It's nothing more than an attempt for Silicon Valley to pretend that they're a bastion of pure innovation, where all advancements are only for good. It's naive and extremely holier-than-thou.
The other extreme is that some folks actually have a conscience.
Reality is probably on a continuum in between.
Those people are not working in AdTech.
Is it hyperbole, or do you honestly feel that trying to connect users with products they might like is inherently unconscionable?
For example, I tried to find a pair of quality underwear that did not have some guys name above the crotch for years. I heard mention of me undies on a podcast, checked it out, and am now a happy customer. ( this is not a paid post )
It is delusional to suggest that this is the goal of ad-tech. The only people thinking about the users and the products are the creative teams that make the ads themselves.
Ad-tech, on the other hand, engages in dragnet data mining operations that serve the creative/design teams at ad agencies. The way the ad-tech industry has decided to go about things absolutely is inherently unconscionable. The unrestrained nonsense they've unleashed on the web over the past two decades have resulted in leaving nearly all internet users vulnerable to malicious code, privacy loss, and other horrible things.
> some of them just got shot at yesterday
Nice appeal to emotion there. But how do you know what the people at YouTube HQ did for a living? Do you have insider information? By all means, don't hold back.
Or are you making uninformed hyperbolic statements?
> The unrestrained nonsense they've unleashed on the web over the past two decades
I feel sometimes like I'm the only one who remembers how awful, insulting, and dangerous ads were before.
> But how do you know what the people at YouTube HQ did for a living? Do you have insider information? By all means, don't hold back.
I asked, "You want to have that conversation with them?"
I'll ask you the same thing.
You know some of them are here.
They're your peers.
But feel free to demonize them without talking to them.
> how awful, insulting, and dangerous ads were before
You seem to be missing the point. Yes, advertisements are awful, insulting to our intelligence, and dangerous psychologically. But that has nothing to do with ad-tech. Your conflation of advertisement production with ad-tech is especially curious, considering your strangely dogmatic defense of this reprehensible industry.
It's even more curious that you didn't reference any of the things I actually brought up in my post about the ad-tech industry. The content of an advertisement is not nearly as important as the means by which people are consuming the content. This is a fundamental premise of Marshall McLuhan, on whose ideas much of the advertising industry has operated for decades now. ("The medium is the message.") The real problem with ad-tech is not the advertising content that it helps propagate, but rather the techniques employed by ad-tech to achieve its goals. Why don't you respond to those problems I raised, rather than ones that are both wholly irrelevant to the discussion and entirely absent from my comment? Ad-tech is what introduced malicious code, unethical privacy breaches, and absurdly non-scientific measurement practices to the advertisement industry as a whole. The ads distributed on yesterday's television and radio broadcasts, and on yesteryear's magazines and newspapers, could never have come close to the destruction today's internet ads achieve - because those older media were not capable of being leveraged as irresponsibly as ad-tech leverages the world wide web.
Of course it should. You denied any users X exist, (Ad-Tech who think about the users.) I was hoping to demonstrate that your sample size of X that you know well enough to judge them so, is too small to be meaningful. I say that because I know many people in Ad-Tech, and almost all of them care very much about users. Since our conclusions are different, I can conclude our samples are different populations, or you're speaking in hyperbole.
You said:
> The only people thinking about the users and the products are the creative teams that make the ads themselves. ... is inherently unconscionable.
If you know people in Ad-Tech, and you tell them, "You don't care about users, and your business is inherently unconscionable" I'd like to hear what responses you get. Genuinely. Would they agree with you? Or, more likely would they say something like, "At my place, even when I think about the user, it doesn't matter much," which seems much more likely the kind of human response you'd get.
> It's even more curious
You opened with bald-faced hyperbole. I'm trying to get you to admit that your most outrageous claims are based on nothing but lies. Once I do that, maybe I'll dive into the rest of what you said.
My concession to you is that there are awful ways to do ads - exploitative, manipulative, bad for the user. And there are ways to do ads that are not those things. You claim there's no difference - it's all homogeneously bad. That's hyperbole or delusion.
Moreover, none of it is particularly helpful. It's just spite. You don't have any actionable proposals for making the world a better place. You're just making "dead lawyer" jokes.
And I did respond directly, reminding you that ads used to be far worse. You haven't responded to that at all.
Out of morbid curiosity, do you get that ads fund most of the internet?
> Out of morbid curiosity, do you get that ads fund most of the internet?
Yes. But that does not mean that we want or need advertising, or that it is not tasteless. It might mean that we cannot conceive of or achieve an alternative version of the world without advertising and with the internet.
