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Ask HN: Do Facebook and Google employees use ad blockers?

7 points by discordance ↗ HN
There's a lot of discussion going on around Facebook, WhatsApp, Google and the ad model their users are exposed to.

Would be interesting to find out whether the people responsible for these systems participate in the economy they've built?

9 comments

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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.
discordance
Thanks for your input, although it's not the financial impact of using an ad blocker that i'm asking about. It's whether they support the reasoning or underlying philosophy of what they work on day to day.
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...

gt2
Well ad blockers are a reality. They are in the Chrome app store. Using them from time to time could be seen as testing something (eating your own dogfood). It isn't the same as taking a stance against the company mission. Speaking of which, it's hard to imagine a company which has thousands of employees that all believe fully in every practice and mission of the business.
babygoat
It’s like if a person who works in television went to the bathroom during a commercial break. In other words, totally normal.
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.

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

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.