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Comment by beerlord | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really a fan of GDPR actually. I think advertising has its place, and the more targeted it is, the better the results for everyone. The worst thing that people can point to that this kind of advertising has caused is fake news on Facebook, which is more of a problem with America's campaign financing (non)restrictions than anything (and probably the fact that the candidate who used it was quite anti-establishment).

What the internet is missing though is an alternate funding mechanism. When I visit a site I indirectly give the owner something like $0.002 (0.2 cents) worth of bucks from advertisers who show things to me. Why can't I just pay the website that as a microtransaction directly? Transaction fees would eat it all - but aggregated enough, and perhaps as part of a $10/month 'internet content subscription', it could work in the way that Spotify does.

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> The worst thing that people can point to that this kind of advertising has caused is fake news on Facebook

The worst thing about targeted ads is that we're building an insane surveillance infrastructure that the government is already eager to tap into, and will be even more eager if one of our governments devolves into dictatorship.

I'm from East Germany; and while I'm too young to have experienced it myself, the Stasi is still fresh in our minds. What we build today in the name of improved advertisement would have brought tears to Mielke's eyes.

If you're German, then the Snowden documents show that your government is participating in domestic surveillance that it cooperates with Five Eyes on. This is a few orders of magnitude more invasive than what advertisers do.

The Stasi are fresh in no one's minds or you would eliminate this surveillance.

We don't even need to look at the Snowden documents anymore. The largest Internet exchange (DE-CIX) recently lost a court case which tries to get rid of the BND wire tapping.

Wow, that's a poignant last paragraph. Good writing! :)

>Why can't I just pay the website that as a microtransaction directly?

There have been multiple attempts at offering that. The most prominent is probably the current iteration of flattr [1], but it seems really hard to get people excited for that model which in turn means it isn't worth the hassle of signing up for content creators.

Patreon is probably the closest to a working model, but that means a few people have to really love your service.

1: https://flattr.com/

Advertising's place is as a vehicle for emotional manipulation and stuffing all available channels with propaganda selling the advertiser's particular brand of product or politics.

Certainly it can also be used to dispense useful information, but if someone is spending money to dispense that particular information, they have an agenda. It might be innocuous, "buy our product!". Or it can be malicious. Either way there is always intent and you cannot separate media, especially advertising, from the intent behind the media and the very goal of advertising is to grab (or accost or steal) your attention.

The internet already has alternate funding mechanisms: the host either eats the cost themselves and pays for it out of pocket, sells something to pay for hosting and other expenses, or users pay the host directly for access. Advertising is just one of at least four options.

Your comment seems like an attempt at emotional manipulation and propaganda for your particular politics. Your argument doesn't seem to reasonably distinguish between good or bad behavior generally.

Can you point to the point where SIIX's wording is seeking to emotionally manipulate you? I think you're conflating "emotional manipulation" with "using words that have emotional connotations" in an effort to build a strawman.

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