The author writes that you can either pay with money or you can “pay with your attention”. What’s left unsaid is the cost of that attention. I believe that cost is very high and it isn’t just ads, it’s the design of countless products including social media sites, games and even the site you’re reading this on right now. It’s all designed to extract as much attention as possible, and the cost is people’s ability to concentrate, learn and get shit done. The cost is, in other words, staggeringly high.
As the person who originally asked "why" I feel like I ought to respond, though much of it is covered by other comments. I used to work in more trad advertising, so my question wasn't so much an objection to working in advertising itself, but specifically Google's version of advertising, which I see as gross overreach into people's personal lives.
In other comments people have mentioned YouTube subscriptions as being an alternative, it really isn't - OK, you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you. That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here.
I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse.
I'm not sure why traditional advertising should get a pass here. Traditional advertising finds whatever fears and insecurities you have and exploits them to sell you stuff. If you're worried you're not manly enough, better buy an $80k truck with at least a V-6. If you're worried you're not a good enough parent, better give your kids some sugary crap. Exploiting people's psychology like this is also an overreach.
Do you have a position on a better alternative business model, or do you feel that a service like YouTube shouldn't exist?
It seems to me that YouTube and many of the ad-supported services out there provide broad benefits to people, and I am swayed by OPs point that a regressively priced business model which restricts these benefits to the global rich is a greater disservice.
Only a couple of years to quit something that blackened your soul? A couple of years is a pretty common amount of time to remain in a job these days.
If I sound judgy there, note that you are condemning a lot of people. Not me, actually, but I still take issue because the basis of your condemnation doesn't even make sense to me...
I think ads are a decent way to pay for a service and I prefer targeted ads to generic ads, especially since they are more effective (and if the idea is to pay for the service you are using, that is relevant).
So the issue is the data, and so the fact that Google has never sold or lost their user's data - you seem to imply otherwise - is extremely relevant, and is why I'm OK with them storing my data. In this industry that is very rare, and yet you consider Google the worst - I'm having a hard time squaring that.
> That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here.
[I work at Google too, not on ads though] Could you clarify what you mean by this.
A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that.
> you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you
This is concretely untrue, even by the stretchy definitions. Google (and generally most ad companies) don't sell your data. Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention, and some people find that just as bad.
But if you aren't seeing ads, they're not even doing that. There's no one they're selling anything of yours to. Not your data, not your attention, nothing.
My understanding is this is how people felt about traditional advertising during the rise of Madison Avenue as well? Or at least, this is how it was portrayed on Mad Men : )
> I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse.
I can definitely feel this - I worked in mobile gaming for a little while. The camaraderie was amazing, I keep in touch with a number of coworkers from that job - the company was terrible (like gaming companies tend to be) but the fact that I was devoting part of my life to building a system I knew was deeply immoral and taking advantage of people's addiction is what pushed me away from it in the end.
I really try to avoid judging people over their career or life choices since nobody is as simple as a statistic, but advertising and mobile gaming is where I break this rule - I definitely don't judge marketers as categorically evil, but the vocation is poisonous. In the article the author calls out that...
> One answer is that I'm earning to give: I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give.
As a response to people asking why they're in marketing and I think this is a really bad sign. If you need to justify your work by calling out the charity you're doing with the earnings then I think you, internally, have identified that what you're doing is causing harm to society.
I understand and sympathize with the fact that brands with poor visibility can struggle to break into established markets but these positives seem quite limited when stacked up against over-consumption, addiction exploitation, decreased general attentiveness, a weakening of what objective truths are and leaving a gigantic security hole in our society for disinformation to easily penetrate deep into folks' hearts and minds.
Advertising, at it's most basic, is trying to change the minds of consumers - you're attempting to take someone who is thinking wrong and make them think right - where right is the mindset that leads them to purchase your product. I think that advertising is really an emotional manipulation at its core.
There is probably a distinction between purely informational marketing that's done to increase general awareness of your brand and marketing that's targeting increasing the chances that an uninterested party will impulse buy your product (the later is what can lead to the over consumption of high sugar products and spur on obesity). I, honestly, couldn't draw a line between the two so if we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater so be it.
I've tried to write this up with a calm head and in an even manner, but my apologies in advance if it's too strong - it's a subject I personally have extremely strong feelings on.
My gripe with the author's rationalization (which is probably held by many of his peers as well, not to point specifically at him) is that the default of the web has become that you must accept ads being thrown in your face to do the most benign browsing activity.
a user makes an http request to a domain. the current accepted response is to send back ads and trackers, pillage and extract as much value from that user as possible, immediately. as a user I feel I should be prompted:
"this site is funded by ads. by continuing, you agree to the following..."
its just a sort of zero permission adulteration of the web - guaranteed ad revenue from a click begets more crap clickbait content and so on. in fact, perhaps ads and tracking mechanisms should be treated by browsers the same as zero click JS malware. no content til the user agrees to have ads delivered to them.
i get it, of course prompting a user would create friction and decrease revenue. its the user's machine, data. they are entitled to the optionality of rejecting an HTTP response if it contains unwanted/unwelcome crap.
The web, even as it is, functions exactly like this. You make a request to a domain, that domain says "here are some trackers". The user's browser then has a choice about whether to load them. My browser (and the browsers of many here) just ignores the request to download scripts that I don't want, because that's what I told it to do and the browser is my agent.
The big problem is that most people do not use a browser that is truly their agent--they use a browser that is an agent of an advertising company. The result is entirely predictable: Chrome acts in the best interests of its client, and loads the ads and trackers.
If we want to change the status quo with regards to advertising, we don't need to change the technology at all: we have to change the way people see a web browser. We need to help people to make the paradigm shift from "Chrome is how you consume content on the internet" to "a browser is an agent that acts on my behalf in the digital realm".
