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Comment by mhaberl | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. We should attack the core issue here; tracking is a form of invaison of privacy and should be banned in general.

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The core issue is people want free shit.

No, the core issue is that advertisments are not enough for them, they want personal data too.

Giving someone with a website an image that they put up there is simple and requires zero cookies. If your goal is to have people see that banner this is literally all you need to do.

But of course advertisers want targeted ads, they want to get metrics (they don't care how truthful those metrics are, but who cares right?).

I don't think most websites honestly care about personal data. What most sites want to know is what anonymous users are doing on their sites so they can improve them.

I for one need this data on a daily basis to help me decide how to make products better. I think the legislation doesn't do it's job properly. Why not force it so that like apple, the browser informs the websites that they don't want to be tracked, then it is the websites issue if they are caught tracking. Or all browsers forcibly obscure a users PII.

I have made a living selling a software product for more than ten years without any behavior tracking at all. I just don't think tracking users is necessary.

Analytics companies that try to sell their analytics will of course tell you that you need analytics, but I just don't think it's true.

The only analytics I need are sales numbers. When they go up, I know I'm on the right track :)

The way I learn about my customers is that I put my email address on every page of my website. And then I read emails that folks send me, and this way I learn way more about my customers than any analytics could tell me, all without invading someones privacy.

(There is one exception: My apps do send crash reports, but they only send stack traces, no user data, and I don't log any identifiable info like IP addresses.)

No idea what product you make, but thank you! Yours is a company I would like doing business with.

The advertisers who’s advertisements are shown care. And because they pay more for targeted ads the website cares.

The ad industry believes targeted ads are cheaper and more effective in aggregate than un-targeted ads.

Also if the website is selling PII to “partners” as another revenue stream the the website cares.

The ad industry used to target ads by aiming at a publication’s audience or subscriber base. The publication would conduct surveys or do Nielsen rating type measures to get a sense who their audience was.

When publications online went from trying to build an audience to trying to drive traffic we ended up with the situation we have now. They don’t have audiences anymore, they have atomized bits of content without much in the way of editorial voice or culture to tie it together. They care not one whit about making their site a destination, just trying to chum the waters for whatever will bring in a catch of fresh eyeballs.

Exactly. I think even if people were to pay for visiting a website, there would still be ads or tracking because that's too profitable a thing to let go.

Or maybe billions of venture funding created unrealistic growth expectations. This turned otherwise good businesses into data hogs.

Nah. People have always wanted free shit. I once volunteered at an event for fancy people. Occasionally we would put out some moderately cool free shit. I saw a lot people worth millions to hundreds of millions leaping into the scrum for things that they could buy for $50-100.

People wanting free shit is a constant. The problem is how we channel that desire, which is very much in our control.

This "you can't have free stuff" argument I've seen way too many times now is based on a false premise.

You _absolutely_ can have free stuff. I remember the web when it was run by hobbyists, and that's exactly how it worked. What people who use the "no free stuff" argument really mean is that there are those who are on the web to make money, and you can't have their stuff for free.

To that I'd say; take your stuff and go home. Your stuff is exactly what ruined the web in the first place.

That stuff that you've consumed wasn't free, those hobbyists paid for it out of the pocket. Sure, some can afford to do this to this day, but this doesn't scale. Nowadays internet is too populous and expectations are set too high for this to keep working.

Sure, I was one of the ones that paid for it out of my own pocket.

> Nowadays internet is too populous and expectations are set too high for this to keep working.

I agree with you on both counts, and would like to see a return to a niche web that doesn't work for most people.

EDIT:

P.S. I realise how unlikely that is, so it's not something I'd waste energy on. What I do think is worth thinking about though, is how impossible certain companies are making it for the niche web of the early days to even exist in its own little corner.

> I agree with you on both counts, and would like to see a return to a niche web that doesn't work for most people.

That would be a web without Google, and in fact any search engine at all. Do you really want to go back to 1990 level of functionality?

A thousand times yes, but again, I know that's not something that's possible.

What I'm objecting to is it not being possible for even the old farts like me who want it. Google and co.'s contributions to things like e-mail and websites have made it more and more unfeasible to self-host and manage these services. It's a bit like how you're _technically_ free to farm your own food, only not really because you can't comply with the regulations surrounding growing crops (no I'm not kidding, Google and gasp).

I think expectations are set too low nowadays.

Man, that's so "unclassy" of those millionaires.

It was a surprise to me for sure. On the other hand, maybe being aggressively, pathologically grabby is how a lot of people become millionaires.

Exactly. I know at least one that bought a box of paper clips 30+ years ago and still uses the same ones today.

Nothing is free.

So people pay with their privacy, some because they are tricked into it, some because they don't care.

Point is that invaison of privacy is bad and you should not have even an option to trade it for "free shit".

That is far from certain. I happily pay for Netflix and other services that provide high quality content without ads. Consider reading Jaron Lanier's books or content, there is another way.

And there lies problem. You pay 10 bucks a month to behemoth, but would you pay 1 cent to the site which gives you less value than Netflix? That would be way impractical. So the smaller sites have to turn to ads and tracking to keep the lights on

That's the problem Brave is trying to solve. Micropayments have been a potential niche for cryptocurrencies, it just hasn't taken off (yet), even though there's a lot of crypto related "innovations" (DeFi, NFT's, whatnot).

That's so weird, I don't pay any money to Ycombinator. And yet, no cookie popups!

That's because Hacker News _is_ the ad. It helps promote YCombinator itself, by adding prestige.

But as ads go its really benign. No tracking, no constant in your face reminders, no retargeting etc...

I'm not sure if that was their goal when launching HN, but it definitely helps their brand image now.

We're talking about tracking cookies, not ads.

You're being pedantic. Tracking cookies are, in general, in support of ads.

Which is irrelevant, since the converse does not need to be true - we are talking about tracking cookies.

Postulate 1: This website is free.

Postulate 2: This website does not use tracking cookies.

Theorem 1: Tracking cookies are not required for free websites to exist.

Postulate 3: This website is an ad.

Theorem 2: Ads do not require tracking cookies.

Note that my original comment asserted Theorem 1 only.

There are many forms of free. One of them is that the free product supports the paid product in some manner which is the case with HN and Y Combinator. Something similar applies with the lightly branded content marketing sites and reports that many companies sponsor. Ad-supported is just one approach, albeit a common one.

You're posting this as a HN contributor or as a freeloader?

It was advertising companies that started this trend of giving shit away for “free”. Before then people were used to paying for services.

> "Before then people were used to paying for services."

… and/or were more often genuinely grateful for things that were given freely and generously …

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