Hacker News Reader

Comment by dave2000 | Hacker News Reader

dave2000

Kind of odd to even bring ethics up when discussing how websites make money. It doesn't matter at all. Ethics is normally used to discuss other people getting harmed by actions, but when all that harm can be removed simply by closing the browser and doing something else it's barely worth talking about. Is it ethical for a shop to advertise its products in the shop windows when the people running the shop know that there are higher quality products available in a competitors store? Who gives a shit?

View on HN

> Who gives a shit?

I do. That's probably why I won't be running an effective business any time soon. Being nice and not fucking people over doesn't get you far in highly competitive markets.

I strongly second what 'nitrogen wrote[0]. This is very much about ethics.

> Is it ethical for a shop to advertise its products in the shop windows when the people running the shop know that there are higher quality products available in a competitors store?

In my opinion, no. Basically, if you know your product is shit, you are morally obliged to make it better or find something else to sell; lying to people to make them buy your stuff instead of something objectively better is fucking them over for your own gain.

Think about it the next time you find yourself on the receiving end of such businessmen.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11759628

I completely agree and hope that more and more other engineers just say NO to aggressive advertising bullshit. It is not like one has no choice.

That's partially why I left Demand.

> I do. That's probably why I won't be running an effective business any time soon. Being nice and not fucking people over doesn't get you far in highly competitive markets.

> lying to people to make them buy your stuff instead of something objectively better is fucking them over for your own gain

Thanks, this needed to be said. I'm in the same position. I will probably never be able to run a business either because I hold these same views.

That argument would lead you to the conclusion that if your peers are objectively better than you, then it's immoral for you to seek employment; you must improve yourself or choose a different industry. So do you think you are among the world's best in your area of expertise, or are you voluntarily unemployed? ;)

I do suffer from impostor syndrome sometimes :).

That said, most of my peers who are objectively better than me are already employed, and it's up to employers to select from the available pool of employees. My responsibility is to truthfully present my skills during interview.

If it is on the employer to make a value judgement on your skills, then isn't it also up to the window shopper to make a value judgement on the merchandise?

Well, yes - but in my original comment I didn't say that if you get half a feature behind your competitor, you should trash your merchandise and go do something else. I complained about people willingly making and selling shit, covering the deficiencies up with marketing.

In hiring analogy, it would be as if I couldn't code at all, but could talk my way through the interviews - and so instead of actually learning to code, I'd earn money by getting employed at companies and trying to extract as many paychecks and benefits as I can and then quitting before they figure out I'm a fraud.

Me investing my time to get a job through pure charisma, without bringing any merit to the table, is like selling products on pure marketing. Pretty dishonest, and also poisons the ecosystem for everyone.

Fortunately, hypocrisy is not a fallacy.

It is when other people do it.

> hypocrisy is not a fallacy

... but a warning sign that an argument is probably too broad, too absolute, too confidently stated, and has ten thousand exceptions that you didn't consider.

Kind of odd to even bring ethics up when discussing how websites make money. It doesn't matter at all.

This is why we can't have nice things. Because people adopt a FYGM attitude. Because they piss in the pool we all have to swim in.

...all that harm can be removed simply by...

...quitting smoking? Throwing away the prescription pain meds? Giving up junk food?

How about not robbing people of their valuable time and money? How about moving past negative-sum business models where the distributed costs far outweigh the concentrated gains?

> How about moving past ... where the distributed costs far outweigh the concentrated gains?

That pretty much describes living in the US and even Europe to a degree compared to most of the world.

How deep should morality go? Almost all of us in the US consume an order of magnitude more than most of the world for instance.

If I'm actively searching for some information I need, I cannot "simply close the browser and do something else". Search results are polluted with junk and time it takes to find useful information has increased a lot. Finding in-depth information is getting harder and harder because of flood of low quality pages that only hit the keywords and skim the topic on the surface.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com