I think that's revisionism. Social media existed before online advertising. Usenet was quite massive and vibrant, countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers, web-based forums covered pretty much the same ground as Reddit does today. All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses such as ISPs that actively wanted the internet to be interesting because they were making money by selling access to it.

The thing that changed in the mid-2000s was that we found ways to not only provide these services, but extract billions of dollars while doing it. Good for Mark Zuckerberg, but I doubt the internet would be hurting without that.

The internet was absolutely better without that. I arrived after the original Eternal September, but there have been more and more until now everyone is perpetually online 24/7.

Now fucking everything about the world is a hustle to monetize every possible nook and cranny around content. There isn't even content anymore, it's nearly all AI slop as a substrate to grow ads on.

I am nostalgic for the era when I found "punch the monkey" irritating. People used to make websites as a labor of love.

> All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses ...

That goodwill seems to be in short supply since... hmmm the mid 2000's (rough guess). And goodwill like that seems to be honestly not even understood by the generation(s)* since then.

* Saying "generations" (plural) there because we've had quite a few people go through their formative years during this time and not just a single clearly defined generation.

That's exactly because the goodwill competes with billions of profits.

>countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers

Most of those IRC servers ran on university networks. (So did most IRC clients, until the late 1990s.)

You can't compare 2000s social media to what it's become today. It's orders of magnitude larger today both in terms of volume of data and cultural impact.

That's no revisionism. Infrastructure always costed money, but it was relatively inexpensive to develop a social network back then. Instagram had a team of 12 if I'm not mistaken before being bought. So it was easier back then to justify what was pocket change to corporations. The potential payoff was incredible.

But eventually the money printing machine needs to start printing money.

> You can't compare 2000s social media to what it's become today. It's orders of magnitude larger today both in terms of volume of data and cultural impact.

Why? The available computing power and bandwidth are orders of magnitude more plentiful / cheaper than in the 2000s, too. I can't think of any technical reason why we couldn't have social in today's world media without advertising money.

The main non-technical reason why you can't run Facebook on the cheap is that it's expensive to respond to regulatory and PR pressures they're under. You need an army of lawyers, lobbyists, and compliance people in almost every country on the planet.

But that's in some respects a product of consolidation that we never really needed in the first place: we don't need every human on the planet on the same social network. Social circles are small and the only reason to have everyone under the same roof is if you want to be the gatekeeper for the world's ad targeting data.

The scrutiny is also a product of amount of money involved. No one is exerting as much pressure on Signal, Mastodon, etc, precisely because they're not trillion-dollar companies.

I agree completely. We would benefit a lot from people dispersing into multiple competing social media solutions, but the current state of things is that if I don't join Instagram it's likely I won't have many of my contacts available.

So while infrastructure is also much cheaper than it was 10 maybe 20 years ago, and you could in theory spin up an Instagram competitor in the cheap, people use what they use, and the money printing machine needs to print money. So we need an alternative to ads, which could be just people choosing to joint a paid social network, or another business model, but to just write off ads as something you could regulate into oblivion without consequences is just naive.

I've actually wrote before in my blog against a form of political realism, and this in a sense falls into it, but we gotta be pragmatic eventually, and take into account the dynamics that feed the powers that be.

I don't think we have a right to a business model. Either you figure one out for your particular site (selling access to the website, donations, etc) or you don't and stop and either is ok.

For Google, they figured out it's ads... So is it ok?

Ostensibly not, if it is outlawed.

But under what principle would you allow advertising, in general, online?

That seems like an arbitrary penalty. What harm is being prevented by banning advertising, in general?

Allowing advertising quickly makes everything about getting more eyeballs and therefore more income from advertising. Users aren't the customer, they are the product.

That directly leads to all these addictive dark patterns.

All human laws are arbitrary in the sense that they have no natural precedents. We made them up because they make society better when we have them. Sometimes they end up not doing that so we change them as needed. In this case, a lot of people think society would be improved if we created this one.

Endless, near inescapable psychological manipulation. It has crept up slowly, and some of us have been feeling the negative effects longer than others, but it is so so so much worse than it was even 10 years ago.

> What harm is being prevented by banning advertising, in general?

The harms of addictive design in internet social media.

Regardless, my point was just to answer the question, "is it okay as a business model?" Ostensibly, if advertising online were banned, a business model centered around selling online advertisement attention would not be ok.

Theft of attention. Your attention shouldn't be the website you visits to sell.

