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One of my pet meta-theories about Hacker News is that the frustration expressed over several apparently different stories really has a single source: Hacker New

One of my pet meta-theories about Hacker News is that the frustration expressed over several apparently different stories really has a single source: Hacker News likes the internet of 10-20 years ago a lot more than the average person. One place this shows up is a frequently-expressed sentiment that the internet is a less magical, less weird, and more corporate place than it was 10-20 years ago. Part of this may be because SEO has diluted the voices of individual creators. But part of it is also because way more average, everyday, tech-unsavvy people are on the internet now. Another example is the periodic highlighting of somewhat garish HTML-based websites. I like these too! My own personal website falls in this category! But as far as I know, the generic internet user likes the generic slick-graphics-and-whitespace style, and so go the websites that want to attract them. More relevant to the topic at hand, many comments in this thread argue that targeted ads are unnecessary for a functional internet, since the internet of 20 years ago seemed to work just fine without targeted ads. But, again, it's less clear to me that general internet users -- that is, mostly people who never experienced the internet of 20 years ago -- have the same preference. It's funny, because I'm to a large extent on HN's side on this one. But my enthusiasm is tempered by my sneaking suspicion that the other side is a lot bigger, and my side is actually powered by more elitism and nostalgia than I thought.

AshWolfy 6y ago
I have no nostalgia for the internet of old, the internet for me growing up with facebook, reddit, and newgrounds, i just dont want my privacy violated
ErikVandeWater 6y ago
I would say that the average HN user isn't so much opposed to targetted ads as they are opposed to organizations that are unaccountable to them storing their personal information in an insecure way. And Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. all provided information to the NSA so it could illegally spy on almost every American with access to the internet.
- vaidhy 6y ago
  This also seems to be a tech-elite/libertarian mindset and borders on paranoia. Does the average voter care enough to vote one way or other for it? I would suspect not.. they have bigger problems to deal with and they seem ok with government knowing something about them.
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    Being opposed to something that is literally proven to actually happen is "tech-elite/libertarian mindset and borders on paranoia"? I don't understand your point of view at all, frankly. It's okay to say that you personally don't believe in a right to privacy or don't believe that it's an issue to vacuum up the data of own's own citizens, etc, but what I don't understand is saying that other people are paranoid elitists if they hold the view that they think it's wrong to spy on citizens. It seems incredibly uncharitable. Furthermore your comment reads like you're addressing an argument the GP never made. What's the relevance of this section: > Does the average voter care enough to vote one way or other for it? I would suspect not.. they have bigger problems to deal with and they seem ok with government knowing something about them. The GP never insinuated that the average voter cares about such things (indeed by mentioning that the HN userbase does that implies that the general population does not otherwise it would not be worth mentioning)
- jefftk 6y ago
  If that were the case, then wouldn't you expect the average HN user to like FLoC? Targeted ads, where the personal information is stored securely in your browser. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
  - pueblito 6y ago
    Why would I trust that what FLoC is presented as being is actually just that and only that? Everything google makes seems like bait and switch lies massaged by lawyerspeak to make it legal. Like anyone else who has burned me and my friends in the past, they have to show me they have nothing up their sleeve first
guerrilla 6y ago
So basically you're saying it's like Eternal September spread everywhere. I don't hear normies liking tracking much though, quite the opposite.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  I think one way to put it is that normies don't like a visible reminder of what the service/organization knows about them, but are otherwise perfectly content to not care about how the sausage is made. (Which is understandable since naturally a non-tech person isn't going to have a good mental model of what cookies, HTTP requests, tracking pixels etc are) In other words, you can track the normies all you want as long as your app doesn't do something "creepy" that reveals how much it really does know about them
- g_p 6y ago
  Indeed, there's a couple of data points suggesting that when users are asked for informed consent for tracking, only around 9% agree. That was true across both the UK information commissioner's website, as well as a small commercial shop website (from memory). It strikes me that, as you say, even "normies" don't like tracking. I think the problem is when sleek services obfuscate how they work and users don't understand what happens. The average "normie" doesn't realise that, by default, a cloud service provider sees all their data in the clear. They assume it's somehow private, but haven't seen behind the veil to understand how services work. And the increasing complexity of the tech stack means understanding it becomes harder and harder every day that goes by.
  - lupire 6y ago
    Yes, people like free stuff better than expensive stuff. But when you offer people a dollar to track them, they happily accept.
- kristofferR 6y ago
