[roughly]

> Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first

This phrase is approaching a Betteridge's law level tell for who’s at the wheel - nobody needs to insist they’re putting people first unless it’s really obvious they’re not.

“My corporate doublespeak has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my corporate doublespeak.”

[Wowfunhappy]

> Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, as such we quickly stopped running the ad experience, and are reviewing internally.

That says to me that Firefox is aware the ad experience did not put people first, and that Firefox broke their commitment. They are discussing internally how this was allowed to happen.

[roughly]

Is there a single normal human being outside a corporate environment that would even talk about an "ad experience"? Ads by definition do not put people first, putting ads over unrelated content in your app is definitionally user hostile, and nobody in any context outside an advertising department would ever think otherwise. To even get to the point where you're having to assert your 'people first' bonafides over something so transparently anti-people requires the kind of utter blindness to the entirely of the human experience that can only occur in an organization who's priorities absolutely put ads in front of people.

[Aeolun]

It’s absolutely possible to do ads in a way that puts people first. This just isn’t it.

[pierat]

Absolutely not. Advertisements are a malignant cancer of capitalism, and will show up anywhere they are allowed or encouraged. And in a short time, they will crowd out human voices to the fake voice of "buy this shit"... And soon, even those fake voices are crowded out by louder signs of "buy this shit".

There is no ethical advertisement. At the root of advertisements are intentional psychological engineering used to manipulate people.

[ShroudedNight]

I am rather belligerently anti-ad, but when I sit quietly to contemplate alternatives I must admit that in certain limited contexts, I found advertising incredibly useful in the [relatively] distant past: I would pick up the computer paper specifically for the ads, as they provided the cost lists for items sold by the various vendors on College St (Toronto), and without them such information was essentially unattainable. There were also occasions when Google's original search-relevant text ads were exceptionally welcome.

Given that there has been a context previously where it was welcome, there may well be contemporaneous contexts where ads could exist in harmony with independently motivated user objectives. Basically all of what I see today, though, ain't it.

[akaij]

I'm not entirely convinced of it being impossible: https://vimeo.com/233586784

[midasuni]

Most people on HN rely on the adtech industry for their paycheck, you won’t see much agreement here.

[account42]

> Advertisements are a malignant cancer of capitalism

I'm stealing this.

[lost_tourist]

I'm guessing that you don't like capitalism and believe humans can actually have a nice egalitarian non-capitalistic society where everyone shares across the entire planet?

[roughly]

Ok, I’ll bite. How?

[eikenberry]

This rule doesn't hold in general though... eg. "putting the customer first" is code for treating employees as interchangeable cogs without any voice. But it does mean that they are actually putting the customer ahead of employees.