[iamnothere]

Wouldn’t it lead to the opposite? You spending time on the platform earns them money because they’re gathering data for targeted ads, and showing you those ads. Non-targeted ads barely pay anything.

Addictive content feeds are expensive with the live HD video playing everywhere and the constant tweaks needed from teams working to further refine targeting based on behavior.

[hatthew]

For typical social media sites, engagement will pretty much always be proportional to both revenue and cost per user. Either revenue > cost, and the site is incentivized to increase engagement, or revenue < cost and the site dies. There is no middle ground where a site gets a healthy revenue that's greater than its costs, but increasing engagement won't increase revenue. The exceptions are niche sites that do things like fixed subscriptions, or cost money to create content but not to consume it (but even in these cases, increasing engagement probably still increases the chance users start/continue to be paid customers).

[iamnothere]

You assume that subscriptions wouldn’t become more common without targeted ads. It’s certainly possible.

(I’m not sure if it’s even possible to ban targeted ads, haven’t thought much about it. Perhaps there’s a regulation of commerce angle. I do think that businesses could be forced to provide more clarity about the exchange that’s taking place, the value of the data, how the data is used, and so on.)

[annjose]

I agree it’s very possible subscriptions would become more common if targeted ads were restricted. Personally I’d rather pay money for a good product/service than 'being the product' for a bad product that monetizes my data.

[fsflover]

So we should ban all ads, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269