Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I have never, even once, bought a product or chosen a brand based on advertising (of course you can point to subconscious conditioning, but that would not support the point you're making).




I’ve bought hundreds of products from ads. Most of them I wouldn’t have known about if not for the ads. And I’m pretty happy with all those purchases.

Great. So set your agent to “show me adverts” and let the rest of use set our agents to “don’t show me adverts”.

Then we come to the rub: if "don't show me adverts" suddenly made common tasks (checking email, using a search engine) cost a bit of money, how many people would go for that?

Quite a few. Hence people who pay for Netflix, YouTube, etc.

Certainly I don’t have adverts when I check my email, does Hotmail etc do adverts now? I’m sure they didn’t back in the early 00s.


Hard to tell, as those 2 specific services are currently monopolized by a company who refuses to offer those specific services ad-free

Email certainly isn’t monopolised! I can think of at least 3 mainstream search engines - although all advert driven

Look everyone, we found one!



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: