum ticket, carefully placed concession stands in "free" public spaces, etc., etc.?

Advertisers in fact pay money for publishing their ads.

If not then your supposed liberalism is strongly biased against those who disprove of advertising.

Picking from the items you've mentioned: drugs: if someone is putting substances in their own body, they don't need your permission and you don't have a say on what they can do with their body, they own it, its their property

next, sex (say even prostitution): Two consenting adults having sex. What's your problem? Same as above, you should've no interest in what others are doing with their bodies. You don't own their bodies.

Human Trafficking: Forced human trafficking is bad. Everyone should buy protection/insurance against this from private businesses (security agencies). Voluntary trafficking is none of your business.

Banks: banks are over-regulated. Let them run like other businesses. Don't bail them out if they fail (not with tax dollars at least). Let them fail as other businesses do. Let better banks take the positions of the ones which can't serve customer interest

I would appreciate/welcome any arguments against what I said

So, advertising models based on clickthroughs definitely haven't worked on me. (Admittedly uBlock has reduced my exposure somewhat)

But the magazine style "increase awareness of product and hope that leads to eventual interest and purchase" probably works as well on me as anyone else.

We almost always instinctively are attracted to the familiar, so just seeing a product before makes us value it higher, even if it's intrinsic value is less. That hard-wired instinct is hard to control.

If I see an advert for Coca Cola, it doesn't make me want a Coke. I hate Coke and I understand that it is not at all good for me.

No amount of advertising is going to make me buy one. Simply being aware of the brand in this case seems pointless, because I'm doing nothing with it.

In other cases advertisements will merely lead me to avoid that brand or company out of spite, because I hated their advert (as I do most adverts).

I loathe Pepsi Max ads. I like Coke Zero add. But I never buy Coke, I only ever buy Pepsi Max.

From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means.

A lot of people argue that "you'll just search for what you want" except I'm tired of searching for "shirt" and then scrolling for days looking for something that may work. Every once in a while I'm hit with a really good ad, and I'll click it, and maybe even buy.

If you want to make a fair comparison, that should be compared to all the things you didn't find because useless ads took up your time and mental space.

Also, whether or not you found something through an ad is not the point; one isn't not going to convince a smoker to quit smoking by trying to convince them that nicotine doesn't make them feel good - it's the other shit about it that is bad.

In the case of advertising, there's a lot of cynical manipulation going on. The nagging factor in children's advertising comes to mind as one really evil example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi63rXnuWbw

I've been TV- and ad-free since 2001 (yes, yes, I know: the "how do you know someone doesn't watch TV? They'll tell you"-smugness curse strikes again). In my case it was accidental however: I was living in a student appartment with no access to TV and Internet for over a year, having only books to read and rented movies to watch. Even when forced upon you you start noticing the difference pretty quickly, and wondering how you ever was capable of considering this normal. Nowadays ads just feel invasive, like strangers shouting at me on the street claiming they want to have a conversation while really they just want to get into my pockets.

> Nowadays ads just feel invasive, like strangers shouting at me on the street claiming they want to have a conversation while really they just want to get into my pockets.

I understand your point here. But to clarify, if I were to add up the seconds/minutes of time I lose to ads over the course of a month (for example), I don't think I'd spend that regained time on product hunting. My point was less "I save so much time via ads" but more "I don't want to shop." I view it as a time saver (at the expense of perhaps finding "the perfect item") rather than as purely a nuisance. That said, I definitely prefer content without ads.

This might seem harsh, but no one is weighing the benefits of your existence to decide whether you live or die. You own yourself and you can sustain yourself hence you exist. Similarly, advertisers exist because they can sustain themselves, they are not coercing you into viewing / using content laden with ads. You're voluntarily consuming content which has ads. If you don't like it don't use ad-laden products

This is a complete non-sequitur. Plenty of things that are not public services are regulated or even forbidden. In fact, most of the things that are regulated or forbidden are, and the decision to do so is always based on "weighing benefits/downsides of it."

> This might seem harsh, but no one is weighing the benefits of your existence to decide whether you live or die.

Actually, yes we do, it's called criminal law. It is used to lock up (or in some barbaric nations, end the lives of) people whose "benefits of existing" within society have been found wanting. For humans we just happen default to assuming innocents until proven otherwise.

