Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

How would you enforce that? Who can be trusted with the ability to classify things as advertising and in so doing silence their critics?

The solution is explicit trust. Not fingerprints for users, but digital signatures for content. If it's not signed by somebody the user trusts, don't render it.

The user is the only one who can be approach that task without a conflict of interest. If somebody wants the user to run code that phones home about user behavior, make them gain the user's trust.

 help



Many countries ban cigarette advertising. Not saying its perfect but has helped reduce smoking.

That works if your ads have a physical location in space, like a billboard or a radio station, so that you have a place to go when you decide it's time to shut them down. You can't even get a stable URL for a web ad. Where are the cops gonna go? How many different "not my problem try this guy" hops are they gonna have to traverse before they find somebody who actually did the bad thing, how many different countries will they have to visit while they do so?

It only works if you re-architect the web into something that's even more censorship friendly than it currently is. I hate ads too, but the medicine seems worse than the disease in this case.


This is silly, you are dismissing a solution which improves a problem in a positive way.

Hospitals are not perfect, people die, with your l;ogic we should close down them all.

Doing nothing and keeping advertising keeps a negative situation alive.


Oh I'm all for banning advertising, let's do that, it's terrible. We just have to be careful to not create an even bigger problem while we do so, and we should be prepared to have to fix the web in more fundamental ways as well.

I didnt say ban ALL advertising, its not practical to think its sensible to stop a pizzeria from putting a sign outside. Im simply saying third party advertising should be banned, aka no more ads on the internet from Google or Facebook for other companies. If Facebook wants to advertise Insta, thats fine. No more billboards up and down everywhere for this or that...

What badness could come out from banning advertising ? Can you think of a few examples ?




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2027 batch! Applications are open till November 2.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: