Hacker News Reader

Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

> It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads

What? No they don’t. I wish. Where did you get that idea? Apple loves ads. They do a ton of them and sell them to you. You can’t do an App Store search without seeing an ad right at the top, and the bottom, and the sides, and under your pillow. It’s absolutely littered with them.

What Apple rails against is the tracking and invasion of privacy. Which incidentally ads do a lot of. Even Safari content blockers are ingrained in that philosophy: it’s not about blocking ads, it’s about blocking things that invade your privacy.

View on HN

The App Store Search and iCloud Ads are relatively recent thing. The focus on tracking and invasion of privacy is also a refined version of it. Their whole PR campaign from 2017 to 2020 against ads. ( And it was more targeting Facebook Ads without saying it. Which Apple plan to destroy ) Somewhere between 2019 - 2022 They literally have to come out and said to say they are not against ads but only against tracking because the whole Ad industry was furious so they have calm things down.

Here is another angle. If Apple could successfully destroy the In App Ads industry, which they earn nothing from, and force those value into subscription, who will benefit most? Remember Apple tried iAds and earn a percentage of it but failed.

People should at least read PG's Submarine [1] to understand how modern PR and media works. Once you have that understanding the lens of reading anything about Apple becomes a little different.

[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I think you've got your timeline mixed up. App Store search ads debuted in 2016, prior to your entire narrative.

> Their whole PR campaign from 2017 to 2020 against ads.

Could you provide specific examples? It is possible that I’m misremembering, but in that case you should be able to point me to those specific campaigns.

Everything else in your comment has nothing to do with my point, though.

Apple is absolutely fine with tracking and privacy invasion, as long as they're the ones doing it.

Which has nothing to do with the point, which is that that’s what they rail against, not ads. If they are hypocrites about it is an orthogonal matter.

It's genuinely getting depressing watching HN try to justify Tim Cook's actions ad-hoc. You can't name a single ideal Apple values more than money.

  Soon (2028?) "Yes, we know Apple advertises to us and backdoors their services for the government. But *at least* my personal data isn't being sold, without Apple's privacy promise I would be helpless."

> It's genuinely getting depressing watching HN try to justify Tim Cook's actions ad-hoc.

Your comment is absurd. I criticise Tim Cook all the time.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Try to understand what people are saying without injecting your own preconceived notions and maybe you won’t get as depressed. Making a correction about a point is not the same as defending it.

I am not attacking your character. This is specifically aimed at HN's cognitive dissonance surrounding Apple doing anything possibly bad. It is pointless to shield Tim Cook from ancillary flak, the hypocrisy here is exactly why this topic is so important to discuss. The comments here confirm that, everyone is saying this isn't what they expected. It isn't orthogonal.

> Making a correction about a point is not the same as defending it.

That is called astroturfing, and it is a deliberate bad-faith discussion tactic. If you genuinely don't think their comment is relevant to your point, then there would be no reason to write a reply to it. This is exactly the subliminal shit that depresses me, this site is whipped by Apple and will do anything except admit it.

> The comments here confirm that, everyone is saying this isn't what they expected.

No, no they are not. That is so simple to disprove.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44414508

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44411237

Again, you’re only seeing what you want to see. Your opinion on Apple isn’t special or rare, it’s shared by tons of people on HN.

> If you genuinely don't think their comment is relevant to your point, then there would be no reason to write a reply to it.

So someone misunderstands or mischaracterises your point, and in your mind you should never correct and clarify the misconception, because doing so is bad faith? I mean, you do that if you want to, but that’s not what astroturfing is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com