Hacker News Reader

"It's free real estate" is a meme based on a parody of late-night infomercials touting quick and easy money but are actually bait-and-switch scams.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-free-real-estate

The other two bits are probably meaning that the phone company can make money selling your location and make money charging you to change phone numbers every so often to avoid tracking efforts by people who only have your old number.

View on HN

Thanks for the helpful explanation (TIL a new meme :)). I guess it seems the problem is the commenter using inconsistent subjects, i.e. it would make sense (even without punctuation, or knowing the meme) had it been phrased as:

> Charge for your users' locations! Charge users to change/auto-rotate their numbers! It's free real estate!

Indeed this is what I meant. I pondered my informal phrasing afterwards.

Also I entered single carriage feeds between sentences, forgetting that they're going to get stripped on HN anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com