Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

One of my pet meta-theories about Hacker News is that the frustration expressed over several apparently different stories really has a single source: Hacker News likes the internet of 10-20 years ago a lot more than the average person.

One place this shows up is a frequently-expressed sentiment that the internet is a less magical, less weird, and more corporate place than it was 10-20 years ago. Part of this may be because SEO has diluted the voices of individual creators. But part of it is also because way more average, everyday, tech-unsavvy people are on the internet now.

Another example is the periodic highlighting of somewhat garish HTML-based websites. I like these too! My own personal website falls in this category! But as far as I know, the generic internet user likes the generic slick-graphics-and-whitespace style, and so go the websites that want to attract them.

More relevant to the topic at hand, many comments in this thread argue that targeted ads are unnecessary for a functional internet, since the internet of 20 years ago seemed to work just fine without targeted ads. But, again, it's less clear to me that general internet users -- that is, mostly people who never experienced the internet of 20 years ago -- have the same preference.

It's funny, because I'm to a large extent on HN's side on this one. But my enthusiasm is tempered by my sneaking suspicion that the other side is a lot bigger, and my side is actually powered by more elitism and nostalgia than I thought.

I like your observation. I do not completely agree, though.

A tech-unsavvy user often dislikes "targeted advertising", as much as I could observe. For one, for the weird cross-media targeting effects, when a person sees the same ads, or ads about the same thing, like a fridge, following the user on many unrelated sites. It's most annoying when this keeps happening after the user has bought a fridge, and is unlikely to buy another just yet.

A less recognized but more annoying effect of ads is that they consume as much CPU and network latency as possible without making some sites outright unusable. The user says: see, I have this new and powerful computer, and this new and fast network thingie — why is the internet so slow? This is when installing even a simple ad-blocking extension shows the difference very vividly.

BTW I think that truly targeted ads can be useful — such laser-precision ads in Facebook showed me a few niche communities that interested me, e.g. dedicated to chiptune music creation. But most ads I see when I browse without ad-blocking are pretty lame, maybe 2% are well-targeted (and then I click on them). I keep a separate browser profile without ad-blocking to see what the internet is like for a vanilla user. OTOH the amount of tracking normally present on innocuous sites is surprisingly large, and slows things down rather unpleasantly, even if the ads are served instantly.

So yes, the internet full of ads is the norm for last 20+ years, and no, "normal users" do notice the impact of it.