Brussels is going head-to-head with social media platforms to change addictive design.
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Here's the actual statement from the European Comission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling, but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found, and equally would have terrible consequences on situations where this is actually quite valuable. IE if you disallow infinite scrolling, what page sizes are allowed? Can I just have a page of 10,000 elements that lazy load?
Regardless of your take around whether this is EU overreach, I'm glad they're not implementing strict laws around what you can/can't do - there are valuable situations for these UI patterns, even if in combination they can create addictive experiences. Still, I do think that overregulation here will lead to services being fractured. I was writing about this earlier this morning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005367), but the regulated friction of major platforms (ie discord w/ ID laws) is on a collision course with the ease of vibe coding up your own. When that happens, these comissions are going to need to think long and hard around having a few large companies to watch over is better than millions of small micro-niche ones.
>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"
Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iterations. Impossible. They'd need to change their top priority from "maximizing engagement by fostering addictive behavior" to "offering a product with enough quality for someone to pay a fee in order to be able to use it".
Define "advertising". I feel this might be hard to do.
For example is my blog talking about Windows considered as Advertising? What about my blog discussing products we make? What about the web site for my local restaurant?
If I add my restaurant location to Google maps, is that advertising? Are review sites?
If I'm an aggregator (like booking.com) and I display the results for a search is that advertising?
I assume though you meant advertising as in 3rd party advertising. So no Google ad words, no YouTube ads etc. Ok, let's explore that...take say YouTube...
Can creators still embed "sponsored by" scenes? Can they do product placement?
Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not implementable. Leaving aside the merit for a moment, there's just no way that any politician can make it happen. Google and Facebook are too big, with too much cash to lobby with. And that's before you tell everyone that the free internet is no more, now you gotta pay subscriptions.
And, here's the kicker, even if you did force users to pay for Facebook and Google, it's still in their interest to maximize engagement...
By stingraycharles 2026-02-145:139 reply Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.
It’s about the compensation. That makes it advertising.
Regular booking.com is fine. Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not.
Regular Google Maps to register your restaurant is fine. Paying Google Maps to promote your restaurant is not.
It’s not that hard to implement. Advertising is pretty well defined.
By kenjackson 2026-02-1414:221 reply What people who advertise indirectly on the internet. For example the ads around a baseball field - can that baseball game no longer be streamed? Product placement in a movie - can that movie only be in theaters and DVD, but not Netflix? Could streaming companies show previews of coming shows on their own platform?
I also assume it means that sites like X could no longer charge for verified accounts.
By true_religion 2026-02-1415:142 reply I'm curious what the point is in calling out obvious edge cases that can be addressed by either the legislation allowing for discretion in enforcement via the FCC or other department, or having the court system directly address this factors?
What's important is agreeing or disagreeing with the spirit of the law, not trying to get a HN comment to give you a bullet-proof wording.
By lores 2026-02-1518:58 Because as long as there is a theoretical edge case, nothing should be done, your model is flawed. That's a mentality very common amongst software engineers. In the real physical world, even tying your shoes has edge cases.
Hmm, thinking of it, it may explain the love of sandals in said community.
By kenjackson 2026-02-1418:391 reply The obvious edge cases are often the difference between a law having any teeth at all. Or the edge cases can be such a big loophole that everything fits under it.
By lores 2026-02-1518:59 That's what the judiciary is for. Really!
You will just see the shift of the methods used in government corruption to circumvent such rules, e.g., your wife gets a wildly lucrative “book deal” right after you do something, and then when time has passed, you also get a “book deal” or are hired to speak at exorbitant fees or get hired in some BS position or are made a member of a board, or your children are hired as executives or even made board members.
The problem with the direct approach, i.e., “ban advertising”, is that it is hung up on a specific term, not the underlying dynamic/system. It’s fighting a symptom, not the disease/cause.
By stickynotememo 2026-02-1412:062 reply Well, yeah. There are always ways to get around laws. But this is like saying taxes are a bad idea because tax evasion exists.
It's the eternal hacker news debate:
"let's regulate x"
"but surely we can't regulate x because defining x is complicated"
"plenty of things are complex and are regulated, also here is a definition that covers almost all cases and the rest can be left to judicial nous"
"but people will just evade the law anyway"
Honestly pick a post about the EU at random and you'll be able to find some variety of this chain of conversation. It's so general an argument that it could be made about literally any law that's ever existed, making it entirely null if you believe in any regulation whatsoever
By throwup238 2026-02-1415:013 reply I once had the idea to create a HackerNews equivalent to tvtropes called hntropes that crowd sources all of these patterns.
By Teever 2026-02-1419:49 My personal favourite hntrope is how any conversation about a geological feature outside of the US will inevitable turn into one about American geological features and then shortly after it will just descend generic American discussion.
I conceptualize this as something like the Hamming Distance, where you can measure the number of replies the conversation will have before an inevitable pivot to generic American stuff.
So the conversation could start with "Why back in 2013 I had a lovely time fishing in Scotland. The lakes there are remarkable."
"Boy me too that fishing was just great caught such and such fish blah blah blah love those lakes"
"Why that reminds me of the time I went fishing in Kentucky, boy the lakes there let me tell you..."
"Kentucky you say? Why I was just in Kentucky the other day! Boy they sure have < difference in real estate prices | difference in crime rates | differnce in minimum wage... >
and now it's a conversation about Kentucky real estate instead of a conversation about fishing in Scotland.
By rickydroll 2026-02-1615:31 do it
By permo-w 2026-02-1418:34 Do it
By account42 2026-02-1612:20 And you can also up penalties for people who are caught trying to work their way around laws in order to deter most from trying.
By int_19h 2026-02-152:56 Nevertheless, if it takes a lot more effort to do, there will be less of it.
Promotion of anything at all is advertising, with or without compensation. The word advertising is pretty well defined, and the dictionary definitions don’t usually mention compensation, e.g. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/advertise.
An example I’m sure you would consider advertising - consider Google advertising Google Fiber in Google search results, or Facebook advertising business services on Facebook, or Apple, Netflix, Cinemark advertising their own shows & products in their own channels. You’ve seen lots of these, I’m sure you would consider them ads, but it’s not the compensation that makes them ads.
Yes, but if we're talking about incentives and "primordial domino tiles" then compensated advertising is what createa the incentives for the whole attention economy and addictive design in the first place.
Feel free to keep doing "pro-bono" advertising, but shareholders definitely wouldn't.
By stingraycharles 2026-02-1411:45 That’s my thinking. Follow the money, get rid of the source of money, and the whole thing falls down.
Of course that will not happen as there are way too many interests involved.
By fauigerzigerk 2026-02-1414:151 reply >compensated advertising is what createa the incentives for the whole attention economy
Why would you not want to keep people engaged and even "addicted" in order to keep them as subscribers and make them upgrade to more expensive subscriptions?
Do you have a specific example of a subscription based platform that is as insidiously addicting as the ad supported ones?
By fauigerzigerk 2026-02-1418:141 reply - Games.
- Gambling while rarely subscription based is usually paid for directly rather than ad funded.
- Newspaper subscriptions are no less addictive for news junkies than purely ad funded newspapers.
- I watch a lot of Youtube, far more than I used to before I started paying for the subscription.
- Netflix and in the olden days TV.
I'm not entirely sure what "insidiously addictive" actually means. I do sometimes scroll through some TikTok vids. I don't find it particularly addictive compared to, say, Hacker News.
You're right that modern video games and Netflix are a good examples of things that are non-ad-based, but are insidiously addictive. I used "insidiously addictive" to mean something which is engineered specifically to maximize addictive potential, and is not addictive purely on its own merits.
An example of a game development pattern that I would consider "merely addictive" would be a game developer trying to make their game as fun as possible. Does maximizing fun inherently make a game more likely to be addictive? Of course, but addiction was not the criteria being optimized for.
An example of an insidiously addictive video game would be one where the developers specifically created features in the hopes that they would create a dependency with the product to drive subscriptions or sales. It's at least partially about the level of cynicism with which the product is being developed.
A more stark example would be a fast food restaurant refining their recipe to make it more delicious versus one adding drugs to the food to make people addicted.
Newspapers and Youtube are both examples of services that are engineered to be ad-based but have a subscription option, so they're most likely still driven by the same attention-seeking incentives.
By fauigerzigerk 2026-02-1420:482 reply Corporations want to sell as much as possible to make as much money as possible.
Whenever the frequency, quantity or intensity of use drives up earnings, you are bound to get the same result: More "addictive" designs are better for earnings than less "addictive" designs. The difference (if any) between addictive because fun and addictive by design is irrelevant for this outcome.
What I will grant you is that the link can be more direct with ad funding. If a newspaper publisher knows that some very loyal subscribers only ever read 5 articles every morning, making that particular group read 30 articles would not drive up earnings.
But I think on average across all readers the link between reading more and higher earnings would still exist and hence the incentive to make the product more "addictive".
The "problem" (for corporations) is that the process of signing up for a subscription is itself a major obstacle in user flow and can serve as a point where users "wake up" and realize what they are doing.
Sure, you can design your pages after the sign up to be addictive, but that wouldn't actually help you to get more subscribers - so there is not a lot of economic rationale to do so (unless you have other mechanisms to "monetize" already signed up users, such as lootboxes or in-app purchases)
In contrast, if you can use advertising to monetize non-subscribed users, you can sidestep that entire obstacle altogether. That's why there is a lot of economic incentive to design the free part of services to be addictive, as long as there is advertising.
By fauigerzigerk 2026-02-1513:32 I don't get it. Why do you think that it doesn't make sense for subscription based services to be as addictive as possible so that users don't churn?
Second, I don't believe that forms of "addiction" that have existed for centuries can be beaten by small changes to business models. See my other comment for more detail on this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023484
Also, what would you do about the fact that ad funded services for lower earners are effectively subsidised by higher earners? If you ban the subsidised services, you are causing a massive regressive change to the availability of information and entertainment.
It's the exact opposite of "democratization".
> If a newspaper publisher knows that some very loyal subscribers only ever read 5 articles every morning, making that particular group read 30 articles would not drive up earnings.
I think it's hard to say if that's true. A consumer might be willing to pay more for a service they use a lot rather than a little.
What I do know is that I can see plainly that advertising-driven services are among the worse offenders for creating addictive products and other revenue models generally provide healthier incentives to direct development.
The EU's general approach here is probably better than banning advertising since it diagnoses a clear problem, but leaves it open for regulators and companies to address it.
By fauigerzigerk 2026-02-158:161 reply >What I do know is that I can see plainly that advertising-driven services are among the worse offenders for creating addictive products and other revenue models generally provide healthier incentives to direct development.
I can see plainly that this is not the case and I have given you a number of examples. But I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one.
>The EU's general approach here is probably better than banning advertising since it diagnoses a clear problem
I also prefer this to a ban because a ban would be incredibly destructive and regressive while this regulation will be merely ineffective.
> I also prefer this to a ban because a ban would be incredibly destructive and regressive while this regulation will be merely ineffective.
So what would be your solution to the addiction problem then?
By fauigerzigerk 2026-02-1513:26 This sort of "addiction" has caused moral panics for centuries starting with reading addiction in the 18th century. During my own lifetime we had this sort of hysteria about comic books, video games, TV and now social media.
I don't deny that it can cause problems. I remember a time as a kid when I was reading so much all day every day that I actually got depressed and lonely when I was forced to interact with the real world. I wanted to live in the story I was reading.
I also used to procrastinate a lot here on Hacker News. There's even a setting you can enable called "noprocrast" to stop your addiction if you want.
My wife told me she had trouble staying awake at school for years because she was reading novels into the early morning.
Some people believe that what we are currently seeing is something new that wouldn't exist without ad funded media companies deliberately causing it. My experience tells me that this is not true.
But to answer your question. I have no solution. If anything, the solutions may exist on an individual level - lifestyle, social connections, etc. Banning this or that medium or various kinds of advertising tricks will have no effect whatsoever.
By codethief 2026-02-1418:04 Netflix?
By dahart 2026-02-1415:17 I don’t understand what you mean about shareholders and pro-bono, can you elaborate? Apple advertises Apple products on Apple channels, and Apple’s shareholders love that, and it’s not “pro-bono”.
I don’t think you have the incentives correctly summarized. The incentive of businesses like Google, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram are to make money, and the only way they’ve figured out how to do that at scale is advertising. None of those sites had ads when they started.
Alright, if you want to be pedantic abuot the definition, then ban compensated advertising.
Seems like you missed the point; banning compensated advertising wouldn’t fix the problem at all.
Even though I gave an example of a huge swath of advertising that isn’t “compensated”?
Why? I completely disagree, they are the same as any other ads. But you’re still not seeing the big picture. If you ban advertising compensation, suddenly uncompensated will become the entire problem and the only category. That’s the point.
By fsflover 2026-02-1617:30 Can you give an example? I can't imagine that. Who will start advertising for free?
Surely you're just being pedantic by pointing out that platforms can advertise themselves without paying money to themselves. If those same advertisements were on another platform they would be compensated ads.
And? Those ads aren’t on other platforms, and they won’t go away if you ban compensated advertising. Surely you’re just being completely naive if you think banning “compensated” advertising would change the advertising rather than the compensation mechanisms.
Any compensation mechanism will become outlawed, so what are you talking about?
You can try to stop the payments, but you won’t stop the ads. I’m talking about the same reasons billionaires pay far lower tax rates than you and I. When that much money is on the line, they will find (or make) a legal way. (Anyway, it’s also time to come back from outer space; corporations own the laws and the advertising channels. Our economy, for better or worse, currently depends on advertising. Compensated advertising will never be banned.)
