Google's ad quality problem is acknowledged, not solved

A thread on why Google keeps serving dodgy ads, including malware prompts and fake PDF updaters, produced two clear theories: Google optimizes for revenue and the volume of ads exceeds any feasible human review capacity. Neither explanation is flattering, and both are probably true simultaneously. One commenter described their father uninstalling YouTube because a Google ad convinced him his phone was hacked.

The key insight from the thread: this is not a technical problem Google cannot solve. It is a prioritization problem Google has chosen not to solve. The incentive structure rewards impressions over user safety, and the scale of the ad network makes it easy to frame any individual failure as an edge case.

For builders, the downstream effect is that users increasingly distrust ad-adjacent UI patterns, whether or not those patterns are actually ads. The association between 'something appeared on my screen' and 'this might be a scam' is being trained by Google's negligence into a whole generation of internet users.