  I don't torrent much anymore, but one of the things I really love about private torrent trackers are the forums. They're stuck in the mid 2000s, in all the best ways. Technologically they're ancient (usually HTML tables), the amount of users grow slowly (if at all) and are limited to maximum a few thousand (usually just a few hundred actively using the forums though). Users won't risk their treasured accounts by acting badly, and since very few join private trackers for the forums you get a wide specter of different people participating, in their different ways. Some users are silly and post memes, others post long and thought through replies, often in the same thread. Everything is discussed, from politics to the latest movie. There's no "karma" to earn. After a while you start recognizing the same people. I'm really glad I still have access to it, otherwise I would feel kinda lost in today's internet, where you need to find a new site/subreddit for every topic. No tracking either for that matter.
xenocyon 6y ago
I'll admit I like some aspects of the internet of 20 years ago more than today's. I don't like our current world of targeted ads, SEO, overlays, scripts, autoplay videos, and a thousand trackers. But I don't think this makes me that different from today's average internet user - just different from today's average marketer. Indeed, noxious marketing-friendly/user-hostile devices existed in some form 20 years ago as well (intrusive banner ads, popups etc).
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Today's average user comes to the internet for Youtube, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, and maybe more "useful" stuff like Maps, Translate, Docs, or information like news, recipes, guides, etc. None of this would be possible without ads. No one is going to pay for all that.
  - Ronsenshi 6y ago
    Ads are fine, it's the all-encompassing privacy-stripping tracking that is done to squeeze every bit of money possible. All of the listed services will still be there, they just won't be making excess profits for their owners.
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
      They would be shut down due to economic inviability. Targeted advertising is what makes these companies profitable in the first place.
      - account42 6y ago
        Bullshit. Targeted advertising makes them more profitable.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      > it's the all-encompassing privacy-stripping tracking Which is exactly what FLoC is a step towards fixing. It may not be as perfect as not having any targeted ads at all, but it's a much better than the current status quo As for targeted ads, I would argue that most advertising would be non-viable without it. Yes, something like Coca-Cola won't care, but your average small business owner who needs to target a specific niche will basically be unable to advertise it. Imagine I build an app specifically for people into biking, or into animal crossing, or into some other small niche that's less than 0.1% of the population. How do you propose I grow my audience without any sort of targeting at all?
tomc1985 6y ago
Does that make the HN side any less valid? Without resistance we let the forces that be do whatever they want. I don't find that to be acceptable, especially when so many of us are actually in a position to change things, if only our masters would let us
mrtksn 6y ago
The "good" internet was run by rich people's money, we had a good run because someone paid for it without expectation to make the money back right away but to acquire " internet real estate". Now these people want their money back, they want to scoop the returns of their investments. Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit were all magical. Digg was also magical but it died out when tried to scoop returns in inelegant way. Rich people did not become rich and don't stay rich by giving money away. When Youtube was advertiser unfriendly it was magical but it was also burning a billion $ a quarter, the same goes for all those "evil" companies. It all was a scheme to create and grow a market up until they run out of people. When they run out of people, it's time to make the money back out of it. Hmm, maybe I should remove the " " of "evil" but I am not sure. What was the alternative? The French "internet" maybe, but it died if in the face of capital fuelled frenzy of the American internet. BTW, that's why I am an Apple fanboy, I like the idea of directly paid services. The relationship is simpler.
- nr2x 6y ago
  Oddly I’ve not yet heard the NSF described as “rich people”.
  - artifact_44 6y ago
    Exactly. It was literally the government/edu/dod/doe that gave us the internet. Web service should be nationalized, and so should Chrome. Those "rich people" are in the position they are due to consumer ignorance and apathy, but above all, they are our guests at the trough. Show me someone complaining about over-regulation, and I'll show you someone whos being a hog.
    - owl57 6y ago
      Why would the government want to nationalize the dystopia? It's better run by private business, just like most other things where profit seems to be a useful proxy for desired quality. It could also be useful to seem to be optimizing for profit regardless of actually optimizing for it: "Youtube recommends this video because it thinks it might help keep people engaged and show more ads" is much better implicit marketing than "US government wants people in Elbonia to watch this video".
fermienrico 6y ago
This is a weird take. Just because you're going meta, does not invalidate that the internet has turned into a steaming pile of shit since last 10 years. It sounds pseudo-englightening without any substance. Ok, you've observed this meta aspect of HN. So, what?
- mycologos 6y ago
  > So, what? I agree that it's not a very deep observation, or maybe even not true. But it 1) seems to explain several different reactions I see on Hacker News, and 2) it illustrates a trap that I, as a Hacker News user, find myself falling into without realizing: the belief that the thing I want is the thing that other people want. To me, it's good to be aware of that.
  - lupire 6y ago
    Sometimes what other people want is dumb. The challenge for smart people to separate their bias from their judgement.
theodric 6y ago
