Why I Work on Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#721

Post by meowface » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #595

drcongo wrote: post #119

As the person who originally asked "why" I feel like I ought to respond, though much of it is covered by other comments. I used to work in more trad advertising, so my question wasn't so much an objection to working in advertising itself, but specifically Google's version of advertising, which I see as gross overreach into people's personal lives. In other comments people have mentioned YouTube subscriptions as being…

> That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here. [I work at Google too, not on ads though] Could you clarify what you mean by this. A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messa…

>Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention

Does Google collect information about what websites you visit (via Chrome / Google Analytics / Google account cookies) and what search queries you make and what search results you click on and provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form? (Where advertisers includes not just third parties but also Google / Google subsidiaries themselves.)

If so, that's definitely "harvesting and selling you", IMO. I'm not sure what other form of "harvesting and selling you" would be possible, even?

>A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that.

I assume one of the things they mean is reading Gmail email messages and showing you ads based on the contents of those email messages. My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#722

Post by fartcannon » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

mhb wrote: post #467

fartcannon wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like it would depend on the details. In your example, I might agree that there is net harm to the world. But in other cases, and maybe Jeff's, the harm done by working on ads may be more than offset by the lives saved. Since Jeff is a thoughtful guy and this is important to him, I'm inclined to think that he is producing net good. If you can convince him otherwise, he'd probably change what he's doing.

At best his work is annoying to a lot of peoole. At worst, he profits (a great deal, I might add) from a industry that exploits, manipulates, and coerces.

It's not really my or anyone elses job to convince him.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#723

Post by dougmwne » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #715

manigandham wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely know that it works. We generate petabytes everyday proving it does. That being said there’s plenty of waste due to politics, bureaucracy, bad tech and general mismanagement. It’s important to separate the concept from the implementation.

As a consumer, why does it very strongly feel like in my case, it never, ever works, then? And why does pretty much everyone else I've ever heard talk about this say the exact same thing? Are we being 5D-chess'd and it's working on all of us subliminally and subconsciously and we just think we're immune? Or is there some other huge population of people out there it's working on who actually somehow are real manifesta…

I used to think like you, but now I think it's 5D chess. Marketing is like air, so ever present you can't even see it. If you don't buy anything and live off your homesteading, then marketing probably doesn't have any effect on you. If you live a life anything like the average westerner, you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on things you had to be taught to desire. It's in your TV shows, your news articles, your Instagram feed, your word of mouth, your everything unless you are in the forest (but not looking at anyone else's hiking gear brands). Our economy is based on you consuming many many times more goods and services than your great grandparents, and it wasn't cheap to train you to do that.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#724

Post by _proofs » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

TchoBeer wrote: post #629

andrepd wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being sarcastic? You cannot see consequences in the fact of a gigantic tech company having access to: searches, emails, attachments, photos, videos, location, messages, calls, apps installed and their usage, sleep schedules, driving styles, medical records, and about 1001 things I forgot to mention?

As long as they're not doing anything illegal? No.

genuinely cannot tell if trolling or not -- do you not see a security implication to centralizing PII (or similar data)?

to me it seems really bad to mine and centralize PII (note: this PII is also arbitrarily being shared with third-parties, usually without explicit or informed consent from user).

---

ie: this is data which is mined in a way, depth and scope of any implication is usually abstracted away from the user or hand-waved away in legalese or presented in such an annoying way users have become conditioned to unconditionally accept that which they do not understand, and therefore they likewise usually remain uninformed/ignorant/naive of any implication, security or otherwise, in order to get to the service asap. and this is something absolutely exploited by these companies.

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do we really want companies, companies who have demonstrated they are not immune to simple mistakes leading to vulnerabilities, or leaked PII, mind you, to be in a position where we the user have no choice, but to trust it won't leak PII to nefarious persons (persons who can then do meaningfully harmful things with even basic PII)?

we are already bleeding enough PII as it is -- when should we truly be concerned with stopping it? if never, and there is no concern as you seem to indicate, then let us arbitrarily share medical information, too.

on that subject, there are also so many instances of arbitrarily collected and shared PII, for the sake of ads, that would almost unequivocally be a HIPA violation in other contexts -- to me it seems asinine to have such well-defined understandings of PII for the protection of the person in some contexts, but yet in the context of ads, suddenly anything goes, and the spiel we always get from the ads advocates is: but it is good for the user and the content creators cannot exist without it, so it must exist as is, unchained.

