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by slipheen 2120 days ago
I hope the entire advertising targeting business goes bankrupt, and anything that depends on it goes with it.

Any computer I own (including a phone) is supposed to represent its users interests; It is not supposed to be some compromise between betraying their trust and making money for ad networks.

(Personally, I already have limit tracking enabled. And I use custom DNS filtering, and a bunch of other BS. But my friends and family shouldn't need to do that to have their phone refuse to give information about them)

2 comments

Part of me (the emotional part) agrees with you. But without offering a human-nature compatible monetization mechanism to replace ad monetization, I'm sure you'll lose many things that you deeply value without acknowledging or understanding how they depend on that money.

It could probably be argued that "people in general" are willing to pay for services they value and that a few current generations have just been irreparably "mis-trained" to expect free services, but in any free-ish market economy businesses will be incentivized to offer services with costs as hidden from the user and as externalized as possible.

> I hope the entire advertising targeting business goes bankrupt, and anything that depends on it goes with it.

HN has become a rant fest whenever ad tech gets mentioned.

but this does fit the "minuscule but very vocal minority" trend of our times.

Note that HN does not do ads (except the totally unintrusive job listings) or tracking so it is logical for ad haters to come here :) it's one of the last places left still running on goodwill.

For that it's also one of the few sites I would consider paying a membership for.