I can't speak for anyone else, but I miss the early Web mainly because I was young, had my life ahead of me, and everything was an unknown frontier to be explored. Do you remember how f'in hard it was to find stuff online back when a) there was less stuff online and b) you had to use a metasearch engine like Metafind or Dogpile to aggregate the terrible results from multiple engines into something remotely useful? Remember surfing because actively searching fog data was next to impossible? Remember 300ms-per-hop latency and being impressed by 6KB/sec downloads, taking a week to download a Linux distro and rarely upgrading your packages because it took forever? Remember that day in 1998 when the world changed because some Stanford project called 'Google' appeared? I do. I won't go back. I have a few PDP-8s and a PDP-11/03 and various 8-bit micros and some Teletypes and 80s-90s UNIX systems and Winboxen if I want to go back to the old days. They're not dead, they're still here and they still do exactly what little they did in the past. I don't love how dystopian tech has become, but it's a ton more useful to me and most other people than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago.
- InvertedRhodium 6y ago
  Home, and the internet I remember, are both not only a place but a specific period in time. As I get older the phrase "You can never go home" has really started to resonate with me.
- yuhong 6y ago
  > Remember that day in 1998 when the world changed because some Stanford project called 'Google' appeared? You may want to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008_financial_crisis_on_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008...
- totetsu 6y ago
  I kind of wish the next generation of my family wasn't having thier young minds and perception of tech shaped by the corporate dystopia net. Even if I did have to download the the matrix as a multi part rar file in tiny resolution, or leave Napster running all night on a noisy desktop to get that Radiohead album mp3s.. it's better than bugging a parent for credit card like an addict to buy some cosmetic skin for a game.. skins used to be free and fan made mods! https://ut99.org/viewtopic.php?t=3471 https://ut99.org/viewtopic.php?t=3471
salawat 6y ago
You misunderstand. The hatred of targeted advertising comes more out of what it systemically enables, and incentivizes. The mapping and realtime exploitation of UUID like-metadata collected through ubiquitous surveillance. Dossiers were the things of novels and intelligence agencies, nowadays marketers have sold people (even those like you) that somehow this gratuitous invasion of your privacy is normal, desirable, acceptable, and even more insidiously, always was. Nothing could be further from the truth. You now have multiple dossier's that will follow you around the world. Some governments will deny you entry unless you surrender access to any social media accounts. None of what is normal about the web today was ever at all what made the early web magical. You weren't monetized. You were reaching out and leaving something of yourself out there, and finding that there were like minded individuals to you the world over! You also had the cloak of anonymity. Anything on the net was a non-issue. Controversial viewpoint? Whatever. Really need some insight on XYZ? Trawl the BBS's or a chat room. Nothing was as centralized as it is now. People didn't do daft things like trying to put things you shouldn't on a fundamentally insecure network. People weren't so dependent on things that the ne net was more... Relaxed. Not a full time deal. I have no illusions the magic has faded not just due to age and familiarity, but to what it has become, and what it has enabled the world to become.
bawolff 6y ago
> But, again, it's less clear to me that general internet users -- that is, mostly people who never experienced the internet of 20 years ago -- have the same preference. This may be the case, but i don't think we can draw the conclusion from that that they like the new internet, only that we dont know if they do. Which is a very different conclusion That said, i think the real reason is that the internet sold out and went corporate. I think its pretty similar to what happens when an indie band makes it mainstream - all the original fans tend to hate the change.
astatine 6y ago
I suspect its as much due to the speed as anything else. The internet has moved from early adopter/enthusiast to ubiquity in less than a lifetime. In fact, in less than a working career time span. I imagine that rate of change is not going to keep the early adopters as thrilled as they used to be.
OnlyLys 6y ago
Recently I asked my non tech savvy mom if she wanted to join YouTube Premium with me under a family plan so that she doesn't have to see ads on her YouTube any more. Her response was "No thank you. I like the ads. Sometimes I see things I like".
- rglullis 6y ago
  Ask her if she likes all the implications that comes with giving in to all the privacy invasion and manipulation that comes with those ads that she might like. Ask her if she would give up on the ads that she sometimes likes if she learned that ad tech makes us addicted to our computers, more socially isolated, less likely to connect to our family and community, etc. IOW, ask her if she would trade the ads on Youtube for better quality time with her children and (potential?) grandchildren. Giving in to ads because "some ads are nice" is no different to think that a diet based only on heavily processed foods are nice because "some of it taste good". "The ads are annoying" is the last of the problem with the ad-based economy. People do become ad-blind after a while. The problem is all the tracking, profiling and the "eyeball-based website funding model".
  - freebuju 6y ago
    We were humans before this Internet-thing came to us. And it must adapt to our human ways of life. I'm now even more tempted to likening of the invention of Internet to when man discovered fire. Anyway, back to the topic... Why are you assuming the user is not intelligent/capable of making an informed choice ? Most people by now (we are talking about Internet users after all here) already know the implications of these ads towards their privacy. Yet 9/10 times they will choose convenience over it. You are also assuming that time spent on YouTube is eating on time they would (rather??) spend on their families. What if the user watches Youtube at night when the family is asleep? On to advertising. Some ads are indeed useful, despite of their tracking-based nature. Some are informational. Some are non-intrusive at all. I can't tell you how many times I've taken up a promo (on products I already use) because of a simple ad. Putting all ads on the same bandwagon hurts the players who just care about serving marketing info and nothing more. Foregoing ad-funded products or even ads themselves is not a binary decision. We need to get away from this mentality.
