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

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.

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.

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.

Yea of course it's not for everyone, everyone have different concern, but I could see myself work on this if it paid well.

Perhaps reconsider.

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

sure, thats why I said what everyone consider 'matter' are different, for me this doesn't matter that much.

...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.

This is too much.

Nobody is 'hurting anyone' - not even slightly, by ensuring that their free product also has ads.

If ads are unscrupulous, or if the company is doing shady things otherwise, then yes - bad.

But there is no moral argument against making sure that decent ads work with a free product, or when ads are part of any product wherein the social contract is to that expectation.

Facebook has ads, just like CNN and Cosmopolitan, that's normal, ethical, and within the expectations for user's experience. Again, shady things notwithstanding.

In 2018, people can pay or see ads, or a combination of both, there is no pragmatic way around this, and too many decent products depend upon ads for their existence, that's where we are until someone comes up with something better.

> Nobody is 'hurting anyone' - not even slightly, by ensuring that their free product also has ads.

This isn't a convincing argument. As an extreme example, replace ads with something that's clearly detrimental for the user: "nobody is hurting anyone by ensuring that their free product also delivers a LD50 of cyanide" is clearly bogus. While ads don't kill people, the way that they are distributed currently has many negative externalities that the user must deal with.