The hypothetical you’re talking about does not stop today’s uncompensated for-profit advertising at all, and there is a lot of that. It also would only stop direct payments to content channels from a second party in exchange for advertising. That wouldn’t stop indirect marketing/advertising, nor indirect compensation. Furthermore, content distributors could offer service bundles where advertisers pay for other business services, and ads become a free add-on from a legal accounting perspective. Similarly, advertisers can offer other services, and channels can gift air-time to businesses. Channels could “sponsor” or “endorse” products they “like” without an attached financial transaction.
It just would not be that hard to legally sever advertising from compensation, so if you aren’t banning all advertising including the uncompensated kind, then advertising will happen. And banning all advertising is even more of a non-starter than trying to somehow block payments.
By that logic any and all regulation would be pointless because people will try to circumvent the regulation.
I don’t agree with that. I’m saying that banning advertising payments will obviously have unintended consequences and fail to achieve the actual desired goal. That happens with poorly conceived regulations all the time. I’m also suggesting that not enough people agree with your desire to ban advertising, and there isn’t a clear enough benefit to society, for this particular regulation to pass. You have a Chesterton’s Fence problem if you don’t see the reasons why advertising is so completely pervasive. You have to acknowledge that first and then propose something viable and realistic that can replace it.
By fsflover 2026-02-178:48 You just did not express yourself clearly. Which unintended consequences exactly?
> Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not.
But booking takes a cut of the booking in all scenarios, so they’re already incentivized to prioritize results that result in more profit for them. This all gets very tricky unfortunately.
By 1718627440 2026-02-1412:03 That's not advertising, that's how it works for every store. A grocery store has a larger absolute margin on a more expensive product, given the same relative margin.
By arter45 2026-02-148:53 Yes, but that is different.
Scenario A: Booking.com wants to increase their profits so they analyze their results and prioritize the best ones to reach their target. Regardless, Booking takes a cut of everything.
Scenario B: if you pay Booking $10k you can get to the first page even if you are a random 1-star hotel. Booking takes a cut of everything and also profits by getting money in exchange for more visibility of certain results.
By nozzlegear 2026-02-145:271 reply How would something like Github Sponsors work? Lots of projects use a "sponsor us for $LARGE_SUM and we'll mention you in our readme and release notes" model.
By 1718627440 2026-02-1412:01 Maybe advertising should be banned in stuff that you are not the author for. Google putting ads into their blog posts is fine, Google putting ads into the search result is not. So on a Github project, the maintainer can put adds, Github can not unless it's their project.
By throw0101c 2026-02-1412:372 reply > Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.
So basically all full-time Youtubers who do in-video ad reads, including, but not limited to: MKBHD, Linus Tech Tips, Veritasium, Smarter Every Day, minutephysics, Computerphile, Tom Scott, Patrick Boyle, The Plain Bagel, Sailing La Vagabonde, Sailing SV Delos, Gone with the Wynns, etc.
There is no fundamental right to a particular business model.
This wouldn't mean this type of content would disappear - for every single business producing such content there's a bunch of people doing the same for free. And then there's patreon et al., and funding for education etc.
By throw0101c 2026-02-1415:572 reply > This wouldn't mean this type of content would disappear - for every single business producing such content there's a bunch of people doing the same for free.
For some definition of "same" which may or may not mean "equal" (in the sense of quality, quantity, etc).
It brings to mind some rich people running for public office and putting forward the idea because they're rich they can't be influenced/lobbied or something. Or the general public sometimes complaining about politicians giving themselves raises: well, if you only pay peanuts you're going to get monkeys running things (more than already).
There is more opportunity for different types of people and channels to happen because the money allows people to recompensed for their time/effort. Free only scales so far when you have rent/mortgage, groceries, kids, a partner you may wish to spend time with, etc, to worry about.
> And then there's patreon et al.,
Except for MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips, all (most?) the channels I listed have Patreon, and still find it necessary to in-video ads because it's not enough.
By int_19h 2026-02-153:19 > Except for MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips, all (most?) the channels I listed have Patreon, and still find it necessary to in-video ads because it's not enough.
Some of them will go subscription-only, which means that many of the free users will leave, but those who don't will pay enough to support the channel.
And some will find that the content they produce isn't actually valuable enough to sufficiently many people. Which is unfortunate, but has to be balanced against all the negative externalities of ads.
By account42 2026-02-1612:26 > For some definition of "same" which may or may not mean "equal" (in the sense of quality, quantity, etc).
Yes, the whole point is for better content rather than mass produced slop that just has to be good enough to get ad impressions.
By baq 2026-02-1412:47 Pretty much
What would YouTube look like?
(Genuinely happy to read “like the good old days” as an answer!)
By shaky-carrousel 2026-02-1411:471 reply It would be way smaller and with real content, instead of crappy slop (AI or otherwise).
It would be dead. Google would shut it down or sell it, but who is going to buy billions of dollars a year in costs for no advertising revenue in return? Youtube's hosting costs would put a massive dent in even some hypothetical really nice billionaire's wallet. Apple could afford it and they'd run it a million times better, but would they even consider putting so much loss on their books for the sake of ... PR?
By shaky-carrousel 2026-02-1415:151 reply A subscription based YouTube dead? That makes no sense. And a YouTube without terabytes of slop would be way easier to maintain.
By permo-w 2026-02-1418:34 What percentage of YouTube's revenue do you think is from subs?
The slop is already there. Even without the slop, which it would be borderline impossible to identify en masse, the hosting costs are still astronomical. I appreciate your idealism, but Youtube without advertising revenue would be a financial black hole, and even if it survived, creators would simply be the ones taking the hit
Unless you're suggesting Youtube would just start again from zero, in which case it would just fail and it might as well be the same as dying
> Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.
> It’s about the compensation. That makes it advertising.
if you rent a billboard or space on Google.com, you’re not paying to promote a product/company; you’re just renting space.
So, if you then, yourself, put your company logo there, you’re saying that’s not advertising, but if you pay your nephew to put it there, it is?
You got it reversed. If you're Google and someone is paying you to put content on your website or give it some sort of preferential treatment within your already existing website, that is advertisement. It doesn't really matter whether some company paid for it or the company CEO had their nephew pay for it through aoney laundered network of obfuscation.
By card_zero 2026-02-1412:41 Hosting, or domains, does seem to be a loophole. Renting an entire website for your own product's advert is fine because that's "your website". What about subdomains? Or what about TLDs, suppose the operator of a TLD like .promo has a nice front page with a directory of all the sites, searchable, with short excerpts - all provided for free to the benefit of those who pay to own those sites. This could be like Facebook, or it could be like Neocities. I'm imagining a walled garden that treats its denizens equally, but they gain special attention from being there, and it costs money. Maybe that's OK.
>> Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.
