Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

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>Naive question.

Not really, at least you observed something. It is more like a silent majority. And I have been heavily downvoted for pointing this out previously.

Sometimes post 2016 it went all the way to Ads equals evil on HN along with the rest of the internet and social media. Around 2017 / 2018 tracking becomes evil. This is further fueled in 2019 when Apple went on full PR attack ( or one could argue adding fuel to fire ) about tracking and ads. ( They subsequently pulled back and state they are not against ads after industry backlash ). Target advertising ( whatever that means [1] ). And working in FANNG ( before it was called MAAMA ) would become morally wrong for a short period of time on HN.

But there are, legitimate uses for Ads, and legitimate uses for tracking. So every once in a while you see a few people who dare to offer their contrarian view, those that are working in the ad industry, or working as a business that requires the usage of tracking, funnelling and ads for sales. And offer their views that somehow gets the upvote to top post. Assuming the upvote is not gamed in anyway, that means there are a huge number of HN readers that rarely participate in any discussions, but upvoted something that largely go against the common trend on HN.

There are also some sort of political angle to it. Although I tend to think they are separate issues rather than causes.

[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/8/27/understand...

The "evil ads" argument doesn't even look really thought through to me. The way I look at it, there's 3 options:

1. Do everything for free. Rarely tenable.

2. Charge for things. This necessarily puts focus of business on monetization, or at the very least, it frequently pits providing and extracting value at odds.

3. Delegate monetization (a.k.a. ads). Then you can just focus on providing maximum value to your customers and money scales proportionally.

As a builder of things who's not greedy, #3 sounds like positively best option, if it's financially viable and product type makes it possible.

From the consumer point of view, the business model does not even enter the equation. What matters is media pollution: my display, my computing, my rules ! To hell with the publisher's expectations of a social contract binding viewership with acceptance of advertisement. That is of course incoherent with the taste for free resources, but that is not enough cognitive dissonance to stop anyone from setting up ad blockers.

From my vantage point, that's perfectly fine. Block ads, change the fonts, color the site orange if you want. As you say, your display, your rules. I communicate to my users that I myself use an ad blocker on my own property. There's no dissonance there.

My mom asked me to disable ad blocking I've set up on her devices, as she finds them useful.

> That is of course incoherent with the taste for free resources

Except it's not. Most content that I consume - like your comment here - is created by individuals that do not get paid no matter how the platform that the content is shared on is monetized. It's absurd to say that there would be no content without monetization and when people have content to shere there will be ways to share that content even when ads illegal or blocked by everyone. However as long as ads are accepted by the public at large, ad-laden sites will be more profitable and thus also have more resources to crush any alternatives that provide an ad-free user experience. I'm quite fine with anything that needs ads to survive to disappear as a result of ad-blocking - there will always be something else to fill my time.

False choice. I don't know people who are "all ads are bad". It's "spyware enabling ads are bad" and "ads are too large/frequent/auto playing video/in your face" with a side of "stop eating my cycles and bandwidth".

If companies just put up ads relevant to article as a static image that took up a reasonable amount of space and scrolled with the rest of the content, people wouldn't complain.

This idea there is some "silent majority" of pro-tracking and pro-ad HN users doesn't track with reality. Everyone on HN can uovote and votes are how voices get magnified. If that was the case we'd expect the odd pro-ad/tracking comment to always be near the top of the comments section.

The reality is this is adverse selection: those users probably weren't interested in a post about updates to GA, and didn't click it.

>This idea there is some "silent majority" of pro-tracking and pro-ad HN users doesn't track with reality.

Not anti-ads and tracking doesn't mean those are pro-ads or pro-tracking.

>If that was the case we'd expect the odd pro-ad/tracking comment to always be near the top of the comments section.

It often takes lots of courage to post something contrarian. That is why it rarely happens.

> Everyone on HN can uovote

I don't believe that's true. I'm pretty sure it's a no-op for me.

Ok, here's proof for whoever downvoted me.

I made a new account, wrote a message, upvoted it with my current account.. and no change in points. I never see any message become black or "less grey" after upvote + refresh. It is a no-op for me.

https://i.imgur.com/ettYnxX.png

HN likely does something to prevent vote manipulation from using multiple accounts coming from the same IP. That doesn't exclude the possiblity that your account had a flag to desregard votes before. I personally dislike this kind of hidden moderation like shadow banning. I know people will defend them saying that they are needed to deal with spammers but that does not make them any less dishonest when they invitably affect genuine users.

> It is more like a silent majority.

When asked, more than 90% of people opt out of tracking and ads [1]. No idea what silent majority you're talking about.

> But there are, legitimate uses for Ads, and legitimate uses for tracking.

Yes, there are, and they are very limited use cases.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...

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