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As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Qu

• radicalbyte 3mo ago
  Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.
  • ed_elliott_asc 3mo ago
    Marketeers for venture capitalists? Does that beat vc’s?
    • wongarsu 3mo ago
      Marketeers sounds like a great word for the worst of them. The ones that take over a functioning market and burn it for profit
• AaronAPU 3mo ago
  I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.
  • esseph 3mo ago
    100% agree. It is the source of so much waste and so many ills.
  • CPLX 3mo ago
    Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things. You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.
    • AlexandrB 3mo ago
      Marketing is very often a dishonest attempt at persuasion. That's the whole issue. In the kindle example, the marketers aren't trying to persuade you to buy books by extolling their virtues, they're "gaming the system" to give themselves a leg up in ways that make the system worse and borderline unusable for good-faith actors. Modern marketing frequently "rides the line" of what's legal and has little to no concern for ethics. Teach kids how to annoy their parents so they buy your toys? Sure![1] Prey on teenage girls' insecurities to sell them cosmetics? Of course![2] Lie to folks that they're going to "win big" with your gambling app? Why the hell not! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pester_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pester_power [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_advertising_on_teen_body_image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_advertising_on_teen...
      • CPLX 3mo ago
        Yes, of course, there's often dishonest or misleading or exploitative marketing. But that's not really what the problem is, since marketing would still be annoying even with that solved. The problem is much more akin to a tragedy of the commons type of thing, where, when everyone is shouting, you can't hear what you want to hear. Usually, that's the thing that bothers people. Billboards, unsolicted emails, etc. I think for people who really get annoyed at marketing it helps to take a couple of steps back and look at how we fit into the natural world, everything that frustrates you about human society is something you'll find an analog for. Things like brightly colored frogs that are poisonous, fur spots that look like eyeballs looking backwards, peacocks, bugs that looks like sticks, etc. All of these are what's called emergent behavior, and they're intrinsic to all complex adaptive systems, like natural ecosystems, and human society itself.
• ghusto 3mo ago
  There's an old Bill Hicks bit where during his already awkward standup, he takes a moment to somehow dial the awkwardness up further: If you're of a certain age, you'll know the bit: https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-annotated https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a... It's awkward because you can feel how much he means every word. Of course it's part of the act and you're supposed to find it funny, but at the same time, he very much means what he's saying.
  • rglover 3mo ago
    Drink Coke
  • a4isms 3mo ago
    Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY https://youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
    • stingraycharles 3mo ago
      One of the few times the video is easier to digest than text is comedy like this.
    • Djrichsjdjdnxkd 3mo ago
      Funny, the video is on a service of the biggest advertiser in the world.
      • raffael_de 3mo ago
        there would be nobody in his audience without some sort of marketing ...
  • adiabatichottub 3mo ago
    Ah, the plea for sanity dollar! Huge Market! Sadly, he was never able to rid the world of all these fevered egos tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.
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• sajithdilshan 3mo ago
  The same thing is happening in YouTube right now. My feed is filled with AI generated never ending rambling videos about simple topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 mins, but it keeps on dragging up to 10-30 mins to milk the maximum from monetisation
  • sigmoid10 3mo ago
    Youtube channels are also getting hyper-monetized now. Private equity firms finally learned that some of these informational channels draw a huge crowd of loyal viewers with a very specific kind of technical interest and have built high levels of trustworthiness. Ideal targets for running ads. Now they buy all these channels and have their marketers optimize every corner for generating easy money.
