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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

>FB ads engineer here.

Just wanted to stop by and say that your work is actively making the world a worse place to live, and you should feel bad about it. I hope those RSUs are worth your soul.

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Personal attacks like this will get you banned here. Not cool.

For most people, their work is the thing they know most about. If a person shows up here to discuss that and is met with this sort of harassment, it disincentivizes them—and probably others reading—to contribute about what they know. That makes HN strictly worse.

I know the counterargument for posting like this, but there are lots of places on the internet where shaming is the norm, and you can take this there. This is a community where shaming is not the norm (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and we're not going to let that slide.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Whether ads (in general, or specifically FB ads) make the world a worse place is up for debate, but the casual hatred in your comment directed at this person is actually making this world a worse place to live in.

Facebook taught the world it's acceptable to communicate this way. Don't bore us with your well thought out comments.

No it didn't.

Feels pretty good to subsidize internet access in the developing world and serve as the primary growth engine for millions of small businesses who wouldn't otherwise be able to reach their customers at such a low cost.

> subsidize internet access in the developing world

Are you talking about Facebook's abuse of power to strengthen its monopoly position in developing nations?

If so, 83% of voters in the USA thinks what you are describing as "subsidy" should be illegal here[1], and it would better be described as neo-colonialism than a subsidy.

Is there some other way in which facebook is "subsidizing internet access"?

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/364528-poll-83-percent...

I don’t think OP is talking net neutrality, but Internet.org

I assumed he/she was. Internet.org is in direct opposition to the principle of net neutrality.

Does enabling illegal renting ads make you feel good? https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...

...and accelerate the concentration of wealth and power to the point where the top 10% are starting to complain about the top 1%. Moving into developing nations is just the system expanding to extract what little surplus value they create.

If the point about small businesses was true, we'd see a worldwide surge in their numbers. I don't think we do.

It makes sense, too — the overall pile of disposable income didn't meaningfully increase thanks to Facebook, so it's a zero sum game between small businesses and Coca-Cola. We know who wins that in the long term. Although now with local papers out of business, gutted by facebook.

What about the fact that ads are the only reason garbage such as clickbait and misinformation exists? A lot of that garbage wouldn't exist if its only revenue stream wasn't there.

What about the countless scams or dubious products advertised in Facebook ads while you look the other way because they're still making money for company? If you have the power to broadcast content to a major part of the world's population, this should also involve some responsibility and strict controls on the content, aka thorough human reviews. I don't care if it makes the prices of the ads go up; legitimate brands will still be able to afford it, and the market will become a better place for everyone (plus maybe with less crap in the ads people will actually like them a bit more).

Finally, if you want to do ads, why not just ask the users what products they're interested in, categories they belong to, etc and use that for targeting instead of stalking their every move to try and infer this information?

I suggest you read this regarding the negative impacts of advertising on society: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

It's like a cult, isn't it? In no world can what Facebook's ad system teams are doing be summarized by that level of autofellatio but Facebook. Hacker News is for intellectually stimulating discussions, not marketing-speak to mask false claims. For the record, your claims are primarily false. They pulled out of most of those countries a long while ago, after they realized "colonizer killing net neutrality" is a bad look.

https://theoutline.com/post/4383/facebook-quietly-ended-free...

And the "small businesses" you describe are mostly MLM and anti-vaccine snake oil sellers, so I'm not sure why you feel good about it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/02...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/11/15/majority-an...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/anti-vaccination-group...

With all the respect due, you've got blood on your hands. We have a word for that in civilized society; I think it's "murderer," but maybe they call it something different at Facebook.

Apparently it doesn't feel good enough to post on a non-throwaway though.

What about all the misinformation, conspiracy theories, bad medical information (which can get people killed), and false political ads? Does the "primary growth engine" marketing speak make it all better?

Wow. I can’t imagine hating someone simply because of who they work with.

Is everyone working at BP complicit with the Gulf oil spill? Is everyone working at PG&E responsible for the fires? No. That’s absurd.

Anyways, I’m not a mod, but I did flag your comment because you’re breaking two site rules:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Telling someone that what they do for a living makes the world a worse place is neither a personal insult nor hating.

Social pressure is one of the principal ways we stop people from making self-interested decisions that are detrimental to the group.

It is an insult because you’re attacking them for what they do.

If that's how you want to define "insult," then I disagree that we shouldn't do it.

You shouldn't attack people for who they are, or anything outside of their control (race, gender, etc)

But for choices they make, that affect other people? These are exactly the things you should judge people for

I don’t follow this logic, at all, and I’m honestly trying to understand it, even if I disagree.

How is attacking someone for what they do an insult?

Is there an ethical line?

If someone kills my family, certainly I am not insulting them for calling them a murder?

Anyone can be judged for the actions they take, that doesn't make it an insult.

The BP and PG&E cases were accidents. There might've been negligence but it still wasn't in their best interests to cause those accidents, and now that they happened they've got the opportunity to learn from it and hopefully not do this in the future.

The Facebook case is different. Them stalking people isn't an accident, it's the whole purpose of the company and what pays their bills. Despite seeing the negative effects of their behaviour on society and being given countless opportunities to learn and become less nasty they are continuing as if nothing happened.

Is everyone working at BP complicit with the Gulf oil spill?

Anyone with an option to work elsewhere, yes, though keep in mind, there's a difference between "Working at Facebook" and "Working on Surveillance Dragnet at Facebook."

Workers have power, and workers at Facebook have a lot of power. It's not like they can't get a job elsewhere. That they haven't quit, or unionized and forced Facebook to stop the, frankly, evil things they're doing, is a mark against their moral character.

Working on ad systems actively makes the world worse, and hating a person for working on something that actively makes the world worse will always be reasonable (and justifiable).

I don't think it is fair to anonymously denigrate someones life choices particularly when you have no idea what that person does specifically, and there is ABSOLUTELY a place in this world for advertising on the internet.

We all know exactly what they do. I don't care what the OP does specifically, they are collaborating in building something that makes the world worse for all of us.

> there is ABSOLUTELY a place in this world for advertising on the internet

I have no idea what this means. What I do know is that adtech turns everything it touches into shit.

You’re right, we do know what they do. They probably work on the video game Beat Sabre. (recently bought by Facebook).

Facebook is a large company, and I hate them just fine; but I don’t hate all of their employees and not all of their employees are evil.

They specified that they work on ad systems.

> They probably work on the video game Beat Sabre. (recently bought by Facebook).

And now that it's bought guess what's the purpose of this game (hint: it's not about being a game, it's about collecting even more data and getting people addicted; the "game" part is just a side-effect).

At this point anyone that works at that toxic company is either naive or unethical. There's been way too many warning signs and incidents to figure out that anything they do is in one way or another to stalk people even more and waste their time with ads.

You know what really makes the world a worse place - in-app purchases. Ads meh, I can take them or leave them (I pay a lot for content), but in-app purchases show no mercy.

Respectfully, I disagree. In-app purchases as an architecture gives me a chance to try out the software, and then purchase it to make the ads go away. That's a compromise I like quite a bit. It's a lot cleaner than having one paid- and one ad-supported version of the same app, too.

IMO there’s nothing wrong with IAPs, just pay-to-play (or even pay-to-win). If a developer wants to release more levels, but wants an extra dollar for them, I’ll probably be willing to fork it over.

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