If you already acknowledge that it's just a bullshit job because people need to make money to live, maybe they could do something that is not actively harmful.
What the fuck are you talking about? How many people in this industry indirectly rely on companies like Google for employment?
What percentage of mobile app development is paid for with ads?
What percentage of web development is paid for with ads?
How many open source projects are contributed to by developers who work at companies that rely on ads to you, pay their actual bills
How many “side projects” on this site are paid for with ads
How many projects are B2B where the other B is in ads, or relied on ads, or relies on something that relies on ads.
Sometimes I love HN but then I remember how, frankly, full of shit some people are.
We’ve built this house of cards on ads. If ads go, the industry will collapse into a shadow of itself and half of you won’t get to eat.
It’s nice to act like ads are just this evil thing devs invented but surprise surprise, they’re a form of payment because people don’t like to pay for stuff.
Remove the way people pay for stuff and suddenly this industry where you make 6 figures for jerking off to javascript frameworks doesn’t make sense.
Lots of sites sell things, which is enough reason to make those sites. Millions of sites are representing businesses (restaurant etc). No, the web isn't going away because joe shmoe can't put up ads. Its so cheap to put up a website anyway, folks do it for many reasons.
This industry does as much harm as it does good. It will be good for it if you can't make money anymore by getting people to look in your direction long enough to show people something they might actually want to spend money on.
Then in a decade our new sardonic message board reference will be, "Yes, the software engineering industry cratered. But for a beautiful moment in time, we stopped serving ads."
I don't think the parent commenter disagrees with you about spying. I think they're trying to highlight the fundamental tension of the is-ought problem at play here. Your normative claim is that it's good to limit activity which reduces consumer privacy. The positive conclusion is that to achieve this moral imperative, we'd have to either radically repurpose existing software engineers or radically reduce the industry.
Your point about spying isn't wrong. But I think history shows us that taking away (or reducing) peoples' livelihood while telling them, "well at least you're no longer a moral hazard!" isn't productive. It's too extreme. If you want to actually reduce the negative externalities caused by digital advertising, you can't realistically tell software engineers to take up knitting.
As Upton Sinclair so aptly observed "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
There was a thriving core to the software industry that existed well before the ad-fueled web and still exists today. Plain old business websites, line-of-business internal software, desktop apps, embedded and IoT software, etc., none of these things depend on ads. If you can't see that there is plenty of things to do for software developers to do if ads are curtailed, you need to broaden your horizons.
> All experience a monumental retraction the likes of which our economy has never experienced the moments ads go away.
Such hyperbole; computers are embedded in every aspect of daily life now.
Moreover, even if by some miracle you happened to be correct, propping up the adtech software industry does not justify its negative externalities any more than preserving tobacco jobs justifies the continued sale of cigarettes and subsequent deaths or preserving coal jobs justifies the pollutants produced and its subsequent deaths.
I can clearly see there are plenty of things to do for software engineers beyond advertising. But that was never germane to my point. What does concern my point is how many comparably compensating opportunities there are, how quickly they can transition to them, and whether or not those opportunities will be meaningfully less controversial (e.g. fintech).
How about we built a society in which people don't have to choose between loosing their livelyhood and being a moral hazard. In the meantime, I'm not going to cry about the deaths of immoral industries.
Okay. Again, you're highlighting an is-ought problem. I'm not saying the problem doesn't exist. I'm saying we can't just "build a society in which people don't have to choose between losing their livelihood and being a moral hazard."
It is at the very least extremely nontrivial and not at all straightforward, even if everyone agrees it's not ideal. I'm not asking you to "cry about the deals of immoral industries" - rather as a pragmatist, I'm asking you to consider that unless we have a concrete way forward, suggesting to kill the industry is not productive.
Categorically speaking, advertising as a problem has several notable properties:
1. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it is harmful (contrast with e.g. murder),
2. Reasonable people can disagree about how harmful it is (contrast with e.g. financial fraud),
3. It enables a significant portion (perhaps the majority?) of growth in the tech sector, which itself has empowered the lion's share of economic growth in the past decade,
4. There are few opportunities even within tech which will both pay comparably and which are not either directly or indirectly funded by advertising profits. Of those opportunities, some (such as fintech) are similarly disagreeable to another subset of the population.
The state of the world we live in is such that problems with these characteristics cannot be realistically solved by reducing or taking away the livelihoods of people who enable the problems to exist. I'm not telling you to not care about the problem. I'm also not telling you it can't be fixed. But I am telling you that you can't be so cavalier about what solving the problem entails if you actually want it to change.
I am talking about the tracking here, not the advertising. Reasonable people can not disagree on weather or not tracking everyone individually is harmful or not.
The heart of what I'm getting at is that you cannot be the arbiter of whether or not it's reasonable to disagree about that. As a direct consequence, being cavalier about it will not work for solving the problem. I'm trying to inject nuance into a problem I'm acknowledging exists, not engage in a holy war against the existence of the problem.
If you think reasonable people can't disagree with you about this topic, then fine. Forget that! Instead replace that thought with the idea that a nontrivial number of software engineers - likely the supermajority - will be materially impacted by significantly changing the amount of tracking enabled by advertising. You cannot tell them to just take up knitting anymore than you can tell people who disagree with you to just stop disagreeing with you. If only it were that easy.
>Instead replace that thought with the idea that a nontrivial number of software engineers - likely the supermajority - will be materially impacted by significantly changing the amount of tracking enabled by advertising.
The argument that you can't fight evil industries, because there are people who depend on them, will never be a convincing one.
And yes, if you think spying on everyone on the internet on a massive scale is fine, I do not consider you reasonable.
Aren't there still plenty of things in the world for the software to "eat"? Isn't software industry projected to grow in areas other than adtech?
We don't have to bring down software development down along with adtech. We can shift the software engineers to doing something non-malicious. Salaries may go down a bit, as there aren't many other sources of easy money beyond ads.
I appreciate that it's easy to misconstrue what I said as a personal attack on you, but I was actually talking about the "you" as in any of the audience. If it doesn't apply to you, great! Let's keep it that way.
In keeping with the guidelines of this website, I think it's fair to not immediately resort to personal attacks as a retaliation for a perceived slight.
As for the rest of your reply: I have not and continue to not get reliable statistical information that outlines exactly how ads help businesses. Mostly because the people that work in the ad industry just don't really seem to care about accurate numbers. If they did, it seems to me they would invest a bit more time and effort into understanding what makes a measurement accurate and how you make such a measurement.
That then neatly ties into your claim that basically every business I know wouldn't exist without advertising, which I would classify as the kind of extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Of which there is none.
As for the claim that I am all "uppity": If that means questioning when people do things that I see as wrong, I think that is a virtue.
Take up knitting?