marricks 6y ago
What a cop out. Why carry water for the awful way the internet is heading? Perhaps it’s because the net of the past used to be a “wild frontier” not owned by a couple companies is why people have nostalgia. Those companies can make major decisions for the web based on solely on securing their own profit.
40four 6y ago
I don’t understand the line of logic here. What does nostalgia for the internet of twenty years ago have anything to do with the way big advertising takes advantage of us now? They use underhanded, arguably immoral, technological tricks that most general internet users might not even be aware of, much less understand how to defend themselves. It has nothing to do with the fact they never experienced the ‘old’ internet, they just don’t understand how or why they are being taken advantage of. The HN crowd isn’t mad about obscene privacy practices because of nostalgia. They’re mad about it because they understand the actual technological mechanisms behind it, and how they work. And why the way big advertising exploits those mechanisms is so f’ed up. Edit: Sorry, maybe I’m getting too angry. I think I see what you were going for, about many HN frequenters pining for the days of old. But I don’t agree with the idea that general internet users who weren’t online back then are okay with the current state of big advertising tracking technology. I think they just have no idea how or why it works. I think many people are confused and frustrated that seemingly every random site or social media app they use seems to be aware of everything they do and look at online.
- cm2012 6y ago
  Besides encouraging people to buy things you might think they don't need, what's an actual harm people experience from targeted ads as opposed to non targeted ads?
  - marricks 6y ago
    I guess the choice could be fine, but the simple fact that every year it gets harder and to harder to opt is terrifying. And perhaps the terrifying privacy implications of such a system.
  - tomjen3 6y ago
    If I see an ad for healing crystals on some rando website, then I just think the website is stupid. When I saw one on Facebook I was insulted, because Facebook thinks I am the kind of person who is so stupid they believe in them. You can write this of as not actual harm because it is only emotions, but it had a negative impact on me, which I consider actual harm. The other issue is information leakage. If you want to show an article on your phone to a buddy you don't want the ads to be for adult diapers.
gerash 6y ago
The problem I see mainly is people complain about something without providing a usable alternative. Most of the web tech are open source so it's just a matter of forking an existing tech and convincing others to use your thing instead. If your thing breaks half the existing workflows that's your problem, not others'
KirillPanov 6y ago
> Hacker News likes the internet of 10-20 years ago a lot more than the average person. Isn't that tautological? "The average person" knows nothing (or almost nothing) about the Internet of 20 years ago.
nine_k 6y ago
I like your observation. I do not completely agree, though. A tech-unsavvy user often dislikes "targeted advertising", as much as I could observe. For one, for the weird cross-media targeting effects, when a person sees the same ads, or ads about the same thing, like a fridge, following the user on many unrelated sites. It's most annoying when this keeps happening after the user has bought a fridge, and is unlikely to buy another just yet. A less recognized but more annoying effect of ads is that they consume as much CPU and network latency as possible without making some sites outright unusable. The user says: see, I have this new and powerful computer, and this new and fast network thingie — why is the internet so slow? This is when installing even a simple ad-blocking extension shows the difference very vividly. BTW I think that truly targeted ads can be useful — such laser-precision ads in Facebook showed me a few niche communities that interested me, e.g. dedicated to chiptune music creation. But most ads I see when I browse without ad-blocking are pretty lame, maybe 2% are well-targeted (and then I click on them). I keep a separate browser profile without ad-blocking to see what the internet is like for a vanilla user. OTOH the amount of tracking normally present on innocuous sites is surprisingly large, and slows things down rather unpleasantly, even if the ads are served instantly. So yes, the internet full of ads is the norm for last 20+ years, and no, "normal users" do notice the impact of it.
- vntok 6y ago
  > It's most annoying when this keeps happening after the user has bought a fridge, and is unlikely to buy another just yet On the contrary, the most likely moment any random person online is to buy a fridge is just after they bought one: we know they had a need + awareness of the desired specs + intent to buy, so it's really just a question of convincing them that fridge B is better than the one they bought. Buyer's Remorse is basically free in many countries, ex 14 days to return item in the EU.
de6u99er 6y ago
My problem is, that the data collected is not only used by advertisers.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Advertisers don't collect data, and ad-tech companies don't sell users data.
oytis 6y ago
I really doubt that an average internet use is craving for being tracked. GDPR seems to be widely supported in Europe, the only thing that annoys people are numerous "give us consent please" pop-ups which some attribute to GDPR itself, not to advertisers' attempts to track people despite GDPR.
BrianOnHN 6y ago
> Another example is the periodic highlighting of somewhat garish HTML-based websites. I like these too! I've learned that the mainstream sees these and thinks "bot" or "fake" websites. It took me quite a while to understand what they were saying, which was that my designs, ones that I'd considered minimalist, just plain sucked.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
You got me. I feel nostalgia for lower gini coefficients and less widespread surveillance. Even if my point of view is in the minority on this issue, I do not regret it at all.