And whether or not something can exist on its own has no connection to whether or not it should, except in regards to how hard it is to get rid of.

> You're voluntarily consuming content which has ads. If you don't like it don't use ad-laden products

No, I'm not. The society that exists around me as a whole is not my choice, at best I can poke and prod at it and hope if enough people push into the same direction something changes. Until alternate payment systems like Patreon came along there simply was no way of being both a full member of said society without being confronted (or actively blocking) ads.

Many places have made that decision.

Why would you save mental space for non-adverised products? Are you supposed to be a product researcher? Is that your job? Is time not valuable for you? Because efficient people buy the first thing they recall, for crap that doesn't matter.

> I've been TV- and ad-free since 2001 (yes, yes, I know: the "how do you know someone doesn't watch TV? They'll tell you"-smugness curse strikes again)

How many newspapers and magazines have you bought that contained ads?

Because your complaint is about user-experience, not advertising.

And yes, the anti-advertising smugness is the worst. Everybody advertises, always have, always will. I mean, you had Roman gladiators in ancient times that were sponsored by brands.

So many implicit assumptions and premises I hardly know where to begin...

You're equating "spends a big budget on branding" with "quality", which is a ridiculous fallacy.

Yes, my time is valuable. So buying something that is sub-par for the job is a terrible investment of time and money. The idea that I need an advertisement to help decide which product to buy when I can compare products in the store (both physically or on-line) is also ridiculous.

Plus, the most efficient thing is to not buy crap that doesn't matter in the first place. And I'm a lot better at deciding what matters to me since invasive ads are out of my life.

> How many newspapers and magazines have you bought that contained ads? Because your complaint is about user-experience, not advertising.

First: no it's not. Ads are not equal across media. The amount of manipulation possible through moving pictures and sound is vastly worse than it is through paper advertisement. And for the record: almost none, I barely read the news, and when I do it's on-line, and the few magazines I read are imported so they target people from another country.

> And yes, the anti-advertising smugness is the worst. Everybody advertises, always have, always will. I mean, you had Roman gladiators in ancient times that were sponsored by brands.

This is starting to sound like That One Guy At The Party who gets uncomfortable because one other guest is a vegetarian, and then tries to prove the vegetarian friend is a hypocrite.

I did a parallel with my software business. You can have an exceptional software, but you can't stay frozen waiting your customers to find out you. Be very good is not enough on a world too much information.

But, I think the traditional ad industry is not sustainable. Nobody wants to see intrusive ads, I believe content marketing and organically ads (I don't know if this term really exists), like in sports, are the best for the long run.

That, without the lies and coercion from other companies this place would be doing well, based on its relevant outputs rather than on its [lack of] glossy advertising.

That's a very simplified description of consumption. You make it sound like we only buy stuff we're in immediate need of and therefore actively search for.

Have a government run product listing. Think Amazon reviews, Yelp & Companies house. But with government ID to verify reviewers and harsh police enforcement against fake reviews or miss-leading product descriptions. Make it clear there will be prison time for systematic abuse.

We're at a point where this is technologically trivial & the first country to do it properly will get a big advantage over any that doesn't follow suit quickly.

Any person or company offering a product or service can create an account & list their product (with a price & links to where to buy it). Anyone who's bought the product / service can create a review. Throw in some sensible rules about major product changes requiring listings to be updated.

But what about the advertising industry? Fund a massive nudge campaign to improve citizen behaviour. Tail the funding off over a few years, this is really just welfare for all the anti-workers to give them time to switch into doing something economically productive.

I typically use adverts to help me decide what to buy, but the adverts count as negative points towards the product, because I feel that if a product needs to rely on persuasion techniques, or to bombard my eyeballs all the time (especially if they're preroll-type adverts rather than passive banners) or if they're beside spammy adverts, then the product is likely crap anyway or the company are.

Blame all the spam for this attitude, and all the obtrusive crap that is shown to me against my will each day (it seems that almost no matter where I look, online or physical world, I'm bombarded with someones shitty adverts)

These sorts of attitudes seem odd. What products do thses people buy, since pretty much everything being sold in the west is advertised in some way? It seems like the sort of think someone would say as a sort of virtue signalling, but I can't believe its a policy anyone could stick to.

