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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

A hill I’m happy to die on is: the standard of behavior appropriate for websites is you send whatever (not actively malicious or illegal) content you want, and the user renders it however they want.

If sites want to send me useful content and additional annoying content, I’ll just render the useful bit.

If sites decide they aren’t willing to send the useful bit unless enter some other sort of arrangement with them, that’s fair on their part, I’ll evaluate their other options.

I don’t feel any obligation to render ads or make their business model viable, of course it is no problem if they decide they don’t want me around as a result!

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But then to circle back on the submission, do sites have any obligation to make it easy (or no harder than it initially was) for you to separate the useful from the annoying? No more than you have right (which I agree with) to render it differently to their desire, I'd argue.

I don’t think they do have that obligation. But the business model where ads are hosted in some ad network makes it pretty easy to differentiate between the good and bad content. It is a happy coincidence that this is the source of the most annoying ads generally.

Of course, business models might change. In that case my preferences probably will too, but I don’t think my reasoning will.

What if the “arrangement” is a TOS that you agree to, wherein you agree to render the content how they want? Will you stop using the site, or just ignore the TOS?

I’m not a lawyer but in the US at least, from what I’ve heard TOS requires affirmative consent.

I try to quickly check if I’m agreeing to a cookie consent thing, or if it is a full TOS. But sites have so much garbage when you first show up nowadays. I’ll have to be more careful there.

I will follow their TOS if they follow my local laws regarding advertisements and legal liability (both in term of providing honest and fully disclosed commercial messages and in cases of malware). I strongly doubt they want that deal.

> A hill I’m happy to die on is

Just circling back a bit, what IS advertising? I work at a relatively unknown company - it's not in anyone's daily vocabulary. It exists, but barely. It will actually die if it's not marketed, advertised.

Now I can just go, fuck it, I don't want to work for any company that advertises. Great. Where should I work?

And I have every right to block each and every single one of your advertisements, wherever I am. Guess your company will die.

Don't your existing clients refer new clients? Its the oldest trick in the book.

I feel like the problem here is that we do not have an effective way to match products with consumers who may find it useful without bad actors gaming the system. Companies with a modest marketing budget try to be as targeted as possible with advertising but companies with stupidly large budgets will optimize for “engagement and enragement” which will end up with them creating obnoxious advertisements that are spammed across all channels they can regardless of relevance because they can.

It’s a sad problem that we can’t expect to solve if we continue to limit our discussion around the symptoms of the diseased advertisement industry rather than the root causes of this cancer that ruins it for everyone like your company and most other small and medium sized players.

If advertising was required, nobody would be using most open source applications. Nobody had to sell me linux.

A company website that tells me what the elevator pitch is, is advertising arguably, but is not in the same category as putting a message in something I want to consume. The difference is push vs pull. If I have to seek out your message, if I ask you a question, then it's perfectly acceptable to answer.

The second you answer a question I've never asked, you are morally repugnant and harming society as a whole. It's an inevitable slippery slope to literal mental manipulation at that point. There is no "push" advertising that can NOT go that route, as it is inherently a hostile relationship, with independent competitors.

Maybe a government contractor?

100% agreed. If content is provided for free along side content (ads) that the site wants me to view for their own reasons, I'm under no obligation to view the content they want me to view.

If the site needs me to view content in a specific sequence, then they need to deliver it as such. Otherwise, I'll ignore (technically block) any content other than that in which I'm interested.

Everybody should have line item veto rights for code running on their computer.

if youtube wanted to make the ads unblockable, they could embed them in the primary video stream. They won't do that because then they would have to expend the computational effort of muxing the content instead of offloading it onto your computer. They want their code (javascript) to manage the ads to run on your computer and they want to be able to treat your computer as their slave.

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