[pirocks]

Lots of software I use on a daily basis has no marketing team and became dominant on its merits alone. I would rather all software competed on its merits.

As for you main point about advertising helping me find products I genuinely want/need, this couldn't be further from the truth in my experience. Recently I wanted a new laptop, and one of my criteria was that said laptop should not have pre-installed nonsense like mcafee/Norton(I mean I would be wiping the drive and installing Linux anyway but this is on principle). Anyway it turns out that all large laptop companies install some kind bloatware and also advertise aggressively, so it's quite difficult to search for a laptop without bloatware, since all the ads/seo are for laptops by companies with large advertising budgets and therefore have bloatware. More generally if I'm looking for a product I want there are generally multiple competing providers/manufacturers of said product, and I therefore must figure out which is better, and often there is a clear winner. However the other sides advertising team are incentivized to muddy the waters in this situation making it less obvious which products are best.

Also can you please not yell random words it's actually kind of jarring to read.

[kmlx]

> has no marketing team

"has no marketing team" is different than "has no marketing".

the stars on github are part of marketing.

good docs are part of marketing.

that tweet from a 3rd party is marketing.

if a project isn't exposed anywhere and has no website (i.e. is completely private), then yes, it has no marketing. everything else has degrees of marketing baked in.

[pirocks]

Sorry to respond to such an old thread.

Of course pretty much all communication is advertising in some way, but the topic here is the corporate kind with teams of people trying to optimize click through rates and the like. I don't think they are really comparable and I don't think its particularly difficult to tell the difference in most cases.