Please, continue that "etc"...

Its been 30 years and no one has been able to continue that "etc".

Of course they have. Off the top of my head examples include: Grants in the form of tax dollars (e.g. arxiv). To benefit the authors reputation (e.g. numerous scientists, developers, etc personal sites. zacklabe.com as a useful example). As a hobby (I think aiarena.net falls into this category). To collect data for research purposes (e.g. the original chatgpt release, and early recaptcha)...

What could possible go wrong with the government funding media? It’s not like they would take away funding for media that they don’t agree with.

Why would a government elected in a democracy be less trustworthy than a few private individuals? Do heads of large corporations not have an interest in controlling information?

Why are you acting like this is something hypothetical? The Trump administration just cut funding for both NPR and PBS because they are “too woke”

The same government who threatened to take ABC broadcast license because Kimmel made a joke about a dead podcaster

You're making the counter argument. Government funded media may be cut or controlled in times of (wannabe) dictators, but the same applies to privately funded media (see Kimmel, Colbert, CBS, Washington Post, etc)

So if the government controls the media - who is going to hold the government accountable?

And then there is that entire “free press” thing in the constitution.

And Disney quickly recanted as soon as people started canceling, even the conservative owned local affiliates had to back down.

And I would argue that they have been able to do this because a small group of private individuals control the information networks and either desired that purpose or are ambivalent to their cause in it.

The potential failure of the system because of the effect of the wrong choice in this matter is evidence in favor of my argument, not against it.

I’m continuously astounded by people who want to give the government more power seeing the current state of the US government.

You aren't amazed at how people advocating for privatizing things that are supposed to be for the public good keep doubling down when it doesn't work out? We couldn't be in the place we are if it weren't for those who constantly yelled 'smaller government!' while dismantling all features of accountability and balance of power in order to achieve that end.

Well the difference is that a private company doesn’t have a full army, masked jack booted thugs who shoot people with abandon with “qualified immunity” and the legal right of force to take away my property without a trial (civil forfeiture) or prosecute me because they don’t like me (see the current administration).

They also can’t stop me because I don’t “look like I belong” in my neighborhood (true story). I’d rather not give the government any more power.

But everyone has been listening to your argument and doing what you are advocating for since Reagan and yet here we are.

Have you every thought about the fact that power doesn't just disappear? Someone is going to have control over the jackbooted thugs. Claiming democratic norms and public control over them is bad just ensures that they become the tools of a few people without any way to constrain them.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience and that we are currently having one as a country, but the solution is to push for more democracy, not more privatization.

You know it’s literally in the constitution - the idea of a free press. If the money to keep the press in business, who keeps the government accountable?

And to pretend like the US is a democracy where the popular vote matters completely ignores reality. Every state gets two Senators so South Dakota has the same voting power in the Senate as California. The house districts are so gerrymandered that the sum total of Democratic votes will always be less than their share of the house since it is so easy to dilute Democrats voting power since they live in major cities.

So if you want to push for a more (small d) democratic government, you’re going to first have to overall the entire constitution so the largest states population’s aren’t diluted.

And I posted a link earlier that the government has literally been trying to defund PBS since the 1960a and Mr. Rogers himself had to beg Congress not to defund it.

Right now today the federal government is erasing any signs of anything in museums and national parks that doesn’t make the US look good or admit that gay people exist. This is the government you want controlling the press?

> You know it’s literally in the constitution - the idea of a free press. If the money to keep the press in business, who keeps the government accountable?

The constitution doesn't say anything about whether the government can fund media.

> And to pretend like the US is a democracy where the popular vote matters completely ignores reality.

No one made that claim. In fact, no one claimed that popular vote was even a good standard for a democracy. Is your assertion that the solution to an imperfect system is not to try and reform it, but to rely on a worse one?

> So if you want to push for a more (small d) democratic government, you’re going to first have to overall the entire constitution so the largest states population’s aren’t diluted.

I don't know if that's the answer to the nation's problems, but it is worthy of consideration.

> And I posted a link earlier that the government has literally been trying to defund PBS since the 1960a and Mr. Rogers himself had to beg Congress not to defund it.

The government is not a unified monolith. The whole point of democracy is that everything is being debated all the time and sometimes people don't agree and try to stop or changes things that others did. That's a good thing.

> Right now today the federal government is erasing any signs of anything in museums and national parks that doesn’t make the US look good or admit that gay people exist. This is the government you want controlling the press?

