| The problem is not Ads themselves, it's the fact that they inject perverse incentives into the entire tech ecosystem. To maximize your advertising revenue, you need to track your users as effectively as possible. This: a) Reduces user privacy. Even recent developments like FLoC, which appear to be pro-privacy on the surface, are really just yet another datapoint with which to violate the privacy of users. b) Reduces performance. It's easy to blame trendy bloated tech stacks for the state of the web, but the reality is that a big chunk of the slowness comes from ad-related tracking and delivery technologies (install privacy extensions on a low-end system and see the difference!). This reduced performance disproportionately affects those with lower system and network resources, further reinforcing global inequality. Although some will disagree, I do think that it's possible to advertise ethically, but no large corporation operating in a capitalist society is going to be doing that voluntarily - unless strict regulation comes down from above (Spoiler Alert: It won't). All that said, I don't blame the author for working in adtech, but perhaps only due to my rather bleak perspective that we're all just cogs in the capitalist machine whether we like it or not. Don't hate the player, hate the game. P.S: Cynically, I think the author's announcement of their charitable donations counts against them. It makes it seem like he's trying to "offset" the harm caused by his work, even if he won't openly admit that such harm exists. Charitable donations may make you a net-virtuous individual, but they do nothing to address the harm of adtech itself - which is orthogonal to the author's original claim that they believe that advertising is a good thing. |