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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

It's critically important for adtech companies' customers, since it's an essential part of determining return on investment.

But it's also critically important for both adtech companies and data scientists who work in the space to direct people's attention away from those sorts of metrics. You generally don't want to call the attention of the person who signs your paycheck toward the fact that it's all but impossible to really know for sure if your service has delivered them any net benefit.

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This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud.

But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today.

edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.

This is the industry whose job is to manipulate and deceive people. It should surprise no one that, if they do that to others, they'll do that to themselves as well.

> "edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true."

It's not that you're wrong, it's that you're boring.

"I knew this years ago, look how my cynicism is superior to your naievite" is a boring comment to read. You could explain why you think this is any closer to fraud compared to selling anything else and claiming it's the best in its class, or what safe-harbor carve outs by whom, or why they matter more than other effects, or what you think should be done to change them, or anything more substantial than "I'm not surprised". Oh aren't you? Great, cool story bro. Except it's not /even/ a cool story.

It's old man "get off my lawn". It's every tech forum's old-man status grabbing which is now approaching Reddit /r/SysAdmin levels on HN. The only question is whether aggressive downvoting can curb its growth here before it gets a choke-hold.

Please don't cross into personal attack and name calling. It only makes things considerably worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I will rephrase as "your comment is boring" rather than "you're boring" in future; my intent was to describe the comment and not to attack the author's person.

That would certainly be better.

It's sad to see the downvote culture come here. Downvoting is meant for removing contributions that don't add much to a discussion, not for indicating whether someone agrees or disagrees with you. It seems to be a norm that is spreading though, sadly.

It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring. Not exactly the kind of attitude that we want to have around here.

The downvote button should be replaced with an "off topic" flag. If downvote is opposed with upvote and upvote is understood to mean "I agree" or "this is informative" then downvote would be expected to mean "I disagree" or "this is bunk". It's semantically misleading.

> The downvote button should be replaced with an "off topic" flag.

I hope not. Some of the most informative, useful comments I've seen on Hacker News have taken the form of wild tangents.

I do see where you're going, though, that if "I agree" is sufficient cause for an upvote, then it's only reasonable that a vote in the opposite direction should be allowed to carry the opposite semantics.

It's just that, from a purely social standpoint, that's not actually how human beings typically think, feel, and react. Perhaps it could be that simple on the Vulcan version of Hacker News.

Oh for sure—wild tangents are fine as long as they're unpredictable, which is what makes them interesting. The offtopicness we try to avoid are generic tangents, the kind where people get sucked into the same argument about some topic that they always get sucked into. Those are the black holes of internet forums—it's best to steer clear.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

To be clear, "off topic" here's just an example. My main point was the semantic implication of a downvote - I've seen the argument of "downvotes are not meant for disagreement" expressed here previously.

> It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring.

I don't have an opinion on what "correct" downvoting culture would be, one way or the other, but - if you say "contributions that don't add much to a discussion" should be downvoted, then isn't a "boring" comment precisely one that _should_ be downvoted?

I also always thought that downvoting should be reserved for low quality comments, but I had been corrected and even dang said:

Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN.[1]

I don't really like it, but it has always been the case on HN. The question is if the community voting behavior has actually changed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17666145

Downvoting for disagreement is okay? That is new to me. Well okay then. I will proceed accordingly.

Thanks.

From somewhere in the warren of links to dang posts I traced out from there:

> I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN.

That one gets me, because I had previously assumed that downvoting for disagreement would be a standard Reddit thing, but that HN's community is supposed to strive toward a more "we're all mature adults here" kind of community standard.

That's not true. Downvoting for disagreement has been ok on HN from the beginning.

I realize people have strong feelings about it, but that's because of the psychological intensity of the mechanism. There's no way HN would survive without downvotes, despite the fact that not all downvotes are fair. It's a critical part of the immune system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

I have noticed the same thing over the last four or five months. I’ve been curious if a voting ring has sprung up on HN or maybe a COVID impacted demographic suddenly has a lot of time to patrol the site, or if it’s something else. It would be really interesting to have some anonymized voting data to analyze and see how downvotes map to accounts, geography, and economic trends over time. Though voting data must be relatively huge compared to content and I bet it gets discarded after items close to replies.

> advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries.

What safe-harbor carve-out existed 30 years ago for advertising that another industry might have wanted something similar on?

Lying to consumers. Puffery is the legal term of art.

The "reasoning" allowing advertising/advertisers to lie is that it is assumed consumers do not believe it.

It is not fraud to distract from evidence that your product might not work. It is fraud to claim your product works if it doesn't.

Therefore ad companies are not going to try to prove that their product doesn't work.

Common law fraud is hard to prove in the US.

All of the elements listed below must be proven. However, some of the comments here describe behavior that comes pretty close.

(1) a representation of fact; (2) its falsity; (3) its materiality; (4) the representer’s knowledge of its falsity or ignorance of its truth; (5) the representer’s intent that it should be acted upon by the person in the manner reasonably contemplated; (6) the injured party’s ignorance of its falsity; (7) the injured party’s reliance on its truth; (8) the injured party’s right to rely thereon; and (9) the injured party’s consequent and proximate injury.

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes. I know they suck, but bilious addenda about downvotes also suck, which is why users here are asked to restrain themselves from posting them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Apart from taking threads badly off topic, such complaints usually end up as uncollected garbage, since often the most unfairly downvoted comments end up getting corrective upvotes from users.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&dateRange=...

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