Hacker News Reader

Here, you pay with attention, same as with advertising. Arguably this whole site is an advertising platform for YCombinator, and they keep you coming here by maintaining an engaging community with interesting posts/comments. So while you do get something out of it in the form of potentially useful information, YCombinator also certainly benefits from running this platform.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470304

Looks like an Ad to me. Maybe also try clicking the Y button in the top left, or leaving ‘news.’ out of the URL bar.

If you don't think you pay for Hacker News with your data, try deleting an old comment.

How does that "pay" for anything? Who is that data being sold do? How is it being used to target advertising to me?

try search in HN, algolia is mining the data of HN for sure.

Mining for what?

I bet they couldn't care less and haven't ever touched the data since the implementation.