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by tannhaeuser 2420 days ago
The effect that GDPR has as far as I'm concerned as a user is that many or even most sites accessed from EU come with a prominent banner warning about PII data collection for targetted ads, including a large portion of sites linked from HN. Maybe this isn't noticed on the other side of the pond, but it has a very profound effect on my usage, as I'm immediately turned away from such sites. OTOH, platform sites without ads such as github, where you supposedly already have agreed to their ToS, and where data isn't being used for ads (for the time being) don't suffer from this effect, yet.
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All that I have seen is that now there is one more popup window obscuring the content I'm trying to view, which is especially egregious on mobile.

At this point, I might see one or two lines of text for a news article on initial load between their gommy sticky header, a couple of ads, and their "We're using cookies here, if you don't like it, go screw" popup. Of course that's assuming it's not paywalled.

The net effect of the GDPR, from my perspective as a user, has been to make the internet even shittier to use. There's also the developer side that I have to deal with, but to be honest, after an initial flurry a year or so ago, nobody even asks about whether the software we provide is GDPR compliant anymore.