>I've also met people on the YouTube ads team, and they hate their lives and want to die.
Maybe those informational widgets that pop up when you Google suicide-related terms didn't actually arise from a sense of humanity or civic duty, but from a desire to reduce employee turnover in their ad divisions. /s
Macabre humor aside, I actually wonder if there's any organizations out there funding ads targeted at suicidal individuals. Search terms can only go so far, and ad networks have the ability to gain a far more complete picture. You'd almost think it's something ad networks would partner up on pro bono.
Moreover, it's not hard to imagine imperfect targeting being beneficial, e.g. a family member being alerted to a loved one's state of mind via receiving the ads themselves. Obviously there's quite a few ways such a scheme could backfire or otherwise have adverse effects, though it is interesting to contemplate.
Asking google for suicide topics usually starts off with a big info box (non-ad unit) of:
Need help? United States:
1 (800) 273-8255
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Hours: 24 hours, 7 days a week
Languages: English, Spanish
Website: www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
As for YouTube ad engineers, pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea. Nobody wants to watch them. So, the engineers implementing these things must be under corporate (read: clueless) pressure to crapify the user experience solely to appease management.
(edit: It's also hilarious how ad tech people refuse to recognize how evil and backwards their entire business models are. They vehemently defend, downvote, and mob-mentality their way through the cognitive dissonance of hurting hundreds of millions of users in exchange for retaining their jobs. Because, after all, if I'm doing the work, it can't be bad, right? I'm not a bad person, so the people arguing against me must be the evil ones.
One comment theme that seems to get instant downvotes on HN: the concept you are not entitled to track and record every client-side user action. So many people assume invasive tracing and recording of all user behavior is "just how the world works" and "if we don't do it, we'll fall behind." Kinda military-oligarchy mindset, isn't it? If we don't have all the power, who knows what people will do!)
It seems like anti-suicide ads would be mostly funded by the Ad Council, religious organizations, and non-profits.
When I switched my evil bit on, I came up with a company that helps you make your suicide look like an accident, so that your life insurance pays out, and no one perpetuates hateful memories of you for taking the easy exit.
The premium service makes your suicide look like a civil offense against you, so that your family may also win an additional settlement from a large corporation or government entity.
The extra-evil service matches you up with a demolitions engineer from a terrorist organization that most closely shares your values.
The morally questionable service matches you up with rich people awaiting organ transplants, who don't pay you to kill yourself, per se, but rather to enjoy the final moments of your life in the vicinity of a particular hospital, without being burdened by worry about the future financial needs of your loved ones.
And that's where I turned my evil bit off, because I was starting to creep myself out.
Maybe those informational widgets that pop up when you Google suicide-related terms didn't actually arise from a sense of humanity or civic duty, but from a desire to reduce employee turnover in their ad divisions. /s
Macabre humor aside, I actually wonder if there's any organizations out there funding ads targeted at suicidal individuals. Search terms can only go so far, and ad networks have the ability to gain a far more complete picture. You'd almost think it's something ad networks would partner up on pro bono.
Moreover, it's not hard to imagine imperfect targeting being beneficial, e.g. a family member being alerted to a loved one's state of mind via receiving the ads themselves. Obviously there's quite a few ways such a scheme could backfire or otherwise have adverse effects, though it is interesting to contemplate.