Why developers should start choosing conscience over profit
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
I'd like to see concrete examples with high-profile companies of where conscience was favored over profit.
I know a few developers who would never work for the defense industry, because no matter how justified some wars may be they don't want to directly contribute to weapon code. I'm not sure if I'm with them as it's never come up, but it might be.
I know a fair few people (myself definitely included) who would never work for companies making intrusive ads or advertising/tracking software, because it actively makes the world a worse place for everyone.
These aren't exactly ditching it all to make software that actively makes the world a better place, but if we all refused to make the world a worse place, wouldn't that be good as well?
And if you're reading HN, you have career and employment choices, you really do.
To answer the question, they rubbed their fingers together making the "money gesture"...
I am a realist, I recognise that the 'if' in 'if we all decided not to make the world a worse place' is a very, very big if indeed. Some people just don't care, and it's not like we can all agree on what morality is anyway. To some people it's likely to be seen as extremely moral to contribute to your country's defense capabilities.
So... yeah. But if we could all stop working for the tracking/ad industry I'd be stoked :)
Solving problems in the realm of ad optimization, for example, are as much making as any of the projects you see on github or any of the arduino projects you see mentioned here and elsewhere. In fact, in many ways those ad problems are harder, usually involving more advanced math or clever data analysis techniques to deal with large amounts of data.
'Also, show me a modestly talented developer in today's tech economy who is "strapped for cash" and I will show you someone who choses to not help themselves.'
The joke here is that the developer who is choosing conscience over profit is the type of developer who would be working at a nonprofit or other context that wouldn't be paying nearly as well as a vc-backed startup.
And that is exactly Jeff Hammerbacher's point. It's irrelevant whether or not he's a hypocrite. It sucks. And by the way, his lament isn't simply about those work on ad optimization (something I know about, regrettably), but about all products that rely on ad revenue, because as they say, with those business models users are not the customer but the product.
Most ads are fundamentally manipulative if not dishonest.
The "but ads support a free web" is utter bullshit. There is no free lunch. Advertising simply shifts the cost of the "fee lunch" to the price of the advertised products. In other words we still end up paying. Even worse, it might shift costs regressively, toward lower incomes and the less educated.
BUT IT'S WORSE: We end up paying a lot more.
Not only are you still paying for the costs of the "free website", you are paying for all that advertising overhead, the costs of advertising technology and infrastructure (huge, btw), the agency and creative costs (Don Draper and his colleagues have to pay for the hookers and scotch somehow, not to mention what’s-his-name who basically just lounges in his office barefoot thinking Japanese), and big marketing departments that often outnumber the people who actually write or make things.
You are also paying the opportunity cost of inferior product, because that’s what happens when websites have to design to please advertisers over pleasing us, the users. Dalton Caldwell makes this point comparing Sourceforge to Github: http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal.
Our identities and privacy are bought and sold to the highest bidders. So we foot the bill for those bids AND we pay the cost of lost privacy. A double whammy! It's personalization? Bullshit. Personalization means optimizing something for me, not optimizing for the advertiser. Again, who's the real customer?
IT GETS EVEN WORSE.
Think of the social costs of advertising. The web is infested with misinformation and manipulation. Not just ads, but how relying on a revenue stream entirely dependent on how many ads are seen severely affects the moral choices of those who decide what gets produced and how its presented, the same if not worse than it affects cable “news”. What are the costs of a misinformed and variously manipulated citizenry, of distortions to the free-market?
Knowledge and discourse are the lifeblood of both democracy, free markets, progress. The web, from the little scammy websites to the big brand ones that so many blindly trust, has a huge influence on who we vote for, what we buy, and most importantly, what we believe.
Getting back to the OP's point, if we put conscience ahead of profit, we'd not build ad-supported products. Those are deals with the devil, nothing less.
I have a product and there are people out there who want it. How do I connect the two in an ethical and moral way that doesn't make the world worse?
Back in the day when we lived in small enough communities, word of mouth was entirely sufficient. In fact advertising would have backfired if it contradicted community knowledge and unnecessary if it agreed.
But word of mouth doesn't scale without some help. That's where good collaborative filtering comes in. For example Yelp surfaces mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall gems and buries crap. Yelp's two major problem is that it is ad supported and therefor does not always putting user's interests first, and their collaborative filtering does not understand that people have different tastes.
If all those smart brains that are currently applied to ad revenue and ad conversion optimization were applied to collaborative filtering, I'm convinced we'd find an honest way to connect consumers to producers. Ads would then become as irrelevant as they would in a small village.
If I open my source code, anyone in the world can use it to do whatever they want, evil or otherwise. With closed source, I can choose who my customers are -- at least I have more control over it. Of course if people are skilled, bad, and determined enough, nothing will keep them out.
I can and do, also choose to let people use my software for free when I want to. With Open Source, I don't have that power.
I, for example, support the ACLU's defending the KKK's right to free speech. In the long run... or as MLK might say, the arch of free speech is long but it bends toward good. The same I believe for open source.