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Comment by marketerinland | Hacker News Reader

This is great. I really like this way of presenting the idea.

It’s happening more or less organically, what you’ve described. Users are spending more time in Messenger as opposed to the news feed.

Messenger groups are very hard to reach using ads.

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You may be right in terms of where people are gravitating. But the irony in this is that Messenger only exists to keep people coming back to the ad platform. To me, the question is, how to we convince more people to take a position of rejecting of harmful ad platforms altogether? In this example, this might mean ditching Messenger for Signal.

At some point, we need to accept that HN is not the broader community. Most people don’t care about this problem; most don’t even see it as a problem. If they did, politicians would be talking about it all the time, and it would be a major issue, but it’s not. Sure, the privacy angle has gotten political traction and that’s fine. But it’s the privacy angle - not the overexposure to ads - that is connecting here. Just look at the penetration of ad blockers - it is not that high.

HN has a default assumption sometimes that people enjoy spending hours looking at specs and trying to figure things out. My experience is that human beings are weird, wonderful and different. Some people enjoy doing this. Most people do not.

But, in this case, the proof is in the pudding.

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