But there's misrepresenting, and then there's "What the hell does this have to do with the movie I just watched?"
Good advertising (and I speak as an advertiser) sets up your expectations appropriately so that once you've experienced the product (in this case a movie) you leave satisfied.
Bad advertising promises you something completely different so that you leave the experience disappointed, which results in bad word of mouth.
Honestly, what none of the advertising for Civil War accomplishes (and I really liked the movie) is telling you that this is a movie about war journalism more than anything else. Yeah, there's a "this could happen here" message. But the core experience of the film is what it's like (presumably) to be a war correspondent. Didn't expect that at all going into the theatre.
Also... I loved Happy People. But yes, it's depressing. Beautifully so, but not a comedy.
As a Canadian, it terrifies me that it's supposed to be comforting that these powers are only supposed to be used on foreign targets. The US controls so much of the Internet already, and the idea that it's becoming a full-fledged surveillance state beyond my own country's control is horrifying.
We're always talking about China and TikTok. What about America and the rest of the Internet?
The election of Trump in 2024 and the end of the Russia/Ukraine war might be some of the events that could make the EU come out of its denial about their relationship with the US.
I don't know if this works in a big organization, but as someone working on a solo project, I actually love it, and don't take it as a joke at all.
I reject the deadline part (I'm a solo dev, I do what I want when I want), but I love the idea of focusing on working on discrete functionality that I can then communicate to my small community of followers to show progress.
I think this is precisely the type of advice that's needed for large organizations. They can easily get mired in all the complexity and managing launches by headlines can (1) simply paint the vision of the future for the teams that are building, (2) simply communicate to leadership what is launching and when so they can a) not block and, better yet b) help unblock and even accelerate.
Hey everyone! We're kicking around a concept for a new social media and dating app. It's something we've been looking for and doesn't seem to exist, so we're thinking of making it ourselves. Looking for feedback on the concept.
Would love it if you checked it out and gave us your thoughts.
I generally get downvoted hard when I raise my hand as an advertiser, but here goes.
I think scapegoating advertising is a mistake, because I think we're missing the real problem.
Yes, advertising can and often is unethical and harmful. I can't speak for other advertisers, but I take ethics very seriously. I don't participate in advertising aimed at making problems seem bigger than they are for the sake of selling a product. It's effective (in terms of sales), but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did that.
But: What exactly changed about advertising around 2010 if we're going to say advertising is responsible for a radical decrease in mental health since that time?
On balance, I don't think advertisers today are less ethical than they ever were. The same bad actors exist. There are more laws today to prevent the worst abuses, but there are still ways to legally manipulate the public that I would consider horribly unethical.
Yes, we have access to more data. But from my perspective, I haven't seen data used effectively for much more than targeting, i.e. prioritizing ad budgets towards the people most likely interested in your product. It still makes me uncomfortable, but can that alone impact mental health at these levels? I don't think so.
And so my problem with scapegoating advertising isn't that it's unfair to advertisers. We deserve a lot of the vitriol sent our way. My problem with it is that if we're wrong in our diagnosis, the real problem(s) remain unchecked.
The vast majority of the people I know in advertising didn't want all this data in the first place. We were happy to just work on creative ideas, to try and paint a product in a new light so that the general public would take notice.
What changed is social media, and the social media companies themselves. I truly believe the problem is with engagement metrics and all the crap they do to keep people addicted. Advertisers, in turn, are forced to play the game, because it's the only game in town. If you're not advertising on social media, you might as well not exist. And if you don't play the engagement game, you might as well not be on there at all. It's a trap.
That's not to say there's no one in advertising who is genuinely content to do harm. They exist. They've always existed. But they didn't, and couldn't have, created the platforms and the algorithms that multiplied the problem since 2010.
Further, when I look at my own use on social media, the most toxic content isn't sponsored content or ads, it's stuff that's gone viral by content creators and political actors. It's "recommended content" that should have been flagged as wildly inappropriate rather than promoted for more engagement. Saying the problem is advertising misses all of that horrible stuff.
