[jonathankoren]

Maybe I’m singing, “Don’t Ban The Bomb”[0], but algorithmic advertising literally pays the mortgage and puts food on my table.

You can live your life just fine. No one is interfering with it. No more than getting a flier in the mail asking if you want to drive for Uber is a big disruption. In fact, enough people find some level advertising useful, and have for literally hundreds of years.

[0] https://youtu.be/lSEtCz61O_8

[eertami]

Useful to whom, the companies employing predatory behaviour and psychological tricks to convince people to buy things they do not need?

There's no nice way to put this but the world would not be at all affected or a worse place if your company ceased to exist tomorrow. In fact you could argue many would be better off.

I struggle to believe competant software developers can argue "oh but I didn't have a choice". You chose to join this company to put food on your table. There are many ethically good industries you could also work in to do so. Maybe you'd earn slightly less, but you could have a clean conscience.

[jonathankoren]

I didn’t say I didn’t have a choice. I said, there’s not a problem with this, and even people that supposed not dirtying their hands are being paid by advertising.

Let’s examine the naïveté you expressed. I work for Mozilla, which is basically a non-profit, which in turn gets its money from Google, which gets its money from advertising.

Your favorite website? How does it make money? Advertising.

Why? Because it’s about the only way to make money on the Internet. Even if you’re selling a product, how do you think anyone is going to find it it if you don’t advertise it? Even nonprofits have to “dirty” themselves by advertising.

So spare me the holier than thou routine. You’re in the muck just like everyone else.