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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Building data centers is fine.

Worse, we build Bitcoin mining farms near cheap power, which essentially produces nothing of value and in fact can raise power prices for everyone (eg [1]).

[1]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-crypt...

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30% of stuff on your "usefull" datacenters is just porn. Then we have 30% gaming servers and so on. Who are you to decide that this is more important as digital currency?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23030090

30% of internet content, not data center usage. Serving content is relatively light on compute.

No it's not. Don't even mind sketchy methodology, that number is just 13 years out of date.

Even if your numbers were true (and they're not), at least people enjoy games and porn.

Porn is more valueable than speculative trading on an unregulated shadow economy.

If data centers powering things that are a net-negative for societies should go, I vote that we start with "social" media.

Define "social" media. Does HN count? Why exactly not?

In my view Social Media is characterized by being advertisement funded (HN technically fulfills this), being poorly moderated (HN does not fulfill this IMO), being engagement driven (HN isn't) and encouraging parasocial relationships (HN doesn't). HN is closer to a web forum of the 90s than modern social media.

IMO, social media requires a relationship graph, e.g. friends/follows/subscriptions. HN doesn't have this so it's just a forum.

Most of what people do with social media is just a forum and doesn't need those features.

You could argue advertisement does the same.

Agree, outlaw them both.

Reminded me of this scene in equilibrium.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drYovoinEts

Be careful what you wish for. If you are like the median HN commenter your job may depend on one or both of them.

But it would be a bad argument. Products necessarily compete for attention. The only way to avoid that would be to implement centrally planned economy.

Products compete on merit.

Parts of Europe ban political advertising near campaign periods. Yet obviously democracy works just fine. I view product advertisements in the same vein. I can review candidates on their platform and track record, just as I can review products on their merits by researching on my own.

I wouldn’t mind if all of the “impulse buys” that no one plans, but gets from an ad, went away.

They "compete", but that competition doesn't have to be a push-based model where products insert themselves into unrelated parts of your life vying for dominance (between themselves and over the things in your life you actually care about). If there were a place you could search and have a reasonable expectation of finding just the subset of products worth the price for you personally and able to make your life better, would that count as an ad to you?

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