So again, not trying to say advertising is good for the soul. Not saying it's a net positive for society (although I think whether or not it's a positive has more to do with WHAT is being advertised than the act of advertising in it of itself).
But let's not mistake advertising as the cause of the mental health crisis, at least not without solid evidence to back that up. I don't think the evidence in the original post would support that conclusion at all.
I think what changed, which is pretty easy to identify is an increased invasiveness in placement and format of advertising.
Advertisements in the past had always been fairly simple to ignore. Billboards, commercial breaks, and print or even radio ads were disconnected from the content.
Today ads are in many cases often indistinguishable, even if labeled from content.
Facebook ads look like regular posts, and many ads ARE regular posts. A fitness podcast talking about their sponsors product with the same tone and passion as the content or simply being paid to influence on a product.
Everyone pretty universally used to recognize and be annoyed by commercials and pay little attention to ads.
Now, especially young people, can barely even recognize ads. Especially those done by so called influencers which are just part of the regular content flow.
Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.
That type of content has always existed, though. They were called advertorials. Endless books going back to at least the 40s advocated making ads look as similar to regular content as possible for the very effect you're describing.
So I'm not arguing that that's not a bad thing. It is a bad thing, in my opinion. Anything that's done to deceive the audience in any way is unethical.
I'm saying it's not new, and certainly didn't suddenly take off in 2010. It's been a mainstay in mass media for almost as long mass media has existed.
Further, what Facebook has done is treat all ads the same as regular content. That's not something advertisers chose to do; it's something Facebook chose to do. Blaming advertisers for a decision they had no part in is missing the mark.
To be clear, I think many advertisers are probably pretty happy with what Facebook did there. But that's not the same as the advertisers being responsible for that decision. Facebook did it because it led to more clicks and therefore more revenue for Facebook. Same thing with how Google has progressively made search ads nearly indistinguishable from regular search results. Advertisers didn't do that. Google did. Advertisers didn't decide to make the first 75% of results on Amazon be sponsored or promoted products. Amazon did that themselves.
> Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.
They're media companies, not advertisers. They sell advertising, as virtually all media companies do (with exception for publicly funded or high-subscription-fee companies). Advertisers buy advertising space.
So if your argument is that Google, Amazon, and Facebook are making advertising worse, I agree. If your argument is that advertisers (the people buying the ads) are making things worse, and that this correlates to the drop in mental health, I don't completely discount the theory; but I'd need to see a lot more evidence to support that contention.
I dare say they missed the real lesson: Friction increases commitment; commitment increases compliance.
In Robert Cialdini's book, Influence, he dedicates a whole chapter to this phenomenon.
The easier you make it to get started, the easier you've made it to quit. They have no skin in the game. People value more the things they've spent money/time/effort to acquire.
So the game is in trying to identify which types of friction will increase commitment enough to overcome a drop in initial participation. It's not an easy line to walk.
> We believe that making people invest time, commit to a trial, and put skin in the game will help you build a more engaged user base. This friction weeds out the people who aren’t serious and creates a sense of urgency. It also forces you to focus on the customers and users that really matter.
I did! I guess you didn't read the rules on HN, though?
That paragraph is exactly what inspired me to comment. It misses the mark. It's not just about weeding out those who aren't serious. And it's not just about increasing engagement. It's about commitment.
You can build commitment by introducing moments of friction. Every hurdle they overcome makes them more committed to their purchase decision. It's NOT about engagement. You can have commitment from someone who isn't engaged. They're separate things.
In fact, when selling to enterprises, the person making the purchase decision is probably not the person who will actually use the product. So you need to get them committed to the product too. It's easy for the purchasing department to say: "That free thing you've been using? You can keep using it as long as its free." It's a whole other thing for them to say, "That thing you've been paying for? That you now want to pay 10% more for in order to get more functionality? No, throw it out."
So yes, I read the article and thought about it deeply. Thanks for asking.
It is actually incredibly clever and never thought about it until now. I can relate to so many services I have spent some time curating, managing, triaging, etc ...
