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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious: what’s the alternative to ads then? How do you find new stuff that you might need?

Right! Most days I'm just mindlessly clawing around my house, desperately unaware of what I "need" to live without the aid of hundreds of slow-loading data-tracking overwrought boxes of advertising festering my every vantage point.

Just this morning, I was on the toilet, about to finish up a shit. I reached instinctively to my left to grab... wait, the little roller is empty!

But...what used to be there? What was I about to grab? This is crazy, my mind is completely blank!

If only there were some kind of an unskippable 30 second movie with dancing animated bears that could remind me what product I might use adjacent to a toilet bowl to complete my biological morning ritual!

I laughed, but it's about finding new stuff not stuff you already know exists, and it works sometimes. Of course they made ads too intrusive so we block them now, but even then I did buy something I found very useful after seeing some of the few ads that slipped. I think early 2000 adsense ads were the best. Just simple text or images and contextual to the content of the page you were on.

I find that ads are usually a very poor source of information when trying to figure out what product to buy. Ads are designed to deceive. They're supposed to make the product larger than life, more perfect than possible, and absolutely essential to your continued existence.

What I find more helpful is authentic experience from other consumers of that product. The authentic part is getting harder and harder to validate, of course.

Some adverts are informative. I saw a poster a few years ago saying Jason Donovan was in Joeseph in London as Pharaoh, I likely wouldn’t have known that without that poster at the station.

I didn’t mind skippable YouTube preroll adverts. Now they are unskippable, multiple ones, and appear mid video.

Howver I don’t watch YouTube enough to justify paying more than Netflix and Disney combined just to skip adverts (but not skip the burnt in sponsor adverts)

Is that how much it really costs??? Damn. I have to go to the top and read the comments again with this new information. I pay the equivalent of around $2.5 for 6 people. No way I would pay the same amount as Netflix or Disney, let alone the two together.

U.K. YouTube wants $183 a year for YouTube premium - and that’s not even the family option.

Ok so you want to find out about new products or services from other customers. So how do those other customers find out about the product? At some point there are no customers or so few that you never run into one of these customers. So what does a small company do at the stage where they have no word of mouth?

Imagine if it were your business for a second, you’ve created a new website or a new physical product and you want to get more customers or users, what do you do? It’s not going to sell itself if nobody knows it exists no matter how good it is.

I wanted a new small camera recently. How did I find it? By trying to find opinions of people who had owned different cameras, and comparing their opinions about the ones that they owned.

I didn’t need an ad to tell me to buy a camera. I didn’t see any ads at all! Rather, I decided “I wish I had something to take pictures with”, so I started researching how I could accomplish that thing.

And ads would not have helped me find the best camera option at all, in fact it’s probably a slightly negative signal — they must have big profits to spend lots of money on ads, compared to a company that just makes the best product and has their customers promote it for them.

Same thing with any other product. I see my coworkers using a terminal app I’ve never seen. It looks better than the normal one, so I ask them about it.

Yea aside from it indicating less budget for R&D, anything that’s ridiculously promoted probably means u would b spending significantly more than you should be for that lol.

It’s very simple and not even nuanced I’m just unsure why many seem to gloss over that. Perhaps I’m more jaded than most

I will always have a need for a VPN. I will never pay for NordVPN. Their level of advertising has me convinced they are up to no good regardless of whether that is true or not.

Hahah the other day a buddy asked me about Nord and after suggesting Mullvad for the life of me I couldn’t remember why I was wary about Nord. But that’s what it was, their incessant advertising.

Both of you are missing the point because you're confusing online advertising with traditional media advertising. PPC advertising is about making a conversion on the spot, since ROI can be directly measured. Media advertising is about context poisoning for eventual conversion.

You already know you need toilet paper. There are only so many brands to choose from. Every month, you have to make a decision about one of them based on whatever factors are important to you at that time. (For me, it's usually cost, ply count, and how likely it is that someone in the house is going to flush a massive wad of it and clog the pipe.)

The point of print/radio/television ads are to groom you into associating some positive feeling with a specific choice, whether or not it's new or you know about it. So the next time you're looking at the wall of toilet paper, you recognize the bear, the colors, the jingle, the florid language about its delicate softness upon your tender starfish, and get you to feel something positive enough to get you to gravitate toward it despite its higher price. Joy, lust, anger, and vanity are easy to appeal to.