AshWolfy 6y ago

I have no nostalgia for the internet of old, the internet for me growing up with facebook, reddit, and newgrounds, i just dont want my privacy violated

ErikVandeWater 6y ago

I would say that the average HN user isn't so much opposed to targetted ads as they are opposed to organizations that are unaccountable to them storing their personal information in an insecure way. And Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. all provided information to the NSA so it could illegally spy on almost every American with access to the internet.

vaidhy 6y ago
This also seems to be a tech-elite/libertarian mindset and borders on paranoia. Does the average voter care enough to vote one way or other for it? I would suspect not.. they have bigger problems to deal with and they seem ok with government knowing something about them.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  Being opposed to something that is literally proven to actually happen is "tech-elite/libertarian mindset and borders on paranoia"? I don't understand your point of view at all, frankly. It's okay to say that you personally don't believe in a right to privacy or don't believe that it's an issue to vacuum up the data of own's own citizens, etc, but what I don't understand is saying that other people are paranoid elitists if they hold the view that they think it's wrong to spy on citizens. It seems incredibly uncharitable. Furthermore your comment reads like you're addressing an argument the GP never made. What's the relevance of this section: > Does the average voter care enough to vote one way or other for it? I would suspect not.. they have bigger problems to deal with and they seem ok with government knowing something about them. The GP never insinuated that the average voter cares about such things (indeed by mentioning that the HN userbase does that implies that the general population does not otherwise it would not be worth mentioning)
jefftk 6y ago
If that were the case, then wouldn't you expect the average HN user to like FLoC? Targeted ads, where the personal information is stored securely in your browser. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
- pueblito 6y ago
  Why would I trust that what FLoC is presented as being is actually just that and only that? Everything google makes seems like bait and switch lies massaged by lawyerspeak to make it legal. Like anyone else who has burned me and my friends in the past, they have to show me they have nothing up their sleeve first

guerrilla 6y ago

So basically you're saying it's like Eternal September spread everywhere. I don't hear normies liking tracking much though, quite the opposite.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
I think one way to put it is that normies don't like a visible reminder of what the service/organization knows about them, but are otherwise perfectly content to not care about how the sausage is made. (Which is understandable since naturally a non-tech person isn't going to have a good mental model of what cookies, HTTP requests, tracking pixels etc are) In other words, you can track the normies all you want as long as your app doesn't do something "creepy" that reveals how much it really does know about them
g_p 6y ago
Indeed, there's a couple of data points suggesting that when users are asked for informed consent for tracking, only around 9% agree. That was true across both the UK information commissioner's website, as well as a small commercial shop website (from memory). It strikes me that, as you say, even "normies" don't like tracking. I think the problem is when sleek services obfuscate how they work and users don't understand what happens. The average "normie" doesn't realise that, by default, a cloud service provider sees all their data in the clear. They assume it's somehow private, but haven't seen behind the veil to understand how services work. And the increasing complexity of the tech stack means understanding it becomes harder and harder every day that goes by.
- lupire 6y ago
  Yes, people like free stuff better than expensive stuff. But when you offer people a dollar to track them, they happily accept.
kristofferR 6y ago
I don't torrent much anymore, but one of the things I really love about private torrent trackers are the forums. They're stuck in the mid 2000s, in all the best ways. Technologically they're ancient (usually HTML tables), the amount of users grow slowly (if at all) and are limited to maximum a few thousand (usually just a few hundred actively using the forums though). Users won't risk their treasured accounts by acting badly, and since very few join private trackers for the forums you get a wide specter of different people participating, in their different ways. Some users are silly and post memes, others post long and thought through replies, often in the same thread. Everything is discussed, from politics to the latest movie. There's no "karma" to earn. After a while you start recognizing the same people. I'm really glad I still have access to it, otherwise I would feel kinda lost in today's internet, where you need to find a new site/subreddit for every topic. No tracking either for that matter.

xenocyon 6y ago

I'll admit I like some aspects of the internet of 20 years ago more than today's. I don't like our current world of targeted ads, SEO, overlays, scripts, autoplay videos, and a thousand trackers. But I don't think this makes me that different from today's average internet user - just different from today's average marketer. Indeed, noxious marketing-friendly/user-hostile devices existed in some form 20 years ago as well (intrusive banner ads, popups etc).

