Good insights, and not just software developers, really. We don’t like ads, sensationalism, or anything reeking of bullshit. If we have to talk to someone to find out the price, the product may as well not exist.
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Marketing isn’t for nerds. It’s for the MBA types that make the purchasing decisions and then force the nerds to implement it. They love marketing.
we are not immune, we are just able to install a fuckin adblocker. noone is immune to propaganda.
Yeah, I think that line is getting used as a thought terminating cliche. While the statement is certainly true, not being immune is completely ignoring the idea that people can vary in how susceptible they are.
And every public service app and webshop should have a “developer” section where you can report bugs. I’ll do it even for free you fucking morons!
That’s why just about every technology forum ends up being a consumer board.
Clearly the author have never seen the audiophile community. $100 cable, anyone?
They said nerds not “Placebo Obsessesed Rich Nerds”
$100? On the very low end of audiophile cables. No joke, I have seen cables with the prices climbing towards five figures. There’s a set right now on US audio mart going for over $6000USD. For a set of RCA cables.
Sometimes I think I’m in the wrong business.
Ooooh! Gold plated cables! That’ll reduce the resistance by several milliohms!
once weere told that increases the quality of digitally encoded audio signals!!
AUDIO GOES BRRRRRRR
I have a cable that’ll fix that for ya…
Are nerds all audiophiles tho? 320kbps is usually fine. $300 speakers are usually fine. Nerds do the research, audiophiles are seeking unobtanium.
What about gamers? What do you think all those cool designs are for?
No, but I’d say that all audiophiles are nerds
Nerds are some of the biggest consumers of stupid pointless bullshit on the planet.
Only if it glows blue.
Yes, but only if it is not marketed to us.
A lot of shit is marketed through forums like this; you just don’t notice it.
I block people if they needlesly use a brand name isntead of saying the group name. Do I probably have some false positives? Probably.
Have you tried UBlock® Origin™ Lite?
As a former developer with probably 40 games under my belt, I’m gonna say this is a highly specious article designed to stroke egos. Yes there are very valid points being made that I can personally identify with, but they come from a one-dimensional perspective that also manages to leave out data, and conspicuously lacks basic understanding of the efficacy of ‘general’ sales/marketing, instead filling in with presumptions of comparative efficacy.
Have you ever heard of HeroEngine? It’s no longer around but the developer that was contracted to make it is working on Apex Engine at https://www.apexengine.com/
A long time I haven’t heard that name. It was over hyped at the time IIRC.
If you’re not a studio (Hero engine wasn’t free or cheap), go with Godot.
the rampant consumerism in nerd spaces seems to disprove the Lemmy title in the large, even if this specific example indicates the opposite wrt marketing by software firms aimed at developers.
The irony is that this very post is literally every pillar of marketing in one place.
Identify a specific demographic that may be under-served or for whom you have an attractive product, deliver said product to that demographic.
Here we are in a Technology community gobbling down the product (site/article) and talking all about it. Many will “share” it to various friends. Some will bookmark it, for others viewing the logo impression builds the overall consumer trust score of the brand.
We’re all too smart for it though because I said so.
They tend not to work on neurodivergent people and there is a huge overlap between NDs and “nerds.”
Guess that’s why the big guys want people to be neurotypical.
To make it easier to sell them stuff.To advertisers, humans are just slabs of meat with eyes.
To advertising companies, maybe yes.
But to the ones making the advertisement, we are the wall between them and their money, which just needs to be gotten out of the way.
Plot twist: this is an ad campaign
This… strikes me more as self-aggrandizing than informative.
Yes, many technical folks are put off by certain marketing tricks. Good marketers just use different techniques when targeting people in this market, when they bother to at all.
We’re not immune to manipulation; and thinking that we are makes us more susceptible to it.
Agreed, it’s tooting his own cohort’s horn without acknowledging he is, inf act, susceptible to marketing. The actual topic at hand is marketing for software tools to software devs. Of course hand-waving marketing doesn’t work, it’s a technical field with technical products. The marketing he’s blasting is emotion-based marketing. Guess what, there’s plenty of other emotional decisions that will be affected by marketing in his life. Vacation destinations, artistic exhibitions, restaraunts, games, whatever. This article screams like it’s from someone who loudly proclaims marketing is dumb because they weren’t swayed to by women’s deodorant because of a YouTube ad.
You are not immune to marketing.
But you need to remember that those targeted practices are very few in comparison to the volume of neuro-regular/non-technical folks.
So we arent peone to the same bullshit in regards to volume.Maybe - but the marketing that won’t affect you isn’t what you need to worry about. It’s the parts that do still work on you need to be careful of - and if you assume nothing will ever work on you, you won’t even notice when something does take. Whether that’s buying a trinket that doesn’t actually make you happy, or joining a group that turns out to be a cult.
Always better to assume you can be manipulated, and check in with yourself periodically.
Programmer YouTubers is a good example.
We just get sold on opensource js framework with a sprinkle of SaaS (no rug pull I swear) to keep the investors happy.
Here’s the thing… I want to be sold something. Not anything, but certain somethings. There was a brief time when Google AdSense was new that I was excited for the experience. (I now know how fucking stupid I was, but hey, I was young).
