[chacha102]

Being pro-Small Business doesn’t meant you have to be pro-Advertising. Facebook makes a killing taking money from small businesses through advertising, yet it is consistently one of the lowest ROI marketing techniques, not to mention generally creates the worst UX.

Can you build a successful business on advertising? Yes. But I’d argue that you don’t need to. Almost every service I pay for came to me by word of mouth. That takes time and effort to cultivate, but it isn’t affected by a software update. Or me wanting to not share my personal data.

[spzb]

> Facebook makes a killing taking money from small businesses through advertising

It also takes a lot of money from governments and political campaigns. The micro-level targeting allows highly specific messages to be shown to people matching a specific segment and contradictory messages to be shown to another segment. It's disingenuous of Facebook to claim this is just about small business when it's arguably about undermining the foundations of democracy.

[SifJar]

Word of mouth doesn't work for super niche services/products where e.g. there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product

It also favours more established businesses that are more known, making it harder for new businesses to gain any traction.

I'm not keen on advertising (I use adblockers on all my devices etc.), but there are definitely some (in my opinion) some compelling arguments on both sides.

[FabHK]

> Word of mouth doesn't work for super niche services/products

Nonsense.

See, there are (were?) lots of niche specific publications and communities. They'd actually know about a subject, and provide informed and largely unbiased advice, and carry advertisement, of course. Similarly, there were regional newspapers, carrying information and advertisement of regional interest.

TV and other broad media could not steal their advertisement dollars, because that was the only way to reach the niche or region.

What Facebook is doing is to usurp all of that and monopolise advertisement, driving smaller niche and regional publishers out of business. Their hypocrisy is astounding.

> there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product

I think the trust problem has gotten much worse. As I said, there used to be niche publishers supporting communities (by interest or region) that were interested in keeping these sustainable long term, and therefore would not be interested in scamming their audience. Now, these publishers have been bled dry, and you have to find your information on the world wild web, where any scammer and fly-by-night producer can target you and link farm and buy fake reviews etc.

[SifJar]

OK, but pretending that the world hasn't moved on from these niche publishers seems naive to me.

Perhaps I should have said "in the modern world, word of mouth doesn't work..."

Today, chances are those niche publications & communities are going to be online. And how do we determine the trustworthy ones from the ones that are just trying to exploit us? I guess we need to rely on word of mouth to determine which mouths we should listen to words from...

[KittenInABox]

When you're talking about niche interests IME facebook just plain isn't good enough. You have to go to old-school forums, and from there word-of-mouth of the regulars of these forums.

[nickthegreek]

Depending on the niche, you don’t even need to go forums. a simple YouTube search gets you reviews and opinions from niche professionals along with a comment section and a like/dislike count.

[kergonath]

Quite the contrary. Word of mouth works wonders in small, tightly-knit communities that typically form around very small niches.

[SifJar]

Right, but how do I find that tight-knit community (and begin to trust the people in it) if none of the people I currently associate with are interested in that niche & can introduce me to it?

[pueblito]

Not from advertisements, that’s for sure.

[SifJar]

Well of course, these types of communities aren't going to be paying for advertising because the communities themselves are generally going to be non-profit.

My point was if these communities are hard to find, targeted ads from small businesses in that niche might inform you of relevant products or services, not relevant communities.

Definitely not saying it's a perfect solution, or one that I like, just trying to point out it's not as black & white as people like to make out (especially on sites like HN)

[kergonath]

They tend to cluster around a couple of websites or Facebook groups, so I would say Google. Reddit works as well, there are a lot of subreddits on any subject one would care to mention.

[SifJar]

Sure, but how do I know if I can trust a random community I found via Google or on Reddit?

At least with ads (on a platform like Facebook), it's obvious they're ads and what their incentive is. With a random community, it may be unclear if people within it/the community itself is being paid by some company etc. Or if they have some other incentive to misrepresent the quality of certain products/services (e.g. recommending only what they can get affiliate links for).

[f1refly]

Yes, you don't know whether you can trust a forum that's been up since 2004 whose only reason to exist is to discuss $topic. The rockbox forum for example, how would you know those guys _actually_ like cfw for mp3 players and don't just want to scam your crypto away?

Ads on the other hand you can trust to lie to you 100% of the time. Ads are never honest, their only intention is to fool you to buy something you don't need.

I legitimately don't understand how _anyone_ would think he gains any value from reading dishonest corporate propaganda, less how he would think "hey, thats nice! I'll buy that!"

[kergonath]

I know how to evaluate the quality of the discussions and contributions from my experience.

Also, we can discuss the quality of Internet communities, but I would tend to trust one of these quite a bit more than an advert, even targeted, which was where we were coming from.

As real life examples, I have got advice on stuff to buy from photography websites, modelling (railway and wargames) Facebook groups and blogs without any trouble, and I know where to find it when I need it. I know when to take a photography buff raving about a camera with a grain of salt ("but it has a better score with DXOMARK"), I have about zero confidence in adverts on the web.

[Shared404]

> how do I find that tight-knit community

Start from the related Reddit, and work your way out.

I also like Hackernoon as a starting point.