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I totally agree with this! I built a game and naively added ads to it as it seemed a good way to monetize. The game started to be really liked, and had 300k+ d

• TheCapn 7y ago
  Do you morally disagree with advertising/tracking monetization as a whole or just those particularly geared towards vulnerable populations? (children in your instance) I have my professional job developing software solutions for clients on a contractual base, but for a period after I graduated university I dabbled in mobile development and made the decision during that time that I'd never bloat my crappy apps with ads or tracking. I can't particularly articulate why I'm against that business method as a whole, but something always felt wrong in subjecting people to tracking/advertisements for my own monetary gain... if I'm not producing something worth paying outright for then I'm not going to skim pennies off the privacy of my users.
  • penagwin 7y ago
    I think he was worried about ads that were targeted at adults, but their game was targeted at kids. Similar to how Spotify with ads includes Trojan condom commercials, which makes Spotify-with-ads unusable in many situations
    • hoseja 7y ago
      Which is a moral panic can of worms all on it's own.
  • Retric 7y ago
    Personally it depends on the product. I find advertising specific prescription drugs abhorrent to anyone. However, I think it’s completely reasonable to say talk to your doctor about ED or whatever. If there is only one treatment they seem similar, but when several options exist people should not be pushing for a specific drug based on an ad campaign.
    • nullandvoid 7y ago
      I find the idea of any ad reccomending me to talk to a doctor extremely creepy - in what world would you want ad providers acting as doctors..
      • geofft 7y ago
        In the abstract it makes sense: - We've decided (in the US at least, but most everywhere short of a few communist or communist-adjacent countries) that the way we incentivize and reward drug researchers is by having them work for pharmaceutical companies that profit on the free market—and in particular that drugs are valuable to society and worth researching in proportion to how much profit they bring. - If you don't know that a certain medical condition is a medical condition, you might not seek treatment for it, or you might not recognize it at all. In particular, rare diseases by their nature are those that many doctors don't know how to diagnose, and new treatments by their nature won't have been part of those doctors' curriculum. - There are few means of reliably pushing information to the general public outside of advertising. Therefore advertising "talk to your doctor about this condition" (and perhaps "whether certain drugs might be right for you") is both a rational / logical response within this framework and exactly what the framework wants you to do. If we want to get rid of it, let's redesign the framework: reward drug researchers in some way other than profits, or find out how to inform either doctors or patients about new treatments in some other way.
        • meheleventyone 7y ago
          Drug advertising on TV in the US is one of the more in your face dystopian aspects of visiting. It’s very strange to push specific treatments onto lay people who don’t have the background to clinically diagnose or choose treatments for themselves. Maybe it’s a symptom of lacking a national healthcare system but we manage fine without drug advertising in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. In our case advertising and sales are aimed towards Doctors.
  • sdegutis 7y ago
    Not OP but I've had some thoughts on ads for a while that I've never shared: 1. Ads ruins user experience. This is pretty much an objective fact. People can and do adapt, but it's moving away from the ideal. 2. Ads often manipulates the user (emotionally, psychologically) to get clicks, which is just downright unethical. 3. Often unethical things are advertised, things that shouldn't even be on the market. These are usually rolled into an ad network, and ad embedders don't get a say in what's shown or not. 3. If we removed 99.99% (or maybe 100%) of all ads, I can't imagine that people will have a harder time purchasing what they need, when they need it. Considering only points #1 and #4, there seems to be no harm in supporting ads in any way. But #2 and #3 make it seem, to me at least, unethical to even work for a company whose business relies on ads. I know a man who turned down a job opportunity discussion from Facebook this week for this exact reason, and I think that's noble, especially considering he's very poor and could use the raise.
    • kasey_junk 7y ago
      Just as context, the vast majority of ad budgets are not tied to click through metrics. Ford & Coca Cola do not care a whit if you click on their ads. The vast majority of advertising dollars are around a) brand recognition and b) spending to make sure that it’s the people they want to have brand recognition (for coke everyone, for Ford F-150 a particular demographic). They believe this is important. They have years of evidence to prove it is & that you don’t think it works on you doesn’t matter to them.
      • datavirtue 7y ago
        Brand recognition. In other words: brainwashing or poisoning. Unethical.
      • jodrellblank 7y ago
        The very fact that it works, is the reason it shouldn't be allowed. They pay, your life changes, for their benefit. You have no say in it. It provably works even if you try to resist it, and don't consent to it.
