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Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

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550 points polskibus | 2 comments | 08 Feb 19 16:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.018s | source
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locklock ◴[08 Feb 19 16:47 UTC] No.19116039[source]▶
I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.
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spyspy ◴[08 Feb 19 17:10 UTC] No.19116323[source]▶
Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse game.
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armandososa ◴[08 Feb 19 17:23 UTC] No.19116468[source]▶
I worked on something like this (but at a very much lower scale, of course) and it's fun at first but then I realized that my whole job was making users experience worst and I was miserable for as long as I had that job. I swore not to work on anything advertising-related ever again.
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matz1 ◴[08 Feb 19 17:28 UTC] No.19116538[source]▶
Yea of course it's not for everyone, everyone have different concern, but I could see myself work on this if it paid well.
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eropple ◴[08 Feb 19 17:48 UTC] No.19116767{3}[source]▶
Perhaps reconsider.

"If it paid well" externalizes the ills it inflicts on other people. And they matter, too.

replies(1): >>19117072 #
matz1 ◴[08 Feb 19 18:17 UTC] No.19117072{4}[source]▶
sure, thats why I said what everyone consider 'matter' are different, for me this doesn't matter that much.
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eropple ◴[08 Feb 19 19:01 UTC] No.19117538{5}[source]▶
...And I am lightly suggesting that maybe it should matter.

Hurting others unnecessarily is the only sin in the world. Don't ever, ever be That Guy.

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1. SmellyGeekBoy ◴[08 Feb 19 19:21 UTC] No.19117715{6}[source]▶
Making people looks at adverts is hurting them?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a uBlock user myself but come on.

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2. eropple ◴[08 Feb 19 20:33 UTC] No.19118368[source]▶
In and of itself? No, certainly not. Historically, however, advertisements have been a few things that matter. They've been passive--the level of attention a print advertisement is able to demand is constrained. Or they've been supportive--your "show X is brought to you by Y!" advertisements, which historically tended to have some kind of anchoring into the community surrounding the content or service being consumed.

They're not anymore. To the first, advertisements are designed, by the platform, to for maximal attractiveness (newspapers of prior eras spent much less effort blending content and advertisement and it wasn't until about the year 2000 where loudness-compression made television advertisements blow out your speakers). To the second, these advertisements tend strongly--not always, don't but-for me, but tend strongly--to be disassociated from the community. Having some startup or multinational demand your attention for this-or-that doesn't tie back into your community, there isn't even a local aspect to the business to fall back on. It's just...voices, yelling at you for your attention and your money. That's just not good for us.

I both pay for content (I was happy to sign up for YouTube Red, for example) and aggressively use ad-blocking and the difference on my mental well-being when I don't have access to my accounts, or when somebody insists on watching television and having it scream at me about how I must buy this thing, is noticeable.

This shit is bad for us. We as technologists should not perpetuate it.