Hacker News Reader

Comment by sickofparadox | Hacker News Reader

Surely this tool will be used responsibly and not lead to a renaissance in misleading ads, phishing scams, and malvertising. I trust Meta to have put in the proper safeguards to make this tool simply a net benefit for online users.

View on HN

I think the technology behind all of this is so cool and I love it, but it's difficult not to assume that all of this will ultimately result in the crashing and burning of modern civilization.

It's certainly going to result in wide-sweeping changes, one way or the other.

I’ve noticed recently a flood of weird ads on YouTube. I realized that automated western-sounding voice overs allow companies, I assume from China, to make up some bullshit ad using rhetoric similar to “one weird trick” and “doctors hate him!” to hook people in to sell some random cheap device.

The cost of a full video ad (using stock video) and a custom voice over is so low we are being flooded with absolute nonsense ads. They literally don’t make sense but they must catch suckers.

It’s gonna be an issue when these things are more logically coherent and visually mature.

Your delivery is beyond deadpan to a kind of exhumed-pan I find impressive. Superior snark sir.

Fortune favors the bold.

Pretty easy to block malevolence. Just permaban advertisers that misuse the tools. It's not like you'll struggle to collect evidence on their misdeeds.

They don't do that now[1], why would they do it in the future? There's literally no incentive for them to do it. It's obviously bad for business, since the 'customer' isn't the user, it's the advertiser.

[1] such as https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/almost-60-per...

I would love to see a deepfake video of Zuck saying the exact opposite of this. You know that would be the truth.

did you forget the /s?

Was not needed :)

you never know how many FB sycophants are out there though

I assure you that I am, in fact, not a fan of the fact the brightest minds in the past 20 years have been dedicated to developing and selling more efficiently targeted ads.

I hate to imagine what kind of actual societal progress we could have made had these brilliant minds been working on nearly anything else. So much wasted potential just to serve an ad that gets ignored a tiny bit faster.

well, the brightest minds as self-described by the people doing it.

And the people doing it self select for showing the ability to work in a disingenuous self-advocating marketing field, so you might expect them to talk themselves up.

i don't think the actual brightest mind could stand working in the field for more than about 5 seconds

You can argue that they aren't the top of the pyramid and I'd give you that, in exchange for the admission that the people working for FAANG, MANA, or whatever, are certainly a cohort of smart people who's skills could have gone to basically anything else and humanity would have benefited for it.

The "surely" is a dead giveaway.

i think the username is a pretty good guage of what's going on :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com