That's a definition, sure. I feel like it leaves loopholes (under this definition spam isn't advertising, and I guess affiliation programs are?)
If I pay someone to print flyers is that advertising? If I pay squarespace for my site, is that advertising?
What if I need a Google maps subscription to place pins? Is placing a pin then advertising? Even if the subscription gives me other abilities?
Under your definition I guess YouTube creators can't be sponsored. And all existing videos with sponsorship need yo be removed? And I guess no online watching of sports (lots of people paid to wear a logo there...)
Presumably no product placement in Netflix shows (not sure what to do with old content?)
Of course I'm not paid to advertise MiraclePill. My channel exists purely thanks to patreon. No, I don't know that my "executive level" patreons are all MiraclePill employees...
No, I don't pay Google for ads, the ads are free when I purchase GoogleCoin which I buy because I expect GoogleCoin to go up in value...
>> Advertising is pretty well defined.
Alas, I fear it isn't...
By wasmainiac 2026-02-146:32 Being a little pedantic here no?
80/20 rule, it’s defined well enough to encompass 80% of advertisements. Anything beyond that is tolerated or illegal spam.
And if the situation arises that ads are being used unjustly the legal definition will eventually shift.
What are you trying to say, that it's impossible to define anything legally without edge cases?? That's bullocks.
> If I pay someone to print flyers is that advertising?
What the hell, we're talking about internet... you can't put printed flyers on the internet.
> If I pay squarespace for my site, is that advertising?
No. It's your site, not a third-party site promoting your site!
> What if I need a Google maps subscription to place pins? Is placing a pin then advertising?
If you promote it somehow, yes... if you just say there's a business there, no, since you're not actively promoting it. Information that something exists by itself cannot be included in "promotion".
> And all existing videos with sponsorship need yo be removed?
Yes, or re-uploaded without the sponsor segment.
> And I guess no online watching of sports (lots of people paid to wear a logo there...)
There could be exceptions for ads placed on the real world which are not paid for by the site/creator. There's always cases that must be allowed, no prohibition is absolute.
> Presumably no product placement in Netflix shows (not sure what to do with old content?)
To be honest, I wouldn't mind subtle product placements in shows. That's a lot less hostile than actual ads we see today on the Internet.
> Of course I'm not paid to advertise MiraclePill.
If you lie that you're not paid by someone while you are, like with any law, you can be prosecuted for it.
> Alas, I fear it isn't...
You didn't show what you think you did.
>> And all existing videos with sponsorship need yo be removed?
> Yes, or re-uploaded without the sponsor segment
I hope not. For one that would hit retroactively, but also it would cause a huge loss of valuable content from platforms like YouTube as countless videos with sponsor segments are actually interesting and simply too much to reupload, if the uploader is even active still.
By HappySweeney 2026-02-1411:592 reply Agreed. I believe it's well within Google's ability to auto-edit the sponsored segments out within an acceptable error margin.
Every video that has sponsors has a disclaimer on it so Google knows exactly what those videos are. It could misclassify videos perhaps but I have never seen that happen.
By alpaca128 2026-02-2213:24 > Every video that has sponsors has a disclaimer on it
No. That's what should be the case, but there are entire channels which don't do that or only half-ass it, and I've seen reviewers who just quickly say "thanks to <company> for their support" in the last 10 seconds of the video because they know no one pays attention anymore at that point. Quite a few review channels also do not correctly communicate that the links in the description are affiliate links etc.
By permo-w 2026-02-224:19 They could just buy Sponsorblock
By owisd 2026-02-1414:55 There's been rules around what constitutes advertising or product placement on TV for decades, didn't seem to be such an insurmountable issue first time around.
By littlecranky67 2026-02-149:082 reply In a lot of countries in the EU, advertising for tobaco products, prescription medication, lawyer/docts are prohibited. That ban has been working quite well for decades.
This is true, but it's worth adding that there are no blog posts about those things either, or articles, discussions, etc except in very limited niche places dedicated to talking about them.
If there was a ban on 'internet advertising of anything' then it would basically kill all discussion of any products on the internet.
By littlecranky67 2026-02-149:30 It wouldn't, we in Germany have clear laws when you have to mark something in media as "advertisment" - it is whenever you received a "reward" in order to talk about something, you have to mark it. A reward is already when you receive a product for free, or get reimbursed for travel cost etc. It is clearly definable. Yes, we will never reach 100% success rate, but 95% is already a big step.
By ndriscoll 2026-02-1412:25 Paid blogs/articles are worse than nothing. They are anti-information. If you did successfully eliminate those things, the currently niche places with honest discussion would be easier to find.
By ferngodfather 2026-02-1518:52 How have you managed to take an example of where this worked and then proceed to entirely disapply it in a wider context?
By onion2k 2026-02-1422:01 Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1992. Doubleclick started in 1995. So yes, like those glorious 3 years when hardly anyone was online and most access was via a 28kbps modem.
I'd take adverts over that. :)
By baxtr 2026-02-149:45 In the US, sport teams usually don’t have sponsors on their jerseys. In the EU they do have every inch covered.
By xg15 2026-02-1411:24 I think ad networks and tracking companies have a pretty good idea about what advertising is.
By rrgok 2026-02-146:01 Just answer this question: do you get a compensation for showing me something that I did not click for?
What about just banning personalized advertising? Like: you can pay Google Maps to show your result as sponsored, but Google can only show it to either everybody or randomized people.
By Kerrick 2026-02-145:59 > The Commission believes these terms are sufficiently clear and declines to add definitions of these terms.
- https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/federal_re...
By atoav 2026-02-149:54 You get money from others to show certain content on you platform.
By kerkeslager 2026-02-146:452 reply Let's drop the charade where you pretend you don't know what advertising is. You're smarter than that, and your playing dumb act would be more persuasive if you didn't ask leading questions that clearly show you know the answers. This isn't a good faith argument.
I mean are you really asking whether creators embedding "sponsored by" scenes is an ad as if you don't know? C'mon, don't insult your readers with this nonsense.
HN commenters are not legislators, and even if random HN commenters can't draft legislation, that doesn't mean that a minimally-funded team of experts would have any difficulty with the problem.
I agree with you but I also agree with the person you wrote to. There's a section in Naomi Klein's No Logo about banning advertising, and what that would actually mean in effect. It essentially comes down to not allowing, for example, different cereal brands to have different designs because then the design of the box becomes a kind of advertising.
It might sound nit picking, and it absolutely is, but if we banned Internet advertising (at the exact definition you personally consider advertising to be), you can guarantee the advertising industry would be looking at exactly these loopholes until you reframed your definition.
It's much like how in the UK they banned advertising for tobacco, and years later had to expand it so that supermarkets cannot even show the products visibly because the brand has their own inherent advertising that's visible if you can see it.
