[Shacklz]

> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.

[tomhow]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44930602.

> Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

> I find it deeply depressing

Please don't fulminate on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[fhd2]

I think like that too, or at least used to. I got pretty far by just doing good work - or so I thought. Growing up in a rich country and getting a bit lucky to be found and promoted by the right people probably mattered as much, if not more, than my talents or skills. There's probably thousands of people better at anything I can do but less well off. I think the only reason I'm better off than them is that I had more (largely accidental) "sales" success.

It's amazing to be in a position where you can just create value and people will find and pay you solely based on that. But I don't think that path is available to just anyone without connections or quite a bit of luck. I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got. Somehow, that thought makes it all a bit less depressing to me.

[hliyan]

The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels. However, the fact that influencing those channels is itself a commodity that is available on the market, paradoxically affects the operation of the market adversely.

If supplier A has a product of quality Q at price P, and supplier B has a competing product of quality 1.2Q or 0.9P, all else being equal, we would expect B to prevail in the market, or at least gain a superior market share. However, if A's marketing budget is superior, a larger percentage of the market will hear about their product sooner, and will gain traction earlier. Since all businesses have finite viability, B may go out of business before the market has time to correct the distortion brought on by A's marketing.

There was no solution to this in Adam Smith's time, but we now have something that points to a solution: aggregated reviews/ratings from verified purchasers, indexed or curated in such a a way that is uniformley accessible and conveniently query-able to all market participants. In an environment where such a mechanism is universal, theoretically, there should be no benefit to marketing.

[ndriscoll]

The problem is that even reviews from verified purchasers get gamed in the real world, and aggregated reviews can only cover simple information because people don't have the expertise for a proper review (e.g. try to find basic information like idle power consumption for computers. Or whether some part has working or broken pcie power management). So the problem is that you need morally unassailable competent reviewers.

In theory, you'd need consumers to fund such an organization only until they had so much sway that a review from them became essentially mandatory for anyone to consider your product, at which time they could charge a fee to review a product without becoming beholden to the companies paying the fees.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

My wife used Angie's List to find some really good, honest contractors.

Many years ago, when it was still fairly new.

I'd never recommend Angie's List, these days, though. It's pure garbage.

She also used to rely on Amazon reviews.

Again, it's a dumpster fire, these days. Absolutely worthless.

[lisbbb]

The whole Internet is like this now--it's a victim of its own success. "Dead Internet Theory" is correct, I believe. There must be some kind of sociological term for what happens with popular websites that become victims of their own success, like Craigslist, EBay, Facebook, all of them follow the same predictable pattern. When they are small and unknown, they are useless. Then they hit some critical mass and a wave of new adopters show up and it's amazing--for awhile--then as the inevitable grifters and thieves arrive, the whole thing becomes a turd of astronomical proportions. Then the good people disappear, leaving only the trash behind.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Craigslist hasn't sold out ever and eBay is still useful for its original purpose if you look for genuinely used things. You're confusing them with the Etsy dumpsterfire.

[anon7725]

Ironically, Facebook Marketplace is as or more useful than back-in-the-day Craigslist.

[fhd2]

Sounds like "enshittification" to me: During the growth phase the offering is good, but as growth inevitably slows, most companies will extract value by other means: Cutting costs/quality and raising prices are the most obvious and perhaps least nefarious tactics. There's companies that don't fall too far into this, but I think most successful ones do.

[darepublic]

The problem of evil. The grifters and thieves always show up, late but inevitably, to the party. The game needs a patch to potentially fix though it's unclear what that patch would be and what could be it's unintended side effects

[davidhowlett]

I use and pay for the professional review site https://www.which.co.uk/

They are a charity funded by subscribing consumers. They don't get paid by the sellers so the incentive structure benefits the consumer. I trust what they write.

[mdale]

For an increasing set of product attracting attention and midshare is the product. Creator economy; open source projects that have many stars safer to use then ones that don't. AWS better to use than some small competitor because you know many others are in that same boat. "Not fired for using Microsoft" etc.

Widely used and viewed is value; less and less does a product evaluation work in isolation. So very difficult to evaluate products fairly in that sense. Something may be better but it's only in so far that your review agragation / index is a fair market for attention.

Think GitHub stars and amazon reviews for products or product hunt for new startups, or YouTube or LinkedIn views; all have their game of gathering attention / marketing that plays into products visibility and viability.

[ThrowawayR2]

The phrase was originally "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", which, ironically, did not save IBM once the cost effectiveness of alternatives was too overwhelming to ignore. The effect of mindshare isn't all it's cracked up to be.

[ch4s3]

> The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels.

This couldn’t be more incorrect. In Smith’s day your sources of information would be interpersonal, or one of your local newspapers. Newspapers in the 18th century wore their bias on their sleeves and had very particular world views, they were anything but neutral. You might also learn about commercial interests in coffee houses where stock markets first developed. This was a place where people were trying to sell you something, like shares in a commercial shipping business.

