Friends, ignore this thread. Move on. Don't engage.
With physical contact, speech can signal consent or lack thereof. How would you consent to speech itself?
It's that forceful nature that violates consent. I came to HN to see comments from technologists on random stories as well as cool Show HN posts. So someone showing off a project here isn't advertising, it's just the exact information I asked for. It's when that person pays money to put his project in front of me while I'm browsing news or something that it turns into a massive problem.
The key is to differentiate noise from signal, advertising from information. Advertising is always noise they add to signal in order to get paid. Our brains aren't supposed to be sinks for their noise. Our cognitive functions are absolutely sacred.
Is it mind rape to hold up a political sign in a public square, because they are forcing their opinions into other people who happen to be there?
Besides, demonstrations are easily avoided and ignored. They go to the public square to demonstrate. They don't generally go to your house. Advertisers absolutely would go to your house. They are the sort of people who would calculate the exact viewing angle you have when you look out the window of your home and then set up a billboard covering that exact area so as to mine out every last dime your eyeballs can possibly give. They're the sort of people who'd set up hidden cameras in the house across the street purely so they can monitor you to estimate the number of times you look out your windows every day, all so they can sell the chance to be seen by you to some highest bidder.
Personally I find the Protect The Children charity workers and anti-abortion protesters in large city squares to be right on the line of "mind mild-assault."
TBH the charity people are worse than the anti-abortion protesters because they force images of unfortunate kids into my mind and makes me feel bad. The anti-abortion people are almost quaint to me.
It goes something like this:
* You only have a finite amount of attention. You cannot obviously "pay attention" to everything around you.
* When someone takes your attention, they are consuming some of your finite resource.
* Taking something from someone else is the very definition of theft.
But what we don't have, at least in the US, are strong laws and norms that protect people from this. Why does an lawyer get to steal my attention on the beach with a plane dragging a banner? Why does a storefront get to blast an ad at me when I walk by? Does anybody really think these examples are a net societal benefit?
Of course. If HTTP servers want to send me free web pages, I'm only too happy to consume them. If they send me ads alongside those pages, the ads will be deleted. If they don't like it, they can return 402 Payment Required instead.
Just because somebody handed me a free magazine filled with ads doesn't mean I can't rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash. I'm allowed to keep only the pages I want and discard the rest.
> melt down when you see an ad
I don't see ads, uBlock Origin does a really good job at filtering them out. Highly recommended.
There never was.
There were just a few people profiting from ads trying to gaslight you into believing there was.
The current state of things is entirely the fault of the advertising industry. They've acted like users' banner blindness is an obstacle to be defeated, rather than a constraint to build around. Faced with something the users cannot change, they continue to pile up increasingly hostile techniques that only work for a short while before users start to automatically ignore them.
I'm curious where the one-sided arms race ends. Probably a return to subscriptions that frustrate users but are at least sustainably funded.
I always use an adblock where possible. 1. I've seen too much ads trying to straight up serve malware. 2. I'm definitely not okay with the ad-industry data aggregation tracking my every move online.
Plus the algorithm is kinda dumb: I see you bought a mattress, how about another one, every day, for the next months? I was curious once about a product I would never buy but now, weeks later, I still have ten companies paying ads for the same product, each one claiming to be the real deal.
I still use google news on mobile, no adblock there, some publications are okay, others are, well... I take a screenshot when there's 0% of content on the screen → OnlyAds/NoContent folder.
What then
These entities often claim the code is "open source"
Perhaps users will start compiling the browser themselves and keep the code to run user extensions/add-ons
Maybe they will let "AI" agents compile Firefox for them
The www was designed for its users to send "requests" for resources to destinations, i.e., IP addresses, where the resources are served. The requests are very specific, identifying exactly what was requested. The user specifies the destination
It's possible to automate some requests to destinations the user is not aware of, e.g., by letting the specified destination "trigger" them automatically without any input from the user. This can be useful but naturally it requires trust
Unfortunately, so-called "tech" companies have co-opted this design to support a "business model" of data collection, surveillance and advertising services. Users do not send requests for ads. Software from so-called "tech" companies does this automatically "on their behalf" and it _sends requests to destinations that the user never speficied_
When using software created by these companies (and their partners, like Mozilla) the user sends a single (HTTP) request to a single destination and other parties, e.g., browser developers, the website developers, adtech companies, etc., make more requests for resources the user never requested, e.g., ads
This is only possible when using software that designed to do this
There are various tactics these commercial parties use to coax users into using this software that facilitates unwanted advertising and tracking. In theory it's still a choice to use their software. HTTP servers ggenerally do not require specific HTTP clients. For example, I rarely use the software from so-called "tech" companies or their partners for making HTTP requests. I prefer non-graphical software similar to what was released when the www first went public. It gives me more control. I'm not giving up agency to third parties, I'm not allowing software to load arbitrary resources or run arbitrary Javascript, I'm not delegating authority to so-called "tech" companies by using their software
Eventually, these companies might use tactics such as "attestation" to force users to use their software, (pre)installed after company approval on company-controlled hardware
Same as today.
99% of users won't even know about it, or care.
1% of users will complain and get ignored, or called Luddites.
I mean, that’s pretty rich coming from the folks willfully engaging in human rights violating surveillance to overwhelm you with obscure useless nonsense that is literally an assault on your time, attention and mental health all for the 0.00001% chance of a vague hope you’ll click or tap their lie of an ad for snake oil that doesn’t work and is designed to steal your credit card number anyway, all just to make them rich so they won’t have to get a real job in the first place.
Moral argument. Right.
It still doesn't quite hold, and the fact that it's being handed to them by the companies who get most of the profit is a big red flag.
But it's at least understandable why the site owners don't see themselves nearly as badly as we see the ad companies.