> It's much like how in the UK they banned advertising for tobacco, and years later had to expand it so that supermarkets cannot even show the products visibly because the brand has their own inherent advertising that's visible if you can see it.
So they got rid of 90% of adverts, then adjusted it to get that upto 99%
Meanwhile you're saying "lets use brainwashing to get 8 year olds hooked because we might not get 100% on the first attempt"
> Meanwhile you're saying "lets use brainwashing to get 8 year olds hooked because we might not get 100% on the first attempt"
I said absolutely nothing of the sort and that hostile style of arguing has no place on this site. I will no longer be engaging with you.
By kerkeslager 2026-02-171:56 It's always funny to me when people feel the need to tell us they won't be inflicting their poorly-thought-out fallacies on us any more. Don't threaten me with a good time!
By iso1631 2026-02-1610:07 You are implying there's no point in doing anything as people will find loopholes (which governments can then close)
This site is no place for thought terminating cliches
By kerkeslager 2026-02-171:53 The argument you're making is known as a "perfect solution fallacy".
I don't even know for sure whether I think cereal boxes displaying their contents is advertising--I'm not going to make a snap opinion on that--but it's completely irrelevant. We're drowning in advertising, advertising where it isn't ambigious whether or not it's advertising. We know that YouTubers "sponsored by" scenes are ads--this isn't ambigious, and we can write legislation that bans it.
OPs comment isn’t a charade, he’s pointing out that it’s a very blurry line.
If I receive compensation from company A for a product, and I genuinely like it, is it advertising if I talk about another item on their product line that I bought because of the free item I got?
If I run a retail business, and have a better deal with a provider, am I allowed to prioritise their results?
If I run an AI SAAS, with a bring your own key model, am I allowed to recommend a provider that I think gives the best results, even if my margin is bigger on that model?
I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.
> HN commenters are not legislators
That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
> a minimally funded team of experts would have any difficulty with the problem.
I’m a hugely pro EU person, and support the vast majority of what they do. The Cookie Banner is a disaster and has just resulted in a massive step back for the Internet worldwide. The USB C charger rule missed the forest for the trees. Their stance on technology has been poor, misguided and misunderstood, and often pushes the needle towards US companies winning out.
>> HN commenters are not legislators > That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
To steel man, there's a commenting pattern where if someone doesn't like a high-level idea they demand answers to a dozen specifics that, if it were a legitimate proposal going through a legislature, could take hundreds of people months or years of committees, reports & consultations to decide on all the answers to, but if someone can't come up with an answer on the spot in HN then that's taken as proof that the idea is unworkable.
By maccard 2026-02-1416:32 I’m just going to paste a section of my comment above to you
> I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.
By kerkeslager 2026-02-172:11 > OPs comment isn’t a charade, he’s pointing out that it’s a very blurry line.
Sorry, it just isn't, at least not in a lot of the examples he gave. It's not ambiguous whether "sponsored by" scenes on YouTube are ads: they're ads, and bringing them up only highlights how many OBVIOUSLY NOT BLURRY situations exist that we could easily ban.
> I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.
Well, whether you're trying to gish gallop or not, you're succeeding!
You're simply ignoring the obvious: it seems you agree that billboards and sponsored VPN segments on YT videos are obviously ads. So we can ban those.
> That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
And I'm equally allowed to point out when what passes for "discussion" here is nakedly disingenuous pro-advertising FUD. Sorry, I just don't believe that you're too stupid to identify advertising when it's blatantly obvious. It's a compliment! You're intelligent!
Sure, there are some ambiguous situations, and that simply does not matter. Ban the obvious cases, then iterate to close further loopholes.
> I’m a hugely pro EU person, and support the vast majority of what they do. The Cookie Banner is a disaster and has just resulted in a massive step back for the Internet worldwide. The USB C charger rule missed the forest for the trees. Their stance on technology has been poor, misguided and misunderstood, and often pushes the needle towards US companies winning out.
Is this the "discussion" you're talking about? It seems like you're just bringing up irrelevant stuff.
By saalweachter 2026-02-1411:36 >> HN commenters are not legislators
> That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
I would even go so far as to say that HN commenters are going to be the ones trying to evade/break/find the loopholes in whatever laws the legislators write.
By Moldoteck 2026-02-149:36 i would ban any advertising that targets populations on individual/subgroup behavior. Maybe targeting on country/language level at most, otherwise - just untargeted ads. Another option could be artificial slowdown of loading the content. Eg each content display general element (post, video, image) to be loaded with 0.5-1sec delay from the current in focus content
By toofy 2026-02-148:40 anything where you take any kind of compensation/gift to display/discuss a product.
By jodrellblank 2026-02-1416:52 To quote Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it".
> "Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not implementable."
How about trying it before giving up? Cookie banners were implementable. Laws requiring ID schemes are being implemented. Know-your-customer laws have been implemented. GDPR has been implemented. HIPPA and Sarbanes-Oxley have been implemented. Anti-pornography laws have been implemented despite the gotcha of "but but how will anyone tell what's porn and what isn't?".
"not making a decision" is a decision. Companies are exploiting advertising - trying to avoid doing anything that might be imperfect because it's hard is taking a position, and it's a position in favour of explotative advertising.
By gchamonlive 2026-02-140:4212 reply Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.
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.
By plagiarist 2026-02-143:14 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.
By justinclift 2026-02-147:101 reply > 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.
By fsflover 2026-02-1416:24 That's exactly because the goodwill competes with billions of profits.
By TMWNN 2026-02-150:46 >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.)
By gchamonlive 2026-02-1417:321 reply 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.
By gchamonlive 2026-02-161:10 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.
By gchamonlive 2026-02-141:341 reply For Google, they figured out it's ads... So is it ok?
By lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2026-02-141:511 reply 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?
By Scarblac 2026-02-147:56 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.
By Eisenstein 2026-02-147:10 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.
By duskdozer 2026-02-1413:10 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.
By lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2026-02-1412:04 > 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.
By gpm 2026-02-1412:47 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)...
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-145:023 reply 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.
By Eisenstein 2026-02-147:151 reply 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?
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1413:502 reply 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)
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1416:43 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.
By Eisenstein 2026-02-1415:111 reply 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.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1417:151 reply I’m continuously astounded by people who want to give the government more power seeing the current state of the US government.
By Eisenstein 2026-02-1422:281 reply 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.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1422:341 reply 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.
By Eisenstein 2026-02-1422:441 reply 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.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1423:032 reply 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?
By Eisenstein 2026-02-158:301 reply > 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.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-159:151 reply > 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.
By Eisenstein 2026-02-1513:191 reply 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.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1516:48 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.
By iso1631 2026-02-1415:58 BBC's funding model is in its last 36 months
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1413:48 The government has been threatening to cut PBS funding since at least 1969
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers%27s_1969_United_St...
And Trump just cut funding for both PBS and NPR
By account42 2026-02-1612:49 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.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1418:511 reply 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.