More generally, I'd say it's important to make a clear distinction between statements of principle, and statements of pragmatic policy.
As a matter of principle, if you have something and don't need it, and someone else needs it, you should give it to them, right?
I'm just trying to understand your principle and where the boundaries of it are.
Oh, I don't think I'm well-informed enough to answer that question properly. Let's suppose by "capitalism" you meant allowing market forces to operate freely. No, I wouldn't say that's entirely tasteless, but yes it has tasteless aspects.
And a principle one is advertising, i.e. standing up and saying "Hey, I suggest you buy this, and here's why" when
(a) you have a financial motivation to encourage the sale
(b) quite obviously, that motivation corrupts your role as the recommender
(c) despite being educated people you make no acknowledgement of that corruption.
Ideally, the best way for consumers to choose between competing products would be for them to read peer-reviewed scientific literature comparing the merits of the products and their suitability for the intended use. That again is basically definitional -- that's what science means.
Now, do you think science should be conducted by people with a financial interest in the conclusions of each paper? No, you don't. And that's why you shouldn't have a hard time accepting that advertising is inherently undesirable.
> As a matter of principle, if you have something and don't need it, and someone else needs it, you should give it to them, right?
Yes.
> I'm just trying to understand your principle and where the boundaries of it are
Sure, happy to continue the discussion.
> Yes.
So, is property tasteless?
Why are people trying to sell something? Shouldn't they just give it to me?
And then scientists should determine which products should be made.
And scientists should determine who is the best at making those goods and services.
And scientists should decide who doesn't deserve to live or reproduce.
... So... I purposely tried to go too far. At which point do you think I went too far?
Owning something which you do not make use of and denying access to others who would make good use of it is not a good thing to do.
> Why are people trying to sell something? Shouldn't they just give it to me?
I'm not arguing against the whole of free market capitalism, just advertising. We can still have a free market without advertising. A bit like how we can and do have democracies while severely restricting political campaign funding.
> And then scientists should determine which products should be made.
> And scientists should determine who is the best at making those goods and services.
> And scientists should decide who doesn't deserve to live or reproduce.
Scientists provide information. They do not enforce anything; they are not an executive branch of government.
"Science" is the word we use for the process of rationally answering questions about the universe. That includes comparing products. And comparing who is best at making goods and services.
If it were the case that there were a subset of people who didn't "deserve" to live or reproduce (for some definition of "deserve") then yes, we would want scientists to be involved in identifying that subset of people. The obvious example is criminal punishment. The USA and other countries decide that some people no longer deserve to live. (Other societies in history have sterilized people). Yes, of course we would want those decisions to be based on science -- science as the provider of information and as the process for arriving at conclusions from data; the legal system and government to actually execute and enforce things.
> ... So... I purposely tried to go too far. At which point do you think I went too far?
You didn't go too far. I think you confused two things: (1) scientists making information available to society, and (2) some group of people enforcing a policy.
Free Market good? Free Speech good?
So why can't I pay someone to help me spread the word about how good my product is?
> A bit like how we can and do have democracies while severely restricting political campaign funding.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I do not believe any democracy has actually limited political campaign funding. There have been limits, but they have all had loopholes that have made them completely ineffective.
> Scientists provide information. They do not enforce anything
But, it's scientifically proven that if I only do business with science-based companies, that the products and services I get are better and safer. I therefore boycott all other businesses.
Then, scientists absolutely do enforce everything.
> And comparing who is best at making goods and services.
Actually, no, that's economics. And economics say the best solution is the free market. Not a body of decision makers. Because each person measures their own utility. People can provide evidence and opinions. But each person makes their own decisions.
There's no accounting for taste.
Which movie is scientifically proven to be the most enjoyable by people who like Quentin Tarantino movies, but hate Oliver Stone movies?
Oh, scientists hadn't even gotten to review Snatch yet. If only some advertiser enticed me into giving it a try, I would find out that my opinions change over time in unpredictable and unique ways, that no science board could ever predict.
> some people no longer deserve to live. (Other societies in history have sterilized people). Yes, of course we would want those decisions to be based on science
Science is a tool. Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Science is not humanistic, any more than Capitalism is. That's why science must be regulated. Otherwise, we'd be cloning people with no brains, so we can harvest their organs. We'd instantly kill everyone with an un-treatable infectious disease, because the good of the many outweigh the good of the few or the one. We'd set up a surveillance state to enforce our laws, because it's scientifically proved to be the best way to enforce laws.
Opinions and ethics are human factors you are not accounting for.