> lots of parallels to HFT.

Including the fact that it might make its practitioners rich, while creating nothing of social value.

In the case of ads, arguably negative social value.

Connecting people to goods and services they may want or need in a targeted way that tries to make them more relevant seems positive if anything to me.

Good thing we have search engines. If I want to find a good or service, I'll go look up reviews or the like. Ads only serve to sell me things that I don't need, in the vast majority of cases. I think it's fair to say that making people want more stuff is socially negative.

> making people want more stuff is socially negative

I don't really think so in the general case. Personally I've eaten a lot of food I found out about from ads and wouldn't have known I wanted otherwise, and I'm glad iit happened.

If you want to try new foods, that's cool, I do too. Read local food reviews.

But if ads convince you to try 47 different restaurants and that otherwise you would have been perfectly happy to eat at home, then the ads did a disservice to society.

Relatively nobody goes out of their way for local food reviews. If advertising was suddenly banned I feel like people would end up much less likely to try anything new and life would be more stagnant overall. New businesses would struggle to attract customers and everyone would gravitate to McDonald's and Wal Mart even more than they already do.

I disagree. I and I lot of people I know go out of our ways for local food reviews, and word of mouth is also incredibly powerful.

And you must remember that for every local food ad there are 300 ads for McDonalds or Walmart, and they are just as effective, altough likely for another demographic.

Great, So when do we start?

I would love to see ads that are only relevant to my life instead of penis pills.

I'm seeing lots of good ads for local business on instagram at the moment, e.g. local bars doing home delivery.

Same for HFT

Why work on something that you know doesn't work and makes the world worse?

Some people are absolutely OK with that. Some people, it bothers deeply. Same about weapons work, or other engineering tasks of various applicable moralities. We all have to make our choices. I know I've worked on things of minimal value, just because I needed to pay for life. I've switched to other things when able.

There's nothing unfairly wrong with Google Ads. It's the trackers that are bad.

And who do you think makes the trackers?