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Comment by lucky_cloud | Hacker News Reader

A rare example where Betteridge's law does not apply.

The answer is 100% yes, and we should ban other forms of advertising as well. Ban as many as possible.

I hate ads. I really do. I use ad-blockers and vastly prefer billboard-free zones. On the other hand, I like getting a paycheck, and I don’t know how our company would have ever gotten off the ground without advertising itself.

So essentially, doing someone that's detrimental to people is fine as long as you're the one benefiting from it?

Do you work for a for profit company or is your company feeding starving children in Africa based on word of mouth?

I am working for a for-profit company - I have done so for pretty much all my life, including companies that either rely on, or are directly involved in advertising.

However, I don’t try to justify it in any way (even though my current client is actually completely independent of ads). I know and agree that my contributions to that field are bad for society and try to do better whenever possible, including fighting back when my contractual obligations allow me to (and avoiding contracts that would prevent me to do so).

So not really a complete “dig” to the parent comment, but rather that we might have done wrong but we should strive to do better instead of trying to justify it.

Consider GP's company may (at least in his opinion) make some kind of positive contribution to society, but wouldn't have the opportunity without using some advertising to get off the ground.

Yes, agreed. That’s fine if that’s the case and if it is then I misunderstood and my comment doesn’t apply (see my other reply for an explanation).

IMO, it’s one thing to be involved in harmful advertising, it’s another to try and justify it. I don’t mind if you are involved because you have no other choice, but if you have other options, tired to unsuccessfully steer the ship around and you’re still there, then it’s where there’s a problem.

What type of phone do you own? There is a statistically good chance you own one whose development is funded by an advertising company.

There is a 100% chance you are posting to a site whose entire reason for existing is to advertise companies that it has invested in.

I own no phone. Google phones can't consistently dial emergency numbers, because they're programmed by incompetent fuckwads.

I agree that Hacker News should die.

As you continue to post on it.

Yeah, because they don't allow account deletion.

I don't think this sort of "yet you live in society, curious" argument is particularly helpful

Maybe the deeper problem is that living without enriching ad companies is a complex tax requiring research on everything you buy.

Sure, it’s easy for someone to clutch their pearls without having the courage of their convictions.

Let's say for the sake of argument that all of the people who are not 100% consistent in everything they do all publicly recognize their hypocrisy and failures, no matter how minor, and praise the intelligence, perceptiveness, and moral uprightness of the people who pointed them out.

What then?

The problems still exist, still need to be dealt with. This is why it's not helpful to let the perfect be the enemy of the good or to focus on proving people to be hypocritical to shut down discussion.

Even a person who is perfectly willing to make all of the sacrifices for maximum consistency would find it extremely hard if not impossible to avoid helping ad companies, since these have grown so powerful and omnipresent like Google for instance.

I do actively avoid Google for any of their products outside of search. Not because of some underlying belief system. But because the products suck compared to the alternatives in every category besides search. Even searching on Google sucks without an ad blocker.

I could also avoid any one of the other Big Tech companies without the loss of convenience. I could definitely avoid both of the Ad tech companies - Google and Facebook.

Before I get called out, I couldn’t just avoid 1 of the other three because they allow me to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. But if I didn’t work for them I could.

Look, I don't want to badger you. I'd say at the end of the day the important point is to band together to try to limit the influence of adtech and traditional ad companies. Most of this effort will have to take the form of collective engagement because there's only so much personal sacrifice can do. I'll fully admit I am a hypocrite myself. I simply don't have the resources or energy to do much more than fix the emergencies in front of me. But that's why it's so important that even inconsistent people be allowed to voice their opinion and do something about these things, because it's not their personal consistency that matters but the power of the ad oligopolies and the vileness of modern advertising.

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