I also perhaps should have said web adverts. I don't much pay attention to TV/radio/magazine/newspaper/billboard adverts, so I imagine I buy many products advertised there.

I'm also not saying I don't buy any products that are advertised or that adverts don't work on me, but rather that:

1) If I'm looking for a product, I'll search and read reviews and such, but if I see advertisements, it counts as a negative point. I may still buy the item if it doesn't have enough other negative points.

2) If I see the same irritating advert multiple times, I'll make a mental note to never buy it. A number of youtube preroll adverts have had this effect.

Its just a signal though and probably a weaker one than I like to think, but in general, the spammy scummy misleading or annoying adverts are the ones that stick in my mind and then I make a mental note not to buy those things.

Most of my online shopping is "I want X, so I'll check the usual online stores that sell X". If I see adverts for these things, I always feel a bit like they're trying to influence me (because they are!) or mislead me (because _some_ are) and I feel like its not in my interest to buy what the adverts tell me. Of course, that doesn't mean I won't buy it, if I determine its really the best X, but I'll consider other stuff first.

Similarly, I consciously don't click on sponsored links and other such things, if I notice that this is what they are, because I feel like they're trying to trick me into visiting them because they make money from it, not because its a benefit to me.

(my offline shopping is mostly groceries, most clothes and other household things. For these I just browse my local shops and buy what I like -- no outside-of-store advertising plays a part here and in-store advertisement I typically ignore).

But.. yeah, to each their own :)

Having read about the psychology of these things, I suspect you are more influenced than you would like. Even simple stuff like putting a more expensive product at the right height, and arranged in pleasing rows of identical objects, while the cheaper products are lower or higher (so difficult to get to) and in smaller quantities (so less of the pleasing identical objects effect) etc.

There are books on supermarket psychology, and I recall a good BBC documentary also, but can't think of any names right now, sorry.

For example, if a smaller local bakery competing with a larger and more popular local bakery starts to make birthday cakes but they didn’t before — how does anyone in the community find out about it since people that buy birthday cakes typically go to the incumbent because they have no idea that the smaller bakery is starting to make great birthday cakes as well? It’s going to take a lot of time before that smaller bakery starts selling some cakes because nobody will know to go there for that purpose.

Advertising is precisely the tool that allows new market entrants to compete with the status quo. As another example how does anyone learn that they can run Windows on their Mac without Apple having advertised that fact? Tech writers? How do they find out? PR? PR is advertising too you know, a different kind, but it is still a paid effort to create market awareness of some product or service.

As far as “searching it out” — let’s take searching on Google or Bing as an example — the top organic results are the result of years of SEO; a new incumbent would be buried on page 20 for perhaps years which means that company will die waiting for word of mouth to start to happen. Meanwhile some big competitor with the budget for the extensive content marketing maintains their market leading position because there is literally no way for the new company to ever be discovered.

Advertising is critical if we are to have competition. If we want nothing but Soviet style companies, then sure, eliminate advertising. Good luck ever launching a new product or trying to disrupt anything especially in spaces where virility isn’t possible. A new, more effective adult diaper for instance — who’s going to run out and tell all their friends about that? How much does word of mouth influence a decision as to what car to buy? There’s some influence certainly, but my family of five has different needs than my single neighbor. So word of mouth isn’t so effective when discussing the finer points of 7 seat vehicles. So I search blogs? Ok, so what providers a blogger to review vehicles? Page views? For what? Bloggers will charge for subscriptions to read their content? Good luck with that. Micro payments could be a solution, but a company would still need to let the blogger know there is even a new car to review right? Or are the bloggers camped outside of dealerships waiting for unannounced new models to arrive?

PR is advertising, albeit a more indirect form and PR is very expensive.

My point; eliminating ads is bad for innovation and bad for companies who want to enter new markets.

Also, we don't need to weigh the pros and cons of advertising as long as all actions are voluntary.

Why is it somebody else's business to make the world suit your tastes, you need to put effort for it, either by paying or creating such a product in the world, not by imposing it on others with regulations

http://www.cluetrain.com/

Typically anyone that bothers to select a thing for purchase will examine all the features and attributes that they consider important, but often overlook the negated aspects that only come from familiarity with the product.