Yeah, I've built ad systems. Sometimes I'd give a presentation to some other department of programmers who worked on content, and someone would ask the tense question: Not to be rude, but aren't ads bad?
And I'd promptly say: Ads are propaganda, and a security risk because it executes 3rd party code on your machine. All of us run adblockers.
There was no need for me to point out that ads are also their revenue generator. They just had a burning moral question before they proceeded to interop with the propaganda delivery system, I guess.
It would lead to unnecessary cognitive dissonance to convince myself of some dumb ideology to make me feel better about wasting so much of my one (1) known life, so I just take the hit and be honest about it. The moral question is what I do about it, if I intervene effectively to help dismantle such systems and replace them with something better.
Honestly, there is a place where ads can be useful and helpful. It's just not in the way our society has structured them. My best example is gaming news sites. I like video games, and when I want to see whats new I go to a gaming news site, or a gaming forum, often these are even joined in partnership.
It's opt-in, I see all the new games, big budget games, indie games, nothing is missed. There are no unwanted emails, no biased searches, no interrupting ads, it's all on my own terms. And it works!
I really believe we can extend this model to other product categories, even all categories. Not in the exact way as gaming websites, but an opt-in "go to the market to see new cool shit" sort of way. It doesn't have to be propaganda with surveillance technology like it is now.
And I'd promptly say: Ads are propaganda, and a security risk because it executes 3rd party code on your machine. All of us run adblockers.
There was no need for me to point out that ads are also their revenue generator. They just had a burning moral question before they proceeded to interop with the propaganda delivery system, I guess.
It would lead to unnecessary cognitive dissonance to convince myself of some dumb ideology to make me feel better about wasting so much of my one (1) known life, so I just take the hit and be honest about it. The moral question is what I do about it, if I intervene effectively to help dismantle such systems and replace them with something better.