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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

It's strange to have some moral objection to advertising because advertising is, ultimately, a form of discovery, a way of connecting people who want or need something with those that supply it. Ad revenue on the Internet, almost by definition, means someone found something they wanted.

How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?

The problem with advertising is when it gets too obtrusive, like on TV when, near the end of a movie, you'll see an ad break every 6 minutes (at least in Australia).

I generally like the way Google does advertising (disclaimer: I work for Google). It doesn't get in your way (except in some cases on Youtube). It pays for a lot of great services that are free to the end user (search, GMail) and Google clearly separates organic search results from paid promotion.

How anyone can have a moral objection to that baffles me.

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This is effectively a straw-man.

Treating advertising a way to connect suppliers with those with a need is a common, benign interpretation of what it is, but that view rests on assumptions of trust or informational parity between buyers and sellers. i.e. the sellers have to be meeting genuine needs, or the buyers have to have the information necessary to make good determinations. I don't see why we should assume that's generally true. There are plenty of counterexamples (e.g. Drug companies advertising drugs for conditions for which there is not good evidence of efficacy, and consumers being unable to evaluate the statements for themselves).

Google makes its revenue by auctioning qualified snippets of human attention. By qualified, I mean that it makes algorithmic inferences about the users demographics and intentions and uses these to bucket these snippets of attention so that they can be priced differentially. This is why Google's advertising is so much more profitable than most other forms.

At best, I think you can say that Google's advertising is neutral. The value it provides to society is determined by the qualities of the buyers and sellers.

A more skeptical view would be to point out that buyers are better informed than sellers when they enter these transactions. For example, google's search users don't get to see the price that google is charging for their attention, nor are the mechanisms by which google intends to use, say the Google+ network to improve classification transparent to us.

You can reasonably claim that it would be preposterous (or uncompetitive) for Google to reveal these mechanisms, or that Google couldn't survive such a climate of openness. Certainly their competitors are probably worse. That doesn't mean we should be any less critical.

I think that the more informed we are about how we use our attention, the better, and it's not clear that Google, or any other advertising company is automatically aligned with society in this regard.

"genuine demand" is a true scotsman fallacy waiting to happen. Purchases are revealed preferences. That people have incoherent preferences doesn't mean you get to pontificate about what they should have.

Where is anyone pontificating about what people should have?

I also don't see any mention of whether people's preferences are coherent or not.

I didn't use the words 'genuine demand', but I did talk about genuine need. This isn't a true Scotsman fallacy because I am talking about the buyers ability to get their needs met, and not debating what qualifies as a genuine need - which is as you say, a revealed preference.

> I am talking about the buyers ability to get their needs met

so a 'genuine need' being met is a conversion, right? isn't that what google's algorithms and advertisers optimize for?

i think in your framework of evaluation, that makes better advertisement inherently more moral, and thus, working for a company that's trying to increase conversions an inherently moral task.

I don't see how I've equated a conversion to a genuine need being met. That would imply that nobody ever buys anything that isn't suited to their needs.

I guess I'm falling for trolls here.

preferences are subjective. If someone is buying something you claim they don't need you need to, at the very least, get them to agree with you before you have a plausible case.

you aren't being trolled, get an introductory microecon text.

Plausible case for what? What case do you think I'm making that you are somehow contradicting? Nothing I've said is in conflict with the idea of preferences being subjective.

why do you continue to deny your parent post?

QUOTE: "the sellers have to be meeting genuine needs, or the buyers have to have the information necessary to make good determinations."

both of your assertions are false. markets tend toward equilibria you disagree with. that you disagree with them doesn't make the needs "non-genuine", nor does it mean information asymmetry is a barrier to efficient markets. correcting information asymmetry is itself subject to market forces.

I haven't denied my parent post. You are quoting me out of context - it doesn't make sense if you don't include the full sentence, and you aren't explaining why you think I'm claiming needs are not subjective.

Where have I said anything about me agreeing or disagreeing with people's needs? Certainly not in that quote. My position is simply that Google's advertising doesn't necessarily serve the function of matching people with suppliers of what they want or need because it's an attention auction which is agnostic to the idea of need or want.

You also haven't addressed what part of what I've said is 'pontificating' or why I don't have the right to express my views.

If the way that Google shows ads was entirely driven by the needs/wants of the ad viewers, then it's easy to make a case that the ad viewers are being served. But Google doesn't only have the ad viewers in mind; the interests of advertisers are also being served.

And where the interests of advertisers and those of the ad viewers conflict, who wins? To the extent that advertisers ever win in those conflicts, then the interests of the ad viewers are not being served. And in that case, it's perfectly reasonable to question the social utility of Google's ad-serving.

But it's hard to define exactly how and when the interests of the ad viewers aren't being served. And that's where this thread gets bogged down a bit, on the question of what the ad viewers' "genuine" wants/needs are.

