Comment by talkingtab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by talkingtab | Hacker News Reader

The first comment (now) quibbles about the definition of advertising.

The second comment (now) quibbles about the use of the word cancer. (there is benign cancer).

Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA.

The intent is for the target/prey/victim to be unable to distinguish the truth value.

So here we have a first problem. Is the intent of the first comment on HN

"Most of the arguments .. are not about 'advertising' ..."

made to help me understand the article better? Or are they made with the intent of causing to me doubt the article (or even not to read it).

The same question can be asked about the second question. Ad infinitum and nauseaum.

THAT is STAGE 1 social cancer. I can no longer trust the intention of posts on HN.

STAGE 2 is that I can no longer trust the INTENTION of any media.

Do I want a recipe for cookies? Use the "garrble" to search. Can I really believe that this recipe has ever been made by the person/bot/AI that created it?

STAGE 3. Human societies and Communities are founded on trust. The ability to come to a common understanding of a situation and act collectively. STAGE 3 is when communities and societies no longer function.

The internet has STAGE 2 cancer and some STAGE 3. Since our society in the US depends on the internet ....

Well you cannot trust anything I say, I could be an AI for all you know. And probably my definitions are wrong, my understanding of stages of cancer is faulty, etc.

Here is my 2cents. The article vastly underestimates the damage and dangers, but is definitely worth a read.

One of my least favorite tendencies of software developers is assuming they can pull apart non-technical/mathematic problems involving human complexity, even at a societal scale, with a series of logical thought experiments like they’re debugging software, and that their “bug fixes” and doc updates would tidy everything up with people as effectively as it does with processes. As complex as software can be, it hasn’t a sliver the complexity of human interaction on a small scale, let alone societally. The developer mindset often isn’t effective enough in reasoning about human behavior to make effective user interfaces for software they created.

When you start classifying entire categories of human interaction and societal structures in concrete stages based on a combination of a priori reasoning, gut instinct, anecdotes, and ‘common knowledge,’ there’s a good chance your words are portraying the boogie men in your head rather than any of the very significant and consequential problems in our society. There are entire fields that study complex topics you casually wield in your assessment— they’re probably a good place to start if you honestly think your gut instinct about forum posts on advertising can be meaningfully generalized to societal structures on a whole.

As is true for many people, I have found myself in the terrible situation of having acted with the best of motives, only to find later that my actions were harmful to others. The question is always, what do we do when that happens? How to we look at ourselves in the mirror? This is an ethical, not moral issue.

One choice is simply denial, but I do not like myself when I choose that. Another is not to act because there is never a guarantee that our actions will not be wrong. The stand up choice in my mind is to own up to our mistakes and failures and fix things to the extent we can.

We have developed a business model for the internet that is indeed a cancer on communities, on societies. On the lives of those around us. This was not with evil intent - which would be inexcusable. We just did not know better. But now we do. To ignore this fact, deny it, etc is understandable. But you now know this to be true or that it is possibly true. And in order to be stand up people we need to understand whether this harms others. And we fix it.

And really is the Advertising business model the best we can do?

Yeah I feel that. I also worked for many years as a nightclub bouncer where those actions and consequences are a lot more immediate, which in some ways is easier than with software work, but the nature and immediacy of the consequences could feel a lot more stark. We can't always know everything we need to know to make the best decision. I reckon the only thing we can ask of ourselves is to make the best decision we can based on the information we have, though the decision-making process certainly can be refined.

Like a lot of developers my age, the first programming book I read all the way through was the brilliant Learning Perl by Larry Wall. Likely the most quoted passage from that book isn't about programming, but about programmers: "The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris." The book was funny, and that passage was intended to be humorous commentary on the bravado a little beneficial Dunning-Krueger can give us when approaching a problem in unfamiliar space. It's a joke about starting a projects and not letting daunting tasks kill your optimism: it's not a set of maxims that developers should model their life philosophy on.

One invaluable thing I got from my formal design education was not trusting my assumptions about the needs, perspectives, motivations, and capabilities of other people, or the complexities of the systems in which they operate. In many ways, this directly opposes Wall's Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. This is why interface designers make better interfaces than developers. It's all about pushing back against your own perspective and trying to untangle the messy human element to see what people really need-- in the case of software, what they need to most effectively and efficiently solve their problems-- and how best to provide that for them.

But it's a yin/yang thing. A whole lot of problems in this world have only been solved because someone didn't realize they were trying to solve an insolvable problem, until they did it. But there's a real danger in operating under the assumption that we've got this pan-topic expertise that allows us to slice through any subject with a few quick swipes of our super duper ultrabrains using a few mental calculations based on a couple assumptions and approximate a couple of things about human behavior based on the way we understand it, intuitively. That's lost on a lot of developers and engineers-- especially younger ones. (And after working with developers as a designer rather than as a developer for a while, I understood how infuriating that could be.) When it comes to things like advertising, where people are so heavily peppered with them, and quite possibly have worked on their technical underpinnings, they assume that they "understand advertising" instead of understanding their conscious experience with advertisements.

There are lots of terrible odious things that happen in marketing and advertising and you'll rarely find someone as critical of them as me. As a developer, I've come close to quitting jobs in protest of putting in some creepy telemetry in things I developed, and successfully skewered those initiatives. However, the pushback against advertisements generally is misguided. It's a huge topic that people paint with a broad brush based on their experience with ads. If you're interested in my thoughts, I was pushing back against someone that said we simply could do away with advertisements in this over-long comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43015751

I read and appreciated your thoughtful comment. The problem for me is that "advertising" as is common now on the internet has strong negative effects. I am guessing like when everyone was using coal for heating. We are so used to it that we do not consider it. And there is no viable alternative which makes it unpleasant to think about.

I believe we humans have little tolerance for being helpless. Seriously. To the point where we would rather ignore things. It is like coal. Who wanted to dwell on the damage of coal as a power source when there was no alternative? At least that is how I explain the weird ways humans react.

So then we get to why there is not an alternative to the current internet business model- tracking people and selling them as targets. Why is there no alternative? Perhaps it is because of the mismatch between internet service businesses and our financial system?

The internet is characterized by a staggering number of very, very low value transactions. It is 1 million $0.00001 transactions. There is a finite cost. If I post on HN, if I send an email. There is a very small but nevertheless real cost. But how can I pay $0.0001 to send my email? There is no cost effective way to do that. The cost of a single credit card transaction is much higher (Stripe says 2.9% + 30 cents).

So instead of people paying for a service, third parties pay to target customers. Why would you want to target a customer? While there is some legitimate interest, but targeting is easily used to exploit people. Even when there is some reason the effects can be deadly. The NYT is the source of news for many people. But the advertisers are most interested in one demographic - the very wealthy. So the NYT has a parade of articles about what kind of second vacation home $1 million will buy you in Portand, Maine. Or Edmonton, or Pais. But in Portland, Maine, there is an astonishing problem of homelessness. Does the NYT run articles about "The damage your $1 million second vacation home is doing to the people of Maine"? Nope. Because the target demographic does not want to read that, and the advertisers for $600 boots will not want their ad place near it. Etc.

I think the problem is real. I think the side effects are far more damaging that we can tolerate considering. Appreciate your thinking.

> Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA.

This is pointless moralizing pretending to be clarifying or demarcating.

If I write an essay about climate change to convince you to vote/protest/purchase/boycott <anything> then I will use information to create an opinion in you.

All communication exists to alter the experiences of your interlocutors. You can't hide behind "good intentions" to demarcate. Labelling persuasion as propaganda, is itself propaganda.

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