By NekkoDroid 2026-02-1510:411 reply 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.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1517:05 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.
By snowpid 2026-02-1414:09 no it does not.
We can argue about public media but Germany is a really bad example.
By WarmWash 2026-02-1413:31 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.
By kerkeslager 2026-02-147:07 I support government funding for things that keep the population exercising. It literally saves taxpayers money by driving down healthcare costs.
By juliangmp 2026-02-1414:39 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
By bigfudge 2026-02-1510:04 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.
By Der_Einzige 2026-02-143:201 reply 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?
By johnnyanmac 2026-02-143:56 "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.
By Matticus_Rex 2026-02-143:482 reply I think we have rights to do lots of things that banning this business model would violate.
By gpm 2026-02-143:57 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.
By kerkeslager 2026-02-147:03 Really? Name one.
Note, neither one of us is a corporation, so "we" doesn't refer to corporations.
By coldtea 2026-02-141:11 If it can only be funded via ads, it shouldn't be funded and is not essential to exist.
By tokyobreakfast 2026-02-141:052 reply 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.
By SoftTalker 2026-02-143:34 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.
By rgblambda 2026-02-150:46 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?
By presentation 2026-02-143:381 reply Half of the people on this site think that subscriptions are evil too, though.
By bigfudge 2026-02-149:30 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.
By kevin_thibedeau 2026-02-144:39 Project Xanadu will be ready any decade now.
Banning ads? That's just so authoritarian and absurd. I hope you never become king
By gchamonlive 2026-02-141:331 reply Regulation is freedom. Think of ads powering the web as current day's lead in gas.
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.
By andsoitis 2026-02-145:43 Ooh they should do that on planes!
By NeutralCrane 2026-02-144:502 reply 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
By samrus 2026-02-155:12 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
By direwolf20 2026-02-1415:221 reply Really? It seems like you can't name a single one.
By direwolf20 2026-02-158:58 You already engaged with this discussion but your only engagement was to proudly proclaim that you don't engage. How do you square that circle?
Meanwhile you can't name a single right that isn't supported by regulation.
By AmbroseBierce 2026-02-143:201 reply 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.
By duskdozer 2026-02-1413:24 >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.
By gchamonlive 2026-02-1417:40 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.
By confidantlake 2026-02-1413:331 reply > 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.
By iso1631 2026-02-1418:01 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.
By AmbroseBierce 2026-02-145:121 reply 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.
By b112 2026-02-145:44 Oh I'm not blaming you, but the conversational framework we're being collectively trapped in.
By johnnyanmac 2026-02-143:57 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.
By hunterpayne 2026-02-1414:31 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.
By johnnyanmac 2026-02-144:01 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.
By lobf 2026-02-144:01 I mean really I work in filmmaking. Ads just fund most of my business.
By forgetfreeman 2026-02-141:441 reply Work in something else. I make significantly more doing poison ivy removal than I ever did or was ever going to working in tech.
By rogerrogerr 2026-02-142:491 reply 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.
By forgetfreeman 2026-02-1411:031 reply $100-$200 an hour on average for hand work, more if I need to use an excavator.
By rogerrogerr 2026-02-1418:241 reply What does the friction look like? Insurance, licensing, that kind of thing?
By forgetfreeman 2026-02-153:31 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.
By duskdozer 2026-02-1413:31 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".
By samrus 2026-02-1411:52 I used to be an elevator operator ... :-/
By gchamonlive 2026-02-141:351 reply What do you do? Honest question
By lobf 2026-02-144:00 I work on the production end. I’m a producer and production manager for live-action ads.
By BurningFrog 2026-02-142:267 reply 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.
By BurningFrog 2026-02-1416:44 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.
By duskdozer 2026-02-1413:32 While granting them protections against legal liability for the things that they do in the name of such an entity.
By mr_00ff00 2026-02-142:37 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.
By direwolf20 2026-02-1415:25 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.
By Almondsetat 2026-02-1411:351 reply That is a non sequitur.
By Almondsetat 2026-02-1419:49 >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.
By Matticus_Rex 2026-02-143:491 reply Commercial speech rights are still part of the "free speech" bundle of 1A protections.
By deadlocked 2026-02-158:26 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.
By jimnotgym 2026-02-1410:07 Exactly. Companies can put their marketing guff on their own websites!
By jbxntuehineoh 2026-02-143:471 reply > mmmmm yes thank you daddy may I have some more?
By johnnyanmac 2026-02-144:04 If he's from the US, he's technically correct. That's the high level argument of Citizens United.
Granted, that's proven to be a horrible concept. So let's repeal that.
By forgetfreeman 2026-02-141:431 reply Tell that to the tobacco industry yeah?
By gchamonlive 2026-02-141:47 Yeah hospitals cost money
By Scarblac 2026-02-147:53 Users can pay for services they use.
If that's not viable enough, so be it.
By goosejuice 2026-02-142:44 Paying for content works just fine
By ulrikrasmussen 2026-02-145:40 There should be no viable alternative to the free-because-your-attention-is-the-product business model because that is the core problem
By Hikikomori 2026-02-141:36 Sounds good to me.
By kerkeslager 2026-02-147:02 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.
By skeptic_ai 2026-02-1411:21 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
By gchamonlive 2026-02-141:252 reply How can your question be serious if you already decided the internet was a mistake? I don't think it was. Far from it.
By SecretDreams 2026-02-144:07 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.
By forgetfreeman 2026-02-141:472 reply 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?
By gchamonlive 2026-02-141:512 reply But the internet is so much more than that, isn't it?
By forgetfreeman 2026-02-143:071 reply It really isn't. It was so much more than that but a couple decades of "innovation" and here we are.
By fsflover 2026-02-1417:42
By recursive 2026-02-141:59 It used to be.
By lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2026-02-142:011 reply 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.
By forgetfreeman 2026-02-143:111 reply 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.
By lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2026-02-1412:321 reply 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.
By forgetfreeman 2026-02-1421:241 reply 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.
By lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2026-02-1423:19 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.
By matthewsinclair 2026-02-142:20 I agree [0]. Well, taxed rather than banned. But we’re in the same postcode.
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
Then X will become the only social media as Musk can keep it free unlike any competition and use it to push politics he likes or finds it beneficial for his other companies. In fact, according to reports X is already not making much ad money so it’s already there.
There's already free ad-free social media, see countless services in the fediverse
There are many Mastodon servers run by ordinary people simply because they want to. And before the shit-show the internet has become, there were many forums and IRC channels, absolutely free, and with 0 ads.
Very low traction on these. Let me know when there’s something that people actually use in tens or hundreds of millions and random people are just providing the infrastructure out of pocket and spending all their time on this without expectation.
By NeutralCrane 2026-02-145:031 reply Maybe low traction is a good thing. We don’t need social media to be an all consuming addictive mega platform.
I could have agreed if the high traction ones that do all the bad things didn’t exist.
