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Comment by clobber | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. I feel like a lot of people in this generation are using their talents thinking up new ways to get users to click ads. Myself included.

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That's a fair point. But it's still probably preferable to them using their talents to design increasingly convoluted financial instruments for ripping off suckers ... which is the other thing the most talented members of this generation seem to be doing.

Um, what's the difference? Targeted online advertising involves enough research talent and money to make it not totally unlike an "increasingly convoluted financial instrument".

I don't think governments are going to be bailing out advertisers just yet.

Targeted advertising is probably less nefarious, but neither pursuit is going to cure cancer anytime soon.

Depends on who is generating the money and the type of things they do with it. Google seems to use its money benevolently, investing in projects and systems to improve the world.

Research: you learn about human nature, cultural values, usability, and other human expectations. In a time where technology is changing and more widely adopted, information on people's attitude towards what is offered in, through, and by different technologies is invaluable. The fact that there is financial incentive to do this research just makes it all the more potent.

How soon until wall street comes out with an advertising backed derivative. Then, the two worlds can merge.

I would assume making weapons of destruction would be the least preferable field to spend your talent on.

I certainly agree with you there, the latter alternative is much worse.

That phrasing is a bit loaded. I'm an engineer on Facebook ads (I actually work with Paul, he's sitting right behind me. hi paul) and as much as people want to demonize ads, they do create real value for the businesses that use them and the users that click on them. We never think in terms of "get users to click". If we wanted to do that, we could make the ads bigger, flashier. But we don't because a good user experience is our prime directive, even for ads. And yes, there is a lot of room for improvement. zuck reminds of this regularly.

As I see it I'm building a tool that lets people promote their cause, their business, their band. The fact that they are paying for it is only because there is contention for that space.

I really think that what Facebook and Google has been doing with ads is nothing short of amazing. I find a lot of products and services that are so tailored to what I desire and want. When I am on Facebook, I am eager to find out what kind of ads are targeting my indexed information. It allows me to run into things I never would have actively seen on the internet.

You might appreciate what Jerry Neumann has to say about that:

http://reactionwheel.blogspot.com/2011/04/advertising-fallac...

Short quote: "In that case, if I put an ad in front of someone, and that person decides to click it, then I must be solving a very difficult problem indeed.", but the article is best read entirely.

I hate ads, but then again, flowers are also ads, and they are beautiful. Maybe "human ads" will evolve one day to also be beautiful.

I like this point. But actually that has already happened to an extent offline even if it hasn't much online. Billboards are often sexual or colorful -- even beautiful: they are created by graphic designers. Adverts often have music that we enjoy. Some restaurants try to advertise their food by wofting the smell towards us, etc...

However it could go a lot further. I'm surprised people aren't spraying women's perfume/pheremones on adverts for Lynx for example...

> I'm surprised people aren't spraying women's perfume/pheremones on adverts for Lynx

The liability for this is a lot higher than you think. I have asthma and a coworker's perfume set off an attack yesterday that could have ended me up in the hospital despite having an inhaler.

Symbioses is the issue. The entire f-ing problem. People refuse to give up anything to get a better relationship so they create predatory disguises, try and polish them up and endlessly research ways to hunt customers instead of being one with them. Those who evolve to become one in need and desire with both customers and constituents wiil reap great rewards, monetarily and politically.Someday, someday this society will grow the fuck up.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings

Without ads, Facebook would not be able to pay for the investments in various features like messages, video chat, etc. Plus, the goal is to create more relevant, social ads. Nobody is there yet, but that's the goal. The goal isn't to get people to click on those ads more per se, but to get people to derive more value from them (viewer value + advertiser value), a fraction of which the website can capture.

Disclaimer: I was an intern on FB's ads team last summer. I truly believed my work and those of my colleagues were very important. We wanted to reinvent advertising the "Facebook way".

That's where the money is. If you want people to do something, you need to pay for it. Want cures for various forms of cancer? Funding. A complete string theory? Funding. Improved transportation infrastructure, novel energy sources, dissemination of medical care to the impoverished, long-distance space travel, and sustainable food resources? Funding, funding, funding, funding and funding.

