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The entire advertising industry is scum. I worked in it for two years and wish I never did. That's a sin I now atone for by discouraging younger developers fr

• Avamander 7y ago
  You're too absolutist. How is advertising inherently contrary contrary to the interests of anybody subjected to it? How would you find about a single product people are trying to sell if they don't advertise? E.g. would we better off if we couldn't advertise that free software alternatives exist?
  • liability 7y ago
    Advertising is not a charitable act done for the benifit of consumers, no matter what anybody in the industry tells you. The relationship between advertisers and consumers is inherently adversarial, and advertising professionals are well aware of this fact even when they pretend otherwise (pretending otherwise is just one aspect of their complex web of lies and deceit. Whenever they do it, they remind me of what utter scum they are.) If anybody needs proof of this, install an adblocker and observe as your life does not fall apart despite your now limited exposure to advertising.
    • Avamander 7y ago
      Can you please list your definition of "advertising" because it seems to be much more narrow than what I know of.
      • liability 7y ago
        Fair question. I am chiefly concerned with the promotion of corporate goods or services. Authentic 'public service announcements' ("Smokey the Bear implores you to stop setting things on fire", etc) do not bother me, since the interests of the 'advertiser' and the target audience are reasonably aligned in cases of genuine PSAs. I consider personal advertisement ("I have a patreon" or "please hire me") tacky, but not nearly so bad as corporate propaganda on account of the relative power dynamics.
    • henryfjordan 7y ago
      > The relationship between advertisers and consumers is inherently adversarial That is naive thinking. Advertising exists to reduce friction in the market. I'm a lot more likely to buy something if I know it exists. I won't go to the movies unless I've seen a trailer, for instance. Maybe installing an adblocker doesn't super negatively impact your life but if we completely stop advertising as a practice then spending would slow and all of our lives would be worse off.
      • liability 7y ago
        You may very well go to a movie theater and have a bad experience because an advertiser took a movie they knew was awful and made an appealing trailer for it. The advertiser is just as willing to persuade you to see a bad movie as a good one. They aren't operating in your interest. Far from negatively impacting your life at all, blocking ads significantly improves it. Try it out yourself. I think you'll find that through various interactions with the general public, people who aren't paid to lie about products or services, you still find out about movies worth watching.
• jimktrains2 7y ago
  But yet, part of the allure of hobby magazines, for instances, are the ads. Ads need not be scummy, and just because some are doesn't mean all are. Ads _can_ be primarily informational without being "scummy" or "sleazy". Sure, yes, most of the ad industry is currently about being manipulative and invasive, but it need not be that way. We, as a society, need to figure out how to stop it from being that way across the board, because as you said, good actors will be at a disadvantage to sleazy actors.
  • Frondo 7y ago
    This is a great, great point. Ads themselves aren't necessarily scummy or manipulative. I can't even think of the number of restaurants I've found through their ads, products I've ended up buying through ads, or services I learned about through advertising. Which is sort of the point -- I have interests and some money to spend, and ads tell me of new people (or familiar people with new products/foods) to spend it on. Specialized magazines (hobbyist, regional, etc) seem to hit the absolute right balance for this. People advertising in them know who they're advertising to, in general, and people picking them up know what they're getting; some interesting content (hopefully) and some ads relevant to their hobby/region. Online ads have gone way, way, wayyyyy too far in getting into the scummy hyper-profiling, and they're not even selling stuff I'm then interested in! So what's the point? I mean, in practical terms the point is to try and differentiate their profiles of me from other people's profiles of me -- marketing techniques applied to the business of marketing -- but in real terms, who (aside from the companies building these profiles) benefits? I'm personally holding out hope that the US will adopt a "you own your data and can determine its uses" legal framework, and bring the hammer down on anyone amassing profiles on the populace. Google, Equifax, Facebook, the million anonymous marketing and list-selling firms, all that stuff needs to come under heavy regulation.
  • liability 7y ago
    Advertisements are designed to make you feel informed, rather than to actually inform you. When a product is bad, inferior to the competition or just generally harmful to you (think: sugary soda pop ads), advertising professionals will promote it with just as much vim and vigor, if not more. (To the extent that bad products get more enthusiastic advertising, in a perverse sense viewing ads might actually make you a more informed consumer if you deliberately avoid any product with slick marketing. However I cannot advocate for such an approach because I think the theoretical advantage here is washed out by the practical reality that advertising will effect you in ways contrary to your own interest, but in line with corporate interests.)
