Marketing is a real job in the same way both pharmacists and drug dealers are both real jobs. Its really easy for marketing to go from providing a useful product to using dark patterns like rage bait to peddle the equivalent of drugs to the masses. Marketing gets a bad name for a reason.

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limflick 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I share your aversion to modern marketing tactics, but by your logic, programmers that develop the addictive social media algorithms are the meth cooks. Everyone is complicit. Modern day "tech bros" get a significantly worse rep than marketing folks these days. No use in participating in this blame game.

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ShroudedNight 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I agree that software engineering isn't exempt from warranting serious introspection as to the world that a given project is enabling. I do not agree that we should simply throw up our collective hands and say "Oh well, everyone is complicit." Professional endeavours causing interpersonal harm and enabling exploitative behaviour should be called out and forced to bare the reputational cost wherever and whenever they occur.

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SeanAnderson 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean that kind of tracks? I had to take a computer science ethics course in college. It mainly focused on stuff like the Therac-25 case study, but I could easily see a more modern version of the course covering social media algorithms.

I wonder if marketing courses also have an ethics component taught in them?

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lostlogin 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> focused on stuff like the Therac-25 case study, but I could easily see a more modern version of the course

A good example of bad that can happen but damn is that just plain lazy.

More recent examples are surely more relevant and would generated more discussion.

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gaudystead 6 hours ago | parent [-]

For someone just learning about the Therac-25 incident, what more recent cases would've worked better to foster discussion that can also be read about?

	▲	lostlogin 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'd like to learn this too. But off the top of my head - Facebook and the genocide in Myanmar. The various collosal data breaches that usually have token punishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches Mass surveillance and face identification by private companies for law enforcement eg https://www.auror.co/role/loss-prevention You can't appeal it and they don't respond to requests for your records (like a government department would). Social media and addiction to it. How this should be managed with vulnerable groups, eg children? I'm sure there are numerous better examples out there.