Hacker News Reader

Comment by alwaysdoit | Hacker News Reader

> only give premium services to the most valuable users?

Almost certainly. What people often miss in this discussion is that advertising is progressive--it's a transfer of value from richer people who can and will pay for both the service being used and the product that is being advertised to poorer people who cannot.

View on HN

By convincing them to buy shit they don't need. Very progressive.

You can have a condescending attitude about it if you want, but the reality is advertising-backed business models make services available to people who would not otherwise be able to afford them.

The ramifications of creating barriers to advertising is ultimately taking these services away from the poor.

Within that statement is an ideological assumption that the only way to provide services to people is through a for profit venture. We worship market based solutions except we have things like taxes to build public infrastructure without a profit motive.

I'm not making an ideological assumptions there. I'm just referring to the status quo. The proposals I've seen are along the lines of "let's ban or add obstacles to advertising-based models", not "let's build a publicly funded Google search". I'm not saying the latter is an impossibility, but it's a much larger undertaking, and if you do the former without the latter, the effect will be as I said above--the poor lose access.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com