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Comment by have_faith | Hacker News Reader

There's no losing if people voted with their attention instead. If the terms of exchanging data are unacceptable then don't accept any data from that source. The digital equivalent of voting with your wallet.

Kind of like climate change, there are actions we all know would help but individually giving up those conveniences is difficult.

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> The digital equivalent of voting with your wallet.

And like voting with your wallet, it will be completely ineffectual in actually addressing the problem.

> Kind of like climate change

Another area where the need for comprehensive societal solutions gets dumped on the individual instead, rendering it ineffectual.

Exactly. In theory they are effectual, if people actually did it...

I'm a big proponent of top down climate change policy to force change as opposed to hoping if we virtue signal enough people will be shamed into driving a bit less etc.

I misread your comment then. I assumed you were saying this is the strategy we should adopt on those issues.

With regards to climate change, definitely not. I just wanted to highlight that it's a similar mechanic at play. Perhaps I phrased it oddly.

With regards to Ads I don't take as much a hard line approach as yourself (I remember our last discussion!). I'm very pro ad blocker use but not to go as far as banning them in any way.

Something I've been thinking about is sending a header to websites informing them I'm going to block their ads so they decide not to send me the content if they don't want to. I feel no entitlement to their content as they should not feel any entitlement to what code gets to run on my machine once it reaches me. I might expand on this in a blog post some time soon but it's probably closer to an art project than something actually viable.

>I remember our last discussion!

I'm impressed. I don't think I ever remember individual usernames.

>Something I've been thinking about is sending a header to websites informing them I'm going to block their ads so they decide not to send me the content if they don't want to.

I've actually played with similar ideas in the past (my more moderate days). But my philosophy at this point is that they can choose to give me the data or not give me the data. And I'm free to do with it as I please as long as I don't distribute it without permission. And I'm even softening up on that limitation.

Thats the spirit.

I like this idea.

> Something I've been thinking about is sending a header to websites informing them I'm going to block their ads so they decide not to send me the content if they don't want to. I feel no entitlement to their content as they should not feel any entitlement to what code gets to run on my machine once it reaches me. I might expand on this in a blog post some time soon but it's probably closer to an art project than something actually viable.

An advantage of this is we'd skip the whole ad blocker and anti ad blocker charade and gain a metric ton of performance back.

Alternative theory: there aren't enough people who consider it a problem.

This. I normally just avoid commenting in these threads, but clearly most users don't see this as quite as big of a problem as the HN users that comment in these threads. And maybe, just maybe, they're right.

And maybe, just maybe, they just don't understand the issue in the first place and aren't aware of the implications.

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