• namanyayg 7y ago
  Curious, what industry are you working in now? Do any skills from the ad industry transfer over?
  • liability 7y ago
    I think the only adtech specific skills for a programmer are 'ethical flexibility', which is more a form of moral corruption than a technical skill. It has not been hard for me to find work on things other than ad servers.
• icebraining 7y ago
  I, like a typical nerd, was just pedantically annoyed by the misused of the term "malware". I don't actually disagree that the ad industry should burn to the ground.
  • liability 7y ago
    Adware being considered malware used to be the norm. The temptation of money has normalized adware, but being normalized doesn't make it any less malicious. Subjecting people to advertising is an inherently malicious act.
    • esotericn 7y ago
      Yep. Adware is malware. It's software that does a thing the user doesn't want it to do. That's definitional. About the only exception I can think of would be oldschool stuff like the AllAdvantage toolbar that would pay users for watching ads. That was intentionally installed.
      • icebraining 7y ago
        Does the ad for OpenRent make Tubermap malware? If not, what's the difference?
        • esotericn 7y ago
          Ha. Thanks for visiting! The longer term plan for tubermap, was to essentially have the site be a way of people determining where they should live based on commute times, cost of rent etc. In that sense what you're calling an ad would actually be the primary purpose of the site, i.e. you'd go and look for apartments now you've figured out (based on that pricing information) where makes sense. It just never actually materialized because, well, other projects, jobs, etc. The beta version has rent pricing but it was inaccurate due to people selling parking spaces as 1 bedroom flats on APIs etc. So it's more like kernel.org having a link to lwn.net or something. No-one actually uses the site for navigation because there are better tools for that. You'll note that none of my sites have third party ad networks, analytics, any of that nonsense. If I use CDN's anywhere subresource integrity should be on but there might be some older stuff that doesn't.
• BeetleB 7y ago
  >That's a sin I now atone for by discouraging younger developers from making the same mistake, using the harshest language I think dang will permit. I'm not against your crusade. I would suggest that instead you pick up some books on how to influence people (not talking just about Dale Carnegie here), as well as how to present an argument. Harsh language, shaming, having an absolutist/binary stance, making broad claims without proper support, and not demonstrating understanding with those who are discussing the topic with you will not get you far. > Advertising is propaganda inherently contrary to the interests of anybody subjected to it. All it takes is for me to think of one counterexample to decide you're not worth listening to. > It's rife with psychological manipulation. Did you not spend time to think of other things that you might accept as OK that is also rife with psychological manipulation? > The relationship between advertisers and consumers is inherently adversarial Once again: All I need to do is think of one counterexample where both parties gained value (monetarily and psychologically) to conclude "This guy doesn't know what advertising is".
  • liability 7y ago
    I appreciate your 'concern', but reading those sorts of books, recommended to me by my former coworkers in the advertising space, is what lead me to conclude that the industry is evil. The style advocated by that literature is insincere, cynical, and manipulative. Those who brushed up against it and didn't rejected it are irredeemable. Those who haven't yet corrupted themselves are the ones I hope to help, and I believe I can do so by creating a fanatical anti-advertising mob mentality that allows feelings of self-righteousness. (I am aware if the irony here, since these very techniques were turned into a science by the industry I want dismantled, but that's the way the world works.) > Once again: All I need to do is think of one counterexample where both parties gained value (monetarily and psychologically) You know damn well, but are unlikely to admit unless perhaps called on it, that an advertising professional that gives value to a consumer one day will be just as willing to take it the next. The advertising professional is not motivated by a desire to help the consumer and cases where that happens are incidental at best (and rare.) There is a lot of delusion in the industry too. Advertisers in the pharma space will swear themselves blue that they're helping consumers to find medication that will earnestly help them, but these advertisers are not altruists, they do I because they're paid. And more damning, their industry (pharma advertising) is illegal in other countries with good reason. But this is an industry that regularly turns its own techniques in on itself, using their rhetorical/persuasive skills on their own, to reassure their own that what they're doing is humanitarian.