ehsankia 6y ago
Today's average user comes to the internet for Youtube, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, and maybe more "useful" stuff like Maps, Translate, Docs, or information like news, recipes, guides, etc. None of this would be possible without ads. No one is going to pay for all that.
- Ronsenshi 6y ago
  Ads are fine, it's the all-encompassing privacy-stripping tracking that is done to squeeze every bit of money possible. All of the listed services will still be there, they just won't be making excess profits for their owners.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    They would be shut down due to economic inviability. Targeted advertising is what makes these companies profitable in the first place.
    - account42 6y ago
      Bullshit. Targeted advertising makes them more profitable.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    > it's the all-encompassing privacy-stripping tracking Which is exactly what FLoC is a step towards fixing. It may not be as perfect as not having any targeted ads at all, but it's a much better than the current status quo As for targeted ads, I would argue that most advertising would be non-viable without it. Yes, something like Coca-Cola won't care, but your average small business owner who needs to target a specific niche will basically be unable to advertise it. Imagine I build an app specifically for people into biking, or into animal crossing, or into some other small niche that's less than 0.1% of the population. How do you propose I grow my audience without any sort of targeting at all?

tomc1985 6y ago

Does that make the HN side any less valid? Without resistance we let the forces that be do whatever they want. I don't find that to be acceptable, especially when so many of us are actually in a position to change things, if only our masters would let us

mrtksn 6y ago

The "good" internet was run by rich people's money, we had a good run because someone paid for it without expectation to make the money back right away but to acquire " internet real estate". Now these people want their money back, they want to scoop the returns of their investments. Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit were all magical. Digg was also magical but it died out when tried to scoop returns in inelegant way. Rich people did not become rich and don't stay rich by giving money away. When Youtube was advertiser unfriendly it was magical but it was also burning a billion $ a quarter, the same goes for all those "evil" companies. It all was a scheme to create and grow a market up until they run out of people. When they run out of people, it's time to make the money back out of it. Hmm, maybe I should remove the " " of "evil" but I am not sure. What was the alternative? The French "internet" maybe, but it died if in the face of capital fuelled frenzy of the American internet. BTW, that's why I am an Apple fanboy, I like the idea of directly paid services. The relationship is simpler.

nr2x 6y ago
Oddly I’ve not yet heard the NSF described as “rich people”.
- artifact_44 6y ago
  Exactly. It was literally the government/edu/dod/doe that gave us the internet. Web service should be nationalized, and so should Chrome. Those "rich people" are in the position they are due to consumer ignorance and apathy, but above all, they are our guests at the trough. Show me someone complaining about over-regulation, and I'll show you someone whos being a hog.
  - owl57 6y ago
    Why would the government want to nationalize the dystopia? It's better run by private business, just like most other things where profit seems to be a useful proxy for desired quality. It could also be useful to seem to be optimizing for profit regardless of actually optimizing for it: "Youtube recommends this video because it thinks it might help keep people engaged and show more ads" is much better implicit marketing than "US government wants people in Elbonia to watch this video".

fermienrico 6y ago

This is a weird take. Just because you're going meta, does not invalidate that the internet has turned into a steaming pile of shit since last 10 years. It sounds pseudo-englightening without any substance. Ok, you've observed this meta aspect of HN. So, what?

mycologos 6y ago
> So, what? I agree that it's not a very deep observation, or maybe even not true. But it 1) seems to explain several different reactions I see on Hacker News, and 2) it illustrates a trap that I, as a Hacker News user, find myself falling into without realizing: the belief that the thing I want is the thing that other people want. To me, it's good to be aware of that.
- lupire 6y ago
  Sometimes what other people want is dumb. The challenge for smart people to separate their bias from their judgement.

theodric 6y ago

I can't speak for anyone else, but I miss the early Web mainly because I was young, had my life ahead of me, and everything was an unknown frontier to be explored. Do you remember how f'in hard it was to find stuff online back when a) there was less stuff online and b) you had to use a metasearch engine like Metafind or Dogpile to aggregate the terrible results from multiple engines into something remotely useful? Remember surfing because actively searching fog data was next to impossible? Remember 300ms-per-hop latency and being impressed by 6KB/sec downloads, taking a week to download a Linux distro and rarely upgrading your packages because it took forever? Remember that day in 1998 when the world changed because some Stanford project called 'Google' appeared? I do. I won't go back. I have a few PDP-8s and a PDP-11/03 and various 8-bit micros and some Teletypes and 80s-90s UNIX systems and Winboxen if I want to go back to the old days. They're not dead, they're still here and they still do exactly what little they did in the past. I don't love how dystopian tech has become, but it's a ton more useful to me and most other people than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago.

