Why I Work on Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#841

Post by Grustaf » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #812

cutemonster wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not just paying with your "attention" And maybe abolishing democracy Political manipulation ads, helping an authoritarian rise to power. But ads for buying what I just searched for: "buy new running shoes", aren't like that -- they can be helpful instead :-). It's mainly social network ads like on Facebook that are dangerous for society? From the article: > I think advertising is positive It's both? Ads are differe…

I tried starting a website a while back that would give reliable, unbiased information on a certain class of goods and services. I looked at my competitors and saw that most of them were obviously shilling for the company that was paying them the most, which was never the best. I figured by being the most honest I could be the most trusted and win out. The trouble is, the best companies would rely upon word of mouth.…

Figure out which brand you prefer, contact them and negotiate a commission. If you're open to your readers about it, it should be fine.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#842

Post by meowface » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #820

meowface wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Usability costs. Ads are by definition content users didn't want but are receiving anyway. They use up the bandwidth of users. They take up space on the interface and distract the user, taking attention away from more important things. They make sites uglier and harder to use. They lower the signal to noise ratio. Banner blindness. It's been proven that people have become used to ignoring banner ads. Their eyes jump…

Oh yeah, I can't believe I didn't even mention some obvious ones like bandwidth usage, slower page performance due to loading and rendering and JavaScript-based trackers, etc. There are so many different things to enumerate.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#843

Post by hcs » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #785

dkersten wrote: post #737

I’m against advertisement, in my opinion it’s the worst thing to happen to the internet. However, I have a problem with Google adverts specifically and that is that they’re absolute hot garbage. Google has advertised to me: outright scams, malware, gambling, mobile games with extremely exploitative monetisation. And they are working to take away any privacy I might have to keep showing me this shit. In my opinion, Go…

When I was a impoverished kid, how else was I supposed to get internet and email accept for with Juno, then NetZero or stealing internet? Yeah I used gophernet through a local library dialup and it was not the internet. I mean, my brother once bought a "personal fan" for $1 and that was the most coveted possession we had for about 6 months. As someone who grew up extremely poor and effectively dumpster dived for my f…

Juno and NetZero were magic for me growing up when we couldn't afford dialup (and could only rarely make it to the library). And my current job is almost entirely, if indirectly, funded by the ad industry, doing work which I hope has some intrinsic value.

But I think the advertising industry as currently constituted is a misuse of attention, money, and other resources.

I haven't solved this dilemma for myself, but I don't ignore the conflict just because of the positives. Hopefully I'll find the courage to do more than gripe.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#844

Post by pydry » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

Grustaf wrote: post #840

pydry wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do I don't think advertising does work well on everybody nor does it have to. Maybe not even half of us need to be susceptible for it to be as profitable as it is. I have noticed some people are much more susceptible to suggestion than others. T…

IF advertising didn't work, on average, it would probably have gone away by now, don't you think?

I didn't say it didn't work.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#845

Post by ashtonbaker » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #471

ashtonbaker wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with the narrow definition, you missed: > in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. A dentist recommending that I use more toothpaste may change my behavior, but not in a detrimental way. If the dentist is paid to make the same recommendation, it's more difficult to say whether they made the recommendation purely out of my best interest, so the definition begins to apply again.

This gets back to what I said about comparative advantage. The monetary transfer is only bad if you assume the company can only gain if you lose and the situation is zero sum. If you using toothpaste is good for you, and good for the company, what's the issue? To use a more current example: would Pfizer marketing in a way that intentionally appeals to anti-vax people be mind control to their detriment? Taking a step…

Thanks for expanding. I agree with your delineation between raising awareness or convincing, I think. I don't think it's the most helpful way to understand ads and their potential for harm. There's another way to categorize ads - maybe orthogonal - based on whether they are presented as part of an advertising network or not. There's a fundamental difference between showing a box on a shelf and buying ads on a billboard. Or perhaps the line should be drawn at targeted ads. It's of course possible to show benign "we exist" ads via Facebook ads, or political disinformation ads in a newspaper, but it seems to me that certain methods of advertising are obviously more conducive to harmful, manipulative ads.

Also (and this is more radical), I do think it's a legitimate to want to unsubscribe, even from "we exist" ads. Attention is valuable, it shouldn't be considered an inalienable right to sneak anything you want into my consciousness for the purposes of selling. Even if you accept that it's not a zero-sum game. I recognize that this is not the status quo at all currently, but it's the feeling behind comments like the above.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#846

Post by mc32 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #772

mc32 wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with your gist; however, I would point out that there are niche review sites run by enthusiasts (whether computer parts, cameras, tools, gadgets, clothing, and so on.) and there are the SEO types that are near-worthless. Enthusiast sites have a range of community-only and not ads, some have affiliate links and some have paid reviews and so on. So you have to know how the site operates and take that…

So you happen to have a list of these niche sites or a link to a site that reviews the review sites?