I think that's bad, and hopefully enough other people do so that we can vote out the people who are doing that and restore things to how they were.

> The constitution doesn't say anything about whether the government can fund media.

How can the press be free of government power and funded by the government?

> your assertion that the solution to an imperfect system is not to try and reform it, but to rely on a worse one?

So as both a student of the history of the Civil Rights movement, whose still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow South and who himself has been harassed by the police for thinking he doesn’t belong in his own neighborhood where he made twice the household income alone as the median household income in the county (which itself was the most wealthy county in the state), you’ll have to excuse me for not trusting the government.

I have never once been harassed by a private company and I’ve never had a problem getting a job in 30 years across 10 jobs because of discrimination - everything from startups to the second largest employer in the US (working remotely for that one was why I did make twice the income of the richest county in GA).

> No one made that claim. In fact, no one claimed that popular vote was even a good standard for a democracy. Is your assertion that the solution to an imperfect system is not to try and reform it, but to rely on a worse one?

Well for me, the worse thing that can happen is give a government where the states who are predominantly made up and vote for people who are hostile toward people who look like me have outsized power. Who is going to speak truth to power if the power funds the press?

> The government is not a unified monolith. The whole point of democracy is that everything is being debated all the time and sometimes people don't agree and try to stop or changes things that others did. That's a good thing.

Have you not been paying attention for the last two years?

> I think that's bad, and hopefully enough other people do so that we can vote out the people who are doing that and restore things to how they were.

You know that whole thing about what people think don’t matter between 2 senators per state and gerrymandering and to a lesser extent the electoral college? This country knew exactly what they were getting when they voted in 2024 and 40% of the people still support it.

You haven't addressed the argument at all; all you are doing is mentioning specific qualms you have with how this country is being run. Nothing about the structural problems with the US system or the situation we are in right now, or racism, has anything to do with whether or not the public good is better served by public servants rather than for profit interests. Did you forget that slavery was a for profit system which took government intervention to abolish?

And there are many places in the middle between 'government always bad' and 'private always bad'. Extreme positions never get you a good version of the thing you want.

How do you have a free press that is funded by the government and can report on government corruption and overreach? You keep failing to address that in the last six months the government did take funding from NPR and PBS because they were “too woke”. The government has been threatening to take funding from PBS since the 1960s.

The structural problem is the government. The structure of the government as stated in the Constitution is that the rural Bible thumping, racist part of America structurally has more power because of 2 Senators per state and to a lesser extent the electoral college. Until that’s not the case, the government will always be statistically more likely to be antagonistic to people who look like me.

I’ve worked for 30 years and the last decade+ in roles that put me in the rooms of decision makers. First as a tech lead at product companies and then as a customer facing consultant.

I never wondered whether I was going to be treated differently by corporate America - and I never have either as interviewee or dealing with CxO, directors, etc. The tools of the government on the other hand …

The public servants - the people with the legal right to take my property, liberty and life - those are the problem. You see what the full force of a corrupt government can do to its enemies with the meritless prosecution of Trump’s enemies and that almost half of the people still support. The trigger happy cop that can pull me over because I suspiciously look like I’m going to my own house worries me much more than Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post. The alternative would be the government owning and controlling the press? This government. Even today if I want to learn about anything related to my health, I trust the Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos more than I trust the DHS run by RFK jr? You think that if the government funded newspapers you would get the truth about vaccines? The masked jack booted thugs in MN?

You realize slavery was built into the constitution right? That whole 3/5ths of a person thing. Also the same government endorsed “separate but equal” in a Supreme Court case that had my again still living parents growing up in less well funded schools and drinking from separates water fountains.

I mentioned that until a couple of years ago, I lived in what was the most affluent county in the state. That county was Forsyth County GA and just so you don’t think I’m making this up just to argue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954232

While the outskirts of this county have diversified as far as not being rural. It’s still mostly White and conservative (my step son was one of only four Black students in his entire public high school). More of the Bush/Romney type of classic conservative than populist. What I didn’t mention was this was Forsyth County only 25-35 years ago.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dlzwh2Wh1fw

It was a “sundown town”.

Those people haven’t gone anywhere - we had White friends that lived in the older parts of Forsyth County and even they told us to make sure we call if we get lost coming to their house and don’t walk up to the wrong house by mistake.

