Advertising needs to be more targeted if anything. I don't want to see a bunch of irrelevant junk - I want to see high quality products that are useful to my life.

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juiceland 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"I like being manipulated so I think everyone should be manipulated" is certainly A Take in 2026.

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tripleee 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Is your idea that manipulative advertising actually works based on anything? Trying to make people want something they don't already want is a massive waste of money.

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rurp an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, based on it being one of the largest most profitable industries in the world. There is an immense amount of data showing that shoveling ad money into a product will convince some percent of people to buy it. Or just glance at the ads that fill up most people's Facebook feed and Google SERPs; it's mostly crap that looks flashy but few seconds but that few if any people actually have a real need for.

I've personally blocked who knows how many tens of thousands of ads online over the past couple decades. Somehow I doubt my life is lacking for not buying hundreds of extra products I would have learned about from all those targeted ads.

	▲	tripleee an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm talking about manipulative advertising. Showing someone a product that they're interested in and then go on to buy isn't manipulative.

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physicallyIllfr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, and sometimes the things people want are addictive and ruin their lives.

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tavavex 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In that case you don't want advertising, you want better product discovery. Advertising is fundamentally incompatible with usefulness because it's based on how much cash someone can fork over. A company can make the best product in a market segment, but if they don't have the money to advertise it, they will lose to the hot garbage offered by their competitors. The only recourse is people organically recommending the product to one another - so the most useful venue is not even advertising. Letting companies pay for your attention is actively hostile to you, because there is no guarantee they're presenting you with the best option, just THEIR option.

I'll repeat an idea I had a while ago, but if countries just had national networks where companies could list their products and services in a way that is highly structured and as systematically scrubbed of bias or psychological manipulation as possible, we would get the best of both worlds. Effortless and non-favoring lookup of what you want, fair comparisons between products, no favoritism to the wealthy, no FOMO or mind tricks.

	▲	tripleee an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> because it's based on how much cash someone can fork over I'd argue here that a business's marketing budget is going to be effectively unlimited if it's profitable, assuming they have the initial budget to kickstart it which most do. If $10 in ad spend returns $12, you can just keep pouring money into it. Apart from that yeah you're right that the goal is better product discovery.