For me the first big disagreement begins with asking for what's the alternative. I don't think there needs to be an alternative. I think ads are largely responsible for the sorry state of the seo spammed web where finding what you want can be a complete nightmare. (It costs almost nothing to run a website, and if you spam enough ~zero cost sites loaded with ads and affiliate links, you can probably make a buck. This prospect just encourages spam and low effort sites.)
I don't care one bit if ad supported sites just vanish, no need for an alternative. Yes please, clean up the web. What's left is the stuff that is worth enough for people to pay for.
Just to add a little data from personal experience... About 4 years back I ran a small study in grad school where I was trying to find some alternative to ads. For a survey I basically asked "how much would you be willing to pay to view websites without ads".
I bucketed the responses to something along the lines of greater than $1, $.75, $.5, $.25, $.01 or nothing.
What I was (secretly) hoping was that people would be willing to pay something like a cent for a page view, since I was building a prototype for a more user friendly anti-adblocker, seeing that many websites started to deploy their own back then, and hating that there was no middle ground.
However, what I found was that people were unwilling to pay anything for a page view. I think the author actually mentions this as a failed alternative model.
Point being it really seems like people have decided/agreed that they prefer the ad model to anything else. Even if it means that the cost of serving ads is actually higher (in terms of bandwidth) than what it would cost to just pay a cent or two cents or whatever for pageviews.
I work in the ads business at FB. I do so because I personally like ads and my biggest gripe is that ads are not relevant and personalized enough. I want better ads.
Ultimately ads support a robust ecosystem of free software and content that keeps many creators going. Consumers can also choose to buy their software and content, or donate, but most don’t. Despite their whining, most people want free stuff, and ads are almost free (a small attention cost).
I think people comparing ads to guns, plagues, and locusts need to check their own values. Ads support free stuff for the poor and middle classes. Rich coastal elites can tell themselves they will pay for everything, and that’s great (most don’t). Most consumers cannot afford to pay for software or news subscriptions. Ad models fill out the spectrum of options.
Is the current ads ecosystem perfect? Clearly not. There’s a lot we need to do to educate users, get consent, and increase control and transparency. On the flip side, this needs to be simple and easy: consent needs to be an understandable and low friction process to avoid consent fatigue. They are also plenty of privacy enhancing technologies like differential privacy and local caching to deal with data sharing issues.
If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I support you and respect that! I just think it’s mean and shortsighted to think that everyone else is like you and to aggressively attack adtech engineers, platforms, businesses, and the billions of consumers who aren’t as rich as you and will happily watch ads to get free stuff. The internet is great because a lot of high quality stuff like software, news, videos, etc is free for anyone, anywhere. Ads make that possible and I’m proud of it.
> I think people comparing ads to guns, plagues, and locusts need to check their own values. Ads support free stuff for the poor and middle classes.
Until i can ACTUALLY opt out by paying money, you need to get off your high horse. My data is clearly more valuable to you than my dollars - otherwise I'd have a choice.
> If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I support you and respect that!
I do, pls continue to support me by:
1. making it possible to not have my data constantly collected and sold by facebook in exchange for dollars.
2. Stop tracking me after my account has been deleted.
3. Stop acting like you are part of something good while I don't have a "no surveilance" option. Until then, YOU are the problem.
> Despite their whining, most people want free stuff, and ads are almost free (a small attention cost).
> Most consumers cannot afford to pay for software or news subscriptions.
> Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything.
All this is false.
Growth hacking has created products that are addictive and which people don't really need. These are then justified by saying that consumers can't afford to pay for them (fact is that they wouldn't do because deep down they know they're not worth much). And in the meantime society suffers the consequences whilst FB etc profits hugely.
Ads pit platform owners against their users because their incentives drive platforms to employ addictive designs that prey on psychological weakness to maximize user time on site. This is the fundamental misalignment that drives a lot of downstream effects.
On the other hand, a fixed fee would cap the incentive to push the upper bounds of user time on site, thereby respecting users time and inherent interest in whatever platforms offer, absent addictive designs that try to alter that inherent interest.
Features that nag you to invite people into groups, add non-friends via PYMK, push low quality notifications to reengage, show you outrage-inducing content, push you to constantly engage or share private details of your life, check out related groups and drive you deeper down rabbit holes, etc wouldn’t have the same oxygen if the fixed fee model was used. And a service to chat with and find out what your friends were up to wouldn’t be costly at scale; likely pennies per month [1].
I appreciate your thoughtful comment and the logic you’ve laid out but disagree. I believe we’ve settled on a lucrative, low friction, easy to implement incentive model with ads but it is far far from the ideal model with way too many negative externalities.
Note this only goes for ad models with unlimited appetite for user time. I wouldn’t have a problem with ad models that have an upper bounds, eg 5 ad impressions a day max.
[1] see: WhatsApp $1/yr model prior to FB acquisition
I started hearing the idea that people wanted more personalized ads when I joined an ad tech company, and I have only heard it since from people working in the space. It doesn't seem to be an idea that normal people voice.
I have heard the opposite, which is people getting creeped out due to things like getting ads for infant products before they've told their family they're pregnant (presumably inference from browsing).
Is it really conceivable that the Web would have been stillborn without ads, or with limits to the externalities of ads? Does "software will eat the world" only mean "software will eat the world if it can sell ads?"
I'm pretty sure ads don't support the cell phone industry, or at least didn't support its exponential growth phase, yet the middle class and poor have cell phones.
I would add one more thing to your arguments: people who don't like ads should simply ask web devs of their favourite sites not to serve ads at all. Even if ads and trackers exist it is still ultimately the developers choice to include ad code in their websites.
I sense A LOT of misdirected anger towards ad companies when the "enablers" of ad companies – the web developers willing to monetise traffic with ads – are not getting any blame directed at them.
As long as you guys at Facebook are transparent about what happens if you embed your like buttons or comment sections in blogs and forums etc. the onus is on the developers to serve their visitors with safe content.
While I applaud the author for giving a chunk of his income to charity, to me it just feels like paying a penance for doing something bad.
