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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

IMO, ads should be made illegal, but that's not the point here. Facebook is perfectly free to show ads to people, they are just not free to track people. They are trying to use ads as a justification for tracking here, which is the contested point.

And before you answer that ads without tracking don't pay the bills, that's honestly Facebook's problem.

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Every time I start thinking about ads being made illegal, I think about the small businesses who don't already have their brand established. Banning advertising entirely would crush many entrpreneurs for whom advertising is the only reason anyone knows who they are.

There's a big difference between massive companies seeking to keep their brand in your mind and small businesses trying to let you know they even exist.

But how do you ban one without banning both? Its a complicated issue

The need for advertising arises from having substitute goods on imperfect markets.

If consumers knew the perfect good or service that they wanted to buy and exactly whom to buy it from, there wouldn't be a need for advertising. As it is now, information asymmetry creates a demand for advertising, so until people know everything about every market, you're going to have ads.

The alternative to ads is subscription services, which already exist. If people prefered subscription social media to ad based they would flock to those, but they don't.

“The alternative to indentured servitude is free labor, which already exists. If people preferred free labor to indentured service, no one would sign a service contract, but they do.”

-paraphrasing someone 300 years ago, probably.

Sometimes people pick things that are bad; that people choose something doesn’t make it somehow good.

Pretty extreme to compare FaceBook to indentured servitude, everyone is free to leave FaceBook at any time and we know up front what their model is.

Seems apt to me. Indentured servitude actually seemed reasonable to a lot of people looking to move, you got expensive passage on a ship in exchange for working for a set length of time. Facebook is a platform for social manipulation, in a few hundred years I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see that social manipulation as a morally intolerable evil. The sort of tracking/aggregating they do is a violation of privacy as extreme as indentured service is on free will.

An analogy is not a comparison. I think an analogy here was made to reinforce the point made, not to in any way claim that Facebook somehow deals with indentured servitude.

Por que no los dos? Sign up for Hulu today! Pay a subscription fee and still get the benefit of tons of ads! Or pay more for our Hulu (No Ads) offering, which still has ads on certain programs.

I'm surprised that FB after all these years hasn't offered something as simple as a paid upgrade for removing ads and maybe better photo storage or something.

Maybe that lack of long-term feature is endemic to the capitalist system/environment, because decade-long growth usually isn't allowed to sacrifice short-term growth. I couldn't imagine a private company like Valve Software making the same decisions.

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