
Ask HN: Do Facebook and Google employees use ad blockers? - discordance
There&#x27;s a lot of discussion going on around Facebook, WhatsApp, Google and the ad model their users are exposed to.<p>Would be interesting to find out whether the people responsible for these systems participate in the economy they&#x27;ve built?
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toast0
I've worked at big ad supported companies. Many of my colleagues use ad
blockers. I generally don't, but I did install one on my child's computer
that's used to play flash games from a site that's directed at children, but
runs alcohol ads, and ran multiple autoplay with sound ads at the same time,
and also the cpu required for ads made the games unplayable.

From a moral side, it doesn't feel right to make money from something that I
can turn off, but many people can't. Also, if I'm not seeing the ads, I'm not
experiencing my product how the majority of my users do. I also have avoided
getting an expensive phone, and I do most of my home browsing from inexpensive
computers; partly because I'm cheap, but also because so many of my users
don't have nice phones, so using nice phones means I'm disconnected from my
users (my current phone is probably too nice, but it was cheap; and my work
laptop is rather overpowered, but I didn't pick that)

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rusucosmin
I've been an intern at Google in Mountain View and I used ad blocker. As far
as I saw from other employees/interns it is pretty acceptable to install it.
Nothing wrong with that. Google has tens of thousands of employees and
Facebook is in the same range. These numbers, although big, are still small
compared to the users they have, so I don't think that employees count that
much on the ad economy they've created.

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smt88
I disagree that there's nothing wrong with it.

If ad companies' employees think their ads are dangerous or annoying, how do
they justify pushing that product onto users?

It's like if a vitamin company's employees refused to take their own vitamins
on the grounds that they're unhealthy...

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babygoat
It’s like if a person who works in television went to the bathroom during a
commercial break. In other words, totally normal.

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smt88
No. That's such a congruent analogy, you don't even have to change the roles.

Google is the TV channel. The employees in question aren't content producers
-- they're the salespeople who sell the ads and the engineers who air them.

It's like if _those_ people then went home and used a special device that
removed ads from the TV show.

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babygoat
The only thing about that device that’s special is that it’s freely available
and free of charge.

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soulchild37
It might sound cynical, but I think many Facebook/Google employees use ad
blockers for the purpose of finding flaw in the blocker / circumvent the
blocker so that ads can show to user who use adblock. And then Adblock staff
would find out about this and proceed to improvise their Ad blocking formula.
It's like a cat-mouse chase game cycle.

