That’s a shallow take. The Bay Area used to have a plethora of different types of companies and innovation. Sadly social media and ad companies took over.
Google AdSense became a load-bearing pillar of the Internet before we realized what that meant, and now we (seemingly) can't get rid of it. Every new product is Yet Anotherᵀᴹ free service with a paid subscription tier, which will get more expensive, and the free tier is ad supported. Then the ads get more egregious. Then the free tier becomes a cheap, ad supported tier. Then the ads infiltrate the original paid tier. Then a new service with a fresh round of VC funding sets up to be the "ad free" version of the service that's now infested with ads, and as soon as their AWS bills creep up, the ads enter the new service, but hey there's a cheap subscription if you don't want ads...
2. Advertising is a virus or tumor that will consume all available space in an ecosystem until there is no non-ad content left; it ultimately kills its host.
HN has advertisement. It has the sponsored hiring posts from YC, Show HN posts to projects, and the monthly who is hiring / wants to be hired posts, which are all advertisements. Seems far from cancerous.
HN is also not profitable and is not driven to be so. I don't think it's the ads in and of themselves that's the cancer, but rather that in order to make money, you need just shit-tons of the things. And as the number of ads goes up the amount of attention they get drops which just demands more ads to offset the lower-valued ones.
That being said, I absolutely vibe with the notion of ads being cancer. I would classify personally HN's "ads" as you describe as less advertisements and more just posted notices of things relevant to the community. I don't suspect money changes hands for those to be put up which I would personally classify as the line between the two. And, more importantly, they are likely to be relevant to a fair chunk of the users here, and for those they aren't, they're ignored easily enough too.
HN is only able to bet be profitable because it is backed by a company that is. And if you combine "posted notices of things relevant to the community" with a commercial intent, that is basically the definition of ads.
Also, when you say relevant to the community, what exactly is the definition of that? A job posting on "who is hiring" is likely to be relevant to maybe 0.001% of HN readers. If Apple put a big banner on the site saying "HN users get $100 off a MBP," I bet a much higher percentage of users would click on that (I would). But nobody would ever deny that is an ad. So I don't think community relevance is a great way to determine it. That community relevance factor is exactly what advertisers pay so much to targeted ad companies for anyway.
I do find ads annoying myself and use ad blockers to get rid of them. But I take exception to the idea that they are this cancerous destroying force. Published media has been an advertising platform since well before the internet and I just don't see a feasible way that business model can be replaced just because the medium is now the internet. Yes, there is subscription revenue, but even newspapers back in the day had ads on every page.
Newspapers no longer need to perform the overhead of printing and distributing which was a massive cost to the news org. They can also now sell to the world vs just the local market they can deliver papers to. So not only have their costs been lowered their customer base has expanded quite a bit in theory. Why should we therefore expect to see ads on subscriptions?
> HN is only able to bet be profitable because it is backed by a company that is.
I mean, yes, but also no. We had pages upon pages of unprofitable websites once. There was a time, believe it or not, when all kinds of people setup all kinds of websites, with no expectation whatsoever of making money off of them. I for one hosted a niche phpBB board for years on end at my own expense, offset only by occasional donations from the community we built.
> And if you combine "posted notices of things relevant to the community" with a commercial intent, that is basically the definition of ads.
Well, again, yes and no. I think there's a nuance there. A job posting for example does have commercial intent, but at the same time, it's a mutually beneficial relationship (hopefully anyway) for both the entity and the employee. I would much rather see job ads in a place like this than, I dunno, weight loss drugs and erection pills.
> Also, when you say relevant to the community, what exactly is the definition of that? A job posting on "who is hiring" is likely to be relevant to maybe 0.001% of HN readers.
I think it's much higher than that. Just because you're not unemployed doesn't mean you wouldn't be interested in a job posting. People move companies all the time.
> If Apple put a big banner on the site saying "HN users get $100 off a MBP," I bet a much higher percentage of users would click on that (I would). But nobody would ever deny that is an ad.
But, if the community overall benefits from that, even if that benefit is nothing more significant than a cheaper mac, I'd say that's an overall win for all involved.
> So I don't think community relevance is a great way to determine it. That community relevance factor is exactly what advertisers pay so much to targeted ad companies for anyway.
I'm not saying an ad is good because it's relevant. I'm saying an ad is less irritating if it's relevant. That's why I find most ads so grating, because they are for products I have zero interest in and they are occupying space and attention that would be better filled with something I'm at least vaguely interested in.
In what sense is it effective? I'd been lurking here for months before I learned that YC was a company and it ran this place. (Then again I guess I'm not in any sort of relevant target group).
Still does. Yes, two of the biggest are social media / ads, but out of all the engineers I know in the Bay Area only a small fraction work at ad / social media companies.