They're not trying to inform you of anything or make you a die-hard fan. They're buttering you up to tilt your next purchasing decision in their favor. That's why advertising never stops; it's an endless loop of a handful of charlatans competing with each other to coerce you into buying their version instead of the other guy's.

Like, what new stuff? If that’s something that’s been around for years (like cameras), go ask friends or read some reviews or bug a salesperson in a camera shop. If that’s something that nobody knows about (yet) - well, you don’t know it exists hence you don’t need it. Don’t overcomplicate, keep it simple. That’s basic mental hygiene.

The new stuff you can buy is always limited to whats already available at your market. Your market might be your grocery store, walmart, amazon, a little local bodega, whatever, but if its not there you don't get it ads or not, and if its there chances are you can find it without an ad by going down the right aisle or using the right keywords.

Plus ads are fundamentally inefficient sources of information. Billboard lawyers like to flood the interstates with their "Accident? call me" signage, on the off chance someone without a lawyer has an accident and looks up and sees Jacob Emrani smiling on them. Big payoff for the lawyer if they do get a job from this ad, but for the vast majority of the millions of commuters a day who pass such an ad its probably a useless waste of thought to even catch one in your periphery.

Targeted ads are terrible at that. They are quite often overly specific and just try to convince me to buy more of the things I already know about.

including stuff you literally just purchased

I see you just purchased u-joints for a Dodge pickup. Wait until you see these brake pads for a Honda Civic!

Or, alternatively, I noticed you recently purchased an instant pot. Would you like to subscribe to purchase instant pots monthly?

Professional review sources like Consumer report, ATK, and Wirecutter are far better sources than a random ad. I don't think I would ever buy a random product from an ad without reading reviews unless it was something completely disposable, like a new soda, or something that you have to willfully make terrible to screw it up, like a t shirt

If its not too private, do you mind sharing the last new thing you bought that you hitherto had no knowledge off?

It was an half rack with width that can be regulated. I knew I wanted an half rack or a rack, but the recommended ones on blogs and such were always too big for my taste (also I'm not gonna lift heavy, especially at home). I actually stopped looking for one because I thought there were none fitting my needs, then one day an ad slipped with this model that had good features and reviews and I bought it (after researching it more of course).

I am struggling to know if this is a troll or not?

I don't let Ads tell me what I 'might' need. I already know what I need (I might 'want' something but that is a different topic).

Ads try to convince me that I 'need' whatever it is they are 'selling'.

Not OP but anecdotal experience: Every once in a while I'll go to a store and wander the isles. I see things that I find interesting, but most of the time I don't buy them. Sometimes I think to myself: I would love to know more about topic X. So I use search engines and forums to look for more information on topic X. I happily filter ads because there is no net positive benefit from them for my life. I get excited about things without them, find things I need without them, and have no trouble with either.

Yes, this is the question for the ages. How can you possibly survive if you don't buy more stuff you didn't even know you needed. Clearly, that more than justifies any and all intrusive, exploitive, unethical practices. Won't someone think of the children (buying stuff they don't need).

P.S.: I have had any number of marketing types push back (vehemently) when I expressed my distaste for oppressive ad overload with "well you tell me what the alternative is...how else am I supposed to reach customers". And I have stopped even trying to be nice about it: Figuring that out is your goddam job. My job would be vastly easier if I could just say "all that stuff about ethics, regulation, legislation and simple common decency...that's really inconvenient and I'm going to ignore it". But I don't get to ignore any of that; I still successfully do my job. So why should marketing be somehow different.

Anyone in marketing who says "You tell me how to do my job without crapping on people" is lazy and incompetent.

I see ads when I watch Youtube on my TV, and basically not otherwise. I have never seen one and thought Oh yeah I want/need that, more often it's laughably off base. They could've trivially targeted to the video, but instead decided I might have some niche health concern which is demographically impossible.

Typically the content I'm trying to watch (even if unsponsored) is a far superior advert. I didn't know I wanted a powered/active cooler box (and definitely don't need one) until I saw an AvE video of one last night. Now I'd quite like Makita's, and in fact now I come to think of it I did even share the link with someone who is in the market for one. But the malgorithms did their best to make me learn about and want to buy shitty VPNs and maltesers instead. If I'm watching tool/DIY videos give me the tool ads? I might actually be interested? I might warm to the brand, associating it with my favourite channels?

