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Comment by sgc | Hacker News Reader

With how aggressive websites are in shoving popups down our throats for every little random thing, we need an in-browser AI bot to get rid of them appropriately.

It's leaking too. I got a popup on my keyboard on my phone yesterday, and literally thought "this is too much, I wish I was dead" (I'm doing fine, just an intrusive thought :). Time to dial it back in folks. It is unbearable.

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To those of us with ADHD this firehose of notifications and distractions feels like a deliberate attack on our agency. It does make me feel like I want to die, not because I’m depressed or suicidal generally but because I can’t imagine aging gracefully with this escalating source of entropy.

This is precisely why I'm sidling up to the idea of an old flip phone. The deluge of "communication" that is force-injected into my eyes every day is an immense waste of my mental energy. I hate this age of attention assault.

May I suggest a well configured uBlock Origin and additionally to cut out some websites completely from your life? Doesn't solve the problem in general, but it will hopefully make you feel better. And it will make your browsing faster, because you are not loading all that crap.

I had the thought for much the same reason. It amounts to a denial of service attack on the human psyche.

There are places with laws about advertising pollution in public spaces. That needs to extend beyond advertising to a more general set of aggressive attention grabbing features, and to our digital lives, where we spend a huge amount of our time. It's not going to self-regulate. Ironically, the ubiquitous GDPR popups sort of broke a dam that have led to popups of all sorts being forced on us all over the place.

> feels like a deliberate attack on our agency

It is.

The idea of pushing more contracts than you can read, all of what you must accept just to survive is a deliberate attack on our agency. You are just more sensitive to it.

> we need an in-browser AI bot to get rid of them appropriately.

Not just popups. We need browsers to die and be reborn as User Agents again.

Currently the best browsers do is some translation and summarization, but there's currently zero automation.

An ability to tell user agent a command, in a natural language, like "go through first 10 pages of those Amazon search results, check every one of them including photos, descriptions and reviews, filter products according to those and those criteria (and not whatever Amazon lets me search and filter on) and give me a nice clean list of images and links with zero extra junk" will be a game changer.

We have all the tools, it's about time we show a middle finger to dark patterns and enshittification. Sure, it'll be a game of cat-and-mouse with websites fighting against robotic agents empowering end users (ad industry is going to hate this so much), but it's a battle worth fighting.

We need all of the informatics corporations to die and be reborn as companies that serve their customers.

Well, they surely aren't committing seppuku. No such thing as a corporate honor or shame, only business interests. At least, not with any large corporations.

And this status quo needs to change. Too much power and information disparity at the moment, the markets are essentially broken.

IMO, the easiest and most healthy way to get from here to there is by splitting those companies. There are plenty of ways they can be reborn, many even without hurting anybody.

Or a standard API whereby a user fills out their preferences once in their browser, and the websites ask the browser for this information.

We could do this by sending a header to the website.

What should we call this.. mmh..

"Do Not Track" is a bit long, maybe we just shorten it to DNT?

Nah thats dumb. /s

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/DN...

The actual problem is not the popups, it's that websites have so much spyware crap on them that you need all those warnings.

But also that the popups do not conform to what GDPR demands. Remember, rejecting everything should be the same amount of effort as accepting the settings, and by default non-functional stuff should of course be turned off. If websites followed those rules, we would have way less of a problem here.

If only there were some way to eliminate that need for warnings....

> The actual problem is not the popups

Yes, it is. That's the actual problem and so is everything else about the attention-hijacking industry.

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