>There are hucksters in every industry, and if you ask me, crypto has some next-level hucksterism.
It's certainly hard to compare entire industries apples-to-apples. The worst parts of the cryptocurrency industry are definitely worse than the worst parts of the advertising industry. However, I personally feel like in an "average", "net", or "expected value" sense, advertising may be worse. But maybe it isn't; either way, all I was trying to say is I really just don't like advertising or ad tech, and I wanted to use a rather extreme comparison to viscerally convey that. (Perhaps a little like a kind of "bullshit-industry" analogue of Godwin's law - my comparison was somewhat tongue-in-cheek and bad faith, basically, but also kind of not, because I do like some aspects of cryptocurrencies while I like zero aspects of advertising.)
>that supports indie news publishers
Sure, and maybe someone else could've started one that supports starving children. (The originally posted article similarly mentions that one of their reasons for working on ads is "I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give".)
These all feel like cop-outs to me. I could significantly support independent creators or starving children by running a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, but it still doesn't make it positive on net. The difference is that you and the article author simultaneously say that you feel like the work is inherently positive, too, which in my book just makes it delusional rather than dissonant or contradictory.
So I absolutely don't think you're at all behaving knowingly unethically; just unknowingly. I think part of the issue here is that it's generally only a tiny bit unethical, so it takes a lot for it to add up to being a-lot-unethical, and humans (including myself) usually aren't so good at perceiving these potential cumulative effects when they're upstream of it all.
>The core of advertising is just getting some message about your product or service to a relevant audience.
At the same time, I can't not acknowledge this. How can I fault a small business owner for wanting people to know they exist? There's some cognitive dissonance of my own, here. And at the moment I'm resolving the dissonance by disliking the advertising and ad tech industries rather than disliking businesses who place ads. (As long as the ads they place aren't annoying, deceptive, or malicious in any way.)
Maybe my opinion on all this will eventually shift a bit, though, because a lot of it's certainly more emotional than logical. At a very deep, subjective level, I just strongly dislike advertising and everything about it. It gives me nothing but negative feelings. Most of the cryptocurrency industry gives me negative feelings, too - but the industry as a whole doesn't give me nothing but negative feelings. Some part of it gives me neutral or positive feelings.