I'm all for content-only based ads that take a reasonable amount/location of screen space, minimal/no distracting motions, very low computational expenditure.
How about making ad containers on a page that enforces these?
Why I Work on Ads
341–350 of 882 posts
Re: Why I Work on Ads
#342Sorry but this is a bunch of BS, why work on ads? Because you get a big fat check at the end of the month, and that perfectly fine.
Re: Why I Work on Ads
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the first thing he says to defend his work with ads is that he gives money to charity The reason that I work (as opposed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement ) is so I can donate, which is why I start with that piece of the explanation.
People aren't asking you "why do you choose to work on ads rather than not work at all", they're asking "why do you work on ads rather than a different area". In that context, the fact that you work to donate is not relevant, since you could switch to a different area and continue to donate.
Few areas pay as well, and someone's gonna do it. This is a rational way to maximize his capacity to influence his world as much as possible.
Let's not blame engineers for what is effectively a political issue. If ads are an issue, let's get the law to handle it.
Re: Why I Work on Ads
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems ( e.g. large-scale collect…
In the span of just a few comments in the thread below, I've seen people claim that the ethical problem is: 1. All ads in general. 2. Targeted advertisement, regardless of the privacy implications. 3. Data collection for targeted advertisement. 4. Data collection for anything. 5. Whether or not users consent to all of the above. So I don't really think it is fair for anybody to insist that there is a single agreed up…
Why it has to be a single ethical problem? The industry is quite capable of having multiple ethical problems in parallel.
Re: Why I Work on Ads
#345Aren't effective ads good for society? Don't they make us prosperous? Jobs are created, people get cheaper goods, many small businesses emerge?
You're begging the question. Are they a net good? Do they make us prosperous? Do they create jobs, etc? Because there's a strong case to be made that they: - exploit the credulous, mentally-deficient and emotionally unstable - carry significant externalities in the form of personal data collection & malware - contribute to psychological distress (anxiety, degraded sense of self-worth, poor body image, etc) - cause fi…
Yeah, there are people who overshop, I'm sorry, but so what? What's the alternative? Ban ads? Let the government decide what should be sold / not sold? I believe it should be left to the individual what they consume and buy with their own earned money. No one has the right to say that they can't buy tobacco, or take a predatory loan.
"personal data collection & malware" - you agree to those conditions. In return you get amazing free products. Don't want that? There are many alternatives (Linux, Chromium / Firefox, duckduckgo, telegram and other alternative open-source products).
Re: Why I Work on Ads
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system. Oh? People have been trying since at least https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/246/ (1995)
You seem to be implying that solutions to problems succeed on their technical merit alone. This is trivially false. I used the phrasing "from a technical perspective" very intentionally, for a reason. And, in the specific case of microtransactions, it's well-known that consumers like cheap and free things - which causes them to flock to ad-funded services because said services make it as difficult as possible to see…
A big issue with micropayments is taxes.
If we are using micropayments to let users directly pay a site for views of that site's articles or for skipping ads on those articles, then the jurisdiction that the user is in is likely to consider that a sale in their jurisdiction and want the site to collect VAT or sales tax. If people from 50 different countries purchase articles, you might end up having to deal with taxes in 50 different countries! (Even countries that have thresholds of the form "no tax unless total sales in the country are above $X" might require you to register there and fill out a form each quarter saying you didn't meet the threshold).
The site doesn't have that problem if instead they sell ads and get their money from the advertisers or from the ad network. That money is taxed, but it is taxed as income in the location of the site, not as a sale where the users are. Having people visit your site from 50 different countries doesn't increase the complexity of your tax situation.
Assuming we can't get widespread adoption of more micropayment friendly rules for online purchased of content access and/or ad skipping, there is a way to use micropayments for that while avoiding the tax jurisdiction explosion.
That is the imposition of a middleman service. It sounds like Blendle might be such a middleman.
You buy articles from the middleman, making your micropayment to the middleman. The middleman license the content for resale from the publishers and pays a royalty based on volume.
If you arrange this right when the user buys an article the middleman is the seller for VAT or sales tax purposes and so it is the middleman that has to deal with all the different jurisdictions. The publishers only have to deal with their own jurisdiction and perhaps the jurisdiction of the middleman.
