I am disappointed that the author ended on a "this is bad" message for something with such clear potential for good.
Instead of tearing down, why did the author not apply the very thing he learned and use his article's influence and the power of suggestion to influence more people to use this tool positively?
Because the NYT has finally realized that the tech industry in general and Google in particular are direct competitors and existential threats to their business. This is also the explanation for every other hit piece the mainstream media writes about the tech industry.
It will have to be pulled out for as long as journalists keep writing these biased hit pieces to push their political agenda.
Critiquing tech industry for all the wrong they do is fine. But what NYT does is target two companies and constantly writes articles that find the most negative interpretation to the point where they sometimes even invent things.
Being biased and running a smear campaign against their competitor is what fans anti-journalist sentiment, not people bringing up the bias.
> But does this trope really need to be pulled out in discussing every single newspiece about tech that isn't flattering?
When it comes to dishonest hit pieces like this one, it is the only constructive comment to make. If journalists want to be respected, they should produce respectable work. TFA ain't it.
What's wrong with "fanning the flames of anti-journalist sentiment" exactly? If journalists aren't meeting the basic requirements society has of them, shouldn't there correctly be such sentiment? How else would journalism be motivated to self-reform?
I read it more as a "here's the keys to the kingdom" and referenced the redirectMethod which even has a step-by-step guide to replicate it. The author is from a search engine marketing consulting firm so it would seem to be almost against his self-interest to lay bare these tactics.
The author's point is that although the author only used it for morally unambiguously good deeds, there are always malicious actors and those who believe that their side of argument is "good" (e.g. extreme left and right political ideologies).
The author believes that there should indeed be some manual review for sensitive issues like these. What if an ad buyer bought ads for AR15s or for bulk order sleeping pills? You can argue that those buyers should be caught and tried, but the harm would be already done. The author would like more oversight from Google and those alike before malicious state actors (gasp!) and/or sick individuals use this unchecked power for bad.
Yeah, what if? It's a perfectly legal product in my country and people do buy and sell them online (via FFL transfers rather than directly), and the vast majority of people who own and use those rifles do so safely.
The article is not as interesting as I had guessed from the title, because:
1. It's not about the infosec meaning of social engineering, i.e. the author wasn't trying to get login credenials or system access.
2. It's loosely related to the other meaning of social engineering (causing deliberate societal change), but the author's attempted influence was limited to individuals (getting them to call a hotline).
A better title might be 'how I got 28% conversion for an ad landing page whose CTA was a phone call'.
Ads where you target a small number of people are of course cheap, making pranks like [1] possible for next to no cost. The interesting thing is can you cheaply run campaigns on influential people such a CEOs and politicians. I think you probably could!
They're doing this more and more in the Gmail Android app as well. First there were no ads. Then they added ads to the top of the mail list. Now they're interspersing ads between emails. I finally switched to K-9 because of how intrusive it became.
At least on iOS, they only show up if you have the Promotions category enabled. I don't know if this also true on Android or a desktop browser (I use uBlock).
Ads work. In other news, water is wet. Brought to you by the NYTimes (TM)
NYtimes seems hellbent on convincing people that any information that is not vetted by other humans of authority (preferably themselves) is a danger to society that must be banned. Fits the purpose of a medium that wants control over society. Then again most of us know that the internet is a wild west and thats why we loved it. I know that HN loves them, but this path and the logic behind it is sinister and backwards.
Ad campaigns are not effective campaigns unless they manipulate searcher's behaviors. As you said, water is wet. Ads manipulate. That's the definition of an ad, NY Times.
No, that's not how online ads work or why Google makes money.
Recall that AdWords is a money tree because online advertising by and large does not work but targeted search ads - emphasis on targeted - do. But targeted to what? They only work if they're targeted to commercial queries and basically are useful. Google has lots of systems in place to boost useful ads, defined as someone clicked it and didn't come back to keep searching or an ad that triggered a conversion action. It also demotes non useful ads, e.g. ads that aren't properly targeted.
