I mean there were a few people correct that mortgage backed securities were much higher risk than they were classified as. Just because a bunch of smart people agree on something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s correct. But it can take a long time for people with a lot of money to go broke.
Except a big part of downvoting has nothing to do with the truth of a statement - yes factual inaccuracies and misinformation will be downvoted but that’s just scratching the surface.
If people are rude or posting something completely unhelpful that’s a downvote even if the statement is overall true.
That’s a rather unhelpful way to use a voting system, considering no two people have the same sensibilities toward rudeness or the same purpose for reading a thread. At least voting based on truth has universal utility. In fact, downvoting true information could be actively harmful in many (most?) situations as many (most?) platforms boost or suppress content based on those votes
I also find it a bit.. idk what the word is, egotistical? Self-centered? Judgemental? To vote based on subjective qualities like perceived rudeness or helpfulness (toward one’s own goals or one’s own understanding of a stated goal)
Then talk to dang and attempt to convince him that the voting system needs to be purely based on the truth (or lack thereof) contained within a comment. As it stands, the voting system is primarily intended to surface comments and posts that foster the discussion of interesting things.
Considering that things like attacking the messenger and bad-faith discourse (via insults, etc) are counter to the stated HN ethos, I don't feel it's unhelpful to downvote assholish comments for the sake of being assholish, even if the comment has accurate factual information that is relevant.
Hallelujah cry the internet trolls! Who now are allowed to post rude and vile comments provided they might be true! Downvoting their perceived rudeness would be wrong.
No wait. Nope, that’s not how it works. Downvoting for rudeness, incivility or low effort comments makes for a much better environment.
"Hey boss, I spent $40 milion on a targeted ad campaign with this fancy new agency. They sent us a report showing 2.5% uplift, but I ran it by our in-house stat nerds and they say it's bogus."
vs.
"Hey boss, I spent $40 million on a targeted ad campaign. The agency proves we got a 2.5% uplift. That's $300 million! Ain't I terrific!? Where's my bonus?"
Edit: and...
CEO to board: "We tried a new targetted ad campaign but it didn't make any difference."
vs.
CEO to board: "Last quarter the industry suffered increased competition, and our uptake through traditional advertising channels suffered. Fortunately I had the forsight to direct Marketting to open up to new, inovative methods. I'm pleased to report that it paid off, to the tune of $300 MM, completely offseting the drop from traditional campaigns."
So much of the time of the ad boom has been the period of 0 interest rates.
So many of the adtech dollars have come from venture capitalists pouring money into startups that will be profitable any year now, they swear.
So much of the advertising business has always been about convincing the entire rest of the economy that they desperately need more advertising in order to compete, regardless of any actual stats on ROI.
Is online advertising—and in particular, the hyper-targeted advertising that fuels the industry's insatiable hunger for every last drop of personal data—worthwhile?
We don't know.
You don't know. I don't know. The adtech companies don't know (but they assiduously avoid acknowledging that fact, often even to themselves). Their customers don't know.
Me, I'm comfortable with my educated guess that it's nowhere near as worthwhile as they want to make us believe it is.
> So much of the advertising business has always been about convincing the entire rest of the economy that they desperately need more advertising in order to compete, regardless of any actual stats on ROI.
I've never worked with anyone that doesn't measure ROI or ROAS. I'm not arguing that some companies don't need to spend so much on advertising or that it's not needed for some but there's a pretty clear measure.
> Is online advertising—and in particular, the hyper-targeted advertising that fuels the industry's insatiable hunger for every last drop of personal data—worthwhile?
In my experience in eCommerce marketing is that both Meta and Google are steering advertisers towards massive audience campaigns that aren't hyper-targeted. They might be doing hyper-targeted advertising but it's no longer as recommended as it once was.
All that said, I use ad blockers and I think data should not be hoovered up without consent or awareness and sold without consent. On my personal site and even my online shop I don't use GA or any other third party tool (hosted on Shopify so they inject some things).
There are ways to estimate advertising ROI, but so much of what ads are attempting to do is inherently unmeasurable without a tightly controlled study, particularly given the highly chaotic nature of the economy and people's behavior.
Fundamentally, there are two "sides" of advertising ROI you can try to measure: the individual, and the aggregate. They each have serious challenges.
At the individual level: sure, some people see an ad, say "hey, I want that!" and go buy it. But that's definitely nowhere close to the majority of purchases—even online—and it's very unlikely to be a very high percentage of ad-influenced purchases. Much more often, the ad gets the product into your brain, and then later, when you're shopping, you see it and say, "hm, maybe I should get it," never consciously realizing that the ad caused or contributed to that. Thus, any kind of consumer survey will be unable to capture more than a tiny fraction of ad-influenced purchasing.
At the aggregate level: what you're trying to measure here is simply your sales numbers over time. And except for the very largest of companies, sales numbers will be pretty noisy. That means it's very hard to tell for sure whether this ad or that one worked, or if any of them had any direct effect on sales at all. (That's particularly true for the subtly-influenced purchases I described above; those might happen months after an ad campaign starts.)
Is it totally impossible to measure ROI? No, it's not. But it takes a lot of work, and has a fairly high degree of inherent uncertainty. The old saw "half of all advertising dollars are wasted—we just don't know which half" is very relevant here.
"Work" is loosely correlated with "Make money out of it" (especially for the ad seller)
The buyer of ads does (usually) keep track of conversion (as correctly pointed in the article, also the seller) and when optimizing their strategy they're usually ok with the results they get from it (because they sell and they have sales attributable to the online ads)
But here's the catch, making a more efficient ad probably doesn't make the sellers more money.
All the companies, from startups to giants, across different countries and cultures, must be wrong.
Only few (and they all write blogs) can see through the vile of disguise and tell the readers how online advertising doesn't work.