[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.

[simianwords]

The point of marketing is to provide the signal - you can use your agency and decide whether that signal is valuable or not.

If I'm shown an advertisement for a watch from a well known company with some detailed specs I'm inclined to believe it based on the brand reputation. This signal (the specifications) is valuable to me but not necessarily completely accurate. I'm better off with the signal than without. The reason being there are more instances of truth than lies across all advertisements.. otherwise they wouldn't work.

[alansammarone]

Couldn't agree more with part of your comment, but only because of the fact that you used the word "specs". Assuming the specs are objective, thats the only true form of useful ad.

Ads do work, yes. But not because they present true facts. It's because people tend to buy things that are from brands that they remember (a form of recency bias I guess, although not sure about that). So if you know nothing about which ice cream brand is best, you'll default to the one that had an ad saying "We sell ice cream!". That's, again, a well-studied effect. Consumers are not rational.

I don't remember seeing many tv commercials with a comparison table containing technical specs.

[simianwords]

The specs are not objective in the correct sense. They are just signals that you can later verify.. like all things. Everything has an accuracy number beside it - what makes you think the specs are to be believed?

[alansammarone]

True, agreed. But thats besides the point. For the purposes of this thread, if an ad contains text/information thats well defined enough to be verifiable/falsifiable in principle, thats better than 98% of the “ads” I see on Linkedin (or anywhere else for that matter). “We focus on building reliable, trustworthy AI” is not an example of that unless the CEO finds a way to, or makes an effort towards, providing a method for us to verify that.

[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?

[simianwords]

Its bringing the signals closer to me than I would have otherwise had. The agency part is for me buying it but not necessarily for me to do the research so in that case you are right.

But in practice it is beneficial (for both parties) to sometimes bring the signal closer. If you truly believe in agency then you must trust that the person who buys it after being shown the advertisement was better off being shown the advertisement.

[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".

[simianwords]

You are completely exaggerating and pointing out edge cases. Sure sometimes advertising can be harmful and there are laws against false advertising. But in general it is helpful and provides value. For instance I personally like it when I 'm shown a relevant advertisement which actually convinces me to purchase it. Just recently I saw some advertisement on Instagram related to some concert near where I live. It was actually relevant and I considered purchasing a ticket.

You can always exaggerate and cherry pick bad instances from anything. What you are doing is similar to this. There were a few Samsung phones that blew up and caused injury. You now characterise all phones as being harmful and dangerous to society.

[alansammarone]

Not an edge case at all - phones blowing up is not what we're talking about. The absence of "we spent less than 10% of our budget on cyber security (in fact, we proud ourselves in having less than 5 cyber security experts on the team, and our release cycle is very quick - we don't really listen to the nerds when they say they need more time!), so unless you'd rather avoid a 15 year old kid from Russia completely owning all of your personal data, our product is the most cost effective option! Also, we used existing circuit boards, so our phone's innovation is mostly on the cost side - we managed to make it dirty cheap for you. What are you waiting for?" is what we're talking about.

[kentm]

The things they talked about are so common that I think it’s disingenuous to call them edge cases.

[samiv]

"When an incompetent developer stumbles onto a successful idea an infinity of shit is created."

I agree with you. Sometimes simply being the first mover businesses/solutions/software get name recognition and an unfair(?) advantage that greatly diminishes overall value by blocking better products from emerging.

To put if fairly, some things are so bad it'd be an improvement NOT to have them, so someone else could do a better job and everyone would be better off. Examples.. Emscripten, Python, Bluetooth, Chromecast, any IoT device so far created..

[alansammarone]

You don't need to drag Python into this now :P