I’m always astonished that people make these claims about Smith’s work without having read his books or any relevant history.

[hliyan]

Smith's book sits on my bedside stand as I write this. In the hypothetical society he uses in the book (the one with the butcher and the baker), the flow of market information is indeed interpersonal (though he never explicitly states this, to my recollection) and therefore not only carries some level of trust, but is generally peer-to-peer. The state of 18th century news papers and marketing actually supports my point, which is a point that applies to any society with a high level of economic power asymmetry, not just to the modern era.

[ch4s3]

My point about the news environment is exactly the opposite of what you were saying. Commercial news was everywhere in Smith’s day and very much not neutral or lacking bias.

[lo_zamoyski]

This is a general phenomenon. People form associations through casual encounters with something or other without actually trying to understand what is actually the case.

[ch4s3]

I think it’s the certainty that’s bothers me. It also concerns me that people underpin a larger anticapitalist worldview based on ahistorical and incorrect understandings of capitalism.

[fhd2]

I've thought about this quite a bit, and my conclusion is that the ultimate missing component here is trust. I don't trust star reviews, they can be bought, and platforms don't care about that too much as long as they're making good money.

I trust three things: Recommendations from competent acquaintances, actually good review sites, and brands I've been happy with in the past.

My acquaintances and the review sites I frequent are pretty niche. If they weren't so niche, they'd probably inevitably become corrupted and promote the offering of whoever pays the most. I think it would be amazing if this could be scaled without the corruption, but I don't know how.

That leaves the brand recognition as the one thing that scales. And that mostly happens through marketing. You hear about something and eventually build enough trust to invest, and if the offering is good, you found a good supplier and they found a potentially loyal customer. I think that mechanic isn't so bad, though far from ideal.

[TheOtherHobbes]

None of those work, because they inevitably become vectors of the problem they're supposed to solve.

This is yet another disproof of the nonsense belief that markets reward efficiency, which is good for consumers.

Markets are fundamentally about gaining advantage over others, and it's far easier and cheaper to gain advantage through manipulation and questionable forms of persuasion than by any other means.

Which is why everyone and everything is now drowning in toxic sludge.

Markets, lacking any sense of the collective good, inevitably produce a tragedy of the commons for the benefit of a small number of the most successful, persuasive, and least ethical predatory manipulators.

This is supposed to be "rational", but that framing is itself a manipulation.

There's nothing rational about drowning in toxic sludge. It's a specific moral policy choice, with predictably negative consequences that have played out over and over again.

[motorest]

> I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got.

This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing, both the product/service they are pushing and their own marketing effort.

I've seen plenty of people in LinkedIn just generating absolutely worthless noise that can't possibly reflect positively on them.

[fhd2]

That's the thing with activities anyone can do - pretty much anyone does. And 90% of everything is... not great. I think a lot of those doofuses on LinkedIn just portray some level of success when in reality they're desperate for business, at least some folks I spoke to that are very active there were like that. But that's anecdotal evidence. Depressingly, just how some folks succeed with just a good offering, some folks just succeed with good marketing. But I suppose if you manage to be reasonably good at both, you have a good chance to succeed.

[andrewflnr]

> This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing

What? No, it doesn't assume any such thing. The mere fact that marketing is necessary implies nothing about the skill of those attempting it.

[inopinatus]

It took a while for their sector to become a mainstream byword for snake oil, but when it did, the SEO touts switched to peddling "content marketing" services instead. Not surprising that the internet's most insipid forum remains their favourite target-rich environment.

[terminalshort]

If nobody knows about your product, nobody will buy it. If nobody buys it, you haven't created any value.

[alansammarone]

Same reply as I wrote above:

No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.

[terminalshort]

Why would someone who isn't an engineer look at Github? That gives them no information about the quality of the product.

[alansammarone]

It literally contains as much information as anybody could potentially hope for (public information anyhow - excluding interviews and the like). If they happen not to be able to distinguish between a “page does not exist” (90%~ of cases IME, ie no GH account), or their ego is so inflated that they cant be bothered to spend 2mins asking their CTO (or dont even have one or trust them), thats a different story and its on them. The signal is there.

[Exoristos]

There's an assumption in here that Google works like a proper search engine anymore. Otherwise, you're right on.

[lisbbb]

I think you just explained why my software engineering career was always so disappointing. I was not getting my "product" to the right eyeballs. I also think maybe I just wasn't cut out for the work in certain ways. I'm a fantastic coder, but so little of the work these days depends on fantastic coding skills! In fact, it's not even that important to companies. What top devs do is manage complexity, but I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.

[Our_Benefactors]

> I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.

It is contrived, but it’s usually contrived on behalf of the person who signs your checks, in my experience. Process exists to serve the owners not the worker bees.

