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It's definitely possible to have ads without data mining. It's just not as profitable as with data mining. But Steemit.com could easily display somewhat relevant adds by tying the adds to the tags for the post. So if a post is tagged with lots of food tags, it could display food ads, which would likely not be that ineffective compared to targeted ads.

There could be some algorithmic analysis of the post content as well. But I think it's a question of time when someone implements mining based on all user data. It's all public and freely available after all and has been from the start.

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