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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

My company makes pluggable chat components. It's a pretty niche targeted product, and we run some Google ads on the relevant keywords.

Now you're telling me that we're doing "a legitimized way of abuse"? Seriously? Come on. Nothing in the world is this black and white.

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I'm not going to write an essay in the comments about nuances of ads (though I might put one up on my blog, even if just to have something to link to in HN comments). But I assume your ads on relevant keywords target active searches, and that your company is building a quality, non-abusive product. That falls on the nicer part of the spectrum[0], but it's also not the kind of ads we're talking about here.

Even search ads could still be made more fair (most of the time, if users are searching for something, do they really want to see ads instead of organic content?), but in my quixotic crusade against the malicious market players, I'd love to first get rid of the spammy ads - both in our digital media and on our physical streets - and ads that lie to people.

Cool, I'm with you there.

Of course it isn't that black and white, and I don't think that was the point. I'd interpret it as: Your company is participating in something that, when looked at as a whole, has become something that you could call a legitimized form of abuse on a societal scale.

You are competing for attention with others, possibly a lot less scrupulous than you.

Advertising is like prisoner's dilemma: Companies are like prisoners and if they go overboard with advertising they are like defecting. If all companies had an agreement to rein themselves in, then there will be a rogue company sucking the attention away.

Then bottom feeders are going to target children.

The worst part about the industry is its a zero sum game. All you are trying to do is redirect dollars that would go somewhere else to your thing. You don't add value in that process, you simply redirect it. And because its an arms race it drives businesses to have ludicrous overhead in the form of marketing to reach the audience of whatever actual thing of value they want to sell.

Its one of the laundry list of things I can imagine a far future enlightened species looking back at us and thinking "wow, they sure wasted trillions of hours and dollars just trying to manipulate each other into spending their money differently".

Its absolutely necessary to participate on the individual level, but on the macroeconomic level it should look to anyone as being completely absurd and a huge waste of potential. Its a lot like overspending on the military - the primary function for advertising is zero sum while for the military it is a negative value, while you hope for circumstantial value to emerge and try to use it as an excuse to justify the whole when advertisers make entertaining ads (see the Superbowl Commercials or Flex Tape) or when the military produces scientific innovation.

> wow, they sure wasted trillions of hours and dollars […]

Well, not money, because the money spent just ends up in someone else's pocket. It doesn't disappear or get consumed in the process. What we are wasting is potential value for society as a whole (the hours you rightly mention).

Hours... and natural resources, including fuels used to generate electricity and provide transportation for ads themselves and all the supporting industries. For instance, meatspace ads involve graphics designers, printing shops, producing and moving paints and paper, and moving the final ads to their destination (and then moving them to landfills).

Advertising is wasting opportunities of people by distracting and misleading them.

Advertising is like a forest. All trees have to invest in tall trunks because if they didn't they'd have no chance against other trees. So they all get as tall trunks as physically possible.

Unfortunately society has almost no use for "advertising trunks" so we should impose intelligent limits on advertising so that the mechanism of informing people what they can buy could be less like forest and more like orchard.

I'm going to venture a guess that you've never run an ad campaign before. If you had, at least a mainstream digital one, you'd find that deceptive tactics don't work all that well. People using them do it to get access to the most vulnerable set of people, who aren't usually people companies are competing to advertise to. If I make an ad that implies you'll get something free, for example, and you click on it to find no free offer, you bounce. That makes my ad unsuccessful, more expensive, and less likely to win auctions.

I think this is a "piling problem".

Lot's of good faith actors putting up lots of reasonable ads still results in a massive ad flood for the individual on the receiving end.

After some point the quality stops mattering, it's the sheer quantity that feels overwhelming.

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