[nathanaldensr]

It is depressing. There's nothing spiritual in it--nothing grander than just base greed and psychological manipulation.

[Imustaskforhelp]

To me what is _spiritually_disturbing (in the sense that it hurts my spirit) is the fact that I think that such behaviour is going to keep on happen and the world would get EVEN more polarized, less trustworthy overall.

Greed and psychological manipulation to me feels like they will always continue and I am a pessimist in that sense.

There is good, and then there is greed and greed creates psychological manipulation in most cases.

The most fundamental issues in our society stems from greed imo and this cycle will perpetuate like a cancer. Greed is cancerous. I don't know if I even can bring a change in this greedy world at a scale which can matter.

[spicyusername]

To play devil's advocate here, can any value be created if no one knows about your product?

[alansammarone]

No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.

[Aurornis]

> The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

If people subscribe or follow it’s because they found some value in the content.

Developers often start with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset. They might get lucky with some early leads that make it feel like it’s working.

But marketing works. It’s not “mind hacks” it’s getting your product out there in front of potential customers. The people seeing your content aren’t hypnotized into clicking.

[wohoef]

In my experience people subscribe and follow easy to digest content that makes them feel productive for consuming it.

[simianwords]

Convincing people to buy your product _is_ value creation.

[ndriscoll]

Unless there was a better alternative that you drowned out, in which case it was value destruction.

[goodpoint]

The whole point of advertising is making the "free market agents" less rational. The most popular product is rarely the best.

[simianwords]

No its about product discovery. It is in fact essential to a rational market. Imagine you create a really good product. You actually believe in it and you think people would want to buy it. Please tell me how you will practically get it noticed? I would like actual practical advice.

[jselysianeagle]

Product discovery is one facet of it, certainly. It’s also about pursuading people to buy a product / service they don’t really need, creating demand where none (or not as much) existed previously, of convincing people that their product / service is better than that of others when this might not in fact be the case.

[Levitz]

In the exact same way as if you had a godawful product and you want to sell it.

Promote it, talk about it on social media, possibly contract some marketing services, find out who is more prone to purchasing it and focus on that group, etc etc.

[simianwords]

I think you are agreeing with me. This process is valuable - it brings your product to people who benefit from it. It does not diminish just for the reason that there might be godawful products some times.

[jayd16]

This is actually a pretty solid example of a flaw in free market economics. Marketing can increase and decrease knowledge and there's not a strong market force pushing things the right direction.

[simianwords]

I thought about what you said and I think you are correct. But since we don't live in an ideal rational world do you agree that without advertisements the market can fail? How would new products even enter the limelight?

[simianwords]

That’s like saying your product is good unless it is bad and there are other alternatives

[ndriscoll]

Almost, but that's the gist. Letting people know about your product creates value if and only if the product itself brings them positive net utility for buying it and there were no other even better products that you distracted them from. Convincing someone to buy your product doesn't show that it's actually good (surely you have regretted a purchase before).

Additionally, essentially no marketing is a dry list of facts informing people of products to help them make rational choices. A great deal of marketing contains no explicit facts at all. A large amount of effort is spent getting people to buy things they don't even need (or worse: harms them) and/or throw out perfectly usable items they already have or otherwise participate in conspicuous consumption, which is frankly quite grim against the backdrop of climate change being a (the?) top problem being shouldered onto our successors.

[alansammarone]

What? Your project might be good or bad, if it's bad/low quality/low effort and you take sales away from a better option by abusing human biases (such as recency bias), then you're destroying (potential, not actual) value.

[simianwords]

What if your product is good and you want people to purchase it?

Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The point of marketing is to remove and subvert that agency, disconnect buying decisions from real value, and to limit the consequences of flaws and underperformance.

[amanaplanacanal]

How would they even discover that though? Every single customer would have to buy both products and test for themselves. Ain't nobody got time for that.

[Levitz]

Then they wouldn't need convincing?

[convolvatron]

where is the concern for my agency when an advertiser steals my time and attention. when they call me on the phone, send texts, prisesopen my email account, and plaster ads all over the streets.

in what sense is an ad for hair products different from a person pretending to be a little old lady in South Africa who just wants to make sure her late husbands millions go to a random person on the internet - its not

I have made my choice to try to remove myself as far as possible from your 'product discovery', but that's one choice you're not willing to let me have. there are innumerable people in the world who just want a chance to make me listen to their pitch. what do I owe them that I should have to.

[ohdeargodno]

>Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency.

They can't. Your shit blogspam is all over the internet. You've been using LLMs to advertise it everywhere. You've been using bots to post fake reviews online. You've been selling them on platforms that don't give a shit about customers and will never take returns. Either by being first or having more money, or time to blow into it, you can easily drown out any potential threats. The only way another product comes out on top is by doing the same things as you are.