It helped me create an emotional connection with the product I am using and certainly will generate an emotion if the service will closed or if they introduce features that break the existing user flow.
I think they know that and their point, rightly or wrongly, is that `ls` should, by default, show everything. I don't think they're saying they're unaware of the available flags.
(I'm not sure where I would stand on this topic. Just saying that I think they're fully aware of the flags.)
Why don't you know where you would stand on the topic, there can hardly be simpler questions: when I ask my computer for a list of directory contents, should it hide some of them from me or not?
At least DOS/Windows has a concept of a 'hidden file' attribute, although I don't like the concept (because they still take up disk space and affect the way programs run, so I the user/admin need to deal with them) at least that's a tag in the filesystem associated with the file which is clearly intended to 'hide' the file.
Unix/Linux has no such tag, there's nothing about the file which is hidden. What there is, is a broken directory listing tool which doesn't show some names, but other tools will because they are just ordinary files. Originally a tool which showed the . and .. directories for current/parent, modified to hide those and accidentally hiding 'dotfiles' as well. I can deal with "you have to make choices which details to show, like size or modified time, and which format to show them in". I can't deal with "tool to list files actually hides files from me unless I ask it twice". (Obviously I can deal with it, but having to deal with a broken tool and remember that the tools is broken, is annoying. And the people are Stockholm syndromed to it; it would be easy to 'hide' files by putting them in another directory. That's what we do with /etc, we put config files somewhere we aren't looking so they won't bother us. Why not ~/etc/ for per-user config files?).
Use an alias and ensure the flag is always set to show dotfiles, or don’t use dotfiles, or fork and patch ls, or write a bash wrapper function, or use any language you choose and shell out, or write your own directory listing utility app.
There are trivial solutions to your issue and complicated ones. You’re choosing the one thing which will not solve your issue, complaining. Imagine if you directed such passion towards a positive constructive thing rather than ranting at length about friggin ls
Would you say `ls` was broken if it didn't show files with "w" anywhere in the name and had a --show-w-files flag? And if so, what would be the reason you would call that broken behaviour? And why doesn't that same reason apply to dotfiles?
> "You’re choosing the one thing which will not solve your issue, complaining."
It is not "my issue", it's ls's issue. I'm making a point that "it's not broken, if it was we would have heard of it by now" is wrong. It is broken, you have heard, and you choose to not listen - that's different from not hearing about it and different from it not being broken. It doesn't mean I can't work around it or that I don't know how to.
> "Imagine if you directed such passion towards a positive constructive thing rather than ranting at length about friggin ls"
Imagine if you had just said "yes it is a bit broken" instead of arguing.
I’m not arguing lol. ls not showing dotfiles makes perfect sense to me. They are mainly config files that you don’t use often why have it print all the time when not needed. Also I have no issues with convention over configuration where it’s logical and imo this is a perfect use case.
> "They are mainly config files that you don’t use often why have it print all the time when not needed"
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
"I like having a harpoon in me" said the whale, "sometimes I need to get rid of toxins in my blood so why have a complete skin when not needed?". It was a stupid whale that didn't understand it had kidneys for that.
"Why does my Python code show a different view of files to ls?"
"Because LS has a mistake in it where it doesn't list all the files returned by the filesystem"
"Why don't they fix the mistake?"
"They have twisted their minds and bodies around the brokenness of their tooling. Knowing the intricacies of the broken systems is what gives them wizard status, signals in-group membership, superiority from normies. Putting files in subfolders requires no arcane knowledge, signals boring office corporatism, commands no higher salary."
"Would I be wrong to predict this kind of thing runs deep through the whole system?"
"I've never heard anyone else complain before now", he said, incrementing the "days without complaint" counter on the wall. "Oh, we count in a mixed base of 60 or sometimes base 24 or 12 or 28 or 30 or 31 or 364.25 with a four-period adjustment for the fractional part or base 100 or 1000, with a regional adjustement based on longitude around the planet but modulated by political affiliations, with a region-dependent bi-annual adjustment for tilt of the planet towards the main star but adjusted on different days in different regions, and then seconds from just after the American moon landing but based in London region without the regional adjustment or leap second adjustment".
