Take up knitting?
What percentage of mobile app development is paid for with ads?
What percentage of web development is paid for with ads?
How many open source projects are contributed to by developers who work at companies that rely on ads to you, pay their actual bills
How many “side projects” on this site are paid for with ads
How many projects are B2B where the other B is in ads, or relied on ads, or relies on something that relies on ads.
Sometimes I love HN but then I remember how, frankly, full of shit some people are.
We’ve built this house of cards on ads. If ads go, the industry will collapse into a shadow of itself and half of you won’t get to eat.
It’s nice to act like ads are just this evil thing devs invented but surprise surprise, they’re a form of payment because people don’t like to pay for stuff.
Remove the way people pay for stuff and suddenly this industry where you make 6 figures for jerking off to javascript frameworks doesn’t make sense.
Lots of sites sell things, which is enough reason to make those sites. Millions of sites are representing businesses (restaurant etc). No, the web isn't going away because joe shmoe can't put up ads. Its so cheap to put up a website anyway, folks do it for many reasons.
I don't think the parent commenter disagrees with you about spying. I think they're trying to highlight the fundamental tension of the is-ought problem at play here. Your normative claim is that it's good to limit activity which reduces consumer privacy. The positive conclusion is that to achieve this moral imperative, we'd have to either radically repurpose existing software engineers or radically reduce the industry.
Your point about spying isn't wrong. But I think history shows us that taking away (or reducing) peoples' livelihood while telling them, "well at least you're no longer a moral hazard!" isn't productive. It's too extreme. If you want to actually reduce the negative externalities caused by digital advertising, you can't realistically tell software engineers to take up knitting.
There was a thriving core to the software industry that existed well before the ad-fueled web and still exists today. Plain old business websites, line-of-business internal software, desktop apps, embedded and IoT software, etc., none of these things depend on ads. If you can't see that there is plenty of things to do for software developers to do if ads are curtailed, you need to broaden your horizons.
We don't have to bring down software development down along with adtech. We can shift the software engineers to doing something non-malicious. Salaries may go down a bit, as there aren't many other sources of easy money beyond ads.
I don’t work with ads.
But we have B2C clients that wouldn’t exist without the ad industry, in fact how would people know we exist without the ad industry?
How many of your customers are funded by ads, or use tools funded by ads, or have customers of their own that are?
Not to mention stuff most people use, like GMail, Google Search, “free” apps
We’re part of an ecosystem, you can’t point at the shitty parts and get all uppity, you are on the same ship
In keeping with the guidelines of this website, I think it's fair to not immediately resort to personal attacks as a retaliation for a perceived slight.
As for the rest of your reply: I have not and continue to not get reliable statistical information that outlines exactly how ads help businesses. Mostly because the people that work in the ad industry just don't really seem to care about accurate numbers. If they did, it seems to me they would invest a bit more time and effort into understanding what makes a measurement accurate and how you make such a measurement.
That then neatly ties into your claim that basically every business I know wouldn't exist without advertising, which I would classify as the kind of extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Of which there is none.
As for the claim that I am all "uppity": If that means questioning when people do things that I see as wrong, I think that is a virtue.
