> I have a hard time seeing the difference between paying for likes vs paying for ads from an ethical stand point.
That's a bit like saying you don't see the difference between peeing in a toilet and peeing in someone's pool. You're relieving yourself either way, after all.
"Likes" are supposed to represent the sentiment of the real users. Ads are supposed to be advertising messages.
The two things are very different for a bunch of reasons. First, buying likes is straight up unethical because it's lying and gaming the system. Second, buying likes is harmful because it reduces the trustworthiness of likes.
Buying likes and buying ads are both ethical and unethical.
By buying ads you are trying to game a users newsfeeds without providing any value to the user (if highly liked content provides value, ads do not provide this value).
Buying likes is the same. It games a user's newsfeed but doesn't provide value.
To the user they are the same. To facebook they unethical because they are not paying them.
To the point around harmful the newsfeed itself is untrustworthy. Links were never trustworthy.
It's mildly amusing in a frustrating way how we just assume that ads provide no value these days because ads and marketing in general have become synonymous with hostile psychological manipulation.
In theory (and ancient, pre-internet historical practice), ads can provide genuine value by informing people about the availability and properties of products.
>In what way is it unethical? No harm is done to anyone.
I'm not sure what to say to you if you can't see it. No harm is done? Maybe you only imagine physical or financial harm. These aren't meaningless numbers in a vacuum; likes/followers are taken by people to indicate social importance or approval, they show how other people in the world feel and think about things (comments, pages, issues, opinions). A large part of the public sphere is in this form nowadays. Faking likes/followers/comments is deliberately misrepresenting yourself, fraudulent deception - lying.
Seems to me your argument would apply to faking or buying votes in an election, or TV ratings, or referendums or..faking corporation profits, buying fake stories in news media, or anything in the world where the numbers are diddled. "In what way is it unethical? No harm is done to anyone. There's this system with side effects. Finding a way around the rules does not make it unethical."
Imagine if voting and ranking on HN stories and comments was entirely determined by bought upvotes, downvotes, flagging, abuse reports etc. The site would be destroyed. And if the same thing happened on every forum of any kind online? "No harm done?"
I think your argument is valid, especially when considering an ideal scenario for these platforms.
Unfortunately, I haven't considered likes or even "star ratings" to be "real sentiment" in decades. Even without paid clicks, they rarely reflect quality and are often the result of many other factors. There are plenty of other dishonest methods to boost up your like value without paying for clicks.
> I haven't considered likes or even "star ratings" to be "real sentiment" in decades.
Yes, these things are a prime example of "the tragedy of the commons". But your question was about ethics, and I don't think this affects the ethics of the decision. That the commons may be trashed doesn't make it ethical to contribute to the trashing yourself.
That's a bit like saying you don't see the difference between peeing in a toilet and peeing in someone's pool. You're relieving yourself either way, after all.
"Likes" are supposed to represent the sentiment of the real users. Ads are supposed to be advertising messages.
The two things are very different for a bunch of reasons. First, buying likes is straight up unethical because it's lying and gaming the system. Second, buying likes is harmful because it reduces the trustworthiness of likes.