    • vmurthy 7y ago
  • meowface 7y ago
    I'm not in the app market, but I run a few user-content-oriented websites which get millions of monthly hits. They're funded only by community donations. I decided to never add any ads to any of them. I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking. (In my case, my websites are aimed at adults and there are no concerns about children seeing inappropriate content.) It's not about the morality or even the tracking for me. I personally don't even mind tracking all that much (though I know I'm in a tiny minority on HN). I just, simply, really fucking hate looking at ads. They're annoying and distracting and ugly and will make any decent-looking website look tacky and dumb. And I thought, if I would never want to browse my own website and see ads, why should I subject other users to them? Sure, I use an ad blocker, and most of my users probably do, too, but I'm sure there are many who don't. And there're also the practical concerns about ads affecting page load performance and bandwidth consumption, but that's a more minor consideration. I also try to avoid commercials and video pre-roll ads (even those HBO ones advertising other HBO shows), and I skip past all ad/sponsor parts of podcasts and YouTube videos. I can only think of a single time in my life that an ad led to a purchase, and that was from a YouTuber I liked doing an absurd segment that unexpectedly turned the entire 10 minute video into an over-the-top ad for the sponsor, and it was funny and well-written and well-executed and was something I was already planning to get and seemed to be a good deal and a good product, so I actually did buy it a week or so later. That's one exception out of hundreds of thousands or millions, though. I admit I do feel what might be a kind of revulsion at the thought of huge companies like Google and Facebook making advertising their primary revenue source, or the thought of some of our world's top minds being paid amazing salaries to figure out how to get more people to look at and click ads. But I think it just comes down to me not wanting to see or hear them. They waste my time and/or much of my visual field, and are an eye/ear-sore, and I'd like to do unto others as I would want them to do unto me.
    • Guest0918231 7y ago
      I run a user-content website, and hate advertising too. But, the website costs $15,000 a year in expenses to run, and community donations bring in $3,000. Advertising generates $50,000. I stay with safe ad categories (no drugs, alcohol, gambling, adult content, etc), and use standard display sizes. No audio ads, background ads, popups, etc. I'm sure the site could generate twice the revenue with background advertisements. Anyway, I just wanted to give a slightly different perspective. Although I hate advertising as much as you, my site doesn't work with community donations. So, I use advertising to keep it alive, and try to draw a line somewhere I think is appropriate.
  • orwin 7y ago
    Not a solution for everything, but focused websites/blogs (on guitar, camping, kayaking... Or even painting) can afford "ads" with no tracking (link to amazon products), or even invest some time to call specialized stores about single image ads without using any advertising network.
    • kasey_junk 7y ago
      Links to amazon products are tracking vector number 1 and opting into one of the biggest ad networks.
  • derekp7 7y ago
    I can give you my feelings towards this topic. Personally, I don't mind ads that inform me of the existence of a product that I may be interested in, where it tells me how it can solve my problems. What I don't like is ads that use psychological devices to try to get me to buy their product. I also don't like ads that are a distraction of the content I'm trying to consume. So when playing a game, if the ad scroll at the bottom of the screen is flashy, I can't easily play that game so I give up. Now an ad that shows on a loading screen may be more acceptable, as long as the contents of the ad aren't something that would get me fired if someone at work sees it. I also hate that ads have to have their own javascript in it. The ad networks should provide a safe canned set of functions that they control, and not serve up anything that an ad customer submits. Finally, if I'm already doing research for something (such as browsing through the Bose headphones site), I don't want to see ads for those same headphones that I already researched, following me around on all the web pages I visit. It just really feels like someone is stalking me. Or look through a site like rvtrader, then when you look up the weather the next day you see a bunch of camper ads. Again, stalking. It's gotten to the point where I constantly browse in a private browsing tab (yes, there are ways they can still track me, but they aren't as obvious about it).
    • mywittyname 7y ago
      > (yes, there are ways they can still track me, but they aren't as obvious about it). But then other people in your house get the ads too... > Derek! Have you been shopping for RVs again?!?!
    • renlo 7y ago
      The distraction aspect is what really gets to me; cancelled my NYTimes subscription after these bright red / orange advertisements loaded all over the page, where the content I was interested in was the bland black text over white background. Couldn't even read the headlines without naturally focusing on the bright red advertisements.
      • gryz 7y ago
        So, do they really have the same ads as you could see without subscription?
  • JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > Do you morally disagree with advertising/tracking monetization as a whole or just those particularly geared towards vulnerable populations? Irrespective of one's views on this, it's a controversial topic. Given children are minors, this decision shouldn't be forced on them by app developers.
