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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

It's entirely possible to draw an arbitrary line, right through a gray area.

For instance, tobacco products are illegal to sell to someone under the age of 21. It's not because people magically become responsible on their 21st birthday, it's an arbitrary line drawn in a way to balance personal freedom, public welfare, and the need for cigarette manufacturers to make billions of dollars.

As an outside observer looking in, online ads for weight loss products seem to be 70% scummy, 25% outright fraudulent, with maybe 5% of them selling something of value. I don't believe beauty and fashion products have a similar ratio.

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Arbitrary also means wide open to corruption. I imagine there is a lot of money to be made in influencing Pinterest management in their arbitrary decisions now.

It seems to me that getting rid of one bad thing (scammy slimming ads) can be positive - without them needing to be 100% consistent all the time or policing every possible bad thing. Claims to the contrary seem like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

I think what vkou is sharing is the core of a very common dilemma.

You can allow "any legal ads" and you'll be derided as mercenary but at least you'll be entirely consistent.

Or you can try to set out _some_ kind of boundaries about ads on your platform and get enmeshed in endless debate over whether a) which boundaries should exist b) how far out they should be drawn c) what side of that boundary a given data point is on d) whether boundary enforcement is subject to some kind of internal conspiracy or moral corruption.

There's no winning move, because this is the Internet and you can't please everyone.

I would be absolutely shocked if there was a secret deal between Pinterest management and a special interest group to get scam ads on the platform.

It just doesn't make sense on a risk vs. reward basis.

Of course every company already makes judgement calls about which ads to accept and which to reject. There is no fundamental difference between rejecting crypto scam ads that promise immense profits and diet scam ads that promise effortless weight loss. Nothing fundamentally changed here.

It's not arbitrary to make decisions between shades of grey. Businesses make judgement calls all the time, it's unavoidable. The decisions are only arbitrary in the sense that you can't identify the exact boundary between OK and not-OK, but that's true for all judgement calls so there is no reason to presume a sudden increase in corruption.

Corruption? by "influencing Pinterest management in their arbitrary decisions", do you perhaps just mean a meeting between a business and a customer?

Is that how you'd describe the behavior of the VP of Netflix who accepted kickbacks to approve contracts?

Corruption means a system not operating as it should.

No, corruption is far more narrowly defined than the words you are using. It generally requires kickbacks quid pro quo preferential treatment.

Also, Pinterest is not 'supposed' to be some 100% agnostic, eyes-shut-to-ad content ad network. There isn't some social, legal, or ethical requirement for them to be one. They have always discriminated with what advertisements they allow - for example, you cannot advertise pornography, you cannot advertise fraud and scams on it...

So my corrupted file system was taking bribes? Just kidding but I like my definition just fine. It does require a degree of good faith interpretation of course.

The Netflix case I cited did involve kickbacks. He was convicted in a federal court: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv...

Why is everyone so eager to pick fights in defense of Pinterest? I honestly don't know the difference between them and Instagram and snapchat. Is it some kind of beloved people's social network? When I make vague comments on Amazon threads, I get the opposite, hordes of triggered people thinking I'm an Amazon-defender to challenge.

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