"That seems complicated and disruptive to a lot of people twice a year?"
"It does everything I need, besides I'm sure we'd have heard by now if there were any problems with it".
Because arbitrarily not showing one single subset of files based on the idea that I sometimes won't need that group of files is a ridiculous design. Not a design, a mistake which has become abused as a file organising system instead of subfolders which are an actual design for organising files. Because the system has no idea when needed or when not needed and shouldn't guess. Because in every directory listing, most of the files are not needed, but the ones which are are different each time, that's why we have patterns and globbing to select in the subset you want and also -I / --ignore=PATTERN to exclude the subset you don't want. Adding extra special flags -B "exclude ~ files" is crappy design when you can -I it but at least it doesn't affect you if you don't know/care about it.
It's one thing to be stuck with a bad design from history for pragmatic reasons, it's another to be unable to see that it's a bad design when it only suits some people's use case, sometimes, in some folders, but it's a default which affects everyone all the time in all folders and contradicts what the rest of the system sees.
I have some inside information on how this plays out in Ontario, Canada, at least. One of my family members was a lawyer for the regional Children's Aid, and I worked for him for a few years. Another family member was a child protection social worker for two decades, but retired early because they felt the organization didn't prioritize the welfare of children (as is their mandate) but rather the needs of the organization or (perhaps more realistically) the needs of their own careers.
MANY social workers feel this way. They got into the field out of a genuine concern for the well-being of the most vulnerable members of our society, and instead found themselves dealing with politics (both real and office).
I'm not sure how it is in other countries, but in my region, they actually appoint a lawyer for the child. This is great, but it also tells you a lot about what everyone else's priorities are that children need their own lawyers:
(1) Parents want their kids back, of course. Not all parents are fit to get them back. But their lawyers fight for the return of their kids regardless of circumstances or reasons for their removal.
(2) Child protection agencies are under constant attack, so at the executive level, they lose sight of the individual kids and are instead worried about the needs of the organization and public relations.
(3) The social workers themselves are handcuffed to do anything about it and have to follow procedure, even if they can see it plainly that the procedure is not in the best interests of the child.
(4) Police want nothing to do with any of it and are quick to wash their hands of these situations.
(5) The children's lawyer somehow has to represent the needs of the child, which may place them at odds with their own clients (the kids).
(6) Activist groups will generally support the parents blindly, because by law, for the privacy of the children, the only parties listed above who can publicly speak about any given case are the parents themselves. So you can only ever hear one side of the argument. That's right: If a father, for example, sexually abuses his kids and as a result has them removed, he's free to say just about anything he likes about the matter, without ever acknowledging that he's a child molester. The other parties can't say a thing about this.
As a result, it's impossible, as a member of the public, to ever know whether it was appropriate or not that the children were removed from the care of their parents. I happen to know, from first-hand experience, that it's a mixed bag: Some parents shouldn't be allowed anywhere near any child ever, much less their own. Others are victims of a system gone haywire. And we, the concerned public, can't have an informed discussion about any of it.
All in all, it transforms child protection into a game of who-has-the-best-lawyers rather than trying to do what's right for the kids. Is it any wonder so many kids end up traumatized by this system?
But there's misrepresenting, and then there's "What the hell does this have to do with the movie I just watched?"
Good advertising (and I speak as an advertiser) sets up your expectations appropriately so that once you've experienced the product (in this case a movie) you leave satisfied.
Bad advertising promises you something completely different so that you leave the experience disappointed, which results in bad word of mouth.
Honestly, what none of the advertising for Civil War accomplishes (and I really liked the movie) is telling you that this is a movie about war journalism more than anything else. Yeah, there's a "this could happen here" message. But the core experience of the film is what it's like (presumably) to be a war correspondent. Didn't expect that at all going into the theatre.
Also... I loved Happy People. But yes, it's depressing. Beautifully so, but not a comedy.