Ad campaigns thus don't "manipulate searcher's behaviours": if that were true, there'd be no need for Google to do anything about low quality or irrelevant ads as the mere act of seeing an ad would automatically make it relevant. People start doing commercial searches already knowing what they want, and ads are in a way a solution to the problem that the best organic PageRanked result for a query like 'flowers' might be a Wikipedia page on flowers, whereas almost certainly what the user actually wanted was a hyper-local result for a flower delivery service. Such services don't tend to accumulate much PageRank anyway, so need to be ranked some other way like via an auction.
The rest of online advertising is no more able to manipulate people than billboards are. They raise awareness, if they're clever and memorable. That's about it. Brands that people know about do better than brands that people don't, unless that brand is good enough to spread via word of mouth, in which case they can win without advertising entirely. Which is how Google itself grew for most of its history.
> because online advertising by and large does not work but targeted search ads - emphasis on targeted - do.
as an adsense and adwords user i'm very skeptical about the effectiveness of targeted ads beyond exact keyword matching in general. Keyword-based ads work great, because they are answering exactly what the user is searching, but people rarely search "what should i vote". Other forms like display advertising are also quite effective, depending on the kind of product one wants to advertise (that's why google bought doubleclick). I don't know of any studies with statistics that corroborate google's pricing of ads with their effectiveness.
That said, all advertising is manipulative by definition. Not just advertising, most media reporting is also manipulative to the degree that everyone has biases.
> ads are in a way a solution to the problem that the best organic PageRanked result for a query like 'flowers' might be a Wikipedia page on flowers, whereas almost certainly what the user actually wanted was a hyper-local result for a flower delivery service
I think you are also misstating how adwords works. Google doesn't care if your ad is about the best flower shop, but how much you are willing to pay to rank before others in ads.
>NYtimes seems hellbent on convincing people that any information that is not vetted by other humans of authority (preferably themselves) is a danger to society that must be banned.
You know what, if we assume that most people people are too gullible and dumb to live in a society, there is no longer any reason to uphold the social contract. It's not set in stone that i must live in a democracy if half of them are not fit for it.
(Predictable irrational downvotes only serve to prove this point)
>if we assume that most people people are too gullible and dumb to live in a society
Most people don't have the experience to properly discern information that they aren't intimately familiar with. They don't practice it. They don't have jobs requiring it.
You probably can't run a marathon if you've never trained before. Why are we assuming it's any different with information?
>there is no longer any reason to uphold the social contract.
the social contract in democracies relies on trusting the judgement of your compatriots. if they cant be trusted you don't have to pretend they can, or that you can have a democracy or that they are your compatriots. e.g. Why should i pay the taxes that distrustful people instituted?
If we stop assuming a reasonable level or rationality on the electorate , then why choose to have a democracy - that's irrational
Well, these are the necessary skills for the citizen of a democracy to have and to exercise properly. If you're going to assume that the majority of people are incapable of gaining that skill, the only logical conclusion is that democracy is a mistake.
Has it never occurred to you that perhaps institutional "authorities" who are empowered to "vet" information (before it is consumed by a fragile and untrustworthy public) may, in fact, be the greater danger?
Are you opposed to having intermediaries period, or the particular set of intermediaries that command the largest audiences today? The distinction is important because intermediaries can add valuable context and analysis (we just happen to have a lot of low quality ones imo).
I'm not opposed to having intermediaries. I'm opposed to having a media environment where only particular established and "trusted" intermediaries are capable of disseminating information to the public. While imperfect, I consider it, on net, to be a very good and healthy aspect of our society today that no one holds the kind of institutional power over public information once held by, for example, Walter Cronkite and his employers. Not because Cronkite and CBS were particularly untrustworthy, but because that degree of centralized power posed a tremendous risk.
Not only do I not trust corporate media institutions with that kind of power generally, I am even more distrustful of corporate media institutions that push the narrative that they should have that kind of power. Not just because it's good practice never to give power to someone who obviously wants it that badly, but because the way in which they are campaigning it is itself tendentious and, at times, dishonest--which only makes them even more obviously untrustworthy.
Oddly enough, the heyday of the American newspaper and "yellow journalism" seems to be not too far off from today's era. Hearst and Pulitzer would barely miss a beat in today's clickbait environment. We survived that era because Americans learned not to believe everything they read. It's a shame that the media oligopolies of the 20th century gave them the opportunity to forget.