The idea that a new product aligned to my interests and designed with me in mind would be advertised to me instead of feminine hygiene products or mesothelioma lawsuit ads seemed awesome.
I do not want your bullshit hype machine alpha male inside club cool kid image peddled as the reason I should hand you my money. You’ve got the wrong guy. Tell me what it does with a side of what I can do with it. And the “what I can do with it” shouldn’t be “get laid”.
AdSense could have been amazing if it was used to find good ads for the user instead of finding good users for the ad.
The idea that a new product aligned to my interests and designed with me in mind would be advertised to me instead of feminine hygiene products or mesothelioma lawsuit ads seemed awesome.
Broadly speaking, the problem with modern American advertisement isn’t the content so much as the volume. Tried to watch a football game a few weeks back and I barely saw any football being played. Every millisecond of screen time and every pixel of screen space that wasn’t a moving football was consumed by ads.
I was at an actual game a year ago, foolishly thinking being there was going to be a better experience. NOPE. Ads on the announcements. Ads at the endzones. Ads painted into the turf. I got solicited to buy shit as I was loading up my ticket and right inside the gate once I was scanned in. The whole interior of the stadium was a mall full of overpriced crap. Seats were branded. The food was branded. I was buying something and I was drowning in people trying to sell me more shit.
I don’t care if every single item on offer is something I might actually want. I can’t fucking breath for it all.
Oh, yes. Watched a UK cooking show lately, the experience was alien; every 10 minutes a 5 minute ad window. Local channels are regulated to no more than 5 minutes per half hour or so. Luckily, smart TV lets you jump over it.
Volume is the biggest problem, sure. Content is a close second. I was flabbergasted last time I was in the USA. Ads have barely any relation to what they’re selling.
A poster for shoes features a full-body shot of a half-naked model, the shoes barely visible with the whole poster within your visual field at once.
Ads for beer, travel agencies, clothes and antidepressant medicine, which should be illegal to advertise, by the way, are indistinguishable from each other: just a few happy 20-somethings in a nonspecific late afternoon outdoors setting.
A bunch of ads I saw I don’t even know what they were for, they just had hot young people and logos for companies I never heard of. No text, no nothing.
Several ads purporting to sell an “experience” when they were for the most mundane, use-it-on-autopilot products you’ve ever heard of. The products were so forgettable I can’t remember an actual example, but picture an ad selling you on the wonderful experience of using the new ad-supported monthly coat hanger subscription service and you’ve got it.
Ads for lawyers (something else that should be illegal) were on point though: “hey, do you want money you know you don’t deserve at all but can be argued in bad faith that you do? Hit me up”.
Oh, and everything is perpetually half-off, because the American consumer is apparently too stupid to realize that just means they’re lying about the price.
Ad placement is not only bought for the purpose to introduce you to their product for you to buy. Sadly most ad placement is bought for brand re-enforcement (Coca-Cola purchases a magnitude more ads even though everyone knows the company and the product, but sells many more bottles than Pepsi)
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And the gratuitous association between random brand X and random hot person Y surely also serves a purpose, like subliminally telling your lizard brain that you’ll become like hot person Y, or succeed in mating with them, if you buy brand X. That explains the problem, but does nothing to make it less of a problem.
Bring back catalogs.
Who here remembers Computer Shopper?
When I want something, I’ll come to you. Don’t come to me.
Catalogs are still a thing. I pick up the mail and not only get catalogs from stores I purchased things at ten years ago, but the amount I see in the ‘instant recycle bin’ is insane.
I think McMaster still has a catalogue…
A-fucking-men
I think a slightly more insidious side to targeting ads is that even when they have the “right” product for you, it’s the shitier and overpriced one. The one that spent money on marketing instead of quality.
developers want to read documentation
they won’t look at any white papers
?!?!?!?!!
White papers are shit written by marketing people who try to make their little ad sound like something academic. In truth these white papers are in equal parts misunderstandings, wrong and full of useless fluff. They are AI slop, often completely without any AI involvement.
If someone is serious about the content, they call it a documentation, reference or datasheet.
There are both
But product whitepapers are ads
Those aren’t white papers. They are scientific papers.
White papers are written by companies as a marketing tool. The first two papers you linked above are written by universities and the last one by a research-focussed non-profit.
As per Wikipedia:
Since the 1990s, this type of document has proliferated in business. Today, a business-to-business (B2B) white paper falls under grey literature, more akin to a marketing presentation meant to persuade customers and partners, and promote a certain product or viewpoint.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper
It’s a marketing presentation masquerading as a fake scientific paper.
While I’m not saying they don’t both exist, there are plenty of people writing the original definition for tech products, too.
And I’d argue that purely scientific papers are often written to promote products and viewpoints, too.
Yeah, when I first got a link to a whitepaper in the newsletter, I expected it to be a… a whitepaper (I read the meaning it had back then).
After reading it properly, as if I would an academic paper, I thought it was weird that I didn’t feel like I learnt anything useful.It would take a while (and a few other whitepapers) for me to realise what it had become.
