How was anyone able to sell dog treats before pervasive digital surveillance? Must not have been possible.
While there might be anecdotes to support such a claim, the numbers tell a different story. Any reduction in friction is bound to benefit the businesses with the largest footprint, as they can leverage economies of scale and recursive synergies.
I think it's more nuanced than that - it's not that the current situation overall is better, it's that the state of advertising is better. On the other side of things, the ability of large corporations to achieve greater economies of scale is decidedly worse for small businesses, to your point. The fact that targeted advertising is there helps to offset that a bit.
Maybe so, but I personally don't think that's worth abusing the public with tracking.
That's a pretty big difference in our viewpoints and while HN currently tends towards yours, I have no doubt that my objectives lead to a better world for consumers (and actually, non-consumers as well) than yours.
This is an interesting phenomenon no matter what the topic is - I experience it too. It's human nature to feel counter culture. I believe HN is pretty strongly pro-capitalism for reasons that are obvious due to the nature of the site.
I don't think small business owners are innately more deserving of money. They still make money off the backs of others, just at smaller scales. Competition is important to make capitalism less sociopathic but small business owners aren't meaningfully competing with Amazon.
Also to be clear, I think all advertising is unethical. It's a spectrum for sure though.