    • bityard 3mo ago
      There is a guy on YouTube who did very thorough and well-done presentations on airliner crashes and mishaps and one of the reasons they were so good was that he was a very experienced pilot himself. He was able to give deep insight into the technical details, the industry, and the challenges that pilots face. He always talked at length about those in the context of the incident he was covering, which was how his videos were so much more interesting compared to your typical "accident documentaries" thrown together by outside amateurs which are frankly the majority of videos in this space on YouTube. But since the last year or so, I can't watch him anymore. He sold his channel (and his brand, literally himself) to some kind of YouTube content company and the videos he puts out now are just not watchable. From what I can tell, he mainly does only the presentation now, with only a minor amount of editorializing. Other people seem to do everything else. The visualizations are impressive but the video title/thumbnails are pure click-bait (to the point of being factually false), the videos are WAY longer than they need to be, and he'll repeat the SAME information multiple times just to stretch the time out to 45 minutes to an hour. I like a good story, but it's really hard to pad out most disaster videos into that amount of time unless you have something more to offer than say, "well, the official crash investigation said this and that." His videos now feel a lot more like those old Discovery Channel documentaries that were basically surface-level filler content in between the ads.
• giancarlostoro 3mo ago
  You should have just said quick example: Windows
• toofy 3mo ago
  let’s not forget the marketers who work for the same companies we do. how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built? it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departments are outright lying about the capabilities.” at which point they’ve often twisted and bastardized the product opposite of the reasons we built it to begin with.
  • wseqyrku 3mo ago
    > how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies [..] Trigger warning. Could not finish that sentence.
• ModernMech 3mo ago
  It’s the old lifecycle of a scene. 1) cool people do cool things, start a scene 2) chill people who enjoy watching cool people do cool things spread the word 3) posers get wind and show up, the scene loses its vibe but reaches critical mass 4) advertisers show up looking to monetize the scene, driving out the cool and chill people who are allergic to advertisers. 5) the scene is now dead, filled with posers and ad execs
  • chiefgeek 3mo ago
    Burning Man?
    • Avicebron 3mo ago
      sort of, the same people that ruined tech also ruined burning man.
• toddmorey 3mo ago
  I value both great devs and great marketers because I’ve seen dev teams build awesome tech that never found its audience. It’s the culture of the org and that decides how the ammo is used. What you want is good devs AND good marketers building and promoting great product. Anyone in any role who works at facebook holds culpability. Marketers aren’t building all those user hostile features.
• elorant 3mo ago
  Sorry to break it to you, but those aren’t marketers. Marketers can’t build shit. Those are all savvy developers who realized that they can take their talents to less competitive markets and harvest at scale all the low hanging fruits.
• Theodores 3mo ago
  I have just been looking for a book on O'Reilly, of an existing tech, but I am not sure that tech really matters because AI has taken over in ways that do not interest me. With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+. The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ. Dunning Kruger springs to mind. Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere. Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up. This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them. After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy. In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.
  • skydhash 3mo ago
    I’m fine with old books. Just bought a bunch including “The TCP/IP Guide” and “The Linux Programming Interface”, which are more than a decade old. The oldest is “ The Design and Implementation of the 4.4Bsd Operating System” (30 years). It’s better starting from an old books and retrace the updates from that. And with the benefits of hindsight, you can get truly good ones cheaply.
• Razengan 3mo ago
  Unironically UBI or something similar could eliminate the need for -most- people to resort to petty scams.
  • saratogacx 3mo ago
    Probably not, it just re-baselines. Now the scams aren't for bread money but are for entertainment money. If the time resource isn't changing and the effort isn't changing but the needs fulfilled become wants fulfilled you're getting more joy from each dollar scammed instead of just substance. It may make pity scams less effective though so I'd expect the implementation to change to focus more on creating urgency and less on altruism.
    • Razengan 3mo ago
      > Now the scams aren't for bread money but are for entertainment money. The prospect of not being able to pay for food or rent carries a desperation that isn't there when just wanting to buy a video game or hire a Hooker :) Maybe with hard drug addiction, but that's a different societal problem to tackle. > it just re-baselines If fewer people are chronically -desperate- for money, it could leave a smaller workforce pool available to professional scammers for "hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks" or "paying people to leave 5 star reviews" etc
• warumdarum 3mo ago
  Gametheorys all defectors.. they are real. And that is why we must have lynch mobs ocassionally to regenerate the allmende