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Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

If you own an HDR display then your display preference was to be able to display HDR.

Settings > Accessibility > Display Text & Size > Reduce White Point

I own an HDR screen to display HDR content *when and where I want it*. It has significant value in photography for example. But I certainly don’t want to be looking at hdr ads.

How can we expect to give out a technical ability like HDR but then gatekeep it to only “artistically-valid” endeavors? Who is the arbiter of taste?

Ultimately, you choose what websites you go to, just like people who create websites choose how to present them.

We gave websites the ability to auto-play audio, then they showed they couldn't be trusted with this privilege and we took it away again. We can do the same with HDR images, gating them behind a "click to view", or "allow this site to display HDR content" (plausibly someone could do this with a browser extension already)

I’d certainly be happy to see more controls in the browser side to help control this.

I personally don’t consider this anywhere near as problematic as auto-play audio, but I recognize that that’s subjective.

Auto-playing audio used to be fine too, it took a while for certain websites to learn how annoying they could be with it - give HDR some time!

I’m starting to wonder if this is a good idea for a Safari browser extension (if that’s something that can be controlled that way)

There's a pretty simple solution - gate it on full screen mode.

I witnessed my first HDR mobile game banner ads recently and it’s horrible and should honestly be illegal or something

Impressive, wrong on both counts.

(1) HDR display (e.g. you bought a macbook/iphone) doesn’t mean you want random videos in the instagram feed to be full brightness despite setting your screen brightness to minimum in a dark room and (2) reducing white point just darkens stuff across the display, it doesn’t disable the thing people are complaining about.

I just figured out that low power mode also disables HDR and that’s a one-click toggle.

So to me the user has an off switch and the content creator also gets to express their creative freedom to use the feature or not.

If you don’t want to see HDR content you can do something else with your day. Nobody is holding us hostage to use our phones in a dark room or scroll Instagram.

iOS does not have this switch and it’s a pretty common platform. Low power mode also disables other things. You can of course do what you want with your creative freedom, you’ll just have to live with peoples’ reactions for non-consensually showing them something they passionately do not want to see.

I just disagree with this concept of “non-consent” in this context.

This would be like buying a color TV and getting upset that the commercials don’t remain in black and white, and saying you didn’t consent to that.

But unlike in the color TV analogy we have two methods of disabling (low power mode and reduce white point setting) and we don’t just have 3 TV channels to choose from.

I will definitely concede that the browser and OS should have more controls around this feature.

Nope. It’s like buying a TV that suddenly gives content publishers the ability to show blindingly bright pictures regardless of the device’s brightness setting.

To become more metaphorical again, compare it to suddenly playing a loud, screeching sound or displaying porn or gore. The technology allows you to do it, but it’s offensive and you deserve the resulting anger.

That there is no viable setting to turn it off means there is no basis for consent.

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