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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

I feel this so, so much. The internet was so much better before it got commercialized and polluted with non-stop politics, hype, influencer crap, etc. I just want to be left alone, I know what I want, I don't want you to try and force it on me, trick me into it, etc. I want to have a functioning email account my friends can use where the messages won't get drowned in a sea of spam. I want a phone that only rings when someone I know calls.

We've created such a shithole, a perfect mirror of society I guess.

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> The internet was so much better before it got commercialized

I wonder if we can say the same about our streets (billboards, neon signs, etc etc) compared to, say, streets 200 years ago?

I know a few towns in various US places that do things like:

1. Prohibiting large signs that can be seen from far away

2. No stores over 2 stories tall

3. No big box / chains stores

And wow, those places are magical!

2 is probably too low for a city. 6 to 12 outside a business center hit just right.

These places won't turn into cities - partially because they outlaw large chains / businesses :)

It's all locally owned business.

Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont seem to think so. They outlawed billboards to maintain the natural beauty of their state.

https://www.billboardsin.com/states-where-billboards-are-ban...

Yes, we can. A couple of years ago I drove through Maine and Vermont, and it was absolutely beautiful. Not only because of the natural beauty of those places, but because of the lack of billboards anywhere. It was nice to just enjoy the scenery without being constantly bombarded by ads. The city of São Paulo also banned ads a while back and it made the city a nicer environment to live in and revealed the beauty of some of the architecture that was previously hidden by masses of billboards.

I'm not quite that old - but back that far, there was far less pavement. Far more dust and mud. And far more excrement from horses and other livestock.

However obnoxious it might look, today's streetscape pollution lacks the odor, flies, and infectious disease hazards of yesteryear.

You do not have to bring back horseshit on the streets if you want less visual pollution on the streets ;)

Even as recently as a few decades ago. I grew up just as leaded gasoline was being phased out, catalytic converters were becoming normal, and fuel injection was taking over from carburetors. The air generally smells much better these days.

Hell yes we can! I wish to ban all advertisements from them, for starters.

I swear to god, every single day I have at least one app with a pop up tooltip asking if I'd like a guided tour of all their new features and latest UI shuffle musical chairs. Bonus points if I'm presenting my screen at the time.

Honestly software is almost infuriating to me on a daily basis to me nowadays, I don't know if I'm just curmudgeonly or if software just sucks now but I want everything to just get out of my way when I'm trying to do something.

I guess you could say I want to be left alone...

We were just lucky to be early adopters, it was inevitable that what we loved, and told others to have a look at too, was going to be loved to death by people looking to make a buck

Yes, I agree, in retrospect it was inevitable. I was lucky to be coming of age (and especially naive) at the right time, and so I didn't even see that inevitability. It just looked like an unqualified good to young me.

The deeper problem is being able to nag someone at any time

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