Comment by AlienRobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlienRobot | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You need to be more realist.

"Uses the personal information of the user to advertise"

Is 99.9% of all websites. So long as websites don't sell things, they will be having ads.

This includes Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Imgur, TikTok, Twitch, Youtube, etc. I think even Steam and other game platforms would fall into this category despite the fact they make money selling products. Naturally search engines also fall into this category.

Websites like HN are the exception, not the norm.

It's also disingenuous to say "a personal blog" would be exempt from this when most people don't have blogs in first place since they start microblogging instead. In fact, most people don't want to go through the trouble of maintaining their own blog, dealing with spam, hosting, hacking attempts, software updates, etc., when they can just use tumblr and pin the responsibility on the platform anytime something bad happens.

> Is 99.9% of all websites.

Not at all. You named eleven. Even if I'm generous and raise that by a couple of orders of magnitude, it's still a miniscule fraction of all websites.

Of course it's close to all big tech platforms, but that's not the same thing. And if one of the results of this whole kerfluffle is to make more people realize that the big tech platforms are not the same as "the Internet" or "the Web", that would be a good thing.

> Websites like HN are the exception, not the norm.

Which makes it even more important to ask the question of whether "exception" websites like this one can continue to survive if this bill becomes law. Sure, HN users are a tiny fraction of all Internet users. But that's supposed to be one of the things the Internet is for--to give even very small communities a place where they can be a community, and not have to worry about all the other crap that's out there, and not have to be micromanaged by politicians and lobbyists and tech giants.

> It's also disingenuous to say "a personal blog" would be exempt from this when most people don't have blogs in first place since they start microblogging instead

Not all blogging platforms use targeted ads. And if this gives more of them an incentive not to, that would be a good thing.

You're way underestimating how many boring websites there are. County records websites, tax filing websites, dmv portals, shipping trackers...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com