> No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake.

I disagree with your assessment. For one, if you base reliability on monetary costs, then it's trivial for a fly-by-night scam to work around it. You just have to get more money. A loan could work. Or VC investment - such companies have plenty of money to burn on advertising, and it in no way reflects the quality of their work.

Two, reputation. I don't think reputation matters much to anyone anymore. Think of all the corporate scandals that are featured essentially weekly on HN. Or, closer to the topic, think of all the bullshit newspaper publish that gets thoroughly debunked in discussion threads around HN or topical subreddits. And yet both those corporations and those papers are still happily chugging along, no worse for the wear. If reputation of news publications mattered at all, nobody would post anything from Bloomberg here ever since the Supermicro fiasco.

I think the theory behind the legitimacy is better than the practice. Sure, you can't buy ads in national publications for a fly-by-night level scam the way you can buy social ads. But outright scams can be as big as Enron, and people running scam ICOs/MLM companies etc can definitely afford the ad bill if they don't find the sucker ratio higher through more targeted digital channels...

Binance is charging a million dollars to list your token on the exchange. If anything there's an adverse selection effect: the more willing you are to fork over a million dollars to get your token listed, the more likely you are to be a scam. Crypto projects with the most real adoption and genuine development (like MakerDAO) didn't even ICO at all, they just airdropped tokens to get the ecosystem started and let the quality of the product take it from there.

IIRC there was a similar phenomena with the dot-com boom: companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising did so because they weren't selling anything useful, while the actual survivors spent zero on advertising and grew virally from word of mouth. Google and Facebook make money by selling ads, not by buying them: Google's first ad didn't run until 2010.

One of the advantages of print newspapers is accountability. Print newspapers can be (and generally are) archived by public libraries. My local library has archives of local papers going back decades. When corrections to previously published articles become necessary, the corrections are published in such a way that both the original article and the correction are archived.

Of course there are projects that seek to archive online newspapers too (archive.org is awesome!), but online newspapers are able to thwart archiving either through technical means or policy (robots.txt.) Furthermore even when they aren't maliciously attacking archival efforts, online publications can swap out headlines or even the full content of articles, sometimes before the original has been archived. That sort of undisclosed on-the-fly revision simply isn't possible with print newspapers.

I hate to burst your bubble, but fundamentally, all advertising is a "scam". It's to get you to buy stuff you really don't need.

Also, the print newspaper industry isn't as clean as you think.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

You shouldn't be trusting any ad, wherever it is. Actually, the most reputable the platform, the more skeptical you should be since you are more trusting of the platform to begin with. The easier you are to be duped.

This, like so many extreme opinions, is just wrong.

An advertisement that happens to reach someone who has a problem that your product solves isn't a scam. It is a way to get that person to know about your solution.

And this is just motte and bailey. Yes, there are some advertisements like you describe. No, vast majority of them aren't like that.

It's like a city was proposing to limit car movement through the center to improve air quality, and you countered with "but some cars are electric and don't pollute!". Yeah, right. Wake me up when most of them are.

How do you find the stuff you need then? Go to the big product box in the sky?

Brick&mortar stores, Consumer Reports, magazines[0], product catalogs, trade shows, yellow books, discussion groups, word of mouth. Basically, everything that's pull (vs. push) and limits itself to providing information about products and problems they solve (vs. playing on your emotions, or delivering sales tactics).

--

[0] - See this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348886.

I agree with the dislike for over-extended advertising techniques online. But those are all ads, as such don't really answer my challenge to the parent poster. Ads on some fundamental level provide a service to the recipient.

I feel it's a bit disingenuous on the part of advertisers to claim that any commercial information source is an ad. This basically makes any discussion impossible because if everything is an ad then nothing is. It's a dirty trick of the ad industry.

did the creator of the X pay a third party to present X? is X an essential part of its context? is the recipient of X seeking X itself or something else?

Some ads provide a service to the recipient. Most ads, as exist today, provide a net disservice.

I don't think the parent poster meant absolutely all ads, just the vast majority of them. But in so far as they meant all ads, it's still a good point you shouldn't trust them - not even the product catalogs you yourself paid for. There's very little legal and social protection from the merchant lying to you, and all the business incentives to do so.

Consumer Reports and Octopart