> the most brilliant minds in the world are researching best ways to make internet advertisements as addictive as they can be.

They're doing a great job, ads are so addictive I've even turned off my Ad blocker so I can get more of them! Won't someone save me!

I assume you're saying that ads are irrelevant because we have AdBlock?

Ads would always exist, but think about how many great (even lifesaving) solutions we're missing out on because market decided they aren't worthy of pursuit.

I'm saying ads aren't "addictive", because they're pretty despised. They might be effective, when people see them, but I don't think anyone is "addicted" to ads.

Every influencer is basically an ad on two legs.

Are we talking about influencers, or “the world’s brightest minds”?

They're working together. Youtube algorithms compute the most likely influencer that is going to occupy your attention and serve you advertisements in the process.

"Nobody is addicted to ads" is true if you think only about the pop-ups and couple-second videos as "ads" - but the concept of advertisements is much wider than that. Some adverisements may not even be presented as such - they may be presented as "useful content", but which is chosen above other such useful content by the virtue of being paid for to the advertising company.

You're nitpicking an irrelevant detail. Expand "ads" in my comment to "screen time" generally and the "despised" counterargument falls apart. The whole point of my comment is that brilliant minds are working on making stuff more addictive to people, instead of making the world a better place.

It's the content (and personalized curation, based on what the platform's learned you want to see) that's addictive, not the ads. Users are addicted to the content creators, and watching ads is the price they have to pay to sit through to watch free content. Picking ads that are relevant, or at least not annoying enough to make you switch off, is part of the platform's experience. And there are creators who blend ads in as organic content, or at least a personalized endorsement which doesn't come across as phony, which MrBeast said gets the most positive response.

I recently turned off tracking, and suddenly started getting served ads for 'green cremation'. I guess statistically few people are interested in that, but conversions are lucrative, although the 99% of users who don't want to see it probably get mildly annoyed.

How about an even better -- and more salient -- example? Quant trading firms are gobbling up promising researchers in fields like physics and mathematics. These are people getting funded Ph.Ds at top universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, etc.), and they end up just going to companies which exist solely for the purpose of making rich people richer.

Quant firms provide value to society, hence why they are compensated for it.

Liquidity and price discovery are useful things. Nobody would pay them otherwise.

If the definition of providing value to society = making a profit, then is selling heroin providing value to society?

> Liquidity and price discovery are useful things. Nobody would pay them otherwise.

Is there any other evidence of their usefulness beyond "people pay for it"?

On the liquidity side, would you pay more for a security that you could easily and quickly sell with small slippage than you would for a security that could not be easily sold or only sold with a large slippage?

"People pay for [that]" because it's a genuinely useful property of an investment vehicle.