Comment by moxie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moxie | Hacker News Reader

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I'm interested in the culture implications of your willingness to comment on a story like this and openly admit that you work in this area of the advertising (surveillance?) industry.

Certainly, I don't think anyone would feel comfortable commenting on a story about SPAM mitigation techniques (without using a throwaway account) with text like "This sucks, I'm a spammer, and I'm really excited about it. Don't like SPAM? Don't share your email address!"

Is there really that much cultural acceptance of your field? I assumed this was the kind of thing you had to awkwardly talk around when someone asks "what do you do?" in a bar where others might overhear your response.

One of the things that shocked me most while working at Twitter was that nobody there uses an ad blocker. Like, I literally couldn't find a single person, and I've always assumed that anyone with the technical ability to install ABP immediately did so. So maybe I'm out of touch? Legitimately curious.

I did agonize for a bit when people say things like "the best minds of our century are working on people to click on ads", but I've made peace with myself. I chose advertising instead of finance because I deemed it to be less scumbaggy than finance (not really, online advertising is a shithole filled with mines and there are many many faces of online advertising ranging from the very clean to the very dodgy)

I thankfully work for a company that tries very hard not to work on the dodgy side of things, and we do actively work on tackling really dodgy stuff, so I don't think comparing online advertising to spamming is quite a valid point.

I don't think it's cultural acceptance. I'm just being open with my views. My views on online advertising is similar to my views on guns: advertising is not inherently bad neither is it inherently good.

I chose advertising instead of finance because I deemed it to be less scumbaggy than finance

What about everything else?

Honestly yes you're out of touch, and it heartens me. It took me up until about 2007 to realize that all this talk of funding websites with ads referred to a working business model. Having continuously run adblock, I simply didn't know how much advertising had invaded everything.

I was getting ready for the top-voted HN comment to be something defending advertising, and was probably saved because this move by Mozilla isn't so bold. It seems most developers these days are happy to be on the take of advertising and DRM companies and will trot out all manner of justifications for why their code should run unhindered on your device.

The company I work for allows targeting of advertisements based on the video content on a page. We do track users by dropping a cookie (so that we can calculate GRPs) but make no attempt to identify or behaviourally target users - we don't believe either are very effective for brand-building, which is our target market; it's about having your brand associated with certain content, not patterns of browsing.

A lot of people at work use AdBlock - even the operations people who spend a lot of their time looking at (and for) ad-laden pages will often have one browser with and another without, or will browse in Incognito mode when they need to see ads.

I've long found it a bit ironic...

>I've long found it a bit ironic...

I've always thought it as a Darwinian thing.

Some programmers probably believe "I use ads for money but I block all the other ones because I have the intelligence to do so and anyone who doesn't is a sucker and it doesn't matter that I'm exploiting them because they don't care enough."

My two cents.

I never use an ad blocker either. I know that a lot of the web is only possible because of ads.

That being said, I'm pretty adept at using my brain for ad blocking. I didn't even notice when Facebook rolled out sponsored posts.

Agreed, but the problem is, it has been overused to the point that they have become nuisances. I really don't want to be a parasite, so I usually go disable abp on sites that I trust (which, ironically, makes all those "thanks for not using adblocker" messages on reddit rather counterproductive.)

I used to work in an advertising start-up, and I have no qualms about it. I think it's naive to consider it "unacceptable" or "evil" ... and there are two BIG reasons I say this: (1) Google and (2) Free Content vs Pay-walls (1) Google essentially reads your emails and any searches you do, and provides ads based upon any/all data you provide to it (including Google+, Drive, etc.) Last time I checked Google was pretty popular and this business model was pretty well accepted... (2) With so much free-content on the web, is it that much to ask that the people producing that content have a means to make a living? The fact that we can Google virtually ANY information in the world (even on our phones for crying-out-loud) is worth the small sacrifice that we see a few ads in the process

There's cultural acceptance of Google even though they use third party cookies and ads are their primary source of income.

> I've always assumed that anyone with the technical ability to install ABP immediately did so.

Why is that?

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