Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Work on Ads

jefftk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 882 posts

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#441

Post by chakhs »

jnwatson wrote: post #137
falcolas wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the problem is not with advertising in general I disagree. Advertising is intrusive and designed to convince you to do things you wouldn't normally do. It's large scale psychological manipulation that's only considered ethical because we've been doing it for so long.

But so is essentially all interaction with your environment. Every interaction you have with essentially everyone might change your behavior. The only difference is the scale. The problem is that the power of targeted advertising has been democratized (irony intended) to allow everyone to do it. It is capable enough that it can end peaceful democracies.

Only if you think everyone around you is trying to deceive you. Ads are designed to push you into taking unreasonable and uninformed decisions by showing advantages only and amplifying them and deliberately hiding the cons.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#442

Post by lapnitnelav »

code4you wrote: post #352
kingsuper20 wrote: post #61

The online ad business generally mystifies me. While an awful lot of the internet, especially the surveillance advertising part, looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering (and other) talent in the history of the world, ya gotta ask about the efficacy. The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad.…

I totally agree about the YouTube advertising. YouTube literally has hundreds of hours of my video history to work with, yet the vast majority of the ads I see are completely unrelated to my interests. What's the point of all the tracking if they can't even show me relevant ads on YouTube of all places? Podcast ads tend to be much more relevant, and I can even recall purchases I've made due to them. AFAIK my podcast…

That's because the companies winning bidds on your 'views' are targeting you because of your apparent persona, i.e middle aged man/woman in tech -aka middle class ++ with disposable income, rather than what you are interested in.

On top of that, plenty of marketers are absolutely clueless about how to go about their strategy, mostly because unlike previous generations (in online ads), they don't grok the underlying tech at all.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#443

Post by fartcannon »

mhb wrote: post #425
svnt wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue it's the reverse that's true. He's making it significantly worse than his relatively speaking small contributions make better.

If I design advanced weapons, but donate my salary to charity. The good I do is temporary, but the advanced weapon technology can kill, and repress indefinitely.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#444

Post by whitepaint »

sfink wrote: post #380
whitepaint wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free markets don't work like that. We would only be having billions of jobs filling dirt holes if it produced more value to the society than it extracted it from.

No, we would have those jobs if they produced more value to whoever is asking for those holes to be dug. And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in.

> No, we would have those jobs if they produced more value to whoever is asking for those holes to be dug.

Can you provide example of businesses where employees produce value just for the owners of the business but not the society in general?

> And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in.

What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out?

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#445

Post by Nasrudith »

SirSourdough wrote: post #340
Aunche wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 collection of personal information). Most people have no issue with the collection of personal information in itself. They only start caring when others start to make money off of it. If Google completely got rid of ads as a revenue source and still made the exact…

There’s probably truth to that but I think it stems from what seems to be a quite commonly held opinion that ads are hostile to humans. They clutter our browsing and viewing experiences, not to mention our physical world. They use malicious tactics to steal our attention from what we would otherwise choose for ourselves. And the industry spends vast physical and intellectual resources which could almost certainly be…

I think you are deep in a bubble if you believe that thinking ads are harmful is a common viewpoint in general instead of in niche. You won't see newspapers calling ads in general that way for one, they have to add targetted to not look like obvious flaming hypocrites.

The opposing view would call "harmful" downright hysterical in the same way teens would nigh universally roll eyes at Tipper Gore's claims of music as harmful or Jack Chick's anything.

As for claims that the effort and money at Google could be spent in less harmful ways? No it couldn't, not the money they received - except as operating as a take the money and run scam which hardly qualifies as less harm as an instant zeroing of account values. The "harm" is why they got the money in the first place. You have to give the people paying money what they want to keep receiving money to get what you need to fulfill the demands.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#446

Post by cm2012 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #430
cm2012 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Its not like FB has ever let advertisers "exclude black people" before. The critics said it may be possible that protected categories get less ads for housing, employment, etc due to algorithmic bias. That is a subtle danger, and honestly hard to technically implement at scale, but I think FB has always given a good faith effort in this area.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#447

Post by marcinzm »

cblconfederate wrote: post #261
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).…

Not having ads is also unethical. Imagine trying to spread a novel idea / product to a society or an oligopoly that wants to oppress you

>Imagine trying to spread a novel idea / product to a society

If society actually wants it then they can learn about it from places that aggregate such ideas. Moreover if our lives weren't inundated with ads 24/7 then those aggregators would be in much more demand. Very very few advertisements are for novel ideas that are actually a net positive for society.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#448

Post by shkkmo »

jefftk wrote: post #404
stan_rogers wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, that's still attempting to justify the unjustifiable. The only ethical way of targeting is content relevance, which allows inference of the audience interest without using any audience data other than what they're currently looking at.

> The only ethical way of targeting is content relevance Why?

Targeting based on content fundemenally allows everyone access to ad content. It makes content providers more responsible for the Ads they carry. It allows me to avoid sites that show me bad Ads (such as mail order brides).

Targeting Ads based on anything else is invasive, discriminatory, and enables even higher levels of manipulation. If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#449

Post by elliekelly »

cm2012 wrote: post #154
elliekelly wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the "ads are useful" argument frustratingly disingenuous. It's a transparent and deliberate attempt to move the discussion away from what people actually take issue with in modern internet advertising - tracking and data collection - and instead tries to frame it as something far more benign. The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it consta…

Okay, do you have an example of someone being hurt by tracking and data collection done by Facebook and Google?

There are so many examples readily available that I have a hard time believing any HN user claiming to be unaware of them is anything other than willfully ignorant. It’s probably discussed here every single day if not multiple times each day.

A simple search here for “facebook data” will get you started: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=facebook+data

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#450

Post by jdbernard »

ExtraE wrote: post #348
jdbernard wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

> You get more, more valuable content

There's a couple of non-sequitors here.

1. You don't necessarily get more valuable content. A lot of times the higher ROI leads to gamification of the whole system and you get more content, but it's all spam or varying levels of quality. This spam varies from complete trash to fairly polished, but none of it is actually valuable.

2. Even if we concede the point and assume that we get purely more valuable content, there is a limit to the amount of content anyone can consume in a day. And the advertising itself competes for your attention with even that valuable content. So the benefit from an increased amount of valuable content has a natural limit. The harm from the increase of ads is not so naturally bounded. So even if the balance of cost/benefit starts on the side you think, where the benefit of the content outweighs the cost of advertising, it will naturally, eventually trend towards the cost outweighing the benefit.

You are correct that in my view, personally, the cost already far outweighs the benefit. We can argue whether that's true on the whole for most people, but there is no argument when it comes to me personally. It's not worth it. There is a lot of content I only consume because I'm blocking ads. If I was unable to block ads and had to pay that cost, I would certainly forgo the content.

Post reply on HN