Marketing, the great value siphon. Marketing adds NOTHING of value of the world.

snemvalts an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The sport wouldn't be as popular or have as much funding. The reason football is where it is because of marketing.

This can be extended to all other sports. A sport needs to be easy to follow and easy to advertise with to get funding. Being able to practice it cheaply on a grass-roots level helps.

	▲	voidUpdate an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Would less football be a bad thing? It's the only sport I know where the governing body have to advise the police on how to deal with fan violence, such as "please don't use tear gas on them"
	▲	rationalist an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> The sport wouldn't be as popular or have as much funding. The sport, or the franchise?
	▲	latexr 40 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> The sport wouldn't be as popular or have as much funding. And that’s bad because… I’m really asking. What’s the good thing about having millionaires running around a field passing a ball to each other, while billionaires are raking in even more cash by manipulating you with adverts? Not to mention all the other issues with the industry (John Oliver has multiple episodes on FIFA). If the sport wouldn’t be as popular without marketing, maybe it isn’t that interesting to being with.

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adrianN 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Product discoverability has some value, but marketing is largely a zero sum game.

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mordae an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Discoverability is trivially solvable by dedicating journalists to products. There are already events the companies use to present their products, frequented by journalists who then proceed to write periodicals with new product categories, benchmarks and comparisons.

Those do get gamed and might cheat since they'd get kickbacks, but that should result in a reputation loss as other journalists point it out. There are also various cooperative models that work here well as members can just vote kickback-taking staff out.

People used to actually subscribe to magazines (and some still do) in areas they are interested in. And they still go and visit the shops to see if anything interesting pops up and there is word of mouth.

So I believe discoverability is not really a problem. The fact is that polished advertisements take up bandwidth that would be more productively utilized by a benchmark comparison chart with a commentary on differentiators. People would get more performant and/or better fitting products and services and the overall productivity and happiness would increase.

	▲	iamacyborg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		What you are talking about is marketing and advertising. You’re not solving anything.

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pluc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Marketing is the art of fucking with discoverability so that your shit gets discovered instead of what is relevant.

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someguynamedq an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Hedonistic treadmill says there is little to no value in product discoverability. Marketing is usually creating a new feeling of need, not servicing an authentic existing one.