I may be in the minority on this belief, but I think advertising -- any kind of advertising -- is inherently bad. To me, it's just psychological manipulation. I never want to see any ads, ever. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that removed things like billboards from my vision, I would wear them in a heartbeat, even though billboards are far less harmful than internet-based ads.
I sometimes hear arguments that advertising isn't all bad because when someone actually is planning to make a particular kind of purchase, advertising can help them figure out which brand/model/etc. to buy. The problem with that is that the ads have no interest in satisfying anyone's particular needs in the best way. Someone could easily be swayed by a slick ad for a product that is not as good for their use as another product that had a less-engaging/less-manipulative ad.
The worst thing about internet advertising is of course the erosion of privacy. If ad networks were merely paying for people's eyeballs, that might not be too nefarious. But they're paying to track people and build intimate profiles about them, and that's not ok. I have very little faith that any of these initiatives that will supposedly make ad targeting privacy-preserving will actually work. All they do is make it appear that a company is doing something, so they can point to it when they get in trouble, claiming that they tried really hard to help preserve privacy, but it just didn't work out.
I'm just not interested in any of this crap. I know micropayments and pay-per-article and such are really hard to do, and really hard to get adopted, but that is the only model I will accept if people want me to pay in some way for web content. Making me pay for a $30/month subscription for the three or four articles I'll end up reading on your site per month is not something I'm interested in doing. And I will not pay through psychological manipulation and erosion of privacy.
Here's an honest question: Why should a search engine cost so much?
Look at Wikipedia - it's a search engine and content repository for all of the world's knowledge, and its operating expenses are around $100M / year.
The Internet Archive has an annual budget of $10M / year.
Google on the other hand, has annual revenues of $181B / year, or about 2000 times Wikipedia's spending.
Is the crawling part hard? The folks at Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) crawl the entire web every month and release it free of charge.
What about the search algorithms? Well, you can do a bunch with TFIDF and PageRank, for which patient protection has expired.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the cost of hosting a ubiquitous search engine would be double Wikipedia's annual costs. Still about a thousand times less expensive than Google.
Ads don't pay for a search engine. They pay for vast amounts of excess.
What keeps such a solution from us? Here are a few of many reasons:
* Google pays billions of dollars a year to make it the default option on browsers.
* Exclusive deals with portals such as LinkedIn which exclude open engines such as Archive.org from their content.
* Limits on peer-to-peer connections perpetuated by IPv4 which prevent us from hosting a distributed engine ourselves.
Posing the problem as one of "there's no other way to pay for this expensive machine" is pretty lame isn't it?
"Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize." https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
Biggest issue with this argument - advertising supported businesses are fine, contextual advertising is fine, targeted cross site advertising is a pointless red queen race that is undermining our society in multiple ways.
Can you say more what you mean by "pointless red queen race"?
Let's say someone wants to sell fishing equipment. The traditional way of doing this is to buy ads on fishing sites. So now my fishing equipment purchases make there be more writing about fishing; yay!
Then one of the fishing websites decides to put a tracking pixel on their site to drop "fishing website visitor" cookies (or, in a future without third-party cookies, a turtledove interest group). They make a deal with a third party provider and get paid a small amount per visitor. Then fishing retailers have a new choice: instead of buying ads on fishing sites they can instead buy ads on any site for users who have one of the "fishing website visitor" cookies. If there were a monopoly fishing site, then this would increase their earnings: while the ad space on their site isn't as valuable, they will set the pixel price high enough that they come out ahead. It's not a monopoly, though, so the price of the pixel gets driven down through competition, and money that would go to fishing sites instead goes to the publishers that people who spend money on fishing equipment visit.
In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites.
But there are also many niches that don't have economic tie-ins, or have ones that are far weaker than "writing about fishing" and "buying fishing equipment". In a world with targeted advertising, these niches do better, because of overlap between audiences. A "let's have better housing policy" blog can show ads for fishing equipment, vacations, HVAC supplies, or whatever else visitors have shown interest in on other sites.
Additionally, targeted advertising increases the total amount of funding available for online content, because people with niche interests are available to be advertised to in more places. Seeing ten fishing ads once a week when you visit a fishing site vs seeing twenty fishing ads spread over the course of the week, etc.
So while niche publishers in lucrative niches would likely make more money if we only had context-based advertising, I don't think niche publishers overall, publishers overall, or consumers would be better off.
Just wanted to mention I appreciate seeing a different perspective here.
I know there's a lot of negative reaction to it, and I can empathize with that because there's a long history of negative behavior by the advertising industry. But there's no doubt that there are benefits too, and seeing some nuance on HN is always a win.
Fair enough when the site had one ad. Pretty much no site had one ad now. They have lots of them, which is significantly slowing down loading the page. And if you add all tracking and surveillance code, it can inflate a simple site into megabytes of data. There are common sites that load literally hundreds of outside URLs for ad and surveillance mechanics.
Which brings us to point 2:
> Non-regressive. Paywalls, like other fixed costs, are regressive
Ad costs are regressive too - if you have weak computer and low bw connection, if your connection is unstable or expensive, if your only internet device is a mobile phone with less than excellent bandwidth - which is commonly the case in low income communities - then the last thing you want is to be hit with megabytes of ad data which have zero relationship to what you want to get. Of course, for people sitting on optical gigabit networks with latest-greatest hardware their employer paid for is not much of a problem...
If it was just a paid service, you could work out a deal - maybe it could be cheaper for your country, or have some kind of library or per-provider setup that could make it easier for you to get to it - but you don't have this option, it's megabytes of ad everywhere.
Not to mention how they disproportionately affect "non tech savvy" groups. I almost never see ads, especially not the really obnoxious ones, and I imagine it's the same for most people here. Meanwhile elderly people are being inundated with ads that look like forms and buttons and warnings, and getting tricked into doing who knows what. Even if that's not financially regressive, it still has an outsized impact that is worse for groups that are already having a harder time of it.