Not that I want to be manipulated like that, it just seems bafflingly poorly targeted whenever I do see them that it's irritating and I'm glad I block them everywhere else.

Without advertisements, you have to be bothered by things enough to actually want to implement or look up a solution. When it comes to banal consumer goods, if you can't think of a product on your own, you probably don't actually need it.

Talking to people, and seeking things out myself when I perceive a need for something. If my shoes wear out then I'll decide for myself to seek out new shoes at a shoe store. If I don't know what brands are good, I ask other people what brand they use and if they're happy with it.

If I'm missing out on some product that I might like but I've never heard of because I block ads, that doesn't matter to me. If I don't know that I would want it, then I don't want for it. But generally, people talk about things worth talking about and I'd rather hear about new products from real people who don't have a commercial stake in promoting the thing.

This is either a sad reflection on society, or awesome sarcasm. (Hoping for the latter, but have you seen society lately?)

The need comes first. If I have a need, I (re)search for solutions. The ad does not create the need.

Ads still work. They can generate a want, but if I never see the ad, I'll live happily on in blissful ignorance.

Building awareness is important for new products. Heck, I might like them. Not complaining about ads in general, just the ones that try to get between me and what I really want my to do. The ones that try to make my attention non-optional. Those must die a fiery death.

Are you often in the position where you need something but do not already know that you do?

>what’s the alternative to ads then? How do you find new stuff that you might need?

How did it we accomplish it for the earlier 99.99% of human history?

The earlier 99 percent of human history was pretty garbage. Ads are pretty garbage too but I really don't get why people keep doing this thing where they're like "well how did we manage in the past?" In the past we just died of war and disease and stuff. The past is awful.

The past was awful for lots of reasons of course, but one was that we just weren’t very productive. We’re pretty productive nowadays. We could at least try a system where there’s enough stuff, but we find it naturally or by carefully weighing the pros and cons.

>but we find it naturally or by carefully weighing the pros and cons.

This system doesn't make sense... the incentives for producers don't line up with reality. Producers are incentivized to find ways to break your rules and advertise as if they do it alone, they will profit massively.

>The earlier 99 percent of human history was pretty garbage.

I don't think ads are what changed this.

I'm not saying ads are good. I'm saying the comparison to the past is stupid and it doesn't help the case against ads.

...Talking...to people?

Hah I've run into this exact issue. I've always been the same way, if a medium has unblockable/unremovable ads I'd tend not to consume it; things like radio, magazines, etc. But I realized when I wanted to buy something I didn't even know what brands were in the space. It made doing research a bit trickier.

That doesn't mean ads are necessary though, frankly any system which depends on spending more than your competitors will never produce the best recommendations. Instead I learned to first build a list of companies in a space, then research those companies. I use things like Wirecutter, Reddit, and Productchart to help decide as well.

What I need aren't ads; I need good, user-centric, recommendation and discovery products. Sadly we fell into the local-minimum of ads instead. That said sometimes I do choose to let a company advertise to me in a specific channel (separate email or social media account) so I can keep up with their products and potential deals. That seems like a good middle ground for me.

At least if I get an advertisement I immediately understand the biases behind whoever served it to me, with stuff like reddit or blogs I can never be sure how astroturfed it is, or whether the people reviewing things even know what they are talking about.

I'm not a proponent of advertising in the modern sense, but it's probably the least dishonest way that companies pay to promote their product. Professional reviewers are a good medium but it takes time to find those in a new space where you're not sure if their standards and preferences match yours

> But I realized when I wanted to buy something I didn't even know what brands were in the space.

I this is one of the reasons why Reddit became so popular

You go out and do your own research, you ask the people you trust for their own personal experiences.

The more important question is what can replace the ad-based business model of the internet?

Other than paid subscriptions, which is only a partial solution.

That's where my mind went, too. I think part of the answer is that a lot of it can be replaced by nothing. Some of this stuff driving all these ads doesn't even enrich our lives anyway.

Make it illegal to advertise, make it illegal to ask for paid subscriptions.

Micro transactions

lol

If I want to find new stuff then I would like to access a dedicated resource where all the promoted material could be promoted. Like a promotional book or email tab.

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