I strongly dislike that they've done that. In their partial defense, the selection of recommended articles based on your browsing history is done on device.

In fact this was one of the primary motivations behind Sponsored Tiles in Firefox, to prove the viability of a privacy-preserving monetization model for the web.

It's interesting that while some could certainly characterize all of that screenshot's "Recommended by Pocket" stories as advertisements, recently they've started showing actual Sponsored Stories advertisements in that spot as well.

I'm downvoting this as the same off-topic whataboutism that comes up any time this topic is discussed on HN (and the fact that you felt the need to create a throwaway account to post it makes me think you knew what you were doing here).

I'm not sure account age is so relevant. I create new accounts all the time (several times per month) even though I stand behind what I write. It takes 15 seconds so hardly a big effort. I've noticed that it's possible to extract a lot of info from people's posts, in many cases deanonymizing them if you go through enough history and correlate with other sites. Maybe he is a bit privacy concerned.