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Comment by ulrikrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

Instead of trying to whack a mole on all addictive mechanisms, just ban the business model driving all of them: targeted advertising.

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That would cause most, if not all, modern tech companies to go out of business (or massively downsize). I support it.

Facebook really didn't like that apple made device IDs optional, it's strange that they quieted down about that. They must have found an alternative fingerprinting method.

I believe it's why they went all-in on Metaverse/VR. They want to own the next platform so that could never happen to them again. IIRC, Zuck has stated the latter openly.

Reminds me this is the same reason Valve went half-in on Linux. I guess this force can be used for good or evil.

Valve started supporting Linux and making their own Linux gaming hardware because Microsoft briefly tried to lock down Windows so that games could only be installed from the Microsoft Store.

Apps can just read your root disk UUID on iOS (with no permissions), iirc?

I’m not sure that suffices. If a site has a very “good” (at keeping people glued to the screen) content ranking algorithm, they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads. Longer engagement time by viewers = more ad impressions, targeted or not.

"they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads."

- would they be able to make as much as they do now? I think it would be significantly less.

From Meta's official Financial Report for 2025 [0]:

Total Revenue: $200,966 Million

-Advertising: $196,175 million (97.6%)

-Other rev: $ 4,791 Million ( 2.4%)

[0] https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

Presumably significantly less. But GP's point is that reducing advertising revenue doesn't remove the incentive to maximize engagement.

In fact, it would almost certainly encourage them to keep you engaged even longer in an attempt to make up some of the money lost with the end of targeted advertising.

Wouldn’t it lead to the opposite? You spending time on the platform earns them money because they’re gathering data for targeted ads, and showing you those ads. Non-targeted ads barely pay anything.

Addictive content feeds are expensive with the live HD video playing everywhere and the constant tweaks needed from teams working to further refine targeting based on behavior.

For typical social media sites, engagement will pretty much always be proportional to both revenue and cost per user. Either revenue > cost, and the site is incentivized to increase engagement, or revenue < cost and the site dies. There is no middle ground where a site gets a healthy revenue that's greater than its costs, but increasing engagement won't increase revenue. The exceptions are niche sites that do things like fixed subscriptions, or cost money to create content but not to consume it (but even in these cases, increasing engagement probably still increases the chance users start/continue to be paid customers).

You assume that subscriptions wouldn’t become more common without targeted ads. It’s certainly possible.

(I’m not sure if it’s even possible to ban targeted ads, haven’t thought much about it. Perhaps there’s a regulation of commerce angle. I do think that businesses could be forced to provide more clarity about the exchange that’s taking place, the value of the data, how the data is used, and so on.)

So we should ban all ads, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

I agree it’s very possible subscriptions would become more common if targeted ads were restricted. Personally I’d rather pay money for a good product/service than 'being the product' for a bad product that monetizes my data.

s/targeted //

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