Also regarding regressivity: poorer and/or less informed people are more at-risk for predatory advertising: think scratch lotteries, payday loans, etc. Also of course the "YOU HAVE [241] VIRUSES DETECTED, DOWNLOAD SUPER CLEANER SX"
There's a lot of talk in the comments here about how ads are terrible, Jeff is terrible, etc. Eg "I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a company that does that and even lower of anyone who actually works on serving those adverts."
According to https://www.jefftk.com/donations, Jeff and Julia have donated about $1.5m. GiveWell top rated charities are estimated [1] to save a life for each $3,000 - $5,000 donated. For a ballpark analysis, let's call that $4,000 and ignore secondary factors (eg inflation over their donation history).
Jeff and Julia have saved something like 375 lives, many of them likely children.
Please keep that in mind while forming and communicating your views.
If you really want to be utilitarian about it, then you must weigh the lives saved by donations against the lives destroyed by advertisements. If Jeff does not comes out ahead, he is terrible. The Less Wrong creed "shut up and multiply" is relevant, I ask commenters be sure to understand what I mean before replying to my argument.
I estimate that while he is still earning income, the upper bound for person-years saved will be 550_000 (30 more working years, 19_000_000$ total donations, a lifetime is worth 100 years and costs 3_500$). I estimate the lower bound for person-years destroyed will be 24_000 person-years (50_000_000 people affected, each losing 365 seconds every year over 42 years). These numbers are inconclusive.
I cannot answer the big philosophical question whether he shares responsibility with the other people working in advertisements, so we would divide the total destruction person-years by the number of people working in advertisements. If yes, this would certainly make the donation scheme very favourable/positively utilitarian.
Yeah, I still don't like it. I used to not mind ads because they were just images, but then came the ones that moved, then the ones that made sound, then the ones that injected malicious JavaScript. Then I installed an adblocker, then I installed a script blocker, then I installed a proxy. Now most websites won't work and I'm fine with that.
> So: why is advertising good? (…) The question is, what is the alternative?
“I can’t think of a better alternative than the status quo, thus the status quo is positive” isn’t a sound conclusion. Every sufficiently ingrained societal negative we’ve abolished since was likely reasoned in that manner at one point.
You should become Wanksy, but for advertisements. "Rate My Add, with totally coincidental Poo on it". Maybe there's a market for YTMND with split screen ads, poo or whatever and music for us to mock all these brands with.
I’m against advertisement, in my opinion it’s the worst thing to happen to the internet.
However, I have a problem with Google adverts specifically and that is that they’re absolute hot garbage. Google has advertised to me: outright scams, malware, gambling, mobile games with extremely exploitative monetisation.
And they are working to take away any privacy I might have to keep showing me this shit. In my opinion, Google is basically evil these days.
I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a company that does that and even lower of anyone who actually works on serving those adverts.
When I was a impoverished kid, how else was I supposed to get internet and email accept for with Juno, then NetZero or stealing internet? Yeah I used gophernet through a local library dialup and it was not the internet.
I mean, my brother once bought a "personal fan" for $1 and that was the most coveted possession we had for about 6 months.
As someone who grew up extremely poor and effectively dumpster dived for my first computer what pragmatic alternative is there?
I don't want to be uncharitable but this seems like a very middle class and annoyed wealthy problem to have, I haven't seen any non regressive approaches accept for MAYBE from crypto browsers.
Maybe the wealthy and middle class are just tired of subsidizing the internet and the content on it. As a broke child ads got me to a place where I could download html, learn to program and code and break out of an insane degree of poverty. The borland turbo c books at the library never seemed to have code that would compile.
It may just be my personal experience but all of this feel like pulling up the ladder behind me and I haven't seen anyone articulate practical alternatives that address this issue.
edit: Even mass surveillance and government control seems like an orthogonal near strawman issue to me, as far as I'm aware the most restricted countries on earth like China and NK don't need or use ad networks for their lockdowns. Frankly if you can't scrape data off my hard drive, don't have the power of incarceration (or feed data to those who do), and don't tie it to my credit score or ability to bank (I think we should pass legislation explicitly banning that on the banking side) and don't make it illegal to use ad blockers, I don't see the problem.
Justify it however you want, its not (IMHO) adding value to society and has created perverse incentives on the internet. Donating to "efficient" charities does not excuse what you do for a living. That was thrown out there first to virtue signal, but something tells me if that is your first argument you know that what you are doing isnt good for society. I honestly would feel better about the guy if he just said 'I work on ads. They pay me a shit ton of money. I know its a dirty business, but right now I want to get paid'.
Thanks for sharing. This was a compelling argument that nudged my understanding in a new direction.
I recently started paying creators on Patreon and subscribing to news outlets I wanted to support. But within a year, I realized that this was inefficient, I didn't like/read/watch most of the content that my subscriptions were supporting. As much as I wanted to support the content creators and quality journalism, I questioned the value of my subscriptions and cancelled - I felt like I signed up for a gym membership on Jan 1st that I wasn't using anymore.
Ads allow me "to pay" with my attention for only the content that I value. I don't like ads, I generally use an ad-blocker, but I appreciate the post and the perspective.
I pay for youtube, support some people on patreon and use an adblocker. But I still think ads a net positive and a clever solution to bootstrapping and continuing to support a relatively open online publishing ecosystem.
Thanks for your work and sharing your thoughts jefftk!
> but what about all those sites that don't have a strong commercial tie-in?
Surely it's okay for sites that "don't have a commercial tie-in" to stick with untargeted ads? I just think that building a giant stalking network is an extreme (and ideally illegal) solution to the "problem" that a couple of sites won't make as much money off their popularity as they'd like.
And is it that uncharitable to characterize what Facebook and Google are building as a giant stalking network?
Each ad serve is not worth that much to start with, facebooks CPMs are about $7-8, so they are getting $0.007 per serve with extensive targeting. The falloff is something around 10x+ for completely non targeted ads which for most sites push them below the level of economic feasibility.
This is also why if you stumble into some parts of the web, they vomit out a billion ads per page to try and compensate.