InvertedRhodium 6y ago
Home, and the internet I remember, are both not only a place but a specific period in time. As I get older the phrase "You can never go home" has really started to resonate with me.
yuhong 6y ago
> Remember that day in 1998 when the world changed because some Stanford project called 'Google' appeared? You may want to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008_financial_crisis_on_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008...
totetsu 6y ago
I kind of wish the next generation of my family wasn't having thier young minds and perception of tech shaped by the corporate dystopia net. Even if I did have to download the the matrix as a multi part rar file in tiny resolution, or leave Napster running all night on a noisy desktop to get that Radiohead album mp3s.. it's better than bugging a parent for credit card like an addict to buy some cosmetic skin for a game.. skins used to be free and fan made mods! https://ut99.org/viewtopic.php?t=3471 https://ut99.org/viewtopic.php?t=3471

salawat 6y ago

You misunderstand. The hatred of targeted advertising comes more out of what it systemically enables, and incentivizes. The mapping and realtime exploitation of UUID like-metadata collected through ubiquitous surveillance. Dossiers were the things of novels and intelligence agencies, nowadays marketers have sold people (even those like you) that somehow this gratuitous invasion of your privacy is normal, desirable, acceptable, and even more insidiously, always was. Nothing could be further from the truth. You now have multiple dossier's that will follow you around the world. Some governments will deny you entry unless you surrender access to any social media accounts. None of what is normal about the web today was ever at all what made the early web magical. You weren't monetized. You were reaching out and leaving something of yourself out there, and finding that there were like minded individuals to you the world over! You also had the cloak of anonymity. Anything on the net was a non-issue. Controversial viewpoint? Whatever. Really need some insight on XYZ? Trawl the BBS's or a chat room. Nothing was as centralized as it is now. People didn't do daft things like trying to put things you shouldn't on a fundamentally insecure network. People weren't so dependent on things that the ne net was more... Relaxed. Not a full time deal. I have no illusions the magic has faded not just due to age and familiarity, but to what it has become, and what it has enabled the world to become.

bawolff 6y ago

> But, again, it's less clear to me that general internet users -- that is, mostly people who never experienced the internet of 20 years ago -- have the same preference. This may be the case, but i don't think we can draw the conclusion from that that they like the new internet, only that we dont know if they do. Which is a very different conclusion That said, i think the real reason is that the internet sold out and went corporate. I think its pretty similar to what happens when an indie band makes it mainstream - all the original fans tend to hate the change.

astatine 6y ago

I suspect its as much due to the speed as anything else. The internet has moved from early adopter/enthusiast to ubiquity in less than a lifetime. In fact, in less than a working career time span. I imagine that rate of change is not going to keep the early adopters as thrilled as they used to be.

OnlyLys 6y ago

Recently I asked my non tech savvy mom if she wanted to join YouTube Premium with me under a family plan so that she doesn't have to see ads on her YouTube any more. Her response was "No thank you. I like the ads. Sometimes I see things I like".

rglullis 6y ago
Ask her if she likes all the implications that comes with giving in to all the privacy invasion and manipulation that comes with those ads that she might like. Ask her if she would give up on the ads that she sometimes likes if she learned that ad tech makes us addicted to our computers, more socially isolated, less likely to connect to our family and community, etc. IOW, ask her if she would trade the ads on Youtube for better quality time with her children and (potential?) grandchildren. Giving in to ads because "some ads are nice" is no different to think that a diet based only on heavily processed foods are nice because "some of it taste good". "The ads are annoying" is the last of the problem with the ad-based economy. People do become ad-blind after a while. The problem is all the tracking, profiling and the "eyeball-based website funding model".
- freebuju 6y ago
  We were humans before this Internet-thing came to us. And it must adapt to our human ways of life. I'm now even more tempted to likening of the invention of Internet to when man discovered fire. Anyway, back to the topic... Why are you assuming the user is not intelligent/capable of making an informed choice ? Most people by now (we are talking about Internet users after all here) already know the implications of these ads towards their privacy. Yet 9/10 times they will choose convenience over it. You are also assuming that time spent on YouTube is eating on time they would (rather??) spend on their families. What if the user watches Youtube at night when the family is asleep? On to advertising. Some ads are indeed useful, despite of their tracking-based nature. Some are informational. Some are non-intrusive at all. I can't tell you how many times I've taken up a promo (on products I already use) because of a simple ad. Putting all ads on the same bandwagon hurts the players who just care about serving marketing info and nothing more. Foregoing ad-funded products or even ads themselves is not a binary decision. We need to get away from this mentality.

marricks 6y ago

What a cop out. Why carry water for the awful way the internet is heading? Perhaps it’s because the net of the past used to be a “wild frontier” not owned by a couple companies is why people have nostalgia. Those companies can make major decisions for the web based on solely on securing their own profit.

