Thanks HN for keeping it free of ads and trackers | Hacker News Reader

Thanks HN for keeping it free of ads and trackers

191 pointskhaledh22 comments

HN is a rare place on the web, where it provides great value to a big community for free without any ads or trackers that plague the web right now. So thanks!

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Not to be the curmudgeonly anti-HN/YC person :) but there are totally ads on HN:

- Promoted posts from YC companies hiring

- "Launch HN" posts

- "Applications are open for YC Summer 2022" banner at the bottom of the site

- The whole site is sort-of an ad for a big VC firm

Either way, I suspect having the pulse on tech and mindshare of the tech community is worth more to YC (in $ terms) than money from banner ads.

You are correct, but aren't these all examples of ads done right and in a way that is respectful of the users?

“Native advertising” is a term for that.

The number of times I've seen "EasyPost is hiring" alone..

I would have no problem with online advertising if it all took the same form as on HN. No embedded code, no tracking, no individual targeting, just an opportunity for the advertiser to inform the public of what they're offering and nothing else.

>No embedded code, no tracking, no individual targeting

How do you know we aren't being tracked? Like... what is preventing them from looking at their Load Balancer and seeing which posts Mountain_Skies looked at? We know for a fact that HN know which posts we vote up and down - how do we know they don't do anything with this information?

It's about the incentives. I don't trust Facebook or Google because deep in their DNA, they're advertising companies. They're not advertisers like Ogilvy; they're advertisers because they're really good at profiling people. So when they acquire companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube with free products, I expect those products to add tracking and targeting even when they were strongly against it (esp. WhatsApp).

YC however is the opposite. Their DNA is Paul Graham's essays. They put themselves up as the people who help the small guy. They need your trust.

They use your HN history to evaluate your YC application and they're open about that. It's even on the undocumented features wiki that YC founders can see each other.

Show HN is probably used for scouting startups. They need VC style data, which shows whether the founders are smart, resilient, and whether the startups they make have potential. So yeah, they probably do track you, but not in the creepy stalker way Google does.

That's simply because the value of HN to YC is not in what can be sold to the audience but the value that the audience provides to YC in the form of a breeding ground for new YC backed start-ups and a hiring pool.

The fact that this gives one of the nicest fora on the internet is a happy coincidence, and the fact that it stays nice is mostly due to dang doing a large amount of very hard and often thankless work behind the scenes.

How do I know I'm getting tired? "I know 'dang', but I didn't know we had a mod called 'doing'..."

Neither did I :)

Yes big thanks for not putting this site behind Cloudflare also.

I believe it must be constantly under attack due to its popularity but thanks for managing to keep it up and running without making me solve captchas or 10s checking your browser page.

Hacker News does have ads however. They have job postings for YCombinator-backed startups. For me result "16." is an ad. I don't personally mind them -- they're job postings which are a win-win for everyone.

> HN is a rare place on the web

That's because HN hasn't suffered from an Eternal September[0] yet. Although I did notice an uptick in submissions and comments during the pandemic, which on the whole was healthy, but sometimes not, as the discussions got a little polluted by the 'I'm now working from home now' crowd.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I think that’s because they don’t update the site to be pretty or in line with hip new UI trends. That scares off anyone who both a) needs sites to look like that, and b) can’t correct the UI on their end.

Minimizing the importance of internet points also helps. No one sees your "points" except you. Graying of messages is sometimes abused, as is flagging, but it's far less than on sites like Reddit where it's the unofficial pastime.

I agree with your thank you!

But for the sake of discussion… can you really say they are not tracking your every move, cross-referencing with other sources and selling your data?

I don’t think you can. All you can say is they are not using the standard front-end methods of tracking (which by itself is reason to be thankful for!)

IDK why but HN is the only website working on super old device. For example, my old Blackberry which I have bought few days ago (which means I do not familliar with BB at all) totally refuses to load any other website. Also, totally correct work in Operamini.jar (except of impossibility to upvote and other JS) is a beam of light if I am hiking in very wild places with old Nokia and 1/10 bars of antenna level. I do not want any new functional added because it definitely will break the perfectness of this website.

Unpopular opinion.

I actually dont mind if they only have a single, non dynamic, small banner placement ad on top. Or just a pinned post for x hours for their YC companies that needs some attention.

Although that is not much different to the current hiring and YC Shown HN post.

I agree. StackOverflow historically had done a good thing with this I think. If you were signed in and have contributed so that you have a modest amount of karma, you would just see sidebar ads. Which were almost always topical, minimally animated, and absolutely never in the way of the content. They set an example for the good parts of the web.

It's a slippery slope.

First it starts with a simple non-dynamic ad, then after someone checks the CTR, they make it bigger by 20% to get 1% more CTR.

Then it becomes an animated banner for another 1% CTR.

And then we have a sidebar to carry another ad but vertical this time, etc. Eventually, the interstitals arrive.

Remember the good old days when Google ads meant it was a text only ad?

Kudos to the silent heroes who are running it.

HN is indeed a rare place on the web.

Thank god for hacker news.

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