(un)ironically this is also a psychology presented by abusive relationships where the abuser keeps the abused thinking they need them, and the abuser establishes itself as a (survival) dependency in the abused's mind.

idk, i'm pretty skeptical of the claim that ad tech and the ad industry has good intentions, and i am becoming increasingly of the opinion that most of the advertising models advocates are trying so hard to convince users to enable, are just fucking profit-driven-at-all-costs cancer.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#725

Post by cm2012 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #715

manigandham wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely know that it works. We generate petabytes everyday proving it does. That being said there’s plenty of waste due to politics, bureaucracy, bad tech and general mismanagement. It’s important to separate the concept from the implementation.

As a consumer, why does it very strongly feel like in my case, it never, ever works, then? And why does pretty much everyone else I've ever heard talk about this say the exact same thing? Are we being 5D-chess'd and it's working on all of us subliminally and subconsciously and we just think we're immune? Or is there some other huge population of people out there it's working on who actually somehow are real manifesta…

Most advertising spend on Facebook or IG is actually tracked on click and conversion based performance, it's not subtle at all.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#726

Post by abecedarius » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #220

raspyberr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I foresee micropayments being extremely common place in the future. Something like a digital wallet browser extension. And instead of paying 5p to watch a video, you will instead pay 5p to skip 3 minute ads.

The articles said that the industry has been talking about micropayments for 25 years and says it's hard. I think the real issue is that no large-ish tech organization has any incentive to invest in micropayments.

Digital cash saw no uptake for decades either, between Chaum and Satoshi. This may turn out similarly (and it's not as if it's implausible for digital cash to be a prerequisite for micropayments to take off, in practice).

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#727

Post by meowface » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

dougmwne wrote: post #723

meowface wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consumer, why does it very strongly feel like in my case, it never, ever works, then? And why does pretty much everyone else I've ever heard talk about this say the exact same thing? Are we being 5D-chess'd and it's working on all of us subliminally and subconsciously and we just think we're immune? Or is there some other huge population of people out there it's working on who actually somehow are real manifesta…

I used to think like you, but now I think it's 5D chess. Marketing is like air, so ever present you can't even see it. If you don't buy anything and live off your homesteading, then marketing probably doesn't have any effect on you. If you live a life anything like the average westerner, you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on things you had to be taught to desire. It's in your TV shows, your news articles, you…

It's certainly quite possible. However

>It's in your TV shows, your news articles, your Instagram feed, your word of mouth, your everything unless you are in the forest

I think I, and some decent percentage of HN readers, may kind of be "in the forest". I don't watch TV, I don't read news articles, I've never had an Instagram account or any kind of social media account (besides more "pseudonymous" social media like HN and reddit), I have comprehensive ad blockers, etc.

I also don't really buy products. I buy food, maybe I'll upgrade to a new laptop or phone every 4 - 5 years, but otherwise I don't think I really "consume" new things.

The only thing I can think of that ads have consciously made me do is pay to get rid of them. For example, I pay for YouTube Premium so I can never see ads. (Ad blocking gets tough for mobile devices and casting to other screens.) They got me there, because I watch a lot of YouTube (which I acknowledge is kind of "the new TV") and in some ways it's the best $12/month I've ever spent. It doesn't cover video makers including sponsored content, but I use crowdsourced browser extensions to identify and skip those.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#728

Post by lolinder » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

baby-yoda wrote: post #202

My gripe with the author's rationalization (which is probably held by many of his peers as well, not to point specifically at him) is that the default of the web has become that you must accept ads being thrown in your face to do the most benign browsing activity. a user makes an http request to a domain. the current accepted response is to send back ads and trackers, pillage and extract as much value from that user…

The web, even as it is, functions exactly like this. You make a request to a domain, that domain says "here are some trackers". The user's browser then has a choice about whether to load them. My browser (and the browsers of many here) just ignores the request to download scripts that I don't want, because that's what I told it to do and the browser is my agent.

The big problem is that most people do not use a browser that is truly their agent--they use a browser that is an agent of an advertising company. The result is entirely predictable: Chrome acts in the best interests of its client, and loads the ads and trackers.

If we want to change the status quo with regards to advertising, we don't need to change the technology at all: we have to change the way people see a web browser. We need to help people to make the paradigm shift from "Chrome is how you consume content on the internet" to "a browser is an agent that acts on my behalf in the digital realm".

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#729

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #709

sidlls wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the cost in attention--those ads are produced with the price of our privacy included in the cost.

I feel like there are other costs beyond attention and privacy, too. Costs of malware and fraud are also common, but for the sake of argument we can just focus on somewhat more "legitimate" / "non-malicious" ads. (Emphasis on the scare quotes.) There's the aesthetic cost. If I see an ad on or near a nicely designed or produced website or video, it immediately detracts from the visual appeal. There's the annoyance cos…

[deleted]

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#730

Post by fomine3 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:57 AM UTC

omginternets wrote: post #41

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 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…

Should exposing thoughts without fresh insight be downvoted?