Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

Why is the advertisement industry so sleezy and disgusting? Aren’t there any sensible ways of putting your product or service out there without insane advertisement strategies that invade privacy, cross ethical boundaries and sometimes, literally illegal?

Advertisement is why we have privacy issues (the other being governments spying on their people) and giant corporations based on targeted advertisement business model. It’s sickening and people working in this profession should be ashamed of themselves. Not to mention all the psychological tricks that go into the “smell” of the store, deluding people into buying and then underdelivering, buy one get one free, sales!!! sales!!! sales!!!, 20% off if you sign up for a store credit card, etc. what happened to ethics and honesty in doing business?

There has to be a more sensible way? Word of mouth, magazines, banners, trade shows, demos, putting product on the shelf, etc aren’t good enough? I am not a sales man but boy I despise that whole industry.

Is this really more slimy than targeted ads? At least this is based on the content, not the person's information who is browsing it.

One of the dead comments in this thread calls for "criminalizing advertising". I am quite positive to this idea myself. Does advertising really do anything positive to the economy and the world? Doesn't the paradox of advertising already prove that it is at best unnecessary?

Recently however I read about the time in the middle ages when guilts had forbidden advertisement. They took this to such a degree, that if a merchant would cough while a potential customer was walking nearby, the other merchants would accuse him/her of trying to catch the attention of the passer-by.

Perhaps the reason we allow advertisement is just that we don't know how to get rid of it. However, then we should certainly try to regulate it as much as possible; make rules limiting it to the tolerable and perhaps undamaging.

Unfortunately, it may be that so many industries now depend on selling adverts, that limiting it in any meaningful degree would be very hard politically.

Ads do help with discovery. But most of it is exploitation of psychological shortcomings and biases.

And as formal ads get phased out, we're starting to see native ads more and more on youtube. There are plenty that are disclosed but there are plenty which are not.

The unregulated ones are already illegal though.

You work for a company that makes chatbots, virtual agents, a personalization engine, and analytics. How do you hold such an extreme opinion while contributing to it every single day? Advertising literally pays your salary.

Banning advertisement is fundamentally impossible in a free society because advertising is speech. You can't stop people from persuading other people. You can't realistically ban paid advertisement either, that just pushes it underground because it's so valuable that people will find a way to pay for it anyway. What you're asking for is a society free of financially-motivated influence, and I don't think that has/can/will ever exist.

Even if you could get rid of advertising, that just cedes control of advertising to random natural factors like geography or chance. It's not clear to me how that's a better state of affairs.

The alternative wouldn't be chance. In the ideal world we would have unbiased reviews to guide us.

I very much agree with you however. We can't ban it. It just practically isn't possible. We should be able to regulate it though.

All industry will be sleazy and disgusting if it pays to be that way. If giving kids cancer meant they could make an extra dollar, they’d do it. (And there are plenty of examples of other industries doing exactly that.)

The only way to put a stop to it is to make it unprofitable.

There was a story a few years ago about a girl scout who found that she could be incredibly successful by setting up shop outside marijuana stores.

From one angle, this girl is giving the customer what they want. It's a win-win.

From another angle, this girl is using psychological tricks to exploit her customers to convince them to buy eat high-fat high-sugar cookies.

If it were easy to come up with a clear boundary between ethical and unethical advertising that most people agreed with, I believe we would do it.

There has to be a more sensible way?

Like what? If you were to put forth a recommendation it actually seemed like it could work, that would be something people could go forward with. Short of that, you're asking companies to not take advantage of legal methods that their competitors surely will take advantage of.

But there are no privacy concerns in this case. The ad placement is completely contextual based on content, not based on viewer. They just trained a model to learn what sentiment an article would elicit and allows advertisers to target based on that. This seems like the best case for advertisements for anyone concerned with privacy and targeting.

Competition. Other companies do shady stuff (that works), so you "have to," too.

What's slimy and dishonest about having a store that smells nice? Do you object to cleanliness and a pleasant temperature too?

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