By kaibee 2026-02-146:43 We've come full circle to banning advertising. It seems like we have good reason to believe that people will create the infrastructure for the communities that they _want_ to exist and fund them. So just banning advertising will probably be fine. Worst case scenario, we gradually loosen the ban. The advertising hellscape will grow back immediately, nothing of value will be lost.
By LunaSea 2026-02-1411:31 Forums used to be visited by millions of users.
Hosting millions of users is very cheap (less than 200$ per month).
Moving the goalposts much? Of course there aren't any free services serving millions currently, how could they, when Facebook/X spends millions to make sure everyone stays on their platform? Which non tech savvy would want to move to a platform without all their friends? That's the gotcha with social networks, once you grow big enough, it is really hard for people to move off of it.
Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. You are literally arguing against something that has already happened.
> Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely.
At its peak (late 1990s to early 2000s), IRC was estimated to have about 3–4 million concurrent users worldwide at any given moment, with tens of millions of total users over time.
Pales in comparison with the scale that’s needed today, given the number of people, variety of media, and bandwidth required.
Storage/compute/etc were orders of magnitude more expensive at the time, so the fact that it was 3-4 million is uh, pretty impressive? You could host a Matrix server for your 1,000 closest friends for basically no money.
You're absolutely right compute, network, and storage have continued to decrease in cost and accessibility.
The scale issue is enabling billions of consumers. It takes time and effort and skill.
It turns out that there are relatively skilled people who are willing to give their time and resources freely relative to billions of consumers in the market.
By foxygen 2026-02-1415:34 You know IRC isn't just one giant server serving every single user, right? Same for Mastodon. There were/are many different servers. Again, you are arguing against reality. IRCs/Forums have existed for decades, with hundreds of thousands of active users, with no problem whatsover. Scaling to billions is easy, since with more people using it, more people would be interested in hosting a server.
By duskdozer 2026-02-1415:08 Part of the amount of bandwidth and computing power required today is specifically due to advertising and activities in the same cluster: tons of media files and javascript for ads and analytics and dark patterns and 'catchy' interfaces, all entirely unnecessary and providing no real value.
By hunterpayne 2026-02-1414:41 Senator, we sell ads
No I am not moving the goalposts, the alternative shouldn’t just exist it should actually do the job and by doing the job, I don’t mean that if people made the effort to use it, it can do the job. I mean people should be using it. Also, no people are not stupid and its not their fault for not using it.
By foxygen 2026-02-1415:37 You are completely ignoring the impact that having billions of dollars at your disposal to spend on keeping users addicted to your platform can have. There is no way a free platform can compete with X/Instagram/TikTok, even if such platform had a better product(which they do btw). Just look at Whatsapp/iMessage, both are terrible apps, there are MANY better options, with way more features, and somehow they are still the most used messaging apps in the Western.
By 1718627440 2026-02-1412:09 The people who care about publishing the content.
I think this would have an opposite effect. An addicted customer is a customer willing to pay. Think about gambling or tobacco. BTW OnlyFans somehow lives off subscriptions.
OTOH I gladly pay for YouTube Premium.
By LaundroMat 2026-02-146:00 Because you want to support the platform or because you don't want to see ads?
By Terr_ 2026-02-149:07 Putting on my cynic-hat:
1. Reform occurs, now ad-networks serve ads based on the content it appears near, rather than analyzing the viewer.
2. Ad-network says "You know, I'd pay more if you had a version of this content that drew people who were X, Y, Z..."
3. The sites start duplicating their content into hundreds of inconsequentially-different sub-versions, profiling visitors to guide them to "what fits your interests", but it's actually a secret signal to the ad-networks.
4. Ad-network, super-coincidentally, releases tools that can "help" sites do it.
I have said for years - Micropayents, something like the traffic settlement system for termination charges in the NANPA PSTN, and when I say micropayments I mean 1000ths of a cent. Then the content that does cost money (news, social media, whatever can be monetized and the users are paying for consumption.
What counts as an advertisement? What about a testimonial?
If you try to regulate this, everything will be an ad in disguise.
In my opinion, that's the direction we are heading towards with AI anyway.
I'm surprised we haven't seen an instance of 'pay to increase bias towards my product in training' yet.
I think you can get most of the benefit by just banning targeted advertising.
Require that every user must be shown the exact same ads (probabilistically). Don't allow any kind of interest or demographic based targeting for paid content.
Advertisers would still be able to place Ads on pages they know there target audience goes, but wouldn't be able to make those same Ads follow that target audience around the internet.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-145:041 reply Yes, a user in GA should be shown an ad for a car dealership in Hawaii…
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-145:522 reply Okay what if I am in Florida and Facebook sees that all of my posts are in Spanish, should it not be allowed to target me with Spanish speaking ads?
By arter45 2026-02-149:04 If the ads content depends on a social media company seeing your posts and analyzing them, it’s probably fair to say it’s targeted advertising.
Browsers typically send Accept-Language headers so you could easily return ads in languages matching that header, without having to analyze your posts.
It’s like switching on to a Spanish TV channel and getting Spanish speaking ads. It’s not targeted because you are signalling you probably understand Spanish.
Correct. The proposal is to not be able to use your posts to determine which ads to show. But showing you ads in Spanish because you’re in southern Florida or Puerto Rico would be acceptable.
By phire 2026-02-146:22 Such a law will probably allow targeting based on the browser's language (browsers already send a "Accept-Language" field, doxing you with every single http request), or whatever language you have configured a website/app interface to be shown in.
But not guess a language based on the content of posts.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1413:461 reply Are we also going to target in app advertising? If not, every website will just tell you you must use their app
In this hypothetical scenario, why are you assuming in-app advertising would be any different from browser advertising? Re-read @phire’s comment above; the proposal was to get rid of targeted advertising that uses your personal data to make advertising decisions. I assumed that would apply to all advertising channels, including both web and in-app ads, otherwise you’d be right and it probably wouldn’t work.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1416:411 reply Are you also going to ban websites that aren’t hosted by the US from being seen in the US that have advertising?
Why are you assuming that the hosting locale is even relevant? I’m not going to ban anything, but if @phire’s idea was law, it would probably ban anything advertiser from choosing which ads to show you based on your personal data. It’s irrelevant where the ads or site is hosted, I assume. If ads from foreign countries don’t target individuals, their ads would be legal. If ads from foreign countries, or from the US, use your posts to choose which ads they think you’ll engage with, that wouldn’t be allowed under @phire’s proposal. Is @phire’s suggestion confusing?
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1417:581 reply How are you going to police foreign countries? If they don’t comply are you going to tell ISPs they must block any foreign site that has targeted ads?
I don’t know, maybe by not showing the targeted ads? By putting legal liability on the US based advertising channels & distributors? By making it illegal for US sites to share an individual’s tracking and history information with advertisers? I can imagine a lot of ways this might work.
