Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonahx | Hacker News Reader

> My personal suspicion is that people are just jealous of how much success Google and Facebook have had.

Ah, yes, a classic: "All criticism of success and power stems from envy."

Impervious to pushback (since that would only prove you'd pushed the hot button of painful truth) and always plausible-sounding, this is truly a brilliant weapon for snuffing out legitimate complaints and healthy conversation.

> Unless we want to start paying for google searches

I, and many others, would jump at the chance to pay for an internet without advertising and dark advertising tactics. I happily pay $10/month for youtube red, just to avoid the ad videos, and that's cheap at the price.

View on HN

There are more than billion people in India who will be internet users and who don't have the ability to shell out this kind of money. 10 dollars is probably 2 day salary for many workers.

By the same logic, Google cannot charge much for targeting ads at those same people. So I am not sure what your point is.

Price discrimination is harder to scale than ad targeting.

... they engage in price discrimination when they do ad targeting. You know it doesn't cost an advertiser the same amount to target people in India as it does over here, right?

To be fair, advertisers are significantly less likely to complain about price discrimination than end users.

Yes. Perhaps consider reading comments in the light of, rather than in order to snarkily make, the obvious points.

The point is that targeted ads are a small price to pay for services like google that are so instrumental to the lives of most people. The reach that this model provides probably outweighs the benefits from being purely subscription based anyway.

> The point is that targeted ads are a small price to pay

That's your personal opinion, and that's ok. However, others may and do have a different opinion.

Why is Google instrumental? I can use the internet without Google. Search engines like DuckDuckGo are free. Other email like ProtonMail is available for free. You can run free services and use different ad models, they don't have to be spyware based.

I paid for YouTube red until I got tired of googles own ads promoting their own content which I had zero percent interest in. I’d dismiss and disable it and it’d just come back the next day. So much for ad-free.

Now I use youtube-dl and avoid supporting google in every way I can. They seem to break every principle and promise made to a calculated degree so someone can always point at someone else doing it worse. The real result is they are eroding the status quo. Privacy, content rights, fair search, unburdened UX, have all taken big hits over the last decade and it’s all by choice. Google didn’t accidentally end up here.

I find Microsoft’s behavior annoying and desperate but it’s also not so different from Google. We just consider the contexts different since Google “owns” its website it can do what it wants even if it’s on in a browser on my machine vs the windows shell.

> would jump

This used to exist: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

Not many people were interested, so it got scaled back to an opt in model.

So it's not that many others willing to pay for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com