[crusso]

The dislike of advertising isn't so much that ads pay for free content on the internet. It has to do more with the slippery slope of qualities and techniques that advertisers have and use to be successful.

To be a really good advertiser, you normally need to do some of the following loathsome things (and others not listed):

1. Outright spam. 2. Force opt-out over opt-in notions of content distribution. 3. Collect information on people that normally violates user notions of privacy. 4. Abuse otherwise useful UI features like pop-up windows in order to force ads into user view. 5. Be obnoxious to get your message heard, ie make the ad big, make the colors outlandish, add sound.

Engineers dislike advertising because we know details of how our privacy is being violated. We don't have the bliss of ignorance.

[mkmcdonald]

> 2. Force opt-out over opt-in notions of content distribution.

> Engineers dislike advertising because we know details of how our privacy is being violated. We don't have the bliss of ignorance.

Nailed it.

[brugidou]

I work as an engineer for an advertising company (criteo) and call me naive but I believe we do none of these. I still understand the stereotyped view of advertising companies that we all hate.

Also, Google is (mostly) an advertising company.

[JoelPM]

I also work as an engineer for an ad related company (openx) and I similarly believe we do none of the above. On the engineering side we mostly write code that gets called billions of times a day and has to provide responses in a few hundred milliseconds. It's kinda fun.

Google is definitely an advertising company, but they do it well.

[toddynho]

that's an archaic view on advertising