But I don't think we need to nail that down before we can question the social utility of the ads, because the system accommodates a set of interests (those of the advertisers) that often conflict with the interests of the ad viewers. Now, if you can reduce those conflicts, that's great, but is it really controversial that they exist?

What is the difference between need and want? Economically, there is no difference - there are simply goods that have less elastic demand curves and goods that have more elastic demand curves. The elasticity value that distinguishes "need" from "want" is totally arbitrary.

Fair point, but it doesn't really affect the sense of what I said in my original comment.

Also, just because economists haven't found a bright line between concepts doesn't mean they aren't distinct. I think there's a distinct difference between needing food, and wanting an xbox.

If you start with that assumption, you immediately confront the issue that you may 'need' food, but you don't need tasty food, or much food, or even "easily digested" food. One does not even 'need' "clean" food, as humans are easily able to tolerate being ill most of the time; and, unfortunately, many people worldwide operate with this constraint their entire lives.

In fact, we didn't even really 'need' food at all: what we needed were a few nutrients, maybe in the form of a pill. Food is a luxury, and if our stomachs disagree we can always get stomach-ectomies.

Until, of course, you find that one guy who defines the point of his existence to be the very first guy to get a billion points in Halo: a person might be in a hospital, dying anyway, and while eating may prolong his life another month, he will consider his whole existence to be a waste if you take away his Xbox; at this point the concept of objective needs totally disappears, and you end up back in the land of "differently elastic demand curves".

I didn't say everyone's needs are the same.

Ok: I think one easily gets the other impression from your want/need distinction. Regardless: the first two paragraphs do not even touch on that: that person might 'need' an Xbox, but not one that has a working blue video composite. The point is that there is an elasticity to the demand curve for everything that the person might 'want', but there is no obvious breaking point where you suddenly end up with a 'need': and a great example is that you do not really 'need' food, you just want it very very badly.

That's fair enough. I think this explains the reactions of others in this thread. The distinction between want and need isn't important to my original point, and I certainly wasn't intending to claim them as objective. It was a careless choice of words.

Normally I think your posts are very thoughful, but this time you are attacking a straw man. The OP clearly indicates near the bottom of the post that it's not about working for the betterment of humanity, but about work he personally finds fulfilling. Serving ads is not fulfilling work for him. Morals don't come into it.

If your interpretation is correct--which it may well be--then the OP fundamentally doesn't understand the business of any of these companies. Relatively few engineers work directly on serving ads. The vast majority work on other things. At Google this includes, but is not limited to, Android, Chrome, search, Google+, Maps and self-driving cars.

Except all those projects are about serving ads. Android is about serving ads on cellphones. Chrome about making browsers better, so consumers will use more Google products, and see more ads. G+ is about harvesting social graph data to serve ads. Self driving cars is so people will check their mail on the way into work, and see more ads.

None of that nullifies the direct value those products provide. If self driving cars mean I check my mail on the way to work and see more ads, it's still a self-driving car. I don't see the problem in staring at a couple of electronic billboards if I can live in the future (and not have to stare at real billboards whizzing past me, for that matter).

so journalism doesn't serve society because its "about serving ads"?

I'd be extremely happy to watch ads instead of waste time getting angry on people. Self-driving car would be a dream come true for many, many people.

The OP was attacking a strawman. The assertion that Google and Twitter and Facebook are not working for the betterment of humanity (or are not doing fulfilling work) because they sell ads is ridiculous. Those companies may not be working for the betterment of humanity, but the ad angle is irrelevant.

Take the following:

> Google+ isn’t about sharing cat pictures, it’s about serving ads. Twitter’s massive network of 140-character bits of information isn’t about connecting people across the globe or to view current trends in worldwide thinking, it’s about serving ads. Facebook isn’t about entertaining yourself with games or sharing interesting links, it’s about serving ads.

Replace every instance of "serving ads" with "making money", and the meaning is unchanged, but the naivete is more obvious. You can do that to the entire article.

Every business is about making money. Whether they make that money by selling ads, or selling a product, or selling a subscription, or whatever else is irrelevant. Making money doesn't mean that a business can't also be connecting people, or organizing the world's information, or curing cancer, or any other fulfilling goal.

> Whether they make that money by selling ads, or selling a product, or selling a subscription, or whatever else is irrelevant

The OP is making the point that, for him, the method of making money is entirely relevant to his sense of fulfillment when working for a company. He does not make the claim that a business cannot be doing lots of other cool things alongside making money - in fact, he points out that Google and Twitter and Facebook are indeed achieving fulfilling goals, but he objects to the income stream and therefore would not feel fulfilled by working for those companies. That's completely fair.

Substituting the claim of the OP about "serving ads" with "making money" distorts the entire message, and of course makes it sound ridiculous.

