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Comment by aristus | Hacker News Reader

I happen to work for Facebook, and a large fraction of my friends and family are expatriates. A place to easily keep in touch, share photos of kids, chat with abuelita, all that boring stuff, directly improves our quality of life.

When I recommend Linux for my friends, the top two "programs" they care about are Skype and Facebook. After that, maybe Youtube.

As for the ads, yes, that's a source of revenue. If that is a dealbreaker for author, well, I had that opinion once myself. Then I graduated high school and worked for a very interesting advertising startup, learned about the origins and practice of it and how it grew up alongside print, took advantage of and sped up the development of new technologies, etc. I don't expect to convince anyone but advertising is itself a worthwhile problem.

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I was going to comment that Google, Facebook and Twitter are platforms for search, connections and communicating respectively. Ads are simply a revenue model. If Facebook charged $20 per month, would you work for them then?

However, after seeing comments like: I work for facebook - "advertising is itself a worthwhile problem."

and... I work for google - "People in non-advertising teams hardly ever ask 'how will this effect click-through rates?'."

Hardly ever? :-) Maybe it is more about advertising then I realize.

If "more about" means "non-zero", sure. I don't work in ads now, but I appreciate the extremely tricky and fractal problem they are trying to solve, in the same way I appreciate the work people do in security, design, features, reliability, etc.

The OP has a point: most advertising is a waste of time for both the advertiser and the recipient. There are many perverse incentives that skew outcomes, even leaving aside spam and scams. It's totally fine to hate bad ads.

But condemning advertising per se because most ads don't work is like condemning programming because most strings of characters don't compile.

> Hardly ever? :-) Maybe it is more about advertising then I realize.

That's a broad interpretation of "hardly"... Clearly some people in some non-advertising projects are at some point going to care about some ad metric in some way, so "never" would be inaccurate. That still doesn't mean that there's any significant amount of effort spent on non-ads people on ads performance.

If Facebook charged $20 per month, would anyone use it?

Does Facebook have standards on what kind of ads are served? Does Facebook try to connect people with ads that are relevant? Somehow even if you are trying to _do the right thing_, the author still can't fathom why you'd sink so low as to work for Facebook.

I think that's the point of disagreement. Advertising is often inane and wasteful, but in my opinion it's not fundamentally evil.

If we serve more relevant ads resulting in clicks/sales/etc, we get more revenue. We get happier advertisers, and give users access to things they demonstrably want. There is a clear alignment of incentives to have good standards and to try to square that circle. There are other "crosswinds" which make this task hard, but also (to me) a very interesting optimization problem.

People can (and should) complain when we fail to do it right. But to assume the worst, or to write off the entire industry because we make money from advertising, leaves no room for a meaningful discussion.

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