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It's seriously not ok to harangue someone like this on HN, regardless of how strongly you dislike the company they work for.

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 harassment, it disincentivizes them—and probably others—to contribute about what they know. That makes HN strictly worse.

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

It's also deeply against the spirit of respect that we want people to treat each other with here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22243742.

> Ad tech is like privacy and brain rape [1]. Nobody asked for it.

Ads are what fund the open web. If you want to start a new site, you can put ads on it and start making money. You don't need to convince people to pay you (very hard to do when you're as big as the NYT, let alone when you're small and new), you just sign up to have part of the space on your page used to advertise things.

If you are not ok with ads, use an ad blocker. As I wrote above, sites are offering a trade: you can see our content if you also view our ads. I think ad blockers are fine as a way of saying "I reject your offer", but then the site should be free to say "then I won't send my content".

(Ad blockers today also try to fool the site and work around anti-adblock, which I think isn't fair to the sites.)

> Why do you work for them?

They pay me, it's interesting work, I don't think the work is harmful.

> Do you have an ad blocker on your personal machine?

No. Ads are sometimes annoying, but they don't bother me very much.

> Do your parents?

No, though of course that's not up to me and if my dad decided to install one I wouldn't give him a hard time.

> Do you think about the negative externalities of being paid to fool people into parting with their money?

I have thought about the effect of my job a bunch, but I don't think "fool people into parting with their money" is a major effect of advertising. I've written more about this:

https://www.jefftk.com/p/effect-of-advertising

https://www.jefftk.com/p/value-of-working-in-ads

> Do you believe in the products that you let advertise on your platform?

There are an enormous number of products that advertise through the Google Publisher Tag. Some of them I would buy, some of them aren't right for me but are right for others, and others aren't a good choice for anyone. This is the same thing I'd say about a grocery store.

> How do you justify it?

I don't think I'm doing something harmful that needs "justifying".

If I thought my job was harmful I would quit and do something else.

>> Do you have an ad blocker on your personal machine?

> No. Ads are sometimes annoying, but they don't bother me very much.

I strongly encourage you to install ad blockers on all your browsers (Firefox on Android has uBlock Origin) and browse with ads disabled for 90 days, then disable the ad blockers and see what you think.

Ads on the Internet are a cancer. They are neck-and-neck with the clickbait race to the bottom[0] for the worst thing about the Internet. I think once you have them turned off for a bit you will realise that they have been a constant, oppressive presence that you were just used to.

0: Seriously, CNN doesn't even try to be a news network anymore. It's sad.

> Ad blockers today also try to fool the site and work around anti-adblock, which I think isn't fair to the sites.

You're right, it's not fair, but there is no fair in war, and make no mistake, this is what it is, a war for humanities freedom and dignity and you're on the wrong side of it. My country spend decades and a significant amount of its resources building a giant surveillance network meant to oppress and terrorize it's people but because it was 20th century tech, it was orders of magnitude less powerful than what you do(it relied on human informants, usually extorted into cooperating because somebody informed on them). We dismantled that machine because it was extremely dangerous to the free society we decided to build and we will eventually dismantle your bigger badder machine as well. Make sure you save enough for retirement.

> Ads are what fund the open web.

It wasn't always that way.

Wikipedia, a more useful website than Google (speaking only in terms of my values), gets along just fine without ads. As does Internet Archive, Hacker News, many of the blogs that I read, and all of my personal websites.

> open web

It's funny you call it that. It sounds like a dystopian line directly from Zuckerberg. You don't need to call it "open" as that's what it is (or was) by default. Using this term makes it seem like the web is under attack or at risk of facing a non-open alternative. Maybe it is.

I personally think AMP and Chrome are doing a lot to embrace and extend the web. I don't think it's simply about building a bigger moat around search. If Google had the power to snap their fingers and make all websites have to run on its servers and platform, they would.

I suppose we'll just have to disagree. I'm having a hard time grasping your position.

Thanks for taking the effort to respond. Even though we don't see eye to eye, I appreciate it.

> I work for Google on ads, speaking only for myself

> Ads are what fund the open web.

"Open web" is one of the Orwellian terms used by Google (and their controlled opposition - Mozilla), so it seems you aren't speaking only for yourself, eh?

This is a great comment, and it's a shame you've been downvoted.

> Why do you work for them?

Lots of money, or i-got-mine.