I am thinking about the car enthusiast sites/forums (where you can search for information how to fix minor issues), also places like cpubenchmark, tomshardware, anadtech, dpreview, shoptoolreview and so on. You have to get to know the forum and how they make money, whether it's a labor of love or main source of income, how transparent they are about sponsorship, etc.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#847

Post by canadianfella » Fri, May 07, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #777

adriand wrote: post #647

The author writes that you can either pay with money or you can “pay with your attention”. What’s left unsaid is the cost of that attention. I believe that cost is very high and it isn’t just ads, it’s the design of countless products including social media sites, games and even the site you’re reading this on right now. It’s all designed to extract as much attention as possible, and the cost is people’s ability to c…

The thing is, Google's customers generally do not simply want attention, they want people to pay them for something. Thus, there is a monetary cost if the advertiser succeeds. Google is just a middleman, taking a cut of those prospective sales. The sad part of online ads is that the internet allows an advertiser, with Google's help, to potentially annoy hundreds of millions of people in order to make some small numbe…

> and that is where the whole business becomes far too intrusive and counterproductive.

How is it counterproductive?

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#848

Post by sophacles » Fri, May 07, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

originalvichy wrote: post #821

sophacles wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people comparing ads to guns, plagues, and locusts need to check their own values. Ads support free stuff for the poor and middle classes. Until i can ACTUALLY opt out by paying money, you need to get off your high horse. My data is clearly more valuable to you than my dollars - otherwise I'd have a choice. > If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I s…

I think the displeasure you feel should be directed towards website developers. As far as I know the "no surveillance" option is there: the person who wrote the website can choose whether to inject a tracking program to the code or not. People are misdirecting their hatred towards ad-tracking towards ad developers when in reality the people who decide to use ad trackers in their websites should be asked questions. I…

That's pure bs. I think I'll blame the giant, powerful monopolists (either aspiring or actual). They have been using their clout to kill off organic discovery and trying to ensure stuff that isn't part of the surveillance system gets buried. This isn't a "guns don't kill people; people kill people situation", this is a "I don't like money but I want to eat, so I'll use money" situation - website developers can participate in the surveillance state or starve. That's not a practical choice.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#849

Post by w0de0 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #664

sophacles wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people comparing ads to guns, plagues, and locusts need to check their own values. Ads support free stuff for the poor and middle classes. Until i can ACTUALLY opt out by paying money, you need to get off your high horse. My data is clearly more valuable to you than my dollars - otherwise I'd have a choice. > If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I s…

> My data is clearly more valuable to you than my dollars - otherwise I'd have a choice. Alternatively, people are just not that willing to pay money to avoid ads. FB's revenue per user in the US is ~$5/month, but users who would pay to avoid ads tend to be richer, so to break even FB might need to charge, say, $20/month. I'd bet too few people are willing to pay $20/month to justify the costs and complexity of offer…

"Per user" implies a relationship between the mark and the platform - a continuation of the fiction of consent that pervades Facebook and Google. So I'd rephrase your apologia this way:

"FB's revenue per human datum in the US is ~$5/month, but discrete datums who both know they are tracked by Facebook and are rich enough to pay protection money for privacy are few. To protect everyone, they would need to pay $20/month."

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#850

Post by composer » Fri, May 07, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

nonameiguess wrote: post #815

bmn__ wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want to be utilitarian about it, then you must weigh the lives saved by donations against the lives destroyed by advertisements. If Jeff does not comes out ahead, he is terrible. The Less Wrong creed "shut up and multiply" is relevant, I ask commenters be sure to understand what I mean before replying to my argument. I estimate that while he is still earning income, the upper bound for person-years save…

That isn't how to evaluate a career choice. You evaluate it against all other choices, not in a vacuum. Choosing to work in advertising only comes out ahead if the excess of the good you do with the money you earn over the harm done by the job exceeds the excess good you could have done with money earned over harm of the job from any other job you could have chosen. Net good is better than net harm, but it's not bett…

I like this argument and would like to strengthen it in sligthly diffent dimension...

Every time I hear/read a "net offset" justification like in the greatgrandparent comment my brain only hears

  I'm gonna sell heroin/meth/crack to fund a rehab clinic; 
  AND 
  if more persons are rehabbed than addicted 
  then the whole endeavour is a good thing;
  AND 
  I am a good person; call me "one of the good ones.

The point of the analogy is to share the perspective that "net offsetting" isn't automatically a good thing. Many times the fundamental nature of the initial thing to be offset, in this case advertising, must be given primacy over anything else.

Some see the nature of advertising as neutral, some even see it as good, some see it it as evil. I see it as too impractical to wield as intended; rare-times good, some-times neutral and most-times bad.

Although we can measure air water and noise pollutions, we still have wild disagreements over how much to allow. Given that we suck at measuring the mental pollution produced by advertising-based business models, it is natural that disagreement is even greater over mental pollution.

Where is the startup that shows folks the pollution-free mental spaces that they didn't know they wanted_needed, but that they will never let-go once experienced. Sadly, most minds are limited to imagining the same sad choices jefftk listed. I for one choose to believe that people exist who see how to "fund the web" sans advertising. To them I leave this future message: "Hurry up dammit. We need you. The jefftk's of this world are making the most ungodly of big messes."