Check this English sentence When I started working as a programmer, my company held a book club, and one of the books was about the effectiveness of AB tests. We read how Amazon changing the color of the purchase button drastically increased the sales or some shit like that. Everyone was excited. The executives, the marketing team, and the dev team praised how clever it was, and insisted we should do the same.

It took me like five years to realize it was really not good idea for a small B2B business to spend a part of the limited resources in that. I needed several experiences to understand that in many cases good customer relationship and reliable system is much more important. But it wasn’t until recently that I started thinking like “wait, if it tricks the users into doing something they’re unwilling to do, isn’t it unethical?”

It makes me wonder how little we think about the ethics and the consequences of our investment. It’s not like we understand it’s unethical but do it anyway for profit. We simply don’t care how unethical it can be, not even slightly, until the evidence of the harmful effects are not negligible after years and decades.