[BoiledCabbage]

You'd be shocked at how many people who work on ads really do delude themselves into thinking people find ads "useful".

Their usual justification is in the end somewhere tied to "people click on ads so they must find them useful". And yet somehow always ignores the fact that their platform often does all it can to hide that ads are ads and makes them look as much like content as possible.

[user3939382]

If lots of people work for the company, they’re making a lot, and paying a lot, in the world we live in professional ethics in tech are considered quaint and naive, if they’re even on the radar.

[jdw64]

Maybe breaking into the ad business starts with learning how to lie to yourself.

[BLKNSLVR]

Can you imagine wanting to go into advertising? Surely it must be a last resort, or they were tricked into it, like going to work for Facebook or Google to do important bleeding edge work.

The 'advertising' part only makes sense if it seeped in small degrees at a time.

[xuhu]

It's legal and it pays well. That is all.

[wunderlotus]

Ads can be useful when they are optimized for users and not for advertiser/ad platform.

I do agree with you about the deluding part though. I was (as a user) all for hyper-personalization of ads on all platforms when I worked in ads. Since I’m not longer working in ads, I’m more skeptical and value privacy a lot more.

Honestly, the core problem is that we can’t trust the platforms selling the ads.

[rchaud]

Yeah and private health insurance can be useful if it is designed to pool risk across a population, help make healthcare costs transparent and pay for treatments that people need. But that's not where the money is.