I wonder what would happen if HN banned the submission of insecure links. I bet more than a handful of 'Show HN' posters would take the time to set up letsencrypt (or something similar) in order to post.
Usually these old, forgotten or just obscure websites by someone not looking for SEO traffic or customers that some other person stumbled upon are the most interesting submissions.
They're lost anyway. The web is on a path to deprecate and remove HTTP and as the usage of plain HTTP dwindles even further to a level Google is comfortable with they'll announce the end of plain HTTP on Chrome (likely in a tiered approach). We'll likely see warnings of insecure HTTP, followed by a red page at some point (similar to a mis-configued TLS cert), followed by refusing to connect to HTTP altogether.
This will absolutely happen by the end of this decade, and HTTP will be a distant memory.
If you care for HTTP, you need to ensure the contents of any HTTP sites are preserved in some capacity because one day, they will remain inaccessible, even using old software will likely not work at some point.
You assume that all web content is designed for a browser, and uses html. This is simply not true. There are very cool tools and tricks like getting the weather in a terminal just ‘curl wttr.in’ and bam weather report right in your terminal. There are other tools like ‘curl ifconfig.co’. It would make the tools bit more cumbersome if you had to ‘curl https:// wttr.in’. Unless the maintainers of curl had it default to https.
Edit: how to add an erroneous space because HN was doing something weird with the https link
Submit an https Wayback archive link instead. The initial retrieval from origin to Wayback will be unencrypted, but everyone’s connection to Wayback will be TLS.
HN could even do this programmatically when you submit the http link, kicking off the Wayback archive op and substituting the resulting link. This future proofs the thread in case the content disappears later.
And that is absolutely horrendous user experience.
Http isn't that bad and if you happen to have an ISP that injects ads you have way bigger problems and probably live in a country so infested with ads you won't even notice the difference anyway.
Most certainly not worth banning http submissions for that.
I think it was veiled criticism to the United States' ad culture.
Someone using those ISPs should probably look into a vpn. I know it feels weird to trust a third party more than your ISP, but if they're injecting ads into your HTTP responses, maybe you should.
Anyway, giving the user the option of using https and even defaulting to it is a good thing. But I don't think non-encrypted protocols are that disastrous if no secrets are being transmitted.
Or, perhaps more reasonably, HN could include a little warning symbol/message next to any link that isn't served over TLS. It could also prompt the submitter at the time of posting if they specify a URL that starts "http://" giving them the opportunity to change it to "https://".
Usually these old, forgotten or just obscure websites by someone not looking for SEO traffic or customers that some other person stumbled upon are the most interesting submissions.