The ugly counterpart to this is that funding happens where desire is, and it doesn't need to be legislated if people really want something. If people really wanted cancer treatments / space travel / etc, they'd be paying for it, one way or another. Perhaps your complaint should be "consumers want to pay for their own entertainment, not the advancement of humanity". Don't shoot the highly talented messengers.

Incidentally, $activity for The Cure is such a joke. Have you ever seen anyone donate a substantial amount during such an activity? They throw in like ten dollars. Then they drop forty dollars on sushi to celebrate how fucking enlightened they are.

Those people help make the web possible, and the web is a beautiful, world changing thing. I hope it won't be this way forever, but right now ads are part of the web's infrastructure; they pay the bills.

The political system and economic system encourages this. I think as a result, other fields tend to not pay as well.

Basically, I speculate that an average person wants to do good to others, but hardly at the expense to himself. Just because I believe in the importance of great education, it doesn't mean I would be a public school teacher and take crappy pay and suffer in a system that doesn't recognize excellence, if instead I could be paid much more in a job in Silicon Valley or Wall Street with interesting challenges.

I humbly disagree. For all those figuring out click ads & revenue generation, I think the light at the end of the tunnel is the example of a gentleman named Salman Khan of KhanAcademy.com. We're just buying our way to freedom until this generation's talent can break free enough from material needs (enough to cover living expenses at least) to truly be able to give the best of themselves to the world. Call me overly optimistic or a dreamer, but that's what I'm all about anyways :)

Many of the most talented people in some previous generations were thinking up new ways to kill people, so you can consider that at least an improvement.

If they're using their talents to figure how how to show adds exclusively to those people who actually want to see the ads, that's not such a bad thing.

Exactly. I've never understood the hatred for "targeted advertising." I, for one, prefer advertising to be targeted and relevant! Those ads actually help me and make my life better, as well as helping the producer...

Example: The advertising emails Amazon.com sends me... they usually have a pretty good idea of which artists I like, based on my history of CD purchases. So when those artists release a new album, Amazon emails me. Win-win... it saves me the effort of constantly trawling the Intarwebs to track down "new album" info, and it gets them a few sales that they probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Same deal on Facebook... I list a lot of the bands I like in my profile, so I recently got an ad displayed in Facebook, for the new Motorhead album. Great, I didn't know Motorhead had a new album out. But I love Motorhead... now I'll buy that album and (most likely) be very happy about it.

Yeah, sure, I get that some advertising is obnoxious, over-the-top, annoying or whatever. But I think RyanMcGreal is spot-on here. Make it so I only (or at least mostly) see ads I care about, and I'm not going to complain.

How is it any different then say, the mormans or whatever knocking on a million doors? Sure the few who convert are happy to have been targeted, but what about all the other people who have been bothered and made to do something just to be as they were before being targeted? "Targeted" in any way, shape, or form is predatory and disrupts the many for the pleasure of a few. Don't pretend it is a good thing for the group.

What you just described is the opposite of targeted advertising. Advertising, in general, can be disruptive, but targeted advertising is definitely better than random advertising (which fits better with your example).

A shotgun or a rifle, both are pointed at targets. But yes, some would prefer a cleaner kill. What I'm saying is those who Target their customers better help mostly just themselves and there is no need to lie about it. At least for the publics benefit.

So basically you think all advertising is inherently evil? If so, I don't know what else to say here, because we have a very fundamental disagreement on basic principles.

I personally object to advertising that is "invasive" in the sense that it interferes with my ability to do what I'd otherwise be doing, or makes changes to my environment without my permission... so in computer terms, pop-ups, pop-unders, ads that play sound or video by default (and even worse, can't be disable), those I despise.

But as far as banner ads, emails, etc. go, I mostly don't have a problem with the stuff that's A. easy to ignore, and B. relevant.