FWIW: we didn’t move because we had any problems living there. We sold the house for twice what we had it built for eight years earlier and downsized after my younger (step)son graduated and moved to state tax free, warmer Florida once I pivoted into consulting where it’s relatively easy to find companies that allow remote work.

PBS and BBC are both pretty well regarded and receive public funding.

BBC's funding model is in its last 36 months

Works quite well in germany

It doesn't because it's not the Government funding it out of its own budget but rather the government forcing all citizens into an involuntary contract. This is really the worst possible combination of private and public media.

So let’s hypothetically say that some autocrat decided to take over Germany and decide a certain minority should be - I don’t know extinguished - wouldn’t a free non government run press be useful?

Nahh that would never happen.

I think your main issue in your argument is that you think that only government funded press is allowed to exist, which isn't what anyone was talking about.

Also, what would stop the autocrat from outlawing any non-government news source?? A piece of paper written by people 250 years ago certainly won't.

What’s the use of any press that’s funded by the government? Would you trust them to do accurate reporting on vaccines when the government is run by RFK? Would you trust them to tell the truth about what was going on in Minnesota? Venezuela?

Any government funded press would either be a tool of propaganda or be constantly worried about getting defunded - like what just happened to NPR and PBS.

The government just required the press to get pre approval before they could publish anything - even non classified info.

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2025/09/pentagon...

This idea was so abhorrent that not even Fox News would sign on.

https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-reporting-rules-hegseth-...

Now the part of the press corps that has direct access to talk to Pentagon officials is literally made up of right wing social media influencers.

I agree that there will always be people who believe the Internet peaked in 1996.

But I also agree it's when <1% of people where online, and it's never going back to that.

Tell this your local sports club that needs a new set of shirts.

I support government funding for things that keep the population exercising. It literally saves taxpayers money by driving down healthcare costs.

Nobody is talking about banning ads on sports shirts.

We should be talking about that

But that doesn’t make the streams more or less addictive, or directly pay the platform which has control of that. So it’s basically irrelevant

So you really think ads during a video make them more addictive?

No. The point here is that Google is not paid for the ads, so are not incentivised to make the service more addictive. This seems obvious: it’s not the ads we have a problem with per se—- it’s the distortion of they attention economy they entail.

Clearly any scheme will not be perfect but these sort of objections either seem to misunderstand the core issue, or to be willfully confusing by raising irrelevant details.

That works great when everyone has resources to pay for things online.

In practice, this cuts of 80% of the worlds population.

Oh you mean we can reverse the eternal September? Sign me up! Gatekeeping is good, actually! The “let people enjoy things” crowd is responsibility for facilitating the mass enshittification of everything.

Catering to the lowest common denominator is how we got the Burger King guy on spirit airlines.

Why are you commenting here instead of a website that gatekeeps commenters?

"You criticize society, yet you participate in it".

I have and do pay for website access. That doesn't mean much if the current model flocks to no paid services.

I think we have rights to do lots of things that banning this business model would violate.

I assume you're primarily referring to freedom of expression? I take the view that it doesn't include the freedom to pay people to carry a particular message so long as the restriction on paying is neutral as to the content of the message, but I can certainly respect the view that it does.

My comment about not having a right to business models is in some ways more general. Regardless of whether this business model is protected for some other reason, business models in general aren't, and it's a common flawed argument that they are.

Really? Name one.

Note, neither one of us is a corporation, so "we" doesn't refer to corporations.

If it can only be funded via ads, it shouldn't be funded and is not essential to exist.

HTTP Error 402: Payment Required was created for a reason. Maybe we need to rethink micropayments.

There’s nothing wrong with macro payments either.

Five dollars a month to subscribe or whatever. If people get the value out of it, you can get them to pay it.

Subscription fatigue will quickly limit that. Yes, people used to subscribe to magazines but usually just a few. And by the way, those magazines were full of ads too.

The Economist (ironically a subscription based publication) reported that subscriptions for news media results in greater political polarisation. When the news outlets says something subscribers don't like, they run the risk of losing those subscribers. This incentivises appealing to a specific set of political beliefs and coddling the customer.

Did that actually have hard data to back that up? Because publications that don't use subscriptions still need people to show up and look at ads. So they are motivated to publish the clickbaitiest things possible. Maybe the difference in that case is that they will publish content that attracts people from various political extremes? That certainly wouldn't make them less polarized though.

I can't locate the article unfortunately.