  • eecc 7y ago
    I don’t know, but the only kind of advertisement I consider morally sound is a properly indexed, well described parts catalog with good resolution photos. Think Mouser, DigiKey, Architonic...
  • PeterStuer 7y ago
    I used not to, but after having been in a few research programs exploring the future of add-tech, I now think we should treat advertising as we do environmental pollutants, and the collection and monetization of personal data as a harmful substance business in need of extremely strict regulation.
• ksec 7y ago
  >Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate! That was exactly what happen to my kids yesterday. I don't mind ads, but when they are inappropriate for the 5 years old I get really pissed off. And I wish Apple Arcade could come sooner so they don't get distracted with Ads. It is the same reason I don't really allow them to watch Youtube unattended anymore. I wish there is some curated Kid Channel I can safely let them browse. ( Kid these days are extremely good with technologies )
  • lawfulcactus 7y ago
    Well, there's Youtube Kids: https://www.youtube.com/kids/ https://www.youtube.com/kids/ And on iOS, you can use Guided Access to keep them in the app. Not sure about Android.
    • bilbo0s 7y ago
      Just a warning, if anyone tries to use youtube kids, you'd better use whitelisting.
    • lkb2k 7y ago
      I let my kids try out YouTube kids and I thought all the content was total garbage. Mostly toy unboxing videos, video game walkthroughs, and creepy knockoffs of cartoons they liked. Deleted it very quickly. We stick to DVDs and Netflix now.
    • matt-attack 7y ago
      Yes Guided Access is great. I default it to a 20min timeout. So if I let my 8 year old play Minecraft on it, and he runs off to some corner of the house to binge, I don't have to worry about hunting him down. He'll get a nice warning around 3min out, and then the phone will essentially brick itself. It's great knowing that he will absolutely be coming back to me with the phone in 20min.
    • tb303 7y ago
      Yeah, there's youtube kids! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9EKV2nSU8w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9EKV2nSU8w https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-for-kids-videos-problems-algorithm-recommend https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-for-kids-videos-prob... 2018 you say? surely they've fixed things by now? nope https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/youtube-sexualizes-children.html https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/youtube-sexualizes-childre... etc. and that's why none of my kids' devices have youtube on them anymore
• ransford 7y ago
  Kudos for interrogating your values and seeing your way to something you feel good about!
• musicale 7y ago
  > I removed all ads, I'd rather make less money but have people play and have a good time I wish more developers would think this way! Pretty sure sure I've never heard anyone say "the great thing about this game is all of the fun advertisements and cool micro-transactions."
• earless1 7y ago
  I am not familiar with the ad space, but isn't there a provider/method/framework that would allow people embedding ads on their apps/websites/platforms to select the types or categories of ads they'd be comfortable with?
• azinman2 7y ago
  Love that. How did you market it / how did kids discover it? What’s the game?
• bob1029 7y ago
  I completely agree with your position. I have turned down solicitations from both organizations you listed for exactly the same reasons. Working for any entity that engages in any sort of behavior that involves compromising user experience or privacy simply for sake of profit is not something I can consider at this time. I understand situations arise that are not profit-motivated which can't be avoided (federal investigations, service outages), but it is clear in the case of Facebook and Google what is going on. Compromising user privacy and interactions is their principal means of doing business.
• imhoguy 7y ago
  Link to the game please! Do you also provide donation-ware paid version? I see that as quite popular alternative to ads.
• robomartin 7y ago
  We had several children’s apps on iOS back when ads were allowed. We chose to only have a single ad in the parent accessible settings screen and nowhere else. Showing ads to kids simply did not align with our philosophy.
• Simple_Guy 7y ago
  >this includes turning down jobs at Google and Facebook. why didi you apply?
• cbsmith 7y ago
  That a choice about advertising, not about third party advertising. Even if you had decided to have ads, as long as they were first party adds, the policy would have allowed you to continue to deluge kids with ads.
• blauditore 7y ago
  > this includes turning down jobs at Google and Facebook So did you actually interview with them already knowing that you would reject?
  • nobrains 7y ago
    I think he means that: 1. He will not apply for jobs at Google and Facebook. AND 2. If attempted to be poached by Google and Facebook, he would decline any offer.
  • gbear605 7y ago
    It could be that they interviewed with Google/Facebook and then afterward, but before accepting an offer, decided that they couldn’t abide by the moral situation.