[billwilliams]

I like how much heat this topic on the hacker news. I wonder if its extra touchy given how much "hacker" culture overall developed with online advertising - the big tech successes often depending on sweet sweet ad money. Everybody likes react, hadoop, chrome, mozilla etc, but the truth is that a huge proportion of development on the web was due to ads. And this feels ugly to people. Hackers like to believe their beautiful meritocracy was independent of the advertising bureaucracy. The privileges of the tech elite were made by ads, but now that we're all here in this beautiful (and fully deserved) technological enlightenment, we think we're somehow above it.