Really the problem is that there is a tremendous gap between the costs to serve content and users willingness to pay (either directly or via any indirect method). It is a tremendously deep hole we've built with freemium models that will probably require some level of societal agreement to dig back out of.
Ads are a corrupting influence on the web - the issue with framing this as more open access compared to for-pay services is that it sidesteps how the model corrupts the content of the services itself. There are the data collection and privacy issues as well, but it's the corruption of the content that's a really serious destructive force. In the end you can't even pay for the original non-ad supported content anymore because the content itself is an ad created entirely for the purpose of driving engagement. (There are some exceptions to this e.g. Substack).
It also corrupts what products get built because the incentives between the users of the software and the funders of the software are not aligned (even though ad devs pretend they are by pretending users like relevant ads). To test if users truly find 'relevant ads' as value-add: make two products, one with ads and one without and charge for the one with ads - see how many people buy it.
Why doesn't Hulu charge more many for their streaming service with ads instead of their service without? The behavior of these companies suggests they know on some level this value-add nonsense is a rationalization. Even if you say it's only value-add when compared to un-targeted ads - let users choose to have un-targeted ads without giving up their data privacy. I'd bet money on what choice they'd make.
The truth is targeted ads work and make enormous amounts of money for the ad companies - that's why they do them. The twisted narratives of why this is actually good for people or society are just another example that there is no limit to humanity's ability to rationalize anything when it's in their interest to do so.
--
"“In the beginning not everyone tended to their free data farms. Many did not know what to do with them, some only planted one or two tweets and then abandoned them entirely. This disappointed the earls of our kingdom. If they don’t encourage growth, their share of the data harvest is smaller, there’s no one to hear their pronouncements, and all of the land they spent time cultivating is wasted. They realized that not only do they need to make the land easy to cultivate, but they need to make the serfs want to cultivate it. They experimented for a while and learned that new types of controversial, viciously competitive crops are great for encouraging data farming - they call this type of encouragement ‘engagement’.”"
[+] [-] adriand|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcongo|4 years ago|reply
In other comments people have mentioned YouTube subscriptions as being an alternative, it really isn't - OK, you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you. That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here.
I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse.
[+] [-] notJim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DogOnTheWeb|4 years ago|reply
It seems to me that YouTube and many of the ad-supported services out there provide broad benefits to people, and I am swayed by OPs point that a regressively priced business model which restricts these benefits to the global rich is a greater disservice.
[+] [-] tomComb|4 years ago|reply
If I sound judgy there, note that you are condemning a lot of people. Not me, actually, but I still take issue because the basis of your condemnation doesn't even make sense to me...
I think ads are a decent way to pay for a service and I prefer targeted ads to generic ads, especially since they are more effective (and if the idea is to pay for the service you are using, that is relevant).
So the issue is the data, and so the fact that Google has never sold or lost their user's data - you seem to imply otherwise - is extremely relevant, and is why I'm OK with them storing my data. In this industry that is very rare, and yet you consider Google the worst - I'm having a hard time squaring that.
[+] [-] joshuamorton|4 years ago|reply
[I work at Google too, not on ads though] Could you clarify what you mean by this.
A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that.
> you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you
This is concretely untrue, even by the stretchy definitions. Google (and generally most ad companies) don't sell your data. Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention, and some people find that just as bad.
But if you aren't seeing ads, they're not even doing that. There's no one they're selling anything of yours to. Not your data, not your attention, nothing.
[+] [-] ep103|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munk-a|4 years ago|reply
I can definitely feel this - I worked in mobile gaming for a little while. The camaraderie was amazing, I keep in touch with a number of coworkers from that job - the company was terrible (like gaming companies tend to be) but the fact that I was devoting part of my life to building a system I knew was deeply immoral and taking advantage of people's addiction is what pushed me away from it in the end.
I really try to avoid judging people over their career or life choices since nobody is as simple as a statistic, but advertising and mobile gaming is where I break this rule - I definitely don't judge marketers as categorically evil, but the vocation is poisonous. In the article the author calls out that...
> One answer is that I'm earning to give: I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give.
As a response to people asking why they're in marketing and I think this is a really bad sign. If you need to justify your work by calling out the charity you're doing with the earnings then I think you, internally, have identified that what you're doing is causing harm to society.
I understand and sympathize with the fact that brands with poor visibility can struggle to break into established markets but these positives seem quite limited when stacked up against over-consumption, addiction exploitation, decreased general attentiveness, a weakening of what objective truths are and leaving a gigantic security hole in our society for disinformation to easily penetrate deep into folks' hearts and minds.
Advertising, at it's most basic, is trying to change the minds of consumers - you're attempting to take someone who is thinking wrong and make them think right - where right is the mindset that leads them to purchase your product. I think that advertising is really an emotional manipulation at its core.
There is probably a distinction between purely informational marketing that's done to increase general awareness of your brand and marketing that's targeting increasing the chances that an uninterested party will impulse buy your product (the later is what can lead to the over consumption of high sugar products and spur on obesity). I, honestly, couldn't draw a line between the two so if we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater so be it.
I've tried to write this up with a calm head and in an even manner, but my apologies in advance if it's too strong - it's a subject I personally have extremely strong feelings on.
[+] [-] baby-yoda|4 years ago|reply
a user makes an http request to a domain. the current accepted response is to send back ads and trackers, pillage and extract as much value from that user as possible, immediately. as a user I feel I should be prompted:
"this site is funded by ads. by continuing, you agree to the following..."
its just a sort of zero permission adulteration of the web - guaranteed ad revenue from a click begets more crap clickbait content and so on. in fact, perhaps ads and tracking mechanisms should be treated by browsers the same as zero click JS malware. no content til the user agrees to have ads delivered to them.
i get it, of course prompting a user would create friction and decrease revenue. its the user's machine, data. they are entitled to the optionality of rejecting an HTTP response if it contains unwanted/unwelcome crap.
