AnAmericanPotato

As I think more about this, I have a new theory:

• Advertising is mostly aimed at the "average" for maximum coverage.
• Neurodivergent people are not average.
• Neurodiversity in tech is higher than in the general population.
• Therefore, lots of tech people are accustomed to advertising that is at best aimed elsewhere and at worst hostile toward them.

So perhaps the real story is simply "lots of tech marketers don't understand their audience". Which I think is true. When companies put their spec sheets and feature lists front and center, I'm definitely more likely to pay attention than if I have to dig through screen after screen of meaningless fluff to get any relevant details. So that's something marketers could (but generally don't) do to influence me.

And I'm comfortable with that. Yes, please make better shit, out of greed if nothing else. Stand out by not being an infuriating weasel, respect my time and intelligence, and I will reward you with my time and perhaps money.

But do you have a favourite coffee place, or restaurant? How about a favourite hotel chain?

I'd say I have three favorite coffee shops. One place in particular has the tastiest coffee to drink black, another has better flavored drinks and a generally cooler vibe (local art on display, community bulletin board, that kind of thing), and a third is a better environment to sit and work on my laptop. I consider those my three favorites. None of them are big chains, and none of them advertise, as far as I know.

For restaurants, I have a bunch of favorites for different foods. I have a favorite Indian place, favorite pizza place, favorite sandwich shop, etc. Again, nothing I consider a "favorite" is a chain. I guess if I had to pick a favorite chain, it would be...Chipotle? But I don't feel like marketing draws me there beyond the fact that if they didn't have successful marketing, they wouldn't be anywhere I go in the first place. And still, if I see a small independent burrito place in walking distance, I'm probably going there first. Chipotle isn't so much a "favorite" as it is a serviceable oasis when I'm in a food desert.

For hotel chains...nope, not even a little. I couldn't tell you a single real difference between Marriot and Hilton. If their marketing departments have tried to instill in me any kind of emotional connection with their brands, they have utterly failed.

It's kind of the same with airlines. They're all the same in almost every meaningful way. Every time I fly, I consult my shitlist and try to avoid what's on it, but at this point pretty much every airline has earned a spot on my shitlist. The only emotions I feel toward any airlines are bitterness, frustration, and anger.

I guess this is why hotels and airlines push their reward points so hard; they know they're all the same and cannot possibly earn "loyalty" otherwise. If I were a different kind of nerd, perhaps I'd spend the time to optimize corporate reward points, but at a glance it seems like a sucker's game to me so I mostly ignore it.

Incidentally, who do you think bought all that gamer girl bathwater?

Honestly, I have no idea. Did people actually buy it? I thought the whole thing was a joke.

I'm not about to no-true-scotsman nerdhood here, but I will say that I don't relate to whatever group bought into that. I'm just not that kind of nerd, I guess.

Which raises another point: there are no monolithic demographics of any significant size. Anytime you generalize about "nerds" (or any other group), nothing you say will be 100% correct across the board. Generalizations are still useful when viewed in terms of trends and distribution curves. It's fair to say that men are taller than women even though there are short men and tall women. It would be more precise to say that the height distribution for men skews taller than for women, but I think most people intuitively understand the truth behind the simple, plain English generalization anyway, even if they don't think of it in precise terms.

But would you choose, say, a computer acse without caring about the way it looks or makes you feel?

The way it looks: yes, absolutely. My current box is metallic black with a window. If I could've bought a functionally equivalent one with no window at the same price, I would have. If I could've bought a functionally equivalent one in hot pink for cheaper, I probably would have. (There is a functional aspect to appearance as well, since it's in my field of vision and bright colors could be distracting, so I'd have to think about the pink. "Black" and "no window" are on my wanted-features list for this reason, but other factors can override those wants.)

The way it makes me feel: well, cramped space, bad cable management options, and poor airflow will make me feel bad, so...arguably? But I'd consider that a matter of functionality more than feeling.

I feel like at this point we should talk about the oft-neglected difference between marketing and advertising. There is an aspect of marketing that directs product development down a path toward what they understand people actually want. When done well, this is good. It should be the marketing department's job to learn what problems people have with products in the field, and make sure those problems are addressed in future products. Advertising is a subset of marketing that tries to directly influence consumer behavior to buy whatever they're trying to sell.

For example, there was probably a marketer involved in the location and design of my favorite coffee shop, and if they did their job well then they deserve credit for helping make the kind of place I enjoy sitting in. Cheers to them for that.

But I'm no more likely to go into Dunkin or Starbucks just because they are advertised incessantly. You might find that hard to believe, and I wouldn't blame you! I can't prove it to you. And I understand that among the general population, repeated exposure affects perception, and by extension behavior, in subtle and deeply-rooted ways. I don't imagine that I am immune to the effects that, for example, cause preschool children to prefer the same food from McDonalds bags vs unbranded bags (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17679662/). But we are more than our base nature, and these effects can be negated in practice. I suspect tech nerds in general have internalized stronger countermeasures than the general population. Not full immunity, because reality is too messy, but a notable resistance.

Yeah, there was a time when that was true, but Reddit's been heavily compromised for...I dunno, at least a decade now. Pretty much every public forum becomes compromised after it reaches a certain size, and now with The Power of AI, it's economical to compromise smaller and smaller forums, too, and it's harder and harder to properly calibrate your bullshit detector. yayy....

There are still some great specialized nerd forums out there though. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1603/

It's a mistake to attribute purchases to marketing just because a marketer breathed the same air at some point. First-degree advertising influence and umpteenth-degree influence are very very different.

I mean, I probably wouldn't buy a car from a company I'd never heard of, but that's mainly because there are none. If I happened to buy a car from after researching what was available, I wouldn't attribute that to 's marketing department. At least, not unless they bribed the independent reviewers, ratings boards, etc.

Same deal with most of my tech purchases, except that in that space there often are brands I've never heard of. And I'm (usually) savvy enough to tell when they're legit and when they're not. (I know more than I ever wanted to know about SSD controllers and I'm kind of angry about it.)

You're right that nobody is truly "immune" to marketing, but as a matter of degrees, there's a big difference across groups. There are people out there who look at ads and register them as useful information. There are people who intentionally click on ad banners on Instagram, rather than treating them like digital leprosy. There are people who click on the first Amazon referral listicle they find on Google and then treat it like independent journalism. There are people who use GoDaddy, when the only possible reason anyone would is because that racecar driver is hot. These are not behaviors you should expect among the kind of nerds this article is talking about.

he viewed other libertarians as having the same level of honest compassion as he does but over time it’s become more and more clear that libertarians are overwhelmingly selfish rich white guys who don’t want to be called Repuiblicans

I had a similar progression myself when I was in my teens, maybe even early 20s.

The basic principle of libertarianism is appealing: mind your own damn business and I'll mind mine. And I still agree with that in general — it's just that a single generality does not make a complete worldview. It took me a while to realize how common it is for self-identifying libertarians to lack any capacity for nuance. The natural extreme of "libertarianism" is just anarchy and feudalism.

In a sane world, I might still call myself a libertarian. In a sane world, that might mean letting people live their own damn lives, not throwing them to the wolves (or more literally, bears ) and dismantling the government entirely.

I'm all for minding my own business, but I also acknowledge that maintaining a functional society is everybody's business (as much as I occasionally wish I could opt out and go live in a cave).