“The best minds of my generation are thinking how to make people click ads”

I think I expected to see more of this by now given the number of incredibly liberal folks who work in Adtech.

Sorry to break it to you, you don't get to wash your hands clean of it's incredibly detrimental effects on people mental health, the state of mis-information, and the creation of tooling that manipulates the way people think.

Ads made money before hyper-targeting, and will continue to make money long after. Most folks in Adtech are making an incredibly comfortable living - while ignoring the collective harm that is being done by the industry.

No matter where you work, it's worth asking yourself a few questions.

* What is the mission of my company ?

* What is the revenue generating unit of my company ?

* Are the two aligned ?

* Am I comfortable with the answers to the above questions ?

Don’t listen to this stuff. At least these companies pay fair wages. After decades of avoiding FAANGs because of misplaced idealism from quotes like this I realize that it’s no more noble to be underpaid, under appreciated and overworked at a “moral” company than to be treated with dignity at a FAANG (with dignity at this point being simply defined as a 40 hour work week and enough money for one person to buy a home in the HCOL city where the job is located, which 90% of tech jobs still don’t provide).

It was always disheartening putting my intellect to work to trying to figure out why popunders weren't working for us following the latest release of browser X, when they were still clearly working for porn sites.

...then we looked at how the porn sites were doing it, and were horrified (admittedly, with a tinge of professional respect for them having solved it), and once more, pleaded with our business managers to just give up on popunders, it's leading to devs leaving and/or developing drinking problems.

Tax ads. Put the money into important stuff.

People shouldn't be faulted for taking a high paying job if that is where the opportunities are for them. But we do have a system which is generating outcomes most people aren't happy with. So the rules should change. Maybe just a little at a time.

Our choices aren't only "Ban ads" or "Keep doing advertising the way we are doing it now". This isn't an A/B test. A small tax on advertising would be a good place to start.

Why did you cut out the "and that's ok" part from the title?

I feel like the author is really missing the point of this criticism. It's probably fine on an individual basis to work for (most) adtech companies like google. What sucks is the overall system which incentivizes the creation of arguably dangerous products and behaviours, even if by chance some of that money spills over into being spent on better causes.

The article was not at all what I expected!

I agree that it's hard to gauge the usefulness of applying the best minds to do banal work. After all that the work of making people click on ads is what allowed Google to benefit the world with stuff like Google Maps. But it also created a monopoly: for every Google Maps, there's a Waze left in its wake.

What's truly disheartening about this mercenary culture is not that one can't predict the usefulness of making people click on ads, but that there are so many other tasks which are patently more useful - but whose sponsors have drastically smaller pockets than a FAANG. I'm not talking about lofty projects, like curing cancer and flying to Mars. I'm talking about banal stuff that, at some point of another, affects everyone's. Like trying to navigate a government's website.

It’s funny how we seem to be going meta on ads, and I think it could be good to refocus attention on things that produce better value.

Ads are powerful, but I think they maximize on value to the seller at the expense of the buyer.

Many of the big problems we’ve had have a lot of responsibility on ads, I think: cigarettes, opioids, political action committees, mass consumerism in general, sugar/diabetes, pharmaceutical prices, etc etc.

I think many of these crises are made possible or at least worse through ads that change people’s perception to move them toward more negative behavior. I think this is like the urban legend of hypnosis in that you can’t make people do what they don’t want to, but you can shift just a few percent and that still makes tons of money.

Drinking cokes every day, eating fast food every day, “talking to your doctor about Foo drug,” the list goes on and on. People like doing this stuff so making them do more by showing ads is just a function of ad spend.

I’m fine with ads. The problem I have is that the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to spy on me.

A century ago, any reasonably intelligent and diligent person could join the business world as a "clerk," organizing and arranging information in support of business operations. There was a vast workforce of clerks. They probably made decent money. Nobody lamented the loss of the best minds of their generation.

> That is, they are building software for their own personal amusement or financial gain instead of working for the benefit of us all.

Writing software for their own personal amusement or financial gain is perfectly acceptable. Advertising is perfectly acceptable. The part of that crosses the line is "thinking how to make people click ads" since it violates people's autonomy. It is used to rationalise crossing other ethical boundaries ranging from respecting people's desire for privacy to outright psychological manipulation.

There's a quote, which I absolutely can't find the source for, it's something like geniuses are toiling away in factories.

I think it's a bit arrogant to think you're some type of genius who if only you needn't work, would be able to solve all the world's problems. I'm more than fine with being a cog in the machine, with my dream being retirement at 40. After that I'll work on my music, and video games full time.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

Jeff Hammerbacher

The title is missing the (IMO crucial) "and that's ok" from the original post.

Was this posted in reaction to the Ubiquiti ad discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628198?

How many small niche businesses have been created around hyper targeted ads? I don't know why everyone wants to go back to a million ads for mortgages and feminine hygiene products.

I don't think I've ever deliberately clicked on an ad, in fact I work very hard to block them out and ignore them.

This article completely misses the point of the original quote. The original quote is not 'they could be working in better fields', it's 'the entire structural incentives of capitalism are messed up'.

"There is a meme going around that too many programmers are wasting their careers working on meaningless software: they spend all their time trying to get people to click on ads, they aren’t tackling the important stuff, and they aren’t solving the biggest problems of today. It’s as if all programmers should drop what they are doing and instead try to cure cancer, end world hunger, and generally save the world.

I’m going to call bullshit.

First of all, don’t knock ads—or, to be more accurate, don’t not knock making money. The most well intentioned company in the world can’t accomplish any of its lofty goals if it has no money, and for many companies, ads are the best way to earn that money."