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Comment by o_p | Hacker News Reader

Its just shocking to think that wasting your talent into making people click more ads for some faceless corp can even be compared to creating something great like Photopea.

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

- Jeff Hammerbacher

Compared to the best mids of previous generations making things that would blast civilization back to stone age in matter of minutes, I'd say this is progress :-)

Except even the most destructive technologies have lead to incalculably valuable advancements for society. This is clearly a step back when we'd rather funnel our best minds into ads rather than things that could in a very real way help advance our civilization.

We're going to regret this sooner than later.

I hate ads too, but saying they are worse than nuclear weapons sounds just a bit too extreme... I mean, the information spreading helped by Google search was/is incalculably valuable for humanity.

Nuclear weapons did lead to nuclear energy, and that is a benefit. They also lead to the end of WW2 and to the peace we are living now ( the reason super powers don't fight each other is that attacking each other with nuclear weapons will mean the end of everything ).

I'm not sure what ads can give us...

It's difficult to argue with ideology amd frankly the shenanigans of the less ethical parts of the digital ads industry haven't helped, but if you get the chance or inclination to research advertising from the early days of invention of newspapers to the present day, you may find that it is largely advertising money that paid for democratising access to information, culture, communication and entertainment which was till fairly recently in the history of civilization the privilege of the rich. Not a few social revolutions have been enabled by wide access to information and communication by organisations whose bills arr paid by ad dollars.

Hooray for progress! Instead of destruction of the world we merely have a mental addictive prison for everyone!

Oh wait, we still have those nuclear weapons too!

Worse than that - buy shit they don’t need having been manipulated by big data. Google doesn’t sell clicks it sells expected customer value.

Google is absolutely selling clicks when an advertiser can perch their website on top of a search query for its competitor.

If I spend $1000 on ads and get zero sales I don’t care about number of clicks. Conversely depending on my market a single click could be worth $1000.

Quote should be modified to ‘Some of the best minds’

It should be modified to: lies that ad tech people tell themselves so they feel better about what they do for a living. If you work in a terrible field doing terrible things, you can at least pretend you're really smart so it's not a total loss.

Back in reality, very few of the best minds work in ad tech.

That fraudulent quote should be challenged every time it's posted, until it finally dies.

> are thinking about how to make people click ads and complaining about people using their minds on cryptocurrency

To make money, which is by all account a measure of usefulness in society.

Using the best mind to improve trade is a good thing. Sorry if its not popular around herr but its true.

The trouble with this argument is that you're not starting with a level playing field. Other things being equal, work that produces more value might generate greater expected returns, but clearly in the real world other things are far from equal. There are opportunities available to those who already have money that are not available to everyone else, and consequently everyone else has to pay a premium, usually to the benefit of those who already had money. See also: most of the financial services sector, the standard arguments on the ethics of taxation to fund public services, etc.

You think society is that worse now that it was before ?

Do I think society is worse than what, and in what way(s)?

Perhaps an odd thing to say considering Photopea is monetized by ads.

TV shows are also monetized by ads, but we don't ask talented show writers why they are wasting their time writing episodes when they could be spending their efforts towards creating better ads for washing up detergent.

If the developer of Photopea went to work on advert technology what would happen? The world would loose this great piece of software, one of the worlds richest advertising companies might get imperceptibly better at targeting ads, and the creator has to stop working on his own pet project which he is doing on his own terms and work on whatever his boss tells him to. Besides, if he achieves his goal of becoming one of the most popular image editors in the world, there is a good chance Photopea will be much more valuable than he will have earned as a salary at FAANG.

No. Making use of ads to support your creation is much different than being paid to work on ad technology itself.

Ad technology is what enables products like Photopea to exist in the first place.

Photopea could just as well be monetized by selling licenses or by non-intrusive unpersonalized ads. When you have a great product making money from it isn't hard.

I think that 90% of ad tech is useless shit technology that just exists to take a cut of the money, without actually providing much of a value to anyone.

It's like realtors or financial advisors or other middlemen like that. The main reason for them being there is that it's a very profitable business to get a cut of somebody else's transactions.

People were making things before advertisers tried to pretend nothing else could exist without them, and will continue to do so long after advertisers are gone.

> long after advertisers are gone

May have sounded nice, but successful creators eventually become advertisers. As long as they have money to spend on marketing, they'll spend it to get in front of the right people

ad technology admittedly provides a possibility for monetization, which can justify something to an accountant, but it is completely perpendicular to use-value and technical feasibility. it does not "enable" anything to exist.

I don't use Photopea enough to justify paying for it. I already own Photoshop and only very occasionally fire up Photopea when I need to make a trivial edit to an image for posting online, or suchlike when I can't be arsed waiting for Photoshop to launch.

And, since I have an almost pathological hatred of adverts, I block them and use Stylebot to remove the space where they'd be.

But I'm glad the dev is making a decent living from what I've previously described as probably the most impressive web app I've ever seen. He deserves rewarded for his work but I'm sorry, I'm NEVER even looking at --never mind 'clicking on'-- a single advert while using the web, if I can possibly help it.

Since he has a paid version that doesn't seem to make much money, my guess is that he is not making that much from ads. Probably just enough for me.

I don't think this a waste of time. Adverts help businesses get their products to consumers. This pays people's wages. It aids wealth generation. Nothing bad about that.

Did consumers need those products? Would they have bought the same thing but from a different company? If not, would they iblnstead put this money into savings for a rainy day? Would they save for a house? Wouod we have less homeless and vulnerable people?

Would the clever people working on ads and manipulating consumers actually pursue careers like chemical enginerting which solves fundamental problems of human civilisation?

If everyone saved money in a world where ads didn’t exist, do you think housing wouldn’t be bid up by virtue of many people having extra money to spend?

I hate what web ads have become, but I’m pretty sure they’re not a significant driver of homelessness.

Sure, i am not claiming without ads we will not have homeless people

I am asking whether we have any proof that the advertising i dustry contributes anything substantial to the real economy, or we would be better off if these people were doing something else

If you keep the consequences and scope of view so narrow like that, sure, that is a single positive that isn't weighing it at all with any of the negatives.

Ads also make sure that I add those businesses to my mental blacklist and never want to interact with them again. This affects peoples wages. It aids wealth destruction. Nothing good about that.

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