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And? What's evil about advertising? Seriously, I'm surprised to see this kind of comment ranked so highly on HN. Google makes products. Most of them are goo
by redthrowaway 15y ago
And? What's evil about advertising?
Seriously, I'm surprised to see this kind of comment ranked so highly on HN. Google makes products. Most of them are good, some of them are excellent. In exchange, they show you ads. The alternative is making the user pay. There's nothing wrong with this arrangement; it's the default monetization strategy for a huge number of companies.
The core of the argument seems to be that Google knows too much about you, and is selling your personal data to advertisers. That's not really the case, though. Google isn't going to ESPN and saying, "Here's John Smith from Deerborn, Michigan. He's 38, has a wife and a 4 year old daughter, and cheats on his taxes. Give me $50." They're simply allowing advertisers to target users fitting a certain profile. Now, you may not be comfortable with how much Google knows about you, and that's fine, but targeted advertising is hardly evil.
- vicngtor 15y agoYour comment greatly changed my views on advertising.
- joebadmo 15y agoTotally agree. "You are the product" is such a reductive, partisan talking point that at this point it's actually a pretty good filter for intellectual honesty and critical thinking. I wrote a whole blog post about it here: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9910020865/you-are-the-product http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9910020865/you-are-the-produc...
- betterth 15y agoI'd rather pay a trivial amount of money for their service than be forced into a global information gathering scheme whose sole point (currently) is effective advertising. It's frustrating that they've gobbled up some of the best programmers in the world to make some of the best software in the world-- And then enforced the rule that you can't use their software without being spyed on. Why not let us pay for software? Call it what you want, I call it evil.