40four 6y ago

I don’t understand the line of logic here. What does nostalgia for the internet of twenty years ago have anything to do with the way big advertising takes advantage of us now? They use underhanded, arguably immoral, technological tricks that most general internet users might not even be aware of, much less understand how to defend themselves. It has nothing to do with the fact they never experienced the ‘old’ internet, they just don’t understand how or why they are being taken advantage of. The HN crowd isn’t mad about obscene privacy practices because of nostalgia. They’re mad about it because they understand the actual technological mechanisms behind it, and how they work. And why the way big advertising exploits those mechanisms is so f’ed up. Edit: Sorry, maybe I’m getting too angry. I think I see what you were going for, about many HN frequenters pining for the days of old. But I don’t agree with the idea that general internet users who weren’t online back then are okay with the current state of big advertising tracking technology. I think they just have no idea how or why it works. I think many people are confused and frustrated that seemingly every random site or social media app they use seems to be aware of everything they do and look at online.

cm2012 6y ago
Besides encouraging people to buy things you might think they don't need, what's an actual harm people experience from targeted ads as opposed to non targeted ads?
- marricks 6y ago
  I guess the choice could be fine, but the simple fact that every year it gets harder and to harder to opt is terrifying. And perhaps the terrifying privacy implications of such a system.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  If I see an ad for healing crystals on some rando website, then I just think the website is stupid. When I saw one on Facebook I was insulted, because Facebook thinks I am the kind of person who is so stupid they believe in them. You can write this of as not actual harm because it is only emotions, but it had a negative impact on me, which I consider actual harm. The other issue is information leakage. If you want to show an article on your phone to a buddy you don't want the ads to be for adult diapers.

gerash 6y ago

The problem I see mainly is people complain about something without providing a usable alternative. Most of the web tech are open source so it's just a matter of forking an existing tech and convincing others to use your thing instead. If your thing breaks half the existing workflows that's your problem, not others'

KirillPanov 6y ago

> Hacker News likes the internet of 10-20 years ago a lot more than the average person. Isn't that tautological? "The average person" knows nothing (or almost nothing) about the Internet of 20 years ago.

nine_k 6y ago

I like your observation. I do not completely agree, though. A tech-unsavvy user often dislikes "targeted advertising", as much as I could observe. For one, for the weird cross-media targeting effects, when a person sees the same ads, or ads about the same thing, like a fridge, following the user on many unrelated sites. It's most annoying when this keeps happening after the user has bought a fridge, and is unlikely to buy another just yet. A less recognized but more annoying effect of ads is that they consume as much CPU and network latency as possible without making some sites outright unusable. The user says: see, I have this new and powerful computer, and this new and fast network thingie — why is the internet so slow? This is when installing even a simple ad-blocking extension shows the difference very vividly. BTW I think that truly targeted ads can be useful — such laser-precision ads in Facebook showed me a few niche communities that interested me, e.g. dedicated to chiptune music creation. But most ads I see when I browse without ad-blocking are pretty lame, maybe 2% are well-targeted (and then I click on them). I keep a separate browser profile without ad-blocking to see what the internet is like for a vanilla user. OTOH the amount of tracking normally present on innocuous sites is surprisingly large, and slows things down rather unpleasantly, even if the ads are served instantly. So yes, the internet full of ads is the norm for last 20+ years, and no, "normal users" do notice the impact of it.

vntok 6y ago
> It's most annoying when this keeps happening after the user has bought a fridge, and is unlikely to buy another just yet On the contrary, the most likely moment any random person online is to buy a fridge is just after they bought one: we know they had a need + awareness of the desired specs + intent to buy, so it's really just a question of convincing them that fridge B is better than the one they bought. Buyer's Remorse is basically free in many countries, ex 14 days to return item in the EU.

de6u99er 6y ago

My problem is, that the data collected is not only used by advertisers.

ehsankia 6y ago
Advertisers don't collect data, and ad-tech companies don't sell users data.

oytis 6y ago

I really doubt that an average internet use is craving for being tracked. GDPR seems to be widely supported in Europe, the only thing that annoys people are numerous "give us consent please" pop-ups which some attribute to GDPR itself, not to advertisers' attempts to track people despite GDPR.

BrianOnHN 6y ago

> Another example is the periodic highlighting of somewhat garish HTML-based websites. I like these too! I've learned that the mainstream sees these and thinks "bot" or "fake" websites. It took me quite a while to understand what they were saying, which was that my designs, ones that I'd considered minimalist, just plain sucked.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

You got me. I feel nostalgia for lower gini coefficients and less widespread surveillance. Even if my point of view is in the minority on this issue, I do not regret it at all.