Keep in mind that display ads are wildly ineffective to begin with. Targeted ads may raise your click through rate from 0.2% to 0.6% but that isn't good enough to justify the massive privacy loss and use of bandwidth, server time, engineering talent, etc...
That's the saddest part. A lot of talented people could be working on important problems, but instead they're trying to make people click on ads a tenth of a percent more, so they will buy Crest slightly more often than Colgate.
I guess it's no worse than going into finance: just another way for someone with talent and ambition to make a boatload of money while providing almost no value to society (and sometimes negative value). Still, one could hope that talented people would sacrifice a bit of lucre to do some good. The inventors of Arpanet don't have rocket companies, but I bet they're living comfortably.
And what about all the other stuff that you get for free, including the majority of the content on the internet? What about all the other services like Gmail and the technical projects that have been opensourced? What about all the people who got rich and went on to invest in or start their own companies?
There's no "right" thing to work on. It's like asking why do we have astronauts in space [1] when there are problems here on earth. The truth is that it takes all kinds of people to make this world work and we're all better off if people get to do what they want to do, and hopefully it happens to be what they like doing too.
1. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
It's only free if you think that the details of your life aren't worth anything (I specifically object to advertising targeted to individuals, I have no problem with ads similar to ones you find in a magazine or print newspaper).
Without any discussion, ad companies asserted that they have the right to spy on users and track them in almost every area of their lives online and off. I think we are finally starting to push back in the other direction. Europe has GDPR and I think it's only a matter of time before we have something similar in the US. IMHO companies should only be allowed to collect and use information on individuals in ways that each individual decides to allow.
> There's no "right" thing to work on.
But there are plenty of wrong things to work on.
I'm not against ad-supported businesses, but I'll bet Google would have made plenty of money off plain old search ads, probably enough to make Gmail free for everyone. If not, they could have charged a few bucks a month, or shown untargeted ads. In any case, they wouldn't have had an enormous database of PII, just waiting to be hacked or mined in more malicious ways when the ad bubble pops (e.g. credit reports, insurance).
> There's no "right" thing to work on.
Really[1]? We're paying hucksters 5-10x what we're paying teachers now. If that's what the market demands, then the market is twisted.
[1] http://www.metrolyrics.com/wernher-von-braun-lyrics-tom-lehr...
I prefer that we all have the freedom that you can actually choose to do that, or not.
Wow... Thats cormac mccarthy level bleak but at least honest and I hope not to live in the world your labor may bring into being.
EdTech is mostly just a scam to siphon public school money to private companies. I'd rather just lobby my school district to pay teachers more.
What's the most "right" thing then and why aren't you working on it already? I assume curing cancer is somewhere on that list? Let us all know when you'll be getting to it.