Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaygmbno | Hacker News Reader

This is a fine social contract for the independent blogger just sharing their thoughts on the Internet and maybe hoping to get a few dollars for their server cost.

Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people. There is no social contract with them. They just sell your data.

If you know what they are doing, know how to block it, and refuse to, you are complicit in making the world a worse place. Corporations are not people that should be treated with the respect you are talking about.

View on HN

For so many arguments, I'm also thinking copyright here, the framing is always about the little guy. These laws/practices are there to protect/enable small businesses and content creators.

The reality is very much the opposite, they're about maximising revenue for monopolies. I see no social contract here.

>This is a fine social contract for the independent blogger just sharing their thoughts on the Internet and maybe hoping to get a few dollars for their server cost.

The trouble is the ad-blockers will block their ads as well. Visit somewhere like John Gruber's Daring Fireball site which has the least offensive ad placement possible yet his adverts are still blocked.

With Ublock Origin at least, you can whitelist websites that you want to see ads on.

Yes, the large blue "power" icon in the menu turns uBlock off for the current site.

With Ad Nauseum, the extension destroys your ad profile by clicking on all or nearly all of the blocked ads. The only people that lose anything are the companies.

> Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people.

IMHO this is a very wrong take. Mega corporations are people. Demonstration: nobody goes to work at Google for a while. Everything stops, technical stuff and non technical stuff. No people, no corporations, small ones and large ones.

Easy bet that most of those people disagree with the corporation's ad (and other) practices also. I'd even bet the ones working directly in ad tech are probably the most likely to always use an ad blocker.

Sure, then governments are also just people. How about we restore Monarchy now so someone can actually be held responsible? Also we should completely abandon Nulla poena sine lege since evidently the imbalanced power does not exist between people and also people (government).

This proves that corporations require people, not that they are people. Am I a cell? If so, which kind?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com