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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> Appreciate marketing. It seems like bullshit, but it’s bullshit I don’t want to have to do.

Bullshit? To me it seems more like mind rape when a bunch of corporate ideas and brands are suddenly and forcibly injected into my mind. I didn't ask for it, I didn't consent to it. We don't tolerate it when people violate our bodies, so why is it okay to violate our minds? They "need" it to make money, so it's okay?

If I want to see products, I'll ask for it. I'll open the store app. Until that time, they better keep their marketing to themselves or I'll do everything in my power to defend myself. That's what software like uBlock Origin is: self-defense against hostile megacorporations who want to exploit you in every way possible.

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I agree 100%. If your company can't survive without exploiting human psychology and contributing to a surveillance infrastructure and monetization scheme, good. Companies survived for centuries without internet ads, tracking, targeting, etc. Just because you can take advantage of technological methods and mental vulnerabilities to pimp your product without the consent of the target, doesn't mean you should.

> “Companies survived for centuries without internet ads, tracking, targeting, etc.”

As far back as ancient Rome, vendors still used advertising and marketing. This included word-of-mouth advertisements and billboards (such as in Pompeii before the volcanic eruption). [0]

In the 1900s, newspaper advertising was a major source of advertising. Now that fewer people read print newspapers, advertising has shifted to internet ads and email newsletter ads.

Technology evolves, and marketing evolves to keep up. Even non-profits have significant marketing investments today. I encourage you to actually try to run an organization, for-profit or non-profit, and try to sustainably achieve the mission while rigidly adhering to the ideal that companies shouldn’t use marketing.

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4387300.pdf

> This included word-of-mouth advertisements

This is not really advertising. It's more like a conversation. It's real people talking about their experiences. Advertising is when some phony who's on the corporation's payroll comes to you unsolicited and starts overstating the positives and downplaying the negatives.

There is two things going on here that are getting lumped under the same umbrella. 1) Modern marketing that uses a deep understanding of psychology to treat people as a series of levers to be pressed in order to get a certain reaction. 2) Service discovery. This can be really valuable. Just imagine you made something you were truly proud of and thought would bring value to others lives, or of something you already think is incredible. Finding out about it brought you value.

These two things both get called advertising but we have (quite reasonably) different feelings about them.

> Service discovery

I don't consider this advertising either. If there is a list of services somewhere and people consult it voluntarily, then it's not really advertising, it's information. People are informing themselves about what's available.

For example, I don't consider an online store to be advertising. The whole reason I went there is to see products, so it's totally fine when products are shown. It becomes unethical when they start shoving products in my face everywhere I go.

I was having this argument a couple of weeks ago. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30418664 ) cut-n-pasting from there:

Organic word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations are waaaaaay more effective than any other form of marketing. If you can't develop and sustain word-of-mouth organically then you have to use other less efficient and more coercive means. There are marketplaces that operate efficiently on word of mouth alone. E.g., there are the various "black" markets. There was no appreciable change in availability, quality, or price before and after pot legalization, for example. The high end of most services and products doesn't need to market, they're "saturated" by word-of-mouth alone.

- - - -

Going further, you can trace the historical rise of modern marketing directly from military propaganda techniques. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#World_War_I )

The problem is that in order for you to hear about a product probably a lot of other people need to first. Not a huge fan of advertising myself but to call it 'mind rape' seems a bit over the top.....

Aren't you consenting to it when you are browsing the web? If it bothers me so much ("mind rape") and I know a website has ads, why would I go there?

> Aren't you consenting to it when you are browsing the web?

No.

> If it bothers me so much ("mind rape") and I know a website has ads, why would I go there?

Websites don't have "99% advertising 1% content" warnings to help me decide before I click a link.

Also, there is no reason to avoid going anywhere these days because uBlock Origin exists.

It's the other way around: when advertisers and website owners decide to leverage the internet, the largest distribution channel in the world at no expense to them, agree to the "public square" terms. If they dont like the terms, they can always build their own distribution channel and set whatever rules they like. Advertisers are the real freeloaders here.

I don't think distribution channel can be ad-free as such, let alone claiming every page on the internet needs to agree to this. Would be great if I can get access to superb resources without paying for them but that is not going to happen, hence ads. If you don't like ads (or block them), how come you are not a freeloader?

> If you don't like ads (or block them), how come you are not a freeloader?

They sent us the web page for free. It's their choice, they don't get to shame us for it.

They did that because they assumed we'd look at the ads. The chance that this assumption would turn out to be false was always there. There's just no way they didn't know about this risk.

What's happening is we don't want to look at this noise. We're not gonna do it. They need to accept that and move on instead of shaming us for invalidating the silly assumptions their business model is based on. Where does it say we're obligated to "give back" in exchange for their "free" content? That's just an idea they made up. They got it into their minds that we are "supposed" to pay them back by viewing ads when we are under exactly zero obligation to do so. They are not entitled to our attention.

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