Everyone thinks they are not susceptible to advertising.
Advertising metrics continue to prove that they are wrong.
HN will continue to have "contrarians" who think they are smarter than everyone else, and who reflexively argue contrarian positions, like "privacy is bad, actually", not because those positions are smart, but because the speakers are addicted to being "clever" contrarians.
Less than 1% of Facebook ads get clicked. Not sure what sort of roi marketing folks have come up with to convince purse strings their ads are actually producing, but if the "marketing" department can't spin numbers to look good, might be time find a new marketing department.
Then you can get 2% of your ads clicked on.
All that said, I'd be interested in learning if my layman's perspective is garbage (which, let's be honest, it probably is).
The number is far less than 1%. Other than that, your layman's perspective is correct.
I'm in the custom apparel industry, where a lot of purchases are (were - it's dropped off) driven by facebook ads. If Facebook ads were as effective as the HN zeitgeist seems to think, there would be no other kind of commerce.
It's deeply sad that one party is now so devoted to disinformation and the destruction of democracy that they whine when somebody provides a small-print link to third party fact checkers.
Sorry; I know that you work hard to ensure that HN remains a safe space for white supremacists, mysoginists, and other bigots. I hope I didn't undo your toil by briefly making one such person very slightly uncomfortable.
It is clearly important to PG, sama, and you that HN be a place where hateful people with power can leverage that power, spread disinformation, and make others feel unwanted, so long as they do so using a thin veil of polite language. You do excellent work in achieving that goal.
People use the same logic to accuse us of being communist agents and "totalitarian liberal thought policemen" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20438487). It always feels like the mods are against you.
Please drop the denunciatory rhetoric when posting here. It is tedious and does nothing for your cause except alienate people. It's what smart readers come to HN to get away from, regardless of what they agree with politically. Everybody here disagrees with some bits and agrees with some too, but that doesn't mean they want to spend their days reading boilerplate.
I think it's fair for there to be at least one place on the internet that isn't suffused with ideological copypasta. That doesn't make me a white supremacist misogynist bigot nor a totalitarian liberal thought policeman—nor a centrist milquetoast, to cover that base also.
> I think it's fair for there to be at least one place on the internet that isn't suffused with ideological copypasta.
Holy shit your arrogance is off the fucking _CHAINS_.
Not only have you failed miserably at that goal (this site is comically predictable with it's politics; and it's also trivially easy to game); but your head is so far up your ass that you think you did something that nobody else did.
Wow.
You are a much worse and much stupider person than I thought you were; and I already thought you were nothing but an absolute fucking useless sycophant who is hoping that moderating this site will eventually result in pg/sama giving you a role that has carry.
A 1% chance of death that’s evenly distributed across 80 years is dramatically less impactful to one’s expected quantity of life than a 1% chance of death that happens immediately.
Additionally, I’d note that nearly all higher income individuals take steps to reduce their auto death risks including buying safer vehicles, living closer to work, and using professional drivers when drunk or otherwise impaired.
As for your final paragraph, it is wholly unreasonable to imply that covid (which is killing thousands of Americans per day despite a massive distancing effort) is less serious than the flu (which has persisted over a much longer period of time and which was not subject to special responses).
> As for your final paragraph, it is wholly unreasonable to imply that covid (which is killing thousands of Americans per day despite a massive distancing effort) is less serious than the flu (which has persisted over a much longer period of time and which was not subject to special responses).
I didn't say or imply that. It's worse than the flu, probably 5-10X worse. Not bad, not great.
I'm suggesting that people are freaking out because there's "bodies on the street" and we're all in serious danger (we're overwhelmingly just not) when the death toll to date is about half of what we paid zero attention to whatsoever over the same time period.
My argument is that we shouldn't be nearly as freaked out about COVID as we are, and we should be more freaked out about the flu.
There's reason to take precautions, especially if you're in a risk category, but not at all to the extent of the panic we've seen to date.
In fact Sweden's plan of literally just that is going great, they've not shut anything down, and told people to stay home if they're sick (shocking, I know) and the serious-case infection growth rate has flattened out by itself. [1, 2]
Advertising metrics continue to prove that they are wrong.
HN will continue to have "contrarians" who think they are smarter than everyone else, and who reflexively argue contrarian positions, like "privacy is bad, actually", not because those positions are smart, but because the speakers are addicted to being "clever" contrarians.