[Shuang1]

I use an adblocker and I have for a while now. Every so often I hear a moral argument about why adblockers are bad (ads support free internet, etc) but to be completely honest, I simply don't care anymore. Advertising is in such a malicious state that yes, I'm going to put my own experience quality over whatever collective good there is in watching ads.

[matheusmoreira]

[flagged]

[bheadmaster]

What would constitute "consent" to being communicated information to?

With physical contact, speech can signal consent or lack thereof. How would you consent to speech itself?

[matheusmoreira]

People actively seek information. People don't seek out advertising noise. They avoid such audiovisual pollution quite actively, so much so that corporations get paid in order to force the noise in front of people's eyeballs.

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.

[fsflover]

If I intentionally search for a "new car" or go to a page reviewing cars, then I give my consent to receive new information about it.

[pibaker]

How far would you push this argument?

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?

[matheusmoreira]

My extreme arguments are generally reserved for businesses who are profiting off the abuse. People demonstrating could definitely fall into the unwanted noise category depending on what you believe, but I'm not going to go extreme on them for it.

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.

[card_zero]

It's possible that annoyed people are less economically active, with the result that intrusive ads reduce GDP.

[ianmarcinkowski]

You-know-it-when-you-see-it might be a good boundary. It's different for everyone, surely.

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.

[ryandvm]

"Mind rape" is obviously an attention grabbing way of putting it, but I tend to agree that advertising is essentially theft.

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.

Now obviously we have social norms around attention that allow for a reasonable amount of this non-consensual attention consumption. Things like, make your signage inoffensive, unobtrusive, and generally placed in a way that it is a net positive (the hot dog prices should be near the hot dog vendor).

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?

[ligne]

I hate ads as much as anyone but they are not in any way comparable to rape. Please have some sense of proportion.

[_doctor_love]

Please don't post comments like this. The only thing it can trigger is a flame war. It won't go anywhere productive.

Friends, ignore this thread. Move on. Don't engage.

[ctrlkctrls]

"mind rape". How absurd and inflammatory. The notion of consent here is just ridiculous. Nobody is forcing you to use the Internet, you're happy enough to consume free online services, but then melt down when you see an ad.

[matheusmoreira]

> you're happy enough to consume free online services

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.

[rchaud]

There is no moral argument anymore. Every ad peddler online has broken every TOS imaginable to feed its AI training models, at a scale a human couldn't accomplish in a million years.

[RattlesnakeJake]

That's where I've landed as well.

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.

[ffsm8]

> There is no moral argument anymore.

There never was.

There were just a few people profiting from ads trying to gaslight you into believing there was.

[blaze33]

I understand the moral argument, yes tell me about your product or company from time to time, can be interesting or even funny sometimes but it should stop there.

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.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

What if the advertising services company (Google) and/or its partner (Mozilla) that produce the source code for popular "browsers" remove the ability for users to run "adblockers"

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

[M95D]

> What then

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.

[ikidd]

The thing is, and the article said it, I'm not going to click your ad. Period. That's why I have an ad blocker. So there's no lost revenue, because you'll never, ever get a clickthrough from me.

[MrWiffles]

“[…] moral argument […]”

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.

[jfengel]

The moral argument is less absurd from the people who actually run the web site and are just looking for a way to be compensated for their effort.

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.