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Comment by luckycharms810 | Hacker News Reader

I think I expected to see more of this by now given the number of incredibly liberal folks who work in Adtech.

Sorry to break it to you, you don't get to wash your hands clean of it's incredibly detrimental effects on people mental health, the state of mis-information, and the creation of tooling that manipulates the way people think.

Ads made money before hyper-targeting, and will continue to make money long after. Most folks in Adtech are making an incredibly comfortable living - while ignoring the collective harm that is being done by the industry.

No matter where you work, it's worth asking yourself a few questions.

* What is the mission of my company ?

* What is the revenue generating unit of my company ?

* Are the two aligned ?

* Am I comfortable with the answers to the above questions ?

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If there's any lesson that sums up the way the world works, it is: people follow incentives

If you want folks to work on the cure for cancer or ending world hunger or curtailing climate change, then you're going to have to pay them enough to do it. The reality is that people have families, people have futures to think about, people have material desires. You can chastise them for making personal choices that prioritize their needs, but as long as a climatologist makes 1/10th of the salary of a software engineer at Google, that's not going to change.

Is happiness found in wealth? Not at all. But it's like fat and sugar, we are literally programmed to acquire resources. It was just that for most of human history, it wasn't actually possible to overdo it.

> You can chastise them for making personal choices that prioritize their needs, but as long as a climatologist makes 1/10th of the salary of a software engineer at Google, that's not going to change.

The issue is not that we aren’t willing to pay a climatologist 10x more. It is that companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook can lobby to continue to externalize costs and internalize profits that allow them to retain the ability to pay a software engineer 10x more than someone working for the common good. No one votes on this. It is entrenched in a broken system that is powered by money.

It's not their lobbying that got them to where they are today. Both of those companies delivered tremendous value to many, many people, some of whom gave them tons of money in return.

I agree with you that the society we live in sucks in terms of delivering resources to the best products, but I personally, even after anything, wouldn't want to live without good search engines (i.e. Google).

Facebook I personally use less, but I know that so many people derive amazing value from it, and who am I to say they're wrong?

> incredibly detrimental effects on people mental health > the state of mis-information, and the creation of tooling that manipulates the way people think.

Strong words. Do you have any evidence behind them?

Like, books manipulate the way people think, should we ban books? How about newspapers? Where do you draw the line?

We don't ban books. We criticize books and hold their authors accountable. Should we criticize advertising? Where do you draw the line?

We should definitely criticise advertising. I like to focus on how much it doesn't work, and how much of the industry is borderline fraud.

I worry a lot less about it manipulating people, because it's pretty bad at that. Maybe at the margins (and that's great for large businesses), but advertising can only push you towards something, it's not going to drag you kicking and screaming.

I draw a distinction between introducing ideas to people and manipulating the way people think.

Reading a book, digesting ideas and having a conversation in your mind with the author is incredibly healthy and IMO should be promoted.

Optimizing for "engagement" requires that you offer the mind an endless set of distractions in lieu of good engaging content. Over time the mind starts to degrade to a point where its difficult to digest long-form content and enjoy it as a much healthier habit.

> Optimizing for "engagement" requires that you offer the mind an endless set of distractions in lieu of good engaging content. Over time the mind starts to degrade to a point where its difficult to digest long-form content and enjoy it as a much healthier habit.

This is another really strong claim. I find it odd that most people are so sceptical of the claims established by social science research, except when it confirms a previously held theory.

TV optimises for engagement. Do you think that TV lead to the destruction of people's ability to engage meaningfully with the world, or is that distinction reserved for products invented after (I assume) you were born.

Cos I remember how much everyone gave out about TV (and I was one of those people!) and to see the entire argument wholesale lifted and applied to a completely different medium of communication is disconcerting, to say the least.

Your TV (at least in the past ) could not collect the following information:

- What ads did you stay for ?

- What ads did you listen to, or turn the volume up for ?

- What ads did you hear and see 50% of with 50% of the pixels being on screen at the time you heard them?

- How many times did you see an ad ?

- Whats the average times that an ad is seen before you might convert in an offhand channel ( including offline credit card purchases )?

- What ads changed your scroll velocity - if only for a few 100 milliseconds ?

- What content changed your scroll velocity ?

- Where were you when spent less time on your phone ?

- Where were you when you were more susceptible to a type of ad ?

These aren't signals that you might yourself notice, but these are being collected. They are being collected on almost every website you visit, and an incredibly large data set is being collected. This training set is for you and you alone, but similar training sets can be found.

This training set is now used to determine what content to show you next so that you can stick around for another ad.

This is 'optimizing for engagement'. We are well past the stage of "It's the superbowl so lets play an Axe commercial'.

Some of this sounds fairly hyperbolic to folks who haven't spent time in the industry - but I promise you this is very commonplace non-controversial data collection in the adtech space.

> Some of this sounds fairly hyperbolic to folks who haven't spent time in the industry - but I promise you this is very commonplace non-controversial data collection in the adtech space.

I spent well over half a decade in adtech, and while I don't dispute that this data is collected, I definitely don't think that it's particularly useful.

Fundamentally, the best information to use to predict what you'll buy is what you looked on on a site/app and what you've bought in the past.

The rest of the stuff you list out has really, really small effect sizes, it does make a difference if you're Facebook or Google (though the effects are still just as small) but given their scale, it's meaningful revenue.

Additionally, all of this data is incredibly sparse, so it may help at the margin, but definitely doesn't help overall. That's even assuming that the data can be reliably linked to an individual, which in most cases is definitely not true.

I think that you appear to be concerned more about the tracking than the marketing itself, is that a fair assessment of your position?

> tooling that manipulates the way people think.

... this, being perhaps the most troubling part.-

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