Ad based revenue comes with its own problems. But I doubt there's that many readers who so ferociously disagree with an article that they then refuse to consume any more free content from that outlet any more, which is what happens when someone cancels their subscription. So, to me it makes sense that ad supported news outlets don't suffer as much from having a wider range of views.

>Maybe the difference in that case is that they will publish content that attracts people from various political extremes? That certainly wouldn't make them less polarized though

Replace "extremes" with "views". Most people aren't extremists. I don't understand why being exposed to various views would not make them less polarised?

Half of the people on this site think that subscriptions are evil too, though.

Normally that’s for software and it’s borne of irritation with enshittification and rent extraction from software that was previously free from that. SAAS is a risk if you invest time and energy in developing expertise in it. Lots of us have been burned many times in this way, and for me it’s one of the primary reasons I prefer open source software, beyond any purist gnu type arguments or anticapitlist sentiment.

Project Xanadu will be ready any decade now.

Banning ads? That's just so authoritarian and absurd. I hope you never become king

Regulation is freedom. Think of ads powering the web as current day's lead in gas.

Regulation is freedom? Peace is war, too, I guess.

Restricting freedom of bad actors means enhancing freedom of everyone else.

Say a a kid started throwing tantrums at school. By not punishing/ removing him you restrict the freedom of everyone else.

Can you think of a singe freedom you enjoy that isn’t in one way or another supported by some form of regulation?

> Can you think of a singe freedom you enjoy that isn’t in one way or another supported by some form of regulation?

Regulations can protect freedoms, but they don’t create them. Freedom is inherent. Regulations protect.

And when freedoms are being infringed, regulations need to be brought in. Hence banning ads online

Your freedom isn't being infringed by seeing an ad lol, what a hilarious suggestion

Advertisement commoditizes attention, which incentivizes tech companies to exploit and manipulate people to get their attention. Thats unacceptable. The proposal was to get rid of ads online to combat that. Its a bit drastic, but the logic is clear

Yeah most of them

Really? It seems like you can't name a single one.

Regulation took away your freedom when it took asbestos out of your house right? Please be serious.

Viewing this thread, and the back and forth of it, I need to say something.

Advertising sucks in this thread too.

By that I mean, people are not speaking plainly, and it is almost ingrained into our societies now. We "sell" our position in a discussion, a debate.

For example, regulation does curtail freedom. Completely.

However, lack of regulation can harm people. Significantly.

Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.

In democratic nations, often judges will weigh these two things, when determining if a regulation passes the muster. In my country, we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and often judges will determine if a challenged regulation is of sufficient, required public good, whilst not overtly reducing freedom of the individual.

This is a mature conversation.

Advertising is not.

A primary example I've seen in the US, is people calling immigrants "undocumented" on one side, and "criminals" on the other. This is, of course, a reduction in nuance, and designed to advertise a position merely with the words used. And it is a societal sickness.

An illegal alien is just that, and using that term confers no judgement, for it is simply fact.

There was a time when politics were not first and fore in terms of the use of language. The current trend to be "touchy feely" over use of language, and find great offense at the use of language, does nothing other than stop debate. Reduce discussion. Cause schism instead of collaboration.

And there are those around us, which prefer that.

Don't feed them.

>Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.

If there were no regulation against someone picking you up off the street and chaining you up in their basement, they would be more free in this scenario and you would be less free. You might be able to say regulation can curtail freedom and at the same time increase freedom.

>An illegal alien is just that, and using that term confers no judgement, for it is simply fact.

Well, it also has a connotation just like the other words. "Illegal" and "alien" both evoke meaning that goes beyond the specific condition, and that phrase was generally the predecessor of "criminals" in this example. Those who use different terms are also incentivized to convince others that their chosen word is the one that is most "simply fact" and not "touchy feely" language.

That's a very good response. I agree completely.

> Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.

When I say regulation is freedom, I'm borrowing from dialectics. The only way we figured out how to move forward is to leave something behind.

So when you see regulation, the absence of a given right, let's say to carry a deadly weapon in public, you have to see this is the tailend of the synthesis of a long debate, where we agreed that the risks of arming the population outweighs the benefits of self protection.

So regulation is freedom because freedom is choice, and to choose is to leave something behind. Regulation is just the manifestation of the consequences of that choice.

> Regulation does curtail freedom. Completely.

This depends on what definition of freedom you are using.

Take this definition.

> the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do

Being able to walk down a street because there is a regulation restricting cars would enhance my freedom.

