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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I find it amusing that many text-only webpages emphasize it with a typewriter font.

I find author's position to be very confusing.

> But over the past ~30 years, the internet has become much more commercial. Every page is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies. It just kinda sucks.

later in the same page

> I'm the Head of Marketing for Buzzsprout, a podcast SaaS built on RSS.

And https://www.buzzsprout.com/ads is exactly what you'd expect. The author has no trouble working and getting paid for the same thing they lament.

Fwiw, I work in an industry I've come to abhor (computer vision for security, often euphemised to "smart cities"). I hold my nose and wear my golden handcuffs reluctantly, and "technology transfer" FOSS into garbage products for incompetent middle managers by day, then talk shit about them at night to feel better.

Perhaps the author is in a similar situation?

All of us are "living in the glass house" [1]. If you're taking a strong position, I expect people to be a) self-aware b) state their biases/hypocricy upfront.

It is the holier than thou ("Look how bad things are. tsk tsk") that I cant stand.

The message would have been much better if was like "We live in this economy, and wouldnt it be nice if we could .. oh and by the way, I am part of the problem and here's what I'm doing about it."

The article is no different than a drug dealer saying "the drug problem in this country is out of control.

[1]: People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

FWIW, we don't do any tracking with Buzzsprout Ads. We can tell you which podcasts accepted the ads, how many plays the episodes received, but we don't track the end user at all.

Again, not knocking on the business plan, but how you square that with your stated position?

> But over the past ~30 years, the internet has become much more commercial.

You work for a company doing podcasts, distributed over internet, which lets creators make money. It is the definition of commercial.

> Every page is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies.

You can rewrite that "page" with "content", and then how different is your podcast? "Every content (podcast) is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies".

> We can tell you which podcasts accepted the ads

How do you know which podcasts accepted ads? Yes, by tracking. To be honest, it isnt a bad word at all - but you made it to be a bad word, and I'm pointing that out.

EDIT: Your company uses GTM, which I'm sure you look at as the Head of Marketing.

I suspect they use this for two things:

1. Monospace which helps with formatting

2. Availability: I don’t think there are a whole lot of built-in monospace fonts

You don't need monospace for formatting.

And there are a few options for system fonts: https://iainbean.com/posts/2021/system-fonts-dont-have-to-be...

Boom, you got yourself a text-mostly website with no monospace: https://dmitriid.com/hypermedia-is-a-property-of-the-client (with an option for images of course https://dmitriid.com/romania-2023)

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