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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

That's not the alternative. The alternative is the death of most sites other than walled gardens like Meta and Amazon that own their own advertising end-to-end. Do you want the internet to be even more Meta controlled?

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Who is using tracking? Its not mom and pop websites. Its big corporations. I could care less if they lost money. The internet would be a healthier place without corporations trying to shift public discourse in their favor.

Those mom and pop sites are often filled with trackers and ads. Assuming they haven't just moved to using a third party service that does it for them. It's like saying the person shooting you isn't at fault but only the gun they shoot you with.

The internet and humanity would exist fine without advertisers. History has proven this to be true.

History doesn't move backward and the internet users of the mid 90s are not the internet users of now. Give the vast majority of internet users a choice between the internet of mid 90s (after that ads powered it all) and having nothing but large tech owned sites to browse I think you're delusional if you think they'd actually pick the former.

  after that ads powered it all

You must be browsing too many social media and news sites.

Of the top 100 sites in the US the only ones I see that don't have ads are corporate (ie: Microsoft, Capital One, etc.) and Wikipedia. Arguably the corporate ones are nothing but an ads for that brand. Even Home Depot has ads on its site.

I don't think a 1% rate of no ads is selling your point.

Even most of the smaller sites have Google ads on them in massive quantities.

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