A regulation permitting me to swing my fist into your would restrict my freedom, and damn your nose

It amuses me how the "land of the free" makes it a crime for people to cross the street without doing it at regulated locations.

Completely fair, but I was responding to someone who doesn't think that it curtails freedom but that is the total opposite, you cannot be free if you are dead (except for a few niche philosophical definitions of the word), so human centric regulations like the asbestos ban are orthogonal to freedom, even if I admit in the strictest definition of the word yes, a regulation can curtail your freedom to harm yourself and hypothetically could curtail yourself from positive benefits as well.

But the thing is that statistically the likelihood they were discussing in good faith about this is near none, instead their way of speaking are telltales of a libertarian, where they have a almost religious believe that regulation is their biggest enemy and will never admit that the lack of it could harm or even kill them, I have wasted many many hours talking with such kind of people and don't aim to waste more arguing in good faith giving nuanced responses.

Oh I'm not blaming you, but the conversational framework we're being collectively trapped in.

What we have now sure it's freedom. Let's try having our tax dollars work for us this time.

I disagree, most advertising is just an attempt at manipulation, not just a genuine "our products exist and you might like them." I would consider not being legally manipulated, especially by financially interested groups, more free than the reverse.

So are about 90% of the posts on this topic (any political topic really).

Have we come to such a low cultural point that ads are seen as some kind of basic human right?

Fuck ads. What's absurd is tolerating them and the damage they do to media, consumers, kids, lesser and/or more honest businesses, culture, products, and so on all the way to the Windows and macOS system UIs.

We're on a startup entrepreneur site. I'm not surprised it's seen as the lifeblood of the industry here. It sort of is.

At the same time, this has the same energy of "if we release all the files, the system will collapse". Maybe we need the billionaires to feel some pain sometimes (even if yes, we'll feel more overall).

I think HGttG had a good solution for that involving a large spaceship.

I mean really I work in filmmaking. Ads just fund most of my business.

Work in something else. I make significantly more doing poison ivy removal than I ever did or was ever going to working in tech.

Are you willing to share rough numbers? Totally understand if not, just curious. Been thinking about something like this to get away from the AI force-feeding.

$100-$200 an hour on average for hand work, more if I need to use an excavator.

What does the friction look like? Insurance, licensing, that kind of thing?

Very variable depending on a combination of local/state regulations and what kinds of projects you're willing to tackle. The bottom end of the spectrum is a $50 a month general liability policy.

I mean, someone got paid for driving trucks dumping toxic waste in the river. I would support policies that ensure you don't lose access to healthcare or suffer in deep poverty from losing a job, but I'm not sympathetic to perpetuating such waste and harm on the basis of "it creates jobs".

I used to be an elevator operator ... :-/

What do you do? Honest question

I work on the production end. I’m a producer and production manager for live-action ads.

Freedom of speech is a basic human right.

Ads are speech.

>Ads are speech.

No, they are not.

People have been brainwashed and legal systems have been paid and bought for to consider them as such, just like corporations have been whitewashed to be treated as "persons".

In any case, we regulate all other kinds of speech as well: explicit content, libel, classified information, cigarette ads, and so on.

Let's start there. Corporations being persons is a legal fiction to allow them to consolidate capital. Giving that fictional person human rights is abhorrent to humans. It is a crime against humans. It degrades us.

Corporations are groups of people working together. I don't see why that makes people lose their rights.

If only individuals are allowed freedom of speech NYT, CNN, and other news organizations do not have first amendment rights.

Are you sure you've thought this through?

No, it just ensures that humans acting through such legal fiction have the same rights as humans acting directly.

While granting them protections against legal liability for the things that they do in the name of such an entity.

We already ban tobacco ads on tv (in the us) is their freedom of speech violated?

I don’t think you need to count companies being able to put any message out there as free speech.

Shouting fire in a crowded theater is also speech. So is publishing a highly detailed plan for anyone to kill the president and usurp power. So is child pornography. There's a long list of precedents that free speech in America is not absolute.

And this is about Europe, which has never had an absolutist view of rights to begin with. In Europe, rights are seen as intended to be balanced against each other instead of maximizing an arbitrary set of them to 100%. You have the right to free expression (except in... most countries, so let's call it a theoretical right) as well as the right to not be preyed upon. Although it's legal to distribute chemicals, some of them are highly addictive so they're restricted. Same with social media.

Ads aren't free speech, they are the absence of it, because you are paid for a preselected speech.

That is a non sequitur.

how so?

