I'm always fearful of posting my tech nightmares on HN because so many people here work in industries that exist just to fry brains with ads. Probably most are rolling their eyes saying "We're not that evil." But somebody is thinking "Hmmm."
On the one hand you prevent anyone else from using it for a period of time, but on the other hand you give them ideas that they might not have had.
Well, for 20 years, not forever.
Imagine if I had patented "System for using the Internet to distribute misinformation regarding respiratory viruses, so as to maximize deaths during a pandemic." Facebook would show up later and already be illegal, and a lot less people would have died of COVID.
I doubt the example in your second paragraph is remotely plausible. But I can see how someone might come up with a better example.
Btw, violating a patent isn't illegal in the criminal sense of murder being illegal. As far as I know patents are more about civil liability, and you'd have to sue Facebook for damages, don't you?
That would make doing business quite a lot more expensive for Facebook, of course. But wouldn't ban what they are doing outright.
I don’t know if it’s narcissism or a human way of justifying their actions. For humanity’s sake I hope the latter.
That said, one way to look at it from an advertiser’s perspective is that if you spend money on anything, then relevant ads must exist, and they will continue to try to find them. If they can’t find them, they’ll still continue to spam us with irrelevant ads because they still work a little; statistically, a few people will buy the product for every million people who see the ad.
I spend money, and I even sometimes spend significant amounts of time trying to figure out what to buy when I need something I don’t know a lot about. I also spend far more time than I want to trying to ignore ads I don’t care about on the internet and YouTube, just like I used to with TV.
Those are two separate time sucks, and I’d love to have ads at least be teaching me impartial information about whatever it is I’m shopping for, and help me figure out what I need. It would save me time if I could merge ad watching time with shopping research time. Google and advertisers would love that too. But the level of invasive privacy compromise that would bring would be a million times worse than the bad situation we already have, I’m not willing to accept it.
And “advertorial” is not a web-era idea; the travel, sports, entertainment etc sections of the newspaper, and most of local television news, looked like news but were essentially all paid content one way or another.