[+] [-] lolinder|4 years ago|reply
The big problem is that most people do not use a browser that is truly their agent--they use a browser that is an agent of an advertising company. The result is entirely predictable: Chrome acts in the best interests of its client, and loads the ads and trackers.
If we want to change the status quo with regards to advertising, we don't need to change the technology at all: we have to change the way people see a web browser. We need to help people to make the paradigm shift from "Chrome is how you consume content on the internet" to "a browser is an agent that acts on my behalf in the digital realm".
[+] [-] thrwaeasddsaf|4 years ago|reply
I don't care one bit if ad supported sites just vanish, no need for an alternative. Yes please, clean up the web. What's left is the stuff that is worth enough for people to pay for.
[+] [-] discmonkey|4 years ago|reply
I bucketed the responses to something along the lines of greater than $1, $.75, $.5, $.25, $.01 or nothing.
What I was (secretly) hoping was that people would be willing to pay something like a cent for a page view, since I was building a prototype for a more user friendly anti-adblocker, seeing that many websites started to deploy their own back then, and hating that there was no middle ground.
However, what I found was that people were unwilling to pay anything for a page view. I think the author actually mentions this as a failed alternative model.
Point being it really seems like people have decided/agreed that they prefer the ad model to anything else. Even if it means that the cost of serving ads is actually higher (in terms of bandwidth) than what it would cost to just pay a cent or two cents or whatever for pageviews.
[+] [-] elzbardico|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fomine3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hermesfeet|4 years ago|reply
I work in the ads business at FB. I do so because I personally like ads and my biggest gripe is that ads are not relevant and personalized enough. I want better ads.
Ultimately ads support a robust ecosystem of free software and content that keeps many creators going. Consumers can also choose to buy their software and content, or donate, but most don’t. Despite their whining, most people want free stuff, and ads are almost free (a small attention cost).
I think people comparing ads to guns, plagues, and locusts need to check their own values. Ads support free stuff for the poor and middle classes. Rich coastal elites can tell themselves they will pay for everything, and that’s great (most don’t). Most consumers cannot afford to pay for software or news subscriptions. Ad models fill out the spectrum of options.
Is the current ads ecosystem perfect? Clearly not. There’s a lot we need to do to educate users, get consent, and increase control and transparency. On the flip side, this needs to be simple and easy: consent needs to be an understandable and low friction process to avoid consent fatigue. They are also plenty of privacy enhancing technologies like differential privacy and local caching to deal with data sharing issues.
If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I support you and respect that! I just think it’s mean and shortsighted to think that everyone else is like you and to aggressively attack adtech engineers, platforms, businesses, and the billions of consumers who aren’t as rich as you and will happily watch ads to get free stuff. The internet is great because a lot of high quality stuff like software, news, videos, etc is free for anyone, anywhere. Ads make that possible and I’m proud of it.
[+] [-] sophacles|4 years ago|reply
Until i can ACTUALLY opt out by paying money, you need to get off your high horse. My data is clearly more valuable to you than my dollars - otherwise I'd have a choice.
> If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I support you and respect that!
I do, pls continue to support me by:
1. making it possible to not have my data constantly collected and sold by facebook in exchange for dollars.
2. Stop tracking me after my account has been deleted.
3. Stop acting like you are part of something good while I don't have a "no surveilance" option. Until then, YOU are the problem.
[+] [-] klelatti|4 years ago|reply
> Most consumers cannot afford to pay for software or news subscriptions.
> Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything.
All this is false.
Growth hacking has created products that are addictive and which people don't really need. These are then justified by saying that consumers can't afford to pay for them (fact is that they wouldn't do because deep down they know they're not worth much). And in the meantime society suffers the consequences whilst FB etc profits hugely.
[+] [-] npunt|4 years ago|reply
On the other hand, a fixed fee would cap the incentive to push the upper bounds of user time on site, thereby respecting users time and inherent interest in whatever platforms offer, absent addictive designs that try to alter that inherent interest.
Features that nag you to invite people into groups, add non-friends via PYMK, push low quality notifications to reengage, show you outrage-inducing content, push you to constantly engage or share private details of your life, check out related groups and drive you deeper down rabbit holes, etc wouldn’t have the same oxygen if the fixed fee model was used. And a service to chat with and find out what your friends were up to wouldn’t be costly at scale; likely pennies per month [1].
I appreciate your thoughtful comment and the logic you’ve laid out but disagree. I believe we’ve settled on a lucrative, low friction, easy to implement incentive model with ads but it is far far from the ideal model with way too many negative externalities.
Note this only goes for ad models with unlimited appetite for user time. I wouldn’t have a problem with ad models that have an upper bounds, eg 5 ad impressions a day max.
[1] see: WhatsApp $1/yr model prior to FB acquisition
[+] [-] nitwit005|4 years ago|reply
I have heard the opposite, which is people getting creeped out due to things like getting ads for infant products before they've told their family they're pregnant (presumably inference from browsing).
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure ads don't support the cell phone industry, or at least didn't support its exponential growth phase, yet the middle class and poor have cell phones.
[+] [-] originalvichy|4 years ago|reply
I sense A LOT of misdirected anger towards ad companies when the "enablers" of ad companies – the web developers willing to monetise traffic with ads – are not getting any blame directed at them.
As long as you guys at Facebook are transparent about what happens if you embed your like buttons or comment sections in blogs and forums etc. the onus is on the developers to serve their visitors with safe content.
[+] [-] kelnos|4 years ago|reply
I may be in the minority on this belief, but I think advertising -- any kind of advertising -- is inherently bad. To me, it's just psychological manipulation. I never want to see any ads, ever. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that removed things like billboards from my vision, I would wear them in a heartbeat, even though billboards are far less harmful than internet-based ads.
I sometimes hear arguments that advertising isn't all bad because when someone actually is planning to make a particular kind of purchase, advertising can help them figure out which brand/model/etc. to buy. The problem with that is that the ads have no interest in satisfying anyone's particular needs in the best way. Someone could easily be swayed by a slick ad for a product that is not as good for their use as another product that had a less-engaging/less-manipulative ad.
