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Comment by Barraketh | Hacker News Reader

So, out my now 15+ year career, only about 4 were in AdTech, and I've been out of that game for more than 7 years. But fair enough - happy to play 'ad-guy' for the purposes of this discussion :)

I guess my main contention is that businesses really like ads. But that's usually ok - because it funds cool content! The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television. And if we make ads worse, well, the people who are gong to suffer are the businesses and the content creators. OR, like i mentioned above, we will just drive everyone to large platforms, which is essentially what's happening now.

Another way to frame the question - GDPR came out in 2016. Do you feel like the web is getting better?

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I don't think businesses really like ads. Businesses are forced to buy ads. On Facebook if you want to reach your entire audience you need to pay them, they gate off people seeing content they're subscribed to unless you pay. Google is terrible at surfacing relevant local events.

Ads are forced on small business because regular methods of discovery are intentionally nerfed.

> On Facebook if you want to reach your entire audience you need to pay them

Yeah, it's a private business, if you want to use them to reach people you need to pay. What exactly is wrong with that?

> regular methods of discovery

What are these "regular methods of discovery"? Do you think that small businesses didn't advertise before Facebook/Google/etc came along?

Having a website, showing up in search results.

Being in the yellow pages.

Putting a flyer on a community board or telephone pole. My city has special poles just for flyers.

Word of mouth.

Newspaper ads.

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Sure, some of those are advertising but they're not intrusive or unethical. There aren't as many options for ethically advertising online but that's very intentional, with companies doing the digital equivalent of limiting word of mouth and tearing down flyers.

Intrusion-wise I agree, those communication channels are more "pull" than "push"

Even though the search engine is ad-funded (I don't know any free search engine) and can be more or less intrusive (IE. Duckduckgo is not)

Which channels have been intentionally nerfed?

> The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television.

That's because there was an incentive to create awesome television to lure people away from other channels to watch the ads on your channel. Part of the discussion around the writers and actors on strike right now is the streaming services believe they can make worse content cheaper using AI and still retain subscribers.

> Another way to frame the question - GDPR came out in 2016. Do you feel like the web is getting better?

In Europe, yes. User hostile ad-tech is forced to opt-out of those markets.

No it hasn't. All I've noticed is that I get more pop-ups than ever before and some of the sites I would like to visit block me with a 451 error code.

Phone browsing is a nightmare these days.

Also there are a lot of websites not meeting GDPR rules but major sites do even if it is block all visitors from Europe - cookie consent rules are also broken by many but that is an different law.

Usual problem with laws who enforces them.

> GDPR came out in 2016. Do you feel like the web is getting better?

Yes, because the RTB ecosystem is being dismantled as a direct result.

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