Then he should just say "I am unwilling to work for a company that sells ads", rather than trying to say that none of Google's work is meaningful simply because they sell ads.

I don't believe substituting "serving ads" with "making money" distorts the message at all. I think it merely highlights how immature his stance is. He stated quite plainly that Twitter isn't about connecting people, that Facebook isn't about sharing links, because they are about "serving ads". The implication here is that a company which sells ads cannot do anything, which is ridiculous. He set up a strawman.

The ads are the means to an end, not the other way around. You do what you can to change the world and make a difference, you work on something amazing that you care about, the ads are (often times) your way to fund your ideas while helping other businesses thrive (by bringing in users through buying advertising).

First this: "advertising is, ultimately, a form of discovery, a way of connecting people who want or need something with those that supply it."

Then this: "How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?"

And this: "How anyone can have a moral objection to that baffles me."

This is misleading. There may be people who object to advertising in principle, but even if you don't, if you are seriously trying to think about "moral objections", you need to at least consider what is being advertised and how it is being advertised. Instead, your comment is an example of how advertising advertises itself.

Edit: clarified for coherence

For almost any nonessential item, no one knows what they want until they see it. That might be seeing it when you are walking around a store, seeing your friend who had it, or seeing an ad for it on google but no one would ever think "I need an XBox360" if they have literally never heard of it.

There are rare exceptions, eg someone is hiking and their toes are too cold and they think "I wish I had boots that would keep my toes warmer", then they go find an item that matches that, but I think that is a tiny percentage of the purchases.

That's a weird way to read the OP comment, and I think you're way overreacting to it. You seem to be drawing some insidious connection between those two statements that simply isn't there.

OP didn't claim all advertisements were morally acceptable, but that there was nothing inherently wrong with the enterprise.

It's not always a moral objection to advertising per se, but to the methods that enable targeted advertising. I wrote a short piece about the scope of modeling and mining algorithms if you're interested: http://blog.twodeg.net/when-your-data-sings (there's a TL;DR in the form of a figure at the link)

> How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?

Ads aren't always about giving people what they want or need, because there is that clever hack of creating the need in the first place. Besides, even if ads were really about satisfying existing desires, there is also the problem that people don't necessarily want or need the things that are right for them or for society.

There's a big difference between a moral objection and just not liking ads. I don't have any moral objection to ads, but I share this guy's dislike for them. I never click them and would, for various reasons, generally prefer to pay for a service rather than use it for free and have it monetize via advertising.

It's one thing to not like advertising in general; I think we all prefer to avoid them. A lot of times, ads are crap. Its another thing to entirely dismiss adverting and the people that are involved in advertisement. It's just down right shitty to be condescending about it.

My counter point (http://blog.fisharefriends.us/2011/08/never-work-for-google-...) is that good ads are beneficial to businesses and consumers. Businesses need to make money to invest in future products, and advertising is a necessity to making money.

Someone smarter than me put it thus: [Advertising] cannot be reconciled with the notion of independently determined desires, for [its] central function is to create desires – to bring into being wants that previously did not exist.

you missed the step where they build profiles of users who haven't opted into having their information and details discovered in order to serve them advertising

tv advertisers don't have my email, don't know which websites I am visiting, don't know what I am searching for etc. etc.

> I generally like the way Google does advertising (disclaimer: I work for Google). It doesn't get in your way (except in some cases on Youtube). > It pays for a lot of great services that are free to the end user (search, GMail) and Google clearly separates organic search results from paid promotion.

Got any links/reports to back that up? Which ads pay for what parts of what great services?

Cause it's a wonderful assumption, except the "great services" you quote hardly have any ads on them, but they are everywhere else, where they do (sort of, sometimes), get in your way.

I'm just saying. Google's advertising profits are quite mysterious. And possibly rightly so, they are a company, after all, and it's probably in their best interest not to share that data.

Except it refers statements about what great services their advertising crap exactly pays for to the realm of pure speculation.

It is strange to have some moral objection to being shot because being shot is, ultimately, a chemical reaction, and isn't our existence based on all sorts of chemical reactions.

How exactly is one chemical reaction bad, but so many other reactions good? It makes no sense.

Unsolicited advertisement is spam.

PPC ads in Google SERPs are a great thing because they're keyword-based, highly relevant and targeted.

The problem with ads starts to happen when we get into behavioral targeting, remarketing/retargeting, data exchanges, etc. This is where things get a little creepy. People don't want profiles built up on them with all of their likes and dislikes so that display ads can be better served to them.

What's worse is that Google has been testing out banner ads on some of their other properties like Google Image Search, and Facebook-style ads are showing up in Gmail (see the Groupon ones?).

I'm worried that some day the Google we know and love will end up looking like Yahoo around the late 90's, littered with banner ads.

I remember people making a switch back then to Google when it was banner ad-free and had great search results.

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