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> Personally, I think the idea that Google/Facebook are hurting people by paying talented engineers a lot to work on ads is just not true. I think that if you a
by joepie91_ 12y ago
> Personally, I think the idea that Google/Facebook are hurting people by paying talented engineers a lot to work on ads is just not true. I think that if you act ethically (which is admittedly a question mark sometimes for any big corporation) respecting the market can often do the most social good.
The problem is that advertising is inherently unethical, so that reasoning doesn't hold up.
> What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need?
That only holds up if those other $40 were to spontaneously appear from thin air - but it doesn't, and that difference is coming from somewhere. It means that somewhere, some group of people had to collectively pay $40 more for something, to pay for your salary.
> Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive.
No, it's really not. "Going out and creating something" is not automatically something desirable, if the "something" being created is unethical.
- sarciszewski 12y agoI could go out and create malware, for example, but I don't think most people would appreciate that. :(
- cookiecide 12y agoWell, it's debatable, but I'd argue that exposing serious issues in the presumed robustness of systems turns out to be useful in the long run. In the worst case, it provides another data point for identifying systems that aren't working how they should. Not that I'm advocating the creation of malware, of course. Don't do that. :)
- sarciszewski 12y agoThere's a difference between malware and a 0day. Malware just causes harm to the endpoint. A 0day proves that the potential for a security breakdown is real.
- ditonal 12y agoYou don't make any case for your argument. If one person is making a car, and another person is looking to buy a car, you are contributing value to society by matching them up to make a transaction. I don't dispute that advertising can be unethical, or that many of these big tech companies have faced some difficult decisions and debatably have made the wrongs ones. But you can do unethical things in any industry, and advertising is not fundamentally unethical.
- joepie91_ 12y agoAdvertising absolutely is inherently unethical - manipulation is a core component of it. That's the difference between an advertisement and a listing.