Which is fun and all, but there's external consequences to this behavior. The internet is worse, product reviews are worse, and overall, you're destroying trust in society.

But sure, "agency".

[chmod775]

What? No, it's obviously not the same statement.

[ohdeargodno]

Convincing people to buy your rotten meat is value creation!

Convincing people to buy a bridge is value creation!

Convincing people to buy your Teflon pan that will seep into the environment for centuries is value creation!

Because after all, nothing else matters. Value creation. Value. Creation. Consequences ? Thoughtfulness ? That's for the dumbasses not creating _value_

[Imustaskforhelp]

I searched some greed quotes and here's one I'd like to share

"As long as greed is stronger than compassion, there will always be suffering"

[hk__2]

"Can you make a sentence look more intelligent if you surround it with quotes?"

[Imustaskforhelp]

I didn't want it to sound intelligent but I mean I was mentioning a quote so we do need to place a quote inside quotes afterall lol.

I was just sharing something that I felt relevant to the discussion in the sense that greed is one of the most major causes of suffering, and it is our greed that we are ready to write linkedin mediocrity slop.

[hk__2]

This was more an humorous side comment than a critic, I’m sorry if it looked like this.

[simianwords]

Not sure what you mean. You think people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret.

It’s not always like that and you are removing agency from the person purchasing the product.

[boccko]

'You think people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret.'

No. _history has unequivocally proven_ that people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret. Or at least they should, if they were aware of the full extent of damage typical products cause.

[simianwords]

Its about the numbers. Sure sometimes they are stupid and make stupid decisions but the extent matters. Take your own example - if I ~reach~ read your purchase history can I characterise you as inherently stupid?

[alansammarone]

No so much "stupid", just full of biases and somewhat lazy. This is a well-researched and documented fact. Knowingly abusing these biases to get them to buy or use something that they either don't need - or, worse, buying a low quality/low effort product when better alternatives exist - that's extremely detrimental. That's how we end up with the enshittification of everything.

[simianwords]

Yes there are biases sometimes and it can get exploited and this is an exception that proves the rule. But the rule is that people know what they want to buy and know what they are getting into. You are trying to get in between by suggesting you know more than the buyer and seller.

[amanaplanacanal]

They mostly don't know what they are getting into though. You can't trust advertising, obviously. You can't trust reviews. You have no way to tell if there is actually a better product than the one you are seeing the ad for. You better hope there is a good return policy.

[alansammarone]

exception? I couldn't disagree more. I can think of one or two specific examples "fair" or even "useful" advertising, and that's being generous, among thousands or tens of thousands of examples. I'm not claiming I know more than the buyer or seller, I'm claiming the seller "knows" much more than the buyer, and has vastly more resources and vested interest in the transaction than the buyer (because of the scale, and the fact that people are mostly very similar to each other - economies of scale, essentially). Note I'm restricting my argument to the case of big companies selling to consumers, or big companies buying from other big companies, although the latter is comparatively less damaging to society overall, still pretty bad tho.

The seller knows how much effort/resources were put into the product, knows (or has enough resources to figure out) how to nudge/mislead the consumer, has teams of brilliant people working on that - see the ad industry. I would definitely agree that the consumer has some responsibility, too, to stay informed, and if it weren't for the fact that this causes externalities to society, I wouldn't give a crap about the fact that some corporate director was duped into buying a terrible product. Unfortunately, that causes companies that particularly good in misleading people to outcompete companies who spend their money elsewhere.

[ohdeargodno]

Why do you accuse me of things I've not said, and drift away from the extremely stupid thing you said ? Value creation is not the only thing that matters, and has extremely harmful results if taken to its extremes. Trying to put the blame on "people" and their "agency" is such a destructive behavior that it shouldn't be tolerated. People buying things does not absolve you of the responsibility of creating said product, or of the process used to make them buy your crap. If your marketing process actively makes society worse, you're responsible for it. If your product has consequences for centuries, you're responsible for it. If your advertisement for a gun is "hey it makes really nice holes in your shooting target. And the neighbor you don't like", you're not off the hook when it gets used to shoot someone. In the same way, if your advertisement technique results in hundreds of thousands of people reading your shitty content that actively makes them dumber, you're not off the hook for making society dumber, even if it "creates value"

[Imustaskforhelp]

Convincing people to buy your product by hijacking the algorithm to just gather their attention thousand times and not meaningfully providing any justifiable content in return all in order to somehow sell your product is net negative for society.

Seriously, if being a slop machine in some sense (while mostly) sell slop itself to either other slop machine wannabe's etc and this cycle continues..

I am not saying that all linkedin is like this, but to me most do seem like this.

But is being a slop machine / being mediocre just to sell your product, itself net value creation though?

[lurk2]

> Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

Are you mind-hacking your friends when you text them “Good morning”?