Comment by dmschulman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmschulman | Hacker News Reader

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Your post history would suggest you're a troll, so I'm downvoting this comment, but additionally, you're mingling a bunch of complicated ideas and prescribing a broad generalization.

We live in a market-driven society, people are free to choose to consume what they want to consume (as you point out) but that doesn't give carte blanche to the producers in the marketplace to do whatever they want in the name of ad revenue. When it does reach a tipping point, as I think we're seeing with this Medium article, regulation will start to come to a niche industry that had previously operated under the radar. Especially when human health consequences are involved, the government steps in to ensure protection to its citizens (and its most vulnerable members, children).

If you really are upset that you won't be able to view algorithmically generated children's cartoon videos stuffed with tropes and keywords that exist for no other purpose than to make money, I'm concerned for your wellbeing.

So personal responsibility be damned. Lets just have the government determine what is good for us and what is not.

I'm fairly anti-authoritarian, but there's a difference between "The neighbor is making noise, so close your windows" and "The neighbor is making noise so close your windows and install double-framed exterior walls"

We have gotten to the point where even reasonably conscientious and responsible adults have trouble raising their children. When the advertisers make money by making it a harder world to raise children in, they are externalizing their costs and internalizing the profits.

Some amount of externalities we allow due to pragmatism (the cost of enforcing the regulation is greater than the benefits), but when the line is crossed, some sort of regulation is required.

It is a reasonable policy question to ask where the line is drawn, and what sort of regulation (on the extereme authoritarian side, it is drawn very close and uses criminal law, on the extreme libertarian side, it's drawn less close and might use tort law), but outside of pure anarchy, it's not reasonable to say the line need not be drawn.

I'd rather the elected government do it rather than an unaccountable multinational corporation. What do you think "relevance" algorithms are other than some company determining what is good for us and what is not?

Edit: P.S. Where was the personal responsibility of Facebook after they were caught peddling propaganda placed by foreign actors? As I recall it took a lot of arm twisting to get them to admit there was even an issue.

The difference is choice. Companies can offer whatever they want and it's up to me to decide whether I consume their products and services or not.

Government on the other hand makes the decision and forces it on everyone. Not just those who elected it, everyone.

Edit: as for the foreign propaganda, how many nations and what interests were/are they peddling? If it's already illegal then sure, it should be forbidden from the network. If it's not, then I'm fine with it.

> The difference is choice. Companies can offer whatever they want and it's up to me to decide whether I consume their products and services or not.

Please, tell me how I can escape Google? God knows I've tried - I have a Fastmail email account, I use DDG, and I stick to Apple hardware. That doesn't change the fact >90% of advertising I see on the open web is still "suggested" for me by Google's algorithms, that my employer uses Google Apps and Google Drive for just about everything, that many links I encounter on social networks are AMP, and that most of time I need to verify I'm not a bot I'm filling in a recaptcha.

Saying I have a choice not to use Google is only true in the academic sense. It's theoretically possible, but not without extreme effort and probably not without finding a career outside of the tech industry.

You can choose to switch jobs and not use the internet :p

What you don't have is the power to make others choose what you'd want them to.

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