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Comment by throwaway613834 | Hacker News Reader

> My computer, my rules

Or maybe their website, their rules? Otherwise this is like walking into a store and telling them to take off their ads, because your eyes, your rules.

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Sorry, but nobody ever promised to render your website in any specific way; my browser does whatever I programmed it to do. I might be using w3m. I might be using a browser you never heard of. I might be using a text-to-speech engine. Website owners do not get to set the rules on my machine, no matter how badly they want to.

You can put on rose-colored glasses (or AR goggles) when you walk into a store, too. I don't really see a contradiction.

Exactly: you can put on AR goggles and have them draw opaque rectangles over all the ads in the store, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Not a great analogy.

We all know that HTML is an opt-in language, in that user-agents are designed to render the tags that they support and ignore the ones they don't.

My user-agents do not support ads at all.

Your glasses (or AR goggles) when you walk into the store would correspond to the HTML renderer here.

I can't wait for the day that lightweight sun-glass frames can block real-world ads in real-time. Perhaps replacing them with classical art or even white rectangles.

That sounds great.

It's like requesting a chocolate bar, paying for the delivery, and the store sends you a truck full of garbage with that chocolate bar at the bottom.

Sorry I'm all out of car-themed analogies.

What part of sending a GET request to view a web page corresponds to ordering chocolate bar?

A GET request is not a request to view a web page, it is a request to receive the page. It is up the recipient to determine if and how the page should be rendered.

You seem to be constantly replying in a way that looks like you disagree with me when in fact we're in agreement!

Terrible analogy. It's like me putting my hand in front of my eyes to block out the view.

They don't have to serve me content. But since they do, I can view it however I wish.

I don't think the analogy stands. For example: If I walk into a shoe store I won't see ads for pain meds. I might see ads for special sales or maybe for a sibling store which doesn't sell shoes, but is under the same company. These kind of ads can bypass or are not even blocked by today's adblockers because they usually don't have to be served by an ad-network. And that's perfectly fine. The problem comes when ads are not relevant to your context and are shoved into your face. I would definitely complain if ads are shoved into my face in real life (please don't misunderstand, I am aware there are ads everywhere, assume the scenario where you walk into a shoe store or an apple store). It would also be easy to argue that showing irrelevant ads in your store is distracting and even bad for business.

> The problem comes when ads are not relevant to your context and are shoved into your face.

That's not the problem the parent had:

>> There are no "better" ads. The only good ads are the ones I cannot see.

My apologies, you quoted just the part with

> My computer, my rules

So my reply was mostly about the store analogy.

I see. Well, there's not enough information in the mere phrase "my computer, my rules" to come up with an analogy (or even a reply). If this was about my friend using my computer without permission, the statement would well be an apt one. It's definitely worth looking into the context & main ideas of whatever people are replying to, not the mere tiny parts they quote!

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