That's nothing like what we're talking about. "Targeted" advertising by Mormons would be if they came to the houses of only people who subscribed to a mailing list about Mormonism, routinely logged into a Mormon discussion forum, and had recently purchased a copy of The Book of Mormon.

What the Mormons currently do, as best as I can tell, would better be described as "spray and pray." Or "throw something at the wall and see what sticks."

If they actually did target their solicitation based on some insight about who is actually interested in Mormonism, it would be better for everybody, or almost everybody. The people - like me - who are atheist and don't give a rats ass about Mormonism, would not get bothered by them... the people who were predisposed to join up, would. How is this a bad thing, exactly?

"Targeted" in any way, shape, or form is predatory and disrupts the many for the pleasure of a few.

I don't think "targeted" means what you think it does.

Different was the wrong word. How is it any better(for the targeted) is the question. The assumption that " I know you'll like this" is at best a horrible guess and a lie at worst. I question the belief that tracking a few purchases gives one the ability to have insight into anothers desire to buy your shit.

I question the belief that tracking a few purchases gives one the ability to have insight into anothers desire to buy your shit.

Fair enough. My own empirical observation is that some ad targeting initiatives (the aforementioned Facebook example, the Amazon example) DO result in the delivery of relevant ads, which are actually beneficial to both the buyer and the seller. I won't argue that it guarantees that all ads will be relevant. But if I'm going to see a stream of X ads in a given day, I would personally prefer that the percentage of them that are for things I'd legitimately be interested in, be as high as possible.

Much, much better not to see a stream of ads. That's what's being left out of the discussion. The truth. Don't forget about the point of everything, to make a better life for the living, not just the shareholders. That seems to get left out a lot.

Software is a relatively new field that doesn't have a lot of regulation associated with it. Advertising is somewhat protected from regulation by the Constitution. So naturally marketing software has a lot of innovation. Government is responsible for choking off innovation in other fields like medicine and money transfer.

There's a lot of cool science being done in Valley startups...you just have to dig a little deeper to get through all of the mobile-y social-y noise.

And many more work with enabling people's social lives online. The truth of the matter is, while popular an useful, social apps are quite plain vanilla in terms of the science and technology behind them. The endorphic rewards one gets from creating social apps is derived mostly from popularity rather than some internal sense of achievement, beauty or genius.

You're factually wrong about social sites running on vanilla technology. I bummed more cache misses out of tight paths, and invented more data structures in one year working on Facebook's search backend than I did in any of my nine years working on VMware's virtual machine monitor.

Being a mediocre guitarist is probably easier than being a mediocre violinist; and writing a Facebook clone that works for a few million users is easier than writing a web search engine that supports comparable traffic. But when you are trying to expand the boundaries of what is possible, everything is hard, even things that seem easy when tried in their simplest form.

Facebook is an exception due to its huge scale, i was thinking of the medium size social apps space. Surely scaling problems are hard, but maybe not fundamentally new to the web? It would be interesting to hear some unconventional solutions employed in the facebook scale.

I think you over value "science and technology" and under value interface design, ux, social behavior, etc. Well, you're at least biased towards one set of problems over another.

I've gained far more value from twitter, hacker news, facebook, etc than I have from most academic research that's been done on ... pick a topic.

The audacity to make that comment using a Von Neumann machine.

I suspect all of the mentioned services rely on a lot of academic research on many "science and technology" topics.

Sure, and they rely on many other things. Why act like one is more important than the other?

i assume from your comment you are a computer scientist. this does not hold for most of other sciences.

This is true, and I don't know about other fields. My assumption is that they aren't that different. Most researchers are mediocre, and they find some "in" topic and poke at the periphery and get published.

Maybe I misread you, but you seemed to imply that good minds were being wasted working on social sites. I think this undervalues the ability to do things we know how to do, but to do it well and better than the rest. Apple is inventing new shit, but they make things better than everyone else. this adds enormous value to the world. Many hours of my life are saved because they paid attention and got a lot of details right. It's not science, but it's highly valuable.

er, typo, should have read "apple ISN'T inventing"

I think people have a distorted view of how important typical work was in previous generations.

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