The worst thing about internet advertising is of course the erosion of privacy. If ad networks were merely paying for people's eyeballs, that might not be too nefarious. But they're paying to track people and build intimate profiles about them, and that's not ok. I have very little faith that any of these initiatives that will supposedly make ad targeting privacy-preserving will actually work. All they do is make it appear that a company is doing something, so they can point to it when they get in trouble, claiming that they tried really hard to help preserve privacy, but it just didn't work out.
I'm just not interested in any of this crap. I know micropayments and pay-per-article and such are really hard to do, and really hard to get adopted, but that is the only model I will accept if people want me to pay in some way for web content. Making me pay for a $30/month subscription for the three or four articles I'll end up reading on your site per month is not something I'm interested in doing. And I will not pay through psychological manipulation and erosion of privacy.
[+] [-] alex_young|4 years ago|reply
Look at Wikipedia - it's a search engine and content repository for all of the world's knowledge, and its operating expenses are around $100M / year.
The Internet Archive has an annual budget of $10M / year.
Google on the other hand, has annual revenues of $181B / year, or about 2000 times Wikipedia's spending.
Is the crawling part hard? The folks at Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) crawl the entire web every month and release it free of charge.
What about the search algorithms? Well, you can do a bunch with TFIDF and PageRank, for which patient protection has expired.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the cost of hosting a ubiquitous search engine would be double Wikipedia's annual costs. Still about a thousand times less expensive than Google.
Ads don't pay for a search engine. They pay for vast amounts of excess.
What keeps such a solution from us? Here are a few of many reasons:
* Google pays billions of dollars a year to make it the default option on browsers.
* Exclusive deals with portals such as LinkedIn which exclude open engines such as Archive.org from their content.
* Limits on peer-to-peer connections perpetuated by IPv4 which prevent us from hosting a distributed engine ourselves.
Posing the problem as one of "there's no other way to pay for this expensive machine" is pretty lame isn't it?
[+] [-] wmf|4 years ago|reply
"Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize." https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] czzr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefftk|4 years ago|reply
Let's say someone wants to sell fishing equipment. The traditional way of doing this is to buy ads on fishing sites. So now my fishing equipment purchases make there be more writing about fishing; yay!
Then one of the fishing websites decides to put a tracking pixel on their site to drop "fishing website visitor" cookies (or, in a future without third-party cookies, a turtledove interest group). They make a deal with a third party provider and get paid a small amount per visitor. Then fishing retailers have a new choice: instead of buying ads on fishing sites they can instead buy ads on any site for users who have one of the "fishing website visitor" cookies. If there were a monopoly fishing site, then this would increase their earnings: while the ad space on their site isn't as valuable, they will set the pixel price high enough that they come out ahead. It's not a monopoly, though, so the price of the pixel gets driven down through competition, and money that would go to fishing sites instead goes to the publishers that people who spend money on fishing equipment visit.
In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites.
But there are also many niches that don't have economic tie-ins, or have ones that are far weaker than "writing about fishing" and "buying fishing equipment". In a world with targeted advertising, these niches do better, because of overlap between audiences. A "let's have better housing policy" blog can show ads for fishing equipment, vacations, HVAC supplies, or whatever else visitors have shown interest in on other sites.
Additionally, targeted advertising increases the total amount of funding available for online content, because people with niche interests are available to be advertised to in more places. Seeing ten fishing ads once a week when you visit a fishing site vs seeing twenty fishing ads spread over the course of the week, etc.
So while niche publishers in lucrative niches would likely make more money if we only had context-based advertising, I don't think niche publishers overall, publishers overall, or consumers would be better off.
(This is modified from a comment I originally posted on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620763)
[+] [-] rpicard|4 years ago|reply
I know there's a lot of negative reaction to it, and I can empathize with that because there's a long history of negative behavior by the advertising industry. But there's no doubt that there are benefits too, and seeing some nuance on HN is always a win.
[+] [-] andrepd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SyzygistSix|4 years ago|reply
There most certainly are doubts that there are any benefits. Online ads aren't any more beneficial than billboards.
I think we would do well to follow the example of Sao Paulo.
[+] [-] smsm42|4 years ago|reply
> Minimal friction.
Fair enough when the site had one ad. Pretty much no site had one ad now. They have lots of them, which is significantly slowing down loading the page. And if you add all tracking and surveillance code, it can inflate a simple site into megabytes of data. There are common sites that load literally hundreds of outside URLs for ad and surveillance mechanics.
Which brings us to point 2:
> Non-regressive. Paywalls, like other fixed costs, are regressive
Ad costs are regressive too - if you have weak computer and low bw connection, if your connection is unstable or expensive, if your only internet device is a mobile phone with less than excellent bandwidth - which is commonly the case in low income communities - then the last thing you want is to be hit with megabytes of ad data which have zero relationship to what you want to get. Of course, for people sitting on optical gigabit networks with latest-greatest hardware their employer paid for is not much of a problem...
If it was just a paid service, you could work out a deal - maybe it could be cheaper for your country, or have some kind of library or per-provider setup that could make it easier for you to get to it - but you don't have this option, it's megabytes of ad everywhere.
[+] [-] version_five|4 years ago|reply
Not to mention how they disproportionately affect "non tech savvy" groups. I almost never see ads, especially not the really obnoxious ones, and I imagine it's the same for most people here. Meanwhile elderly people are being inundated with ads that look like forms and buttons and warnings, and getting tricked into doing who knows what. Even if that's not financially regressive, it still has an outsized impact that is worse for groups that are already having a harder time of it.
[+] [-] andrepd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbenamy|4 years ago|reply
According to https://www.jefftk.com/donations, Jeff and Julia have donated about $1.5m. GiveWell top rated charities are estimated [1] to save a life for each $3,000 - $5,000 donated. For a ballpark analysis, let's call that $4,000 and ignore secondary factors (eg inflation over their donation history).