Again, why are foreign sites relevant, and why does this idea seem hard to grasp?
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1419:591 reply Because the internet exists outside of the US and you can get to foreign sites on the Internet?
Do we tell US companies they can’t buy advertising on foreign sites and that those foreign sites can’t be accesed from the US?
We have an existence proof of what happens when a government tries to restrict what people can see on the internet. I live in one of the states that require porn sites to validate ID. If you add all of the sites that ignored the law completely and all of the sites that you can access via a VPN, the number you get is 100%
We also have an existence proof that region-specific laws can change web advertising practices globally with the GDPR.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1421:071 reply The only thing that the GDPR has done outside of the EU is annoying cookie banners.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1423:211 reply How has the GDPR changed the practices of any company outside of the EU? If you think the GDPR and cookie banners on every website is an argument for more government regulating, is that the argument you really want to be making?
Nearly all large U.S. corporations adhere to the data retention rules and right to delete GDPR rules for EU citizens because they also operate in the EU, and nearly all of them proactively adhere to the GDPR for US citizens just to keep things simpler. Fixating on cookie banners is naive. Here’s just one example: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/governance/
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-156:50 Counterpoint: how is the DMCA affecting companies outside of the EU? Companies didn’t care about the right to delete, it didn’t affect their profits.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-146:251 reply But I don’t speak Spanish and I’m in Florida…
Isn’t hearing some Spanish from time to time expected in Miami, whether you speak it or not? I expect to hear Spanish and I live nowhere near a coast… And you prefer that advertisers read through your posts/emails/history/everything to make ads targeted at you? If you don’t care about the risks of targeted advertising, and don’t agree with the EU’s decision to ban manipulative behavior, then the proposal we’re discussing maybe isn’t for you. But at least consider that having an ads language setting is not ruled out by this idea, so if you can’t stand Spanish, then you can have your ads in English without the advertisers reading all your posts.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1417:141 reply I know some Spanish. But if I were an advertiser, I wouldn’t want to waste my money on ad impressions on people who couldn’t understand a word I was saying. I also as a business person who targets Spanish speaking people - like you know immigration assistance or when mask thugs think I’m here illegally when I was born in Puerto Rico (hypothetically).
So what if I have a website based out of the counter and accept advertisements? Are you going to tell ISPs to block those foreign websites?
Let me tell you a little story. The state I live in just passed a law requiring all porn sites to verify age. Guess how many porn sites not based in the US ignored the law entirely? Guess how many who did folks the law can be viewed over a VPN? If you guessed “lesser than 100% between both, you would be wrong.
Obviously sites not based in the US don’t have to follow US laws. And obviously using a VPN circumvents local laws. Again, I’m not going to do any of this, but you answered your own question: one way the US could enforce this would be to require ISPs to block targeted advertising, regardless of where the originating site is located.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1421:081 reply So now we are going to put up the “Great Firewall of America” to protect Americans from those evil foreign advertisers?
You really like where this is going?
No, that’s a straw man. For the fifth(?) time, whether it’s foreign or not is irrelevant, and only you suggested they’re evil. The criteria proposed was whether it’s targeted based on personal content or not, and I’m not alone in not liking where we already are in terms of privacy. Are you suggesting that we need to protect foreign advertiser’s rights to your personal content so they can target ads personalized for you? Why? Are you a foreign advertiser?
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-152:431 reply No I’m saying that how do you stop American companies from buying ads from foreign companies that Americans can get to?
Again I gave you an example of what happens when you try to regulate the Internet - porn companies completely ignoring Florida law?
People accessing sites in other countries via VPN proves absolutely nothing. We are talking about what would happen on US based sites like Google and YouTube, sites that don’t and can’t ignore US law.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-156:51 They could declare domicile overseas and still sell ads to American countries? You know the Internet is international right?
By terminalshort 2026-02-146:211 reply How will they know where their target audience goes if there is no tracking?
By kaibee 2026-02-146:39 Use 0.01% of brain power? How is it that Fox News always has the buy/sell gold ads? Hyper-segmenting society into advertising bubbles is about the same as if you hyper-segmented your body into cell clumps. You need unintentional cross-pollination, otherwise there is no more society.
By fooker 2026-02-143:32 Good policy in my opinion.
By intended 2026-02-143:28 Going too far - laws state that if you were paid for a testimonial by a firm, or if the firm provided the service or product you disclose / it counts as paid endorsements /
You don’t need to go too far down the rabbit hole. You need to introduce friction to ads.
Subscription revenues are tiny when compared ad revenue, so I expect people will resist this idea ferociously.
By NeutralCrane 2026-02-145:012 reply Paying someone for promoting your product or message. I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Talking about your own product on the internet is fine. Paying to promote your message wouldn’t be. TikTok and Reddit and Instagram aren’t trying to keep people endlessly scrolling because they are free-speech fanatics. It entirely comes down to “more time in app = more revenue”. Take away that monetization method and you take away the single incentive that has driven virtually every dark pattern that has developed in social media in the last two decades.
But what if I rent a space on your website that I can fill however I want? And then, coincidentally, I praise my products on that rented space. How is that different from... other hosting offers?
By direwolf20 2026-02-1415:27 Judges and juries are people with common sense, not robots you can easily trick. What did you advertise to clients? It would still be legal to host someone else's content; it would have to be clearly marked as theirs. None of this nonsense where newspapers rent out sections of their website and brand name to advertising companies (IIRC Forbes Business is this — a completely different company renting a sub–URL and sub–brand)
By terminalshort 2026-02-146:221 reply Subscription based services have exactly the same incentive to increase engagement.
By Paradigma11 2026-02-1410:33 No, they have diametrically opposite incentives. They want you to pay the subscription without using their resources. Like a fitness studio.
By AmbroseBierce 2026-02-143:171 reply What counts as pornography? What counts as art? What counts as music? Please, yeah we know, we absolutely know categorization is hard, doesn't mean there is no benefit in having them and shaping them as we go.
By fooker 2026-02-143:33 You'll see that none of these things are banned unilaterally.
Interestingly, there are autocratic governments who do try to ban vague things. The goal there is selective enforcement, not good public policy.
Thats too vague and drastic, every "show HN" is an ads, for notoriety at least. I would prefer we draw the line at "content pushed by a third party against payment must be displaid only with regard to where it is displaid and must not use information about to whom it is displaid" .
I.e displaying an ads about Sentry on a ads technica page, find . Displaying an ads about hiking equipment on ars techbica because i made a google search abd it is estimated I like that -> not fine. It would kill all the incentive to overtrack the ROI will no more justify the cost.
By NeutralCrane 2026-02-144:48 Show HN isn’t advertising in the sense they are addressing: paying a website for space to promote something. There’s no payment taking place with Show HN. If no payment can be made, websites have to find another revenue model besides advertising, and don’t have an incentive to keep users addicted and endