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| ▲ | jimbokun a day ago | parent | next [-] | | What’s your basis for concluding “no”? London is a very desirable place to live. | |
| ▲ | nospice a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | The problem I have with these arguments is that they're awfully close to the anti-tourism arguments you hear in tourist towns such as Tahoe. You have this influx of visitors and money, and there's a considerable number of residents who see it as uniformly negative: congestion, high property prices, and so on. Imagine what it could've been without all these rich tech bros! But then, the US is full of picturesque small towns where the original heavy industry (logging, copper mine, steel mill) disappeared and tourism did not fill the gap. And all the young people moved out in search of better opportunities, except for the ones addicted to meth. There's no money, no jobs, no hope. Every socioeconomic shift has downsides, but it doesn't automatically mean that the alternative is better. Broad economic gains tend to lift all boats because money changes hands. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It also doesn’t mean the alternative is worse. Nothing says such a shift had to be overall good. | |
| ▲ | rwmj a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | In the case of London, it was misallocation, not an influx of anything. It would have been better if the programmers had been founding start up companies, and the physicists had been researching science, instead of working for banks. |
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| ▲ | blargey a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Advertising as a source of consumer information is a market for lemons in and of itself. Everyone is free to claim innovation and deliver trash, and internet brands are a dime a dozen. Even just keeping out overt fraud/scams or propaganda campaigns is apparently a losing battle for platforms. Reviewers/Influencers/interest-publications are often just a half-step above banner ads, but at least has more incentives than just "loudly capture attention" and "publish anything that pays the algorithmic sticker price". | |
| ▲ | ben_w a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > in a cost effective manner Facebook is currently showing me these ads: Lady's earrings (see my name), Pixel 10 (I'm theoretically an iPhone developer), cat food (I don't own any pet let alone a cat), special offers from a supermarket I would have been shopping at anyway even if they had not told me about the offers, a sponsored government message because apparently the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit don't have a better method of contacting German residents than by buying ads from a US social network (I have previously seen such from the British government telling me that some breed of dog was now banned even though I don't own a dog and also live in Germany)… … but none of that's what's importantly wrong. Cost effective? It's an auction, each ad in isolation may be fair (but there's reason even then to be suspicious), but in aggregate the ad sector is an all-pay auction. There's a massive over-supply of solutions because all the startups chase the same ideas at about the same times, and the only one of them to get big is the one that pays enough to the gatekeepers of eyeballs to win the all-pay auction bidding for mindshare. If everyone stopped advertising, the knowledge of solutions would still diffuse, the winner would be so by word of mouth. The difference is that the 1200 "trusted partners" on all the GDPR popups wouldn't collect rent on advising people on the best strategy for selling their user's privacy and battery life and mobile data allowance for money that those users never get to see, and the people buying those eyeballs wouldn't be wasting their VC runway making something other than the product. | | |
| ▲ | yunyu a day ago | parent [-] | | The fact that your Facebook ads are worse is probably because you're in the EU. I'm in the US, and I am getting fairly relevant ads for Broadway shows, data infrastructure products, discounted hotel packages, and climbing gym subscriptions - things that I am actually considering purchasing. And we haven't even brought up intent-based ads (Google search). Word of mouth benefits incumbents. Advertising at least enables newcomers to temporarily burn money to gain mindshare, while “slow diffusion” will lock society into a “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” state forever. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w a day ago | parent [-] | | > And we haven't even brought up intent-based ads (Google search). OK, those also suck, for different reasons. If I search for a thing, a search engine's entire job is to show me about that thing. That the engine's website puts a different thing that whatever the search algorithm thought was the best thing at the top because an advertiser paid for it to be so, is strictly worse. It's worse when the ad is not correct for obvious reasons, but it's also worse when the ad is also the best thing to show me, because in that condition it was already at the top and shouldn't have needed to pay to get there. > Word of mouth benefits incumbents. Ads generally (but not always) benefit whoever is richest, which is usually (but not always) the incumbent. This is why Coca Cola spends so much money on ads, even when those ads say nothing about the product itself e.g. the current GenAI Christmas ad. > Advertising at least enables newcomers to temporarily burn money to gain mindshare, while “slow diffusion” will lock society into a “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” state forever. How long had ChatGPT been out before OpenAI's first ad for it? The Google search engine itself, I heard about from word of mouth back in the 90s when all of us were using AltaVista, which I also only knew about from word of mouth. Firefox, word of mouth. LiveJournal and then Dreamwidth, word of mouth. Facebook, word of mouth. Skype, Telegram, AeroPress, Huel, these are all things I learned about from word of mouth. If I understand correctly, "word of mouth" is also known in marketing-speak as "going viral". | | |
| ▲ | yunyu a day ago | parent [-] | | You are talking about consumer marketing. I am talking about B2B marketing for prescription medications, enterprise SaaS, etc. These are separate markets and the analogies don't quite hold here - the scam problem etc is practically nonexistent for high-LTV goods with high bid costs, and newcomers are typically well funded enough to periodically outbid incumbents (or implement better targeting). The big-ticket B2B products that one hears of from word-of-mouth are usually the worse ones, since there is rarely any "going viral" to speak of. > That the engine's website puts a different thing that whatever the search algorithm thought was the best thing at the top because an advertiser paid for it to be so, is strictly worse. This is not clearly worse than the result being selected by the whims of some arbitrary Google engineer, or being easily gamed by SEO blogspam bots. At least the advertiser stands to lose something if they bid incorrectly. >How long had ChatGPT been out before OpenAI's first ad for it? Just because some products were able to grow organically doesn't imply that paid marketing never benefits startups. This is a false equivalence. I also find it funny that the vast majority of your example products (everything except Huel or Aeropress?) make a lot of money from advertising. Maybe consider why they still exist. |
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| ▲ | wat10000 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | The only way this should happen is if it’s a fake arthritis treatment meant to detect doctors who learn about treatments from advertising instead of legitimate sources, so they can be prevented from practicing medicine. | | |
| ▲ | yunyu a day ago | parent [-] | | What are legitimate sources in your definition? Should physicians be expected to spend all their free time reading every single study in every medical journal or conference, even for niche areas that they don't usually encounter? Should the average diabetic/arthritic patient need to obsessively pore over academic reports to stay informed about their condition? Should advertisers be banned from sponsoring journals or conferences? This is an extremely ill informed line of reasoning. | | |
| ▲ | michaelt a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Doctors should learn about new drugs the traditional way - physically attractive drug company reps taking them out for expensive dinners and gifting them branded golf equipment. | | |
| ▲ | yunyu a day ago | parent [-] | | My favorite form of definitely-not-advertising :) |
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| ▲ | wat10000 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don’t know what counts as legitimate sources. I’ll let the professionals figure that one out. > Should advertisers be banned from sponsoring journals or conferences? It baffles me that you apparently think this is some kind of zinger. Yes! | | |
| ▲ | ghaff a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Journals less commonly but pretty much every conference out there of any scope is sponsored by companies. In fact, absent sponsors, very few conferences would exist other than small volunteer-run ones. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 a day ago | parent [-] | | If attendees aren’t willing to pay the full cost then maybe the conference isn’t providing enough value and we’re better off without it. | | |
| ▲ | ghaff a day ago | parent [-] | | People (and their companies in many cases) have limited budgets. I do pay out of my pocket for some conferences, and conference organizers and (previously) employers in other cases. You're probably not going to convince me that I'm better off sitting at a desk than getting out and collaborating with people at an event from time to time. For that matter, why should companies sponsor open source projects? If they're that valuable, individuals should just pay for them I guess. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 a day ago | parent [-] | | And you’re not going to convince me that collaboration is so valuable that it’s worth corrupting the whole medical establishment, and simultaneously not valuable enough for you to pay what it costs to do it. | | |
| ▲ | ghaff a day ago | parent [-] | | I have nothing to do with the medical establishment. I do know that the conferences I do attend are subsidized by companies in the tech space in various ways. You're welcome to bemoan that of course although I'm pretty sure neither of us are in a position to overturn decades-long (at least) practice. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m ranting about my desire to ban all advertising. It’s obviously never going to happen. |
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| ▲ | yunyu a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Got it. So you want attention to be controlled by the whims of academic/government/publishing bureaucrats or black-box ranking algorithms who are the arbitrators of legitimacy. I can't say I agree with that opinion, but different strokes for different folks. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 a day ago | parent [-] | | I’m very confused. Why would “black-box ranking algorithms” be on the no advertising side? Medicine has a pretty good system for getting knowledge out to doctors as far as I can tell. I fail to see how advertising contributes to this in any way. Banning advertising is the opposite of controlling attention. I’d like a total ban on all advertising, but I at least see some merits in the discovery argument for consumer goods even if I don’t agree with it. But saying advertisement is necessary so doctors can find out about new treatments? I hope this is just subtle satire, because, what? | | |
