Oooo! So they make even more money since the advertisers can’t target the ads and have to use more but less effective ads!!! That’s a nice side effect for business while pretending you’re being noble. Ah, the joy of signaling.
Seriously... My "favorite" part of posts about Google on HN is the posts that combine blind ignorance about the ads business, blind hatred of Google and pat-yourself-on-the-back cynicism. It gets _so_ tiresome.
I love the meta debate about HN. I frequently click out of a thread after reading the first half of the first comment, it's always the same thing over and over. HN is a great as an aggregator of interesting article, but the discussion is frequently lacking substance.
I'd slightly disagree; the reason I complain about it so much is because there are so many people here who are clearly intelligent and thoughtful and have interesting perspectives. I go back and forth on whether picking gems out of the piles of manure is worth it.
In part, I've been badly spoiled by another forum I participate in that heavily moderates tone (and tries to separate it from content). I wouldn't have guessed it, but it turns out that low-effort intellectual dishonesty and rank stupidity of the sort that annoy me here correlate pretty well with emotional incontinence, which means that the occasional low-quality commenter that pops up on that forum gets washed out pretty quickly.
