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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

If you didn’t notice, this comment is an ad for a paid app trying to capitalize on social media anger. I respect the hustle, but this is not a neutral comment on the topic due to the financial interest. There are many free alternative plugins for targeting social media feeds if someone wants to filter these.

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I always liked about HN that we'd be OK with people plugging their products so long as it was on-topic and not all too shameless. After all, it's a site frequented by entrepreneurs, we all know how hard it is to get a product off the ground.

IMO this comment (also before the link was removed) fit that bill perfectly and I'd encourage the author to share the link anyway.

I removed the link, just thought it was relevant to the discussion.

I was going to make a similar accusation as the above but I skimmed your comments and it didn't seem like you were the sort to have ill intent behind bringing it up. Next time you might want to include one of those stuffy "Disclosure" notices.

That's a good idea, thank you for the feedback. I have a hard time finding the line between "advertising" and "sharing something I built" on this site sometimes.

but you should link to it in your bio for those of us still curious to find out what it is you built.

Thanks for asking, I put a link to my personal site in my bio if you want to find it, it's called Scrolless.

Not really anyones fault. Thanks to endless enshittification, relentless advertising and the current 'AI' some people may have become to behave like this even if your intention was good.

You shouldn't remove the link.

Self-promotion is the anti-hyperscaler. I'd far prefer 100,000 hustlers to the hyperscalers forcing device attestation, 92% URL-bar-to-ad-funnel monopoly, "oops no more adblocker for you anymore", hardware we don't own, no direct app downloads, dumping on healthy markets with outside business unit profit to kill them off, continue growing like cancer, etc. etc.

Also, while on the point of this, I'm hoping fast on-device AI agents finally kill off advertising. I'm hoping my agent will stand between me and (advertising, toxicity, the algorithm, etc.) and literally rip the suit and pants right off Meta, Google, et al.

I want to put a de-Google/de-Meta agent on every device.

You want my eyeballs, you pay me.

> I'm hoping fast on-device AI agents finally kill off advertising. I'm hoping my agent will stand between me and (advertising, toxicity, the algorithm, etc.) and literally rip the suit and pants right off Meta, Google, et al.

How'd that work out with browsers?

Funding matters and working for the people pays less than working for businesses.

If we want a user -agent future, then we'd better figure out a financial model to incentivize that at scale. (Graphene or Mozilla subscription service?)

I have no issue with people sharing their personal projects if they're relevant to the discussion.

If you've reading this and you have a personal project please proactively share it in the comments when it's relevant and on topic. I try to upvote and be supportive when I can to make sure they feel welcomed.

If you haven't been on HN, you'd believe this was some aberration as opposed to the norm. This is a YC run forum, so it's pretty normal for comments to contain software advertisment based comments.

I made a website 8 years ago for a business that was abandoned very early on by lack of time. Last week the first order came in.

Makes me curious, why should organic discovery not be a thing? How should it work?

I get that we don't want to look at promotional messages but do customers want to pay for advertising? I think many would be surprised how expensive it is to buy one customer. Some sectors more absurd than others.

I see lots of ads for things I know cost a tiny fraction of what is asked.

The idea everything is spam seems much to convenient for big business to be a coincidence.

I think we should go back to having a link to our website with each post. That actually makes it worth spending some time helping people.

It’s also the norm to call it out when someone isn’t disclosing their financial interest in something.

Hang on, this is a $2.99 one-time payment - below the level you can even buy ads and make a profit. There is no way he's trying to make billions of dollars this way, and it's honest and smart. Consider the perspective - what happens with the "free alternatives"? You know they're not free: either they already track you, or someone buys them and turns them into spyware. We need more things like this, not less.

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