> Stop assuming rational actors when the evidence is telling you there are none.
So you are assuming people are irrational and trying to convince them to rationally act according to rational arguments you provide? Looks like you don't even believe you own assumptions.
but does the fact that water transferred the state of being wet to a separate entity necessarily imply that wetness is an attribute that water possesses? as far as i can tell, something only becomes wet when water (or a liquid in general) is applied to it, and while i suppose you could make the argument that a liquid at an atomic level is constantly applying itself to itself, but i think that would be a painfully pedantic argument and also a straw man because you probably wouldn't make that argument at all.
tl;dr wet is a state that is dependent on the application of liquid, not necessarily an attribute of the liquid itself
>“One sentence could have stopped me,” Kevin wrote. “Had any one of the hundreds of passers-by engaged with me, it would … potentially have showed me that I had the ability to choose life.”
>No person stopped Kevin from trying to kill himself. Could a Google ad have?
No one wanted to save another human...but maybe we could get a robot to do it?
1. What percent of HN readers have a NYT subscription?
2. There are far more comments here than the source -- is that appropriate? Should the comments ride along w/ the article (for future reference and the fact that they paid for the orginal story/reporting)
>Those who bear the brunt of that abuse aren’t just the impatient and impulsive. More than 50 percent of people still can’t differentiate between an ad (redirect or not) and an organic result on Google.
Some reasarch [0] suggests the figure is much higher and around 60% (from 2017).
Over the past 12-13 years, Google has been steadily making changes as to how they display ads to make them more and more invisible to the user. See the graphic [1]. By making them more invisible, there's a greater chance that they'll get clicked on and make Google more money. With each change, Google probably added tens of billions of dollars in revenue.
50 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadInstead of tearing down, why did the author not apply the very thing he learned and use his article's influence and the power of suggestion to influence more people to use this tool positively?
But does this trope really need to be pulled out in discussing every single newspiece about tech that isn't flattering?
It doesn't add anything to the conversation that hasn't been said thousands of times, and it fans the flames of anti-journalist sentiment.
Critiquing tech industry for all the wrong they do is fine. But what NYT does is target two companies and constantly writes articles that find the most negative interpretation to the point where they sometimes even invent things.
Being biased and running a smear campaign against their competitor is what fans anti-journalist sentiment, not people bringing up the bias.
When it comes to dishonest hit pieces like this one, it is the only constructive comment to make. If journalists want to be respected, they should produce respectable work. TFA ain't it.
The author believes that there should indeed be some manual review for sensitive issues like these. What if an ad buyer bought ads for AR15s or for bulk order sleeping pills? You can argue that those buyers should be caught and tried, but the harm would be already done. The author would like more oversight from Google and those alike before malicious state actors (gasp!) and/or sick individuals use this unchecked power for bad.
Yeah, what if? It's a perfectly legal product in my country and people do buy and sell them online (via FFL transfers rather than directly), and the vast majority of people who own and use those rifles do so safely.
1. It's not about the infosec meaning of social engineering, i.e. the author wasn't trying to get login credenials or system access.
2. It's loosely related to the other meaning of social engineering (causing deliberate societal change), but the author's attempted influence was limited to individuals (getting them to call a hotline).
A better title might be 'how I got 28% conversion for an ad landing page whose CTA was a phone call'.
[1] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...
Just wow.
Most people use Google.com to search for Youtube.com.
She's happy and said "Internet is faster now" :o)
NYtimes seems hellbent on convincing people that any information that is not vetted by other humans of authority (preferably themselves) is a danger to society that must be banned. Fits the purpose of a medium that wants control over society. Then again most of us know that the internet is a wild west and thats why we loved it. I know that HN loves them, but this path and the logic behind it is sinister and backwards.
Recall that AdWords is a money tree because online advertising by and large does not work but targeted search ads - emphasis on targeted - do. But targeted to what? They only work if they're targeted to commercial queries and basically are useful. Google has lots of systems in place to boost useful ads, defined as someone clicked it and didn't come back to keep searching or an ad that triggered a conversion action. It also demotes non useful ads, e.g. ads that aren't properly targeted.
