[axlprose]

Do you get angry at small brick-and-mortar businesses that print their logos on their walls/windows so you can quickly identify them as well? What if they have small signs on the sidewalk listing their specials so you know what they offer? Or if they give you brochures with information about their company and what products they offer? Are you saying you'd rather them not do all that, and tediously go around window shopping for yourself, or force independent 3rd parties to go around cataloging everything just so you know what the options are for whatever it is you're shopping for? Because all of those conveniences businesses currently provide count as marketing.

I'm no fan of invasive tracking or obnoxious sales techniques either, but marketing does serve an objectively useful purpose, as any small business owner will tell you. Demanding to do away with it entirely is just throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

[mrguyorama]

If a mom and pop shop paid someone to follow me around all day and suggest their products/services for every little thing, and constantly remind me that they exist and what they do, and even recruit other mom and pop shops to do the same and share the info about where I was, I would ABSOLUTELY hate them.

I'm not asking independent third parties to do anything. I'm asking companies to let me do what a Free market is supposed to let me do: Let me make my own educated choices about what I purchase/use, untarnished by psychological tricks and manipulation and tracking.

[axlprose]

The free market is also supposed to let businesses do just about anything legal they want to get more customers. So basically kinda like how it is now already. And just as you would expect in a free market, the consumers are reacting to these business practices with ad/tracking blockers.

I'm not defending shady tactics here, I'm being realistic about the functionality marketing provides despite the bad stuff. I get the annoyance, but there's no need to be calling all of marketing "evil" when the free market seems to still be working as it should. When a critical mass of consumers begin blocking all tracking utilities, businesses are going be forced to innovate around it one way or another anyway, and you'll get what you want. It may take a while for that to happen, but that's not a reason to be angry at marketing as a whole. Just continue voting with your wallet (or browser extensions in this case).

EDIT: really, downvotes? I don't even think we disagree, but whatever man. I wish I could be surprised at HN downvoting people trying to be calm and rational instead of emotional and hyperbolic, but that's just cliche at this point. I try to avoid commenting on controversial topics for this reason, but I guess I'll have to add "marketing" to my blacklist of topics as well now.

[gk1]

FYI - HN does not allow users to downvote direct replies their posts. So it's not the person you're responding to who downvoted.