Jeff and Julia have saved something like 375 lives, many of them likely children.
Please keep that in mind while forming and communicating your views.
[1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
[+] [-] bmn__|4 years ago|reply
I estimate that while he is still earning income, the upper bound for person-years saved will be 550_000 (30 more working years, 19_000_000$ total donations, a lifetime is worth 100 years and costs 3_500$). I estimate the lower bound for person-years destroyed will be 24_000 person-years (50_000_000 people affected, each losing 365 seconds every year over 42 years). These numbers are inconclusive.
I cannot answer the big philosophical question whether he shares responsibility with the other people working in advertisements, so we would divide the total destruction person-years by the number of people working in advertisements. If yes, this would certainly make the donation scheme very favourable/positively utilitarian.
[+] [-] FriedrichN|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latexr|4 years ago|reply
> (…)
> So: why is advertising good? (…) The question is, what is the alternative?
“I can’t think of a better alternative than the status quo, thus the status quo is positive” isn’t a sound conclusion. Every sufficiently ingrained societal negative we’ve abolished since was likely reasoned in that manner at one point.
[+] [-] djdjdjdjdj|4 years ago|reply
I see an annoying ad in public space? I might get in contact with them to complain about that ad.
I think it is just fair to tell someone my honest opinion as soon as they take the time and effort to target me.
I'm totally lost on why we support generic unrelevant ads in public spaces. It makes our cities ugly.
[+] [-] medium_burrito|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SyzygistSix|4 years ago|reply
Some of the states that care a lot about their communities have done so, like Maine and Vermont.
[+] [-] andrepd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkersten|4 years ago|reply
However, I have a problem with Google adverts specifically and that is that they’re absolute hot garbage. Google has advertised to me: outright scams, malware, gambling, mobile games with extremely exploitative monetisation.
And they are working to take away any privacy I might have to keep showing me this shit. In my opinion, Google is basically evil these days.
I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a company that does that and even lower of anyone who actually works on serving those adverts.
[+] [-] fellowniusmonk|4 years ago|reply
I mean, my brother once bought a "personal fan" for $1 and that was the most coveted possession we had for about 6 months.
As someone who grew up extremely poor and effectively dumpster dived for my first computer what pragmatic alternative is there?
I don't want to be uncharitable but this seems like a very middle class and annoyed wealthy problem to have, I haven't seen any non regressive approaches accept for MAYBE from crypto browsers.
Maybe the wealthy and middle class are just tired of subsidizing the internet and the content on it. As a broke child ads got me to a place where I could download html, learn to program and code and break out of an insane degree of poverty. The borland turbo c books at the library never seemed to have code that would compile.
It may just be my personal experience but all of this feel like pulling up the ladder behind me and I haven't seen anyone articulate practical alternatives that address this issue.
edit: Even mass surveillance and government control seems like an orthogonal near strawman issue to me, as far as I'm aware the most restricted countries on earth like China and NK don't need or use ad networks for their lockdowns. Frankly if you can't scrape data off my hard drive, don't have the power of incarceration (or feed data to those who do), and don't tie it to my credit score or ability to bank (I think we should pass legislation explicitly banning that on the banking side) and don't make it illegal to use ad blockers, I don't see the problem.
[+] [-] S_A_P|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxwellM|4 years ago|reply
I recently started paying creators on Patreon and subscribing to news outlets I wanted to support. But within a year, I realized that this was inefficient, I didn't like/read/watch most of the content that my subscriptions were supporting. As much as I wanted to support the content creators and quality journalism, I questioned the value of my subscriptions and cancelled - I felt like I signed up for a gym membership on Jan 1st that I wasn't using anymore.
Ads allow me "to pay" with my attention for only the content that I value. I don't like ads, I generally use an ad-blocker, but I appreciate the post and the perspective.
[+] [-] goertzen|4 years ago|reply
Thanks for your work and sharing your thoughts jefftk!
[+] [-] creata|4 years ago|reply
Surely it's okay for sites that "don't have a commercial tie-in" to stick with untargeted ads? I just think that building a giant stalking network is an extreme (and ideally illegal) solution to the "problem" that a couple of sites won't make as much money off their popularity as they'd like.
And is it that uncharitable to characterize what Facebook and Google are building as a giant stalking network?
[+] [-] the8bit|4 years ago|reply
This is also why if you stumble into some parts of the web, they vomit out a billion ads per page to try and compensate.
Really the problem is that there is a tremendous gap between the costs to serve content and users willingness to pay (either directly or via any indirect method). It is a tremendously deep hole we've built with freemium models that will probably require some level of societal agreement to dig back out of.
[+] [-] gonehome|4 years ago|reply
It also corrupts what products get built because the incentives between the users of the software and the funders of the software are not aligned (even though ad devs pretend they are by pretending users like relevant ads). To test if users truly find 'relevant ads' as value-add: make two products, one with ads and one without and charge for the one with ads - see how many people buy it.
Why doesn't Hulu charge more many for their streaming service with ads instead of their service without? The behavior of these companies suggests they know on some level this value-add nonsense is a rationalization. Even if you say it's only value-add when compared to un-targeted ads - let users choose to have un-targeted ads without giving up their data privacy. I'd bet money on what choice they'd make.
The truth is targeted ads work and make enormous amounts of money for the ad companies - that's why they do them. The twisted narratives of why this is actually good for people or society are just another example that there is no limit to humanity's ability to rationalize anything when it's in their interest to do so.
--
"“In the beginning not everyone tended to their free data farms. Many did not know what to do with them, some only planted one or two tweets and then abandoned them entirely. This disappointed the earls of our kingdom. If they don’t encourage growth, their share of the data harvest is smaller, there’s no one to hear their pronouncements, and all of the land they spent time cultivating is wasted. They realized that not only do they need to make the land easy to cultivate, but they need to make the serfs want to cultivate it. They experimented for a while and learned that new types of controversial, viciously competitive crops are great for encouraging data farming - they call this type of encouragement ‘engagement’.”"
https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...