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> 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 the

> 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.

spicyusername 1y ago
To play devil's advocate here, can any value be created if no one knows about your product?
- alansammarone 1y ago
  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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
inopinatus 1y ago
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.
nathanaldensr 1y ago
It is depressing. There's nothing spiritual in it--nothing grander than just base greed and psychological manipulation.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  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.
simianwords 1y ago
Convincing people to buy your product _is_ value creation.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  Unless there was a better alternative that you drowned out, in which case it was value destruction.
  - simianwords 1y ago
    That’s like saying your product is good unless it is bad and there are other alternatives
    - alansammarone 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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.
        amanaplanacanal 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        Then they wouldn't need convincing?
fhd2 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - mdale 1y ago
    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.
terminalshort 1y ago
If nobody knows about your product, nobody will buy it. If nobody buys it, you haven't created any value.
- alansammarone 1y ago
  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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Exoristos 1y ago
    There's an assumption in here that Google works like a proper search engine anymore. Otherwise, you're right on.
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    Why would someone who isn't an engineer look at Github? That gives them no information about the quality of the product.
    - alansammarone 1y ago
      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.
Aurornis 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  In my experience people subscribe and follow easy to digest content that makes them feel productive for consuming it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
lurk2 1y ago
> 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”?
tomhow 1y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44930602 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

spicyusername 1y ago

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

alansammarone 1y ago
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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

inopinatus 1y ago

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.

nathanaldensr 1y ago

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

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
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.

simianwords 1y ago

Convincing people to buy your product _is_ value creation.

ndriscoll 1y ago
Unless there was a better alternative that you drowned out, in which case it was value destruction.
- simianwords 1y ago
  That’s like saying your product is good unless it is bad and there are other alternatives
  - alansammarone 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
      - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        Then they wouldn't need convincing?

fhd2 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.
- mdale 1y ago
  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.

terminalshort 1y ago

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

alansammarone 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Exoristos 1y ago
  There's an assumption in here that Google works like a proper search engine anymore. Otherwise, you're right on.
- terminalshort 1y ago
  Why would someone who isn't an engineer look at Github? That gives them no information about the quality of the product.
  - alansammarone 1y ago
    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.

Aurornis 1y ago

> 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 1y ago
In my experience people subscribe and follow easy to digest content that makes them feel productive for consuming it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

lurk2 1y ago

> 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”?

tomhow 1y ago

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