Quote:
Originally Posted by Jibartik
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Tech companies are pretty transparent why they do things, they try to figure out the best way to do things and screw up sometimes.
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I work for the [Data Acquisition Group] in the [Advertising Division] of [Big Tech Company] (generic names used to prevent doxxing).
We spend a lot of time manipulating you. We run A/B tests to see how. For example we will give you a web page that's 'happy', full of nice colors and soothing fonts and information designed to make you feel good. Then we check the response rates. Then we give the other people pages with more negative news, and then we check that. We find that angry people tend to stay on the page a lot longer, driving engagement and therefore offering more value. People reading about fashion will read that article then go somewhere else. People reading an intense article why their political opponent is a liar tend to read other articles of the same type. They click and click and click.
We assign a bid value to people based on their interests. If we have a bunch of low-value visitors, the ad revenue is small because people aren't bidding a lot for your engagement because your bid value is low, that is you're not likely to engage with the page for any significant time because you're not excited enough.
But if we can manipulate you into being more angry, and therefore more engaged, we can drive your value up. Then we can show our advertisers that our visitors are higher value so the advertisers pay more and we can deliver on our revenue forecasts.
We never ever talk about this stuff with people outside the industry. When we talk about manipulating people and operant conditioning techniques to drive revenue, that conversation stays there. That's because we're the opposite of transparent. When we issue a public statement regarding some data breach or privacy loss or anything, it's issued with one objective: Make people forget this shit so we can get back to business. Our 'transparency' is just another method of manipulation. We will be 'transparent' only if it helps you to be monetized over time.
This culture is endemic to the tech industry. I work for a big player and I talk to my counterparts at the other big players all the time, mostly because our businesses are so interconnected. And I hate to break it to you but we're ONLY in this for the money. The only concern regarding ethics is "will this ethics problem drive down revenue". There is never a discussion about what is right or moral, because revenue is paramount. It's all very objectivist - revenue equals success which equals morality.
Imagine Enron run by the Ferengi. Yeah, that's us.