| ▲ | yunyu a day ago | parent [-] | | > Medicine has a pretty good system for getting knowledge out to doctors as far as I can tell. Yes, it does - it’s called advertising. In the US, the average promotional spend per physician exceeds $20k/yr. As a result, a lot more patients are able to quickly benefit from new medications like Dupixent or Ozempic as a result of wider awareness. Suppose we banned Google ads and you are searching for a plumber. You are now entirely at the whims of whoever designs the ranking algorithm on Google/the Yellow Pages, who has nothing at stake here. Meanwhile, advertisers have to bid for your attention - making them at least somewhat aligned with your buying intent. The same applies for doctors searching for state of the art diabetes treatments. It’s hard to say that relying on a fuzzy notion of “legitimacy” (or entrenched status-quo cliques) is a more fair system. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 a day ago | parent [-] | | Your hypothetical is the world I actually live in, except I have to scroll past the ads first. It’s amazing that you’re so invested in advertising as a concept that you’d think a guy who keeps ranting about banning advertising would ever select a plumber from an ad. The only purpose Google ads serve to me is to take up space and waste my time locating where the ads end and the real results begin. Otherwise, they’re at best useless. Being able to distinguish the ads from the real results is an important online safety skill these days to avoid getting ripped off or outright scammed. They’re no longer merely parasitic, but are now actually dangerous. If your argument is that advertising medical treatments to doctors is just like the mundane advertising I see on Google, you’re doing an excellent job of making my case for me. | | |
| ▲ | yunyu a day ago | parent [-] | | Your value to advertisers is probably less than 1% of that of a single doctor or corporate VP. It makes sense that your queries are lower intent - this is hardly contradictory. Fortunately, you are an edge case wrt how firms are actually spending their money, so we’ll leave it at that. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 a day ago | parent [-] | | If you want to argue that advertising is different for doctors than it is for me, and it’s useful for them despite being a drain and a danger for me, then go for it. But that’s the opposite of the argument you laid out. | | |
| ▲ | yunyu a day ago | parent [-] | | Yes, advertising is more relevant and works better for people with power over large purchasing decisions as the bidders have more at stake. Maybe you aren't in the market for plumbers or running shoes, and are instead looking for "download vlc media player". This doesn't contradict anything I said? | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ok, you must be taking the piss. VLC doesn’t advertise. If you search for VLC downloads and click an advertisement for VLC, you’re going to be downloading malware. Even someone who thinks advertising is a modern miracle must be aware of this. | | |
| ▲ | yunyu 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | ...that was my point? You are so close to getting it. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m completely lost. You keep talking about how advertising to doctors and B2B is totally different from advertising to people like me. At the same time you keep talking about my personal experience with advertising. Why? | | |
| ▲ | yunyu 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you search for low-value consumer queries or aren't a buyer for high-ticket B2B items, you will get less relevant ads. Your personal experiences don't extrapolate well here: advertising for high-value goods is totally different from advertising for low-value goods. Example: hypertargeted ads for F-35 engine upgrades in the DC metro - https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/1683476652276236295 Is that clear enough? | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure. I can totally buy that advertising is different for different people. Although I don’t think it’s good regardless. The part that confuses me is that you keep bringing up my experience of advertising despite repeatedly saying it’s not comparable. | | |
| ▲ | yunyu 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I was trying to point out the selection bias in your experiences, since your queries are probably lower-intent than for the typical consumer. Good discussion though. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I get that. But you're the one who brought up my experiences in the first place! The last few messages have been, essentially, "Doctors need advertising to find new treatments just like you need advertising to find plumbers." "I don't need, and actively avoid using, advertising to find plumbers." "Your experience isn't comparable, it's not relevant to doctors finding medical treatments." Followed by many repetitions of the last part. I get it. The part I don't get is why I'm supposed to believe advertising is good for doctors, given your previous argument made no sense (what with comparing it to my own experience with advertising) and you haven't given a new one. |
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