>paid

If I get paid to say something I would have said anyway, is that not free speech?

>preselected

If I go to a protest with a sign that my friend made because I can't, that is not free speech?

That’s not even true in the United States (they’re ‘commercial speech’, which carries a still significant but lesser set of protections), never mind in Europe.

Commercial speech rights are still part of the "free speech" bundle of 1A protections.

Not in practice.

No. Ads are paying money to get a platform for that speech. Having a platform is in no way a basic right.

Exactly. Companies can put their marketing guff on their own websites!

Tell that to the tobacco industry yeah?

Yeah hospitals cost money

Users can pay for services they use.

If that's not viable enough, so be it.

Paying for content works just fine

There should be no viable alternative to the free-because-your-attention-is-the-product business model because that is the core problem

Sounds good to me.

It's called paying for goods and services. You know, basic capitalism.

I think one thing to understand about advertising is that it fundamentally breaks the way capitalists say capitalism works. If you really want capitalism to be about competition to create the best quality at the lowest cost, then you can't have advertising. Advertising inherently drives up cost because it costs, and it allows lower-quality, higher-ost products to outcompete higher-quality, lower-cost products if they are better advertised.

And before some advertiser comes along and says, "But how will we find out about goods and services!?" Search engines. Independent reviewers. Word out mouth. Experts. These are solved problems.

And more to the point, advertising is literally the worst way to find out about goods and services. Mostly, advertising is simply lies, and when it's telling the truth it's not telling you the whole truth. If you're concerned about people being able to find out about goods and services with any accuracy, then you should be against advertising. Ads aren't information, they're misinformation which prevents consumers from making accurately informed decisions.

Why not make Gov level. So any tax you pay goes to a company to maintain a social media etc.

But in reality is going to crap too as how you select the “right” company? If the company is owned by Gov then it will probably be worst than now.

Then it will be back to communism

Why? Serious question. The internet was a mistake.

How can your question be serious if you already decided the internet was a mistake? I don't think it was. Far from it.

Good things get tainted over time. The internet was a good thing. Today, not so much. It's probably a net negative for most youth in terms of cognitive development. Aka a drag on the future of humanity.

Maybe it could be good again, but not on the path it's on.

What part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?

But the internet is so much more than that, isn't it?

It really isn't. It was so much more than that but a couple decades of "innovation" and here we are.

It used to be.

Honestly, some of the shit with ClawdBot^W MoltBot^W OpenClaw and molt.church and molt.book has been some quality entertainment, enabled largely by the Internet. And it's AI slop but that only seems to matter when one of them gets miffed about its PR being rejected and posts an unhinged blog post about the maintainer who rejected said PR. And in a "comedy equals tragedy plus time" way, it's pretty easy to laugh at that, too.

You know there's individuals who will unironically defend any dark pattern one cares to point to so your take here is pretty unsurprising. I feel like this is getting excited over finding a kernel of undigested corn in a random turd.

I meant it more as marveling at the people who get excited at the undigested corn kernel and then make artwork about it, though not to knock participation in this zeitgeist. There really is something fascinating about seeing people congregate over something that excites them, regardless of the curmudgeons who denigrate it. Doubly so if I don't understand it. It doesn't have to be your cup of tea but calling it "a kernel of undigested corn in a random turd" is unduly hostile.

The only thing more predictable than the credulous defense of harmful technologies is the wildly fallacious "old man sneering at clouds". If there is hostility there's generally a good reason for it. Refusing to engage with that is an indication of arrested emotional development or maybe a massive ideological blind spot. It certainly doesn't herald open-mindedness.

This seems like a record for number of projections per sentence.

You do not have any reason to think I've (1) "arrested emotional development" nor (2) an "ideological blind spot"; (3) my "defense of harmful technologies" was not even presented, let alone (4) does it have anything to do with old men shaking their fists at clouds; and you do not have any reason to say I've (5) not been open-minded.

The only thing I said is that there have been some happenings to be entertained by, that is not exclusive to other feelings about them. I can think whoever set up MJ Rathbun has been irresponsible while also laughing at the dumb thing their irresponsible decisions caused.

These feelings are not mutually exclusive and hostility towards the ones I expressed because you made assumptions about other feelings I must have is an indication of arrested emotional development and certainly doesn't herald open-mindedness. Obviously (this is from my perspective, let's remember our emotional development and open-mindedness), you must fear these things in some manner and you are projecting said fears onto my statements in these comments.