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Why I Work on Ads

jefftk.com

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Re: Why I Work on Ads

#421

Post by joshuamorton »

BCM43 wrote: post #418
joshuamorton wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you draw the difference between an ad and not an ad? Is a doctor telling you to brush 2x a day an ad for toothpaste? What about their suggestion that you floss more? Those are aligned with your well being, but will increase your consumption. > change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. This seems obviously wrong. The implication here is that anything advertised must be bad for the t…

> How do you draw the difference between an ad and not an ad? If it's paid promotion, it's an ad. If the doctor's doing this only because they think it's in my best interest, it's not. The FTC already has some pretty clear guidelines on this because ads are required to be clearly marked as such in many cases.

I guess I should clarify in the context of this discussion, we're defining ads as

>psychological warfare against a populace using their very nature against them. All in an effort to get them to change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. Either they stop looking for alternatives, or they make purchases they don't need to

In this context, a doctor making a recommendation to use a particular brand (paid or unpaid) is an ad. Even a doctor generally recommending you change your behavior to consume more toothpaste is an ad.

So in this framing, how do you determine the difference between an ad and not?

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#422

Post by megaman821 »

bobsomers wrote: post #409
jefftk wrote: post #200

Earlier 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.

I don't mean to come across as too forward or rude, and freely admit that I know nothing about you personally. Thank you for making such generous contributions to charity! The way I look at it is like so: I think most people want to bring a net positive value to society. One way of doing that is working on something whose intrinsic value to society is neutral or nebulous (or just not thinking about it too hard), and…

You are contributing 100% of the value to the person, but it is really the person and the situation.

If I increase online sales by 0.1% through optimizing something, I am worth millions of dollars to Amazon and nearly nothing to Joe Schmoe with a small Shopify site.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#423

Post by svnt »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #174
jasode wrote: post #29

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 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…

Information is not passively processed by the brain! The cost of advertising is not your attention; it is your perception. Advertisements fundamentally alter your perception of the world in favor of whatever the advertiser is showing you. You are choosing to have your view of the world shaped in a way that may change your behavior. Note that this change occurs on an emotional level and cannot simply be discarded by y…

This is a really underrated comment. People here tend to oversubscribe to their own capacity for rational behavior. Just because you can be hyper-rational it in one context doesn’t mean you aren’t human. It does mean that as people with better understanding you have a greater responsibility to protect others still capable of believing the internet has one old weird trick.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#424

Post by falcolas »

mbesto wrote: post #319
falcolas wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much toothpaste do you use on your toothbrush? Something the size of a pea, or the whole length of your toothbrush? 'Cause all you need is the first, but most people do the second. Why? Ads. Why do people have such a great impression of John Deere tractors? To the point where there's a whole culture of "green iron" and other companies had huge trouble breaking into the market? Ads. Ads going back to childhood in…

> if they did not change our behavior? If we'd do something naturally, there would be no need for ads in the first place. How would you find a USB charger brand if you were unaware of any to begin with? > Why do folks trust some brands, and not others? So then why even have a brand to begin with? Are you suggesting we just ban all advertising altogether? When you start a new company, new market, new idea, then what w…

There is a vast world of difference between putting out to the public "I sell X" and following you around the internet to auctioning a consumer's eyeballs to the highest ad bidder. Or intentionally changing your behavior with their ads (the toothpaste one being the simplest to understand).

Trying to conflate the two as equivalent when someone says "ads are toxic" in the context of the online ad industry is doing the argument no good.

> How would you find a USB charger brand if you were unaware of any to begin with?

Why search for a brand, and not a high quality, well reviewed USB charger? To use the original example, googling for "good USB charger" and then buying one via an ad will not give you any guarantees that the USB charger is good. All it guarantees is that they paid the most to get your eyeballs on that particular search.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#425

Post by mhb »

svnt wrote: post #413
mhb wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is a decent person by at least a consequentialist definition - that the harm of ads (if any) due to him is offset by the amount of salary he is able to devote to doing good in the world.

What? I want to put together a yo dawg meme for this but I’m too lazy. This is just another corporate cog rationalization. Unless your company is rocketing toward bankruptcy, your salary is by definition a (much) smaller number than the impact your work has on the world. You cannot offset your day job even by what seems to you a large fraction of your personal income.

It's a Peter Singer rationalization and is essentially another version of the shallow pond parable. Instead of destroying a nice pair of shoes, Jeff is, arguably, making the world worse by working on ads. But he's making it more better by using his salary to help people.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#426

Post by closeparen »

falcolas wrote: post #136

Unpopular opinion: Ads by themselves are unethical. Whether targeted, contextual, or just randomly applied. Ads are psychological warfare against a populace using their very nature against them. All in an effort to get them to change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. Either they stop looking for alternatives, or they make purchases they don't need to (see: toothpaste consumption rates).…

Are people hardwired out of the womb to know that your services are available and that they want them?

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#427

Post by maxclark »

jasode wrote: post #29

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 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 alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube..."

I completely agree - until you have kids watching Youtube the Ads are much better in general.

I am however extremely concerned with the amount of data being collected on my family to then aggregate and sell.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#428

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

burkaman wrote: post #392
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Engineers are not somehow separate from society. When you say "let's get the law to handle it", that "us" includes engineers. Politics is just people, including engineers, figuring out how to organize society. If you think something is wrong, the first step is to not do it. If you think it's so wrong it should be illegal, you can take the optional second step of trying to change the law. There are some circumstances…

> The author has 10 years of experience at Google and could easily find a very well paying job either at another department inside Google, or at another company.

My point is that quitting or getting a different job accomplishes nothing. With a multinational corporation like Google, they will never struggle to fill roles. If you work in these positions, you at least have influence on product growth, and you can use the massive amount of money earned to lobby against harmful behavior. If you quit, you have no internal influence and have less money to take political action with, meaning the only way you could change things is through legislation.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#429

Post by marketchair »

Its a trope at this point, but a major point missed by the author is opportunity cost. Haven't we reached a point where optimizing that many basis points of incremental sales isn't worth what new solutions we could build with all these engineers' time?

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#430

Post by HWR_14 »

cm2012 wrote: post #390
HWR_14 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. FB knows your ethnicity. In violation of US federal law, this information is used to show you different apartment ads. This makes it harder for black people to live in integrated communities. Similar things happen with jobs and ethnicity, jobs and gender, with jobs and age discrimination, etc.

FB does enforce the fair housing act and other laws. The platform is actually quite strict nowadays and catches lots of innocent ads in their filters for protected categories. Ad platforms should follow the law, that's working as planned.

FB may do so now but that's only because of lawsuits as recently as 2019. It wasn't something they volunteered to do.

But you asked how targeted ads hurt people, and I showed a fairly recent example. Something that wouldn't exist without targeted advertising. How does that not prove my point?

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