Ad campaigns thus don't "manipulate searcher's behaviours": if that were true, there'd be no need for Google to do anything about low quality or irrelevant ads as the mere act of seeing an ad would automatically make it relevant. People start doing commercial searches already knowing what they want, and ads are in a way a solution to the problem that the best organic PageRanked result for a query like 'flowers' might be a Wikipedia page on flowers, whereas almost certainly what the user actually wanted was a hyper-local result for a flower delivery service. Such services don't tend to accumulate much PageRank anyway, so need to be ranked some other way like via an auction.
The rest of online advertising is no more able to manipulate people than billboards are. They raise awareness, if they're clever and memorable. That's about it. Brands that people know about do better than brands that people don't, unless that brand is good enough to spread via word of mouth, in which case they can win without advertising entirely. Which is how Google itself grew for most of its history.
as an adsense and adwords user i'm very skeptical about the effectiveness of targeted ads beyond exact keyword matching in general. Keyword-based ads work great, because they are answering exactly what the user is searching, but people rarely search "what should i vote". Other forms like display advertising are also quite effective, depending on the kind of product one wants to advertise (that's why google bought doubleclick). I don't know of any studies with statistics that corroborate google's pricing of ads with their effectiveness.
That said, all advertising is manipulative by definition. Not just advertising, most media reporting is also manipulative to the degree that everyone has biases.
> ads are in a way a solution to the problem that the best organic PageRanked result for a query like 'flowers' might be a Wikipedia page on flowers, whereas almost certainly what the user actually wanted was a hyper-local result for a flower delivery service
I think you are also misstating how adwords works. Google doesn't care if your ad is about the best flower shop, but how much you are willing to pay to rank before others in ads.
I mean it objectively is.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html
Stop assuming rational actors when the evidence is telling you there are none.
>Then again most of us know that the internet is a wild west and thats why we loved it.
You'd have to pretty obtuse to ignore the harm this "wild west" (nice romantic framing) has done to several western countries.
(Predictable irrational downvotes only serve to prove this point)
Most people don't have the experience to properly discern information that they aren't intimately familiar with. They don't practice it. They don't have jobs requiring it.
You probably can't run a marathon if you've never trained before. Why are we assuming it's any different with information?
>there is no longer any reason to uphold the social contract.
Explain.
If we stop assuming a reasonable level or rationality on the electorate , then why choose to have a democracy - that's irrational
So I truly don't understand your confusion.
Not only do I not trust corporate media institutions with that kind of power generally, I am even more distrustful of corporate media institutions that push the narrative that they should have that kind of power. Not just because it's good practice never to give power to someone who obviously wants it that badly, but because the way in which they are campaigning it is itself tendentious and, at times, dishonest--which only makes them even more obviously untrustworthy.
Oddly enough, the heyday of the American newspaper and "yellow journalism" seems to be not too far off from today's era. Hearst and Pulitzer would barely miss a beat in today's clickbait environment. We survived that era because Americans learned not to believe everything they read. It's a shame that the media oligopolies of the 20th century gave them the opportunity to forget.
So you are assuming people are irrational and trying to convince them to rationally act according to rational arguments you provide? Looks like you don't even believe you own assumptions.
But again this is HN attempting to discuss civics so I shouldn't be surprised.
tl;dr wet is a state that is dependent on the application of liquid, not necessarily an attribute of the liquid itself
No one wanted to save another human...but maybe we could get a robot to do it?
Is this what they call "peak capitalism"?
1. What percent of HN readers have a NYT subscription?
2. There are far more comments here than the source -- is that appropriate? Should the comments ride along w/ the article (for future reference and the fact that they paid for the orginal story/reporting)
Some reasarch [0] suggests the figure is much higher and around 60% (from 2017).
Over the past 12-13 years, Google has been steadily making changes as to how they display ads to make them more and more invisible to the user. See the graphic [1]. By making them more invisible, there's a greater chance that they'll get clicked on and make Google more money. With each change, Google probably added tens of billions of dollars in revenue.
[0] https://www.smartinsights.com/paid-search-marketing-ppc/paid...
[1] http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/07/...
Also, there was a similar experiment done in targeted ads on Facebook not too long ago.[1]
[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb98pb/google-jigsaw-beca...
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-secret-facebook-war...