21–30 of 145 posts
That so many smart and talented people choose to work on AdTech or systems that support AdTech is such a shame. That being said, I love these little anecdotes, they are super fun to read.
There are so many aspects of adtech that are ethically neutral. Just as advertising itself - there are even ads created by great creators that are works of modern art. It's only when it's abused adtech becomes evil.
Please name 5
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are so many aspects of adtech that are ethically neutral. Just as advertising itself - there are even ads created by great creators that are works of modern art. It's only when it's abused adtech becomes evil.
It may be "many" but it does not mean that the defining nature of advertising is ethically neutral. I think I just quote Banksy/Tejaratchi: "People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is h…
The next time I logged into my gmail to read it I happened to be at a machine without adblock and I saw that google was serving me ads for garbage treatments for male pattern baldness.
Fuck you Google and your shitty advertising. There's nothing wrong with going bald and I don't need you to try and make me feel insecure about my hairline when I'm trying to read about scientists helping burn victims.
Small tasks turn into multi-day endeavors just because the tools keep crashing over and over again, losing all state. Managed advertising accounts just vanish from interfaces. Random buttons turn into "try again" roulette.
It's a good thing their ads are (apparently) effective.
Quick note: it's an unfortunate fact of life that some engineers make a career of exaggerating things.
This is not that, though. I heard this story from people involved at the time, and it's not exaggerated in any way, shape or form.
- There's a websql polyfill. I don't have experience with it, but it looks like a drop in replacement. This is such a strong counterpoint, the rest almost doesn't matter.
- Features tend to be disabled in Chrome with some advanced warning. Not overnight.
- websql is still enabled in chrome today
- if the api were disabled, ad customers could be directed to flip the feature switch in Chrome. If money is on the line, seems like an easy enough task.
I remember when we were to be shut down by AWS because the bill was 2 months due and the administrative contact was a inbox nobody looked at. We discovered it by chance, doing a nightly maintenance: services started to disappear one after another (including the Redis that powered the login, we weren't able to login into the product for half an hour!). We immediately phoned AWS support and asked, no, begged them to turn them up again. They did and we paid everything the morning after.
Hadn't we been in front of the PCs doing the maintenance and witnessed as it was happening, we might have woken up the day after without an online bank (yes) because the production environment would have ceased to exist...
Very interesting story! The title (Google being able to kill facebook) seems a bit exagerated though. If this app was so important (25 to 50% of all facebook revenues), and so important to customers (most powerful editor to manage ads), I'm sure if Google had disabled websql, they would have forked some older chrome / electron with websql support and bundle it with the app.
that would have made builds massive, unless you're referring to just the desktop experience...
TLDR: Facebook built the app responsible for their entire ad platform on a chrome-only tech (WebSQL), and when it was deprecated, instead of dropping in a widely-used polyfill, they decided to do a major 3yr rewrite risking 25% of their revenue in the process. I guess this is the stupid shit that being "too big to fail" permits.