But then you have the issue of who will be the middleman? I don't think we want it to end up like streaming movies, where we've got Netflix and Disney+ and Peacock and Hulu and Prime and Google and HBO Max and a whole bunch of others and you need to use more than one of them to see all the content you want.
We probably need at most 3 or 4 big middlemen that are easy enough for publishers to use that most sites that want to offer a pay per article option are signed up with all of those middlemen.
My guess is that it might end up being the same companies that provide "sign on with" services that end up providing micropayment middlemen services and/or companies that already provide big online stores that sell internationally.
That would be Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
Re: Why I Work on Ads
#347The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer . The alternati…
>The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems ( e.g. large-scale collect…
Here is a genuine question, if one I cannot help but deliver in an acid tone:
what does it mean to be a "decent" person, if one is willfully, or disingenuously, ignorant of participation in an unethical system?
Decent is a stand-in for ethical; this is a contradiction at a logical level,
but to answer my own question,
in contemporary American culture, not least in the readership of HN,
there is disturbing dance between "moving fast and breaking things" (like the law, or social contracts, or presumption of civility) when that is convenient,
and a contradictory but also embraced enthusiasm for giving people benefit of doubt and analogously, as in this case, presumption that intention excuses offense.
I.e. that having "earnest intentions" born in some degree of perhaps bad-faith ignorance, excuses amoral consequence.
That is the sort of wishful/fuzzy/poor thinking that has led our industry into its current state of moral bankruptcy and crises.
By no definition is Jeff a decent person. (Really!)
Re: Why I Work on Ads
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it won't make them nearly as much money. Yes. That's the problem. Make less money from ads --> make less content/riskier to make content (same thing). The more money ads make, the fewer of them you have to see to fund the same amount of content (or, alternatively, you get more/higher quality content for a given (fixed) quantity of ads).
That's not how it plays out though. More effective/profitable ads does not lead to less ads being shown. In fact, it's the opposite. As ads have become more targeted, and theoretically more profitable according to this argument, we have more of them. There is no set "amount of effectiveness," so to speak. If ads are more profitable, advertisers are still going to spend just as much or more on them, precisely because…
Right, ok.
So you see more ads, the people publishing content make more money (more ads + better ads --> more valuable eyeballs --> more valuable content), and then the ROI for making content is higher, so people make + publish more of it. You get more, more valuable content.
Now, you may argue that the privacy cost is higher than the reward of more/better content, but I think that it probably isn't. Especially because it's hard (not impossible) to match your browsing history with your IRL identity and no one really cares about you, I think that the privacy cost is smaller than the reward. You might disagree.
Re: Why I Work on Ads
#349The problem is not Ads themselves, it's the fact that they inject perverse incentives into the entire tech ecosystem.
To maximize your advertising revenue, you need to track your users as effectively as possible. This:
a) Reduces user privacy. Even recent developments like FLoC, which appear to be pro-privacy on the surface, are really just yet another datapoint with which to violate the privacy of users.
b) Reduces performance. It's easy to blame trendy bloated tech stacks for the state of the web, but the reality is that a big chunk of the slowness comes from ad-related tracking and delivery technologies (install privacy extensions on a low-end system and see the difference!). This reduced performance disproportionately affects those with lower system and network resources, further reinforcing global inequality.
Although some will disagree, I do think that it's possible to advertise ethically, but no large corporation operating in a capitalist society is going to be doing that voluntarily - unless strict regulation comes down from above (Spoiler Alert: It won't).
All that said, I don't blame the author for working in adtech, but perhaps only due to my rather bleak perspective that we're all just cogs in the capitalist machine whether we like it or not.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
P.S: Cynically, I think the author's announcement of their charitable donations counts against them. It makes it seem like he's trying to "offset" the harm caused by his work, even if he won't openly admit that such harm exists. Charitable donations may make you a net-virtuous individual, but they do nothing to address the harm of adtech itself - which is orthogonal to the author's original claim that they believe that advertising is a good thing.
Re: Why I Work on Ads
#350Oh man, my sides. This is so rich I'm going to be ill. So the guy who puts his donations majorly on blast is Yet Another Ads Guy. The thing about a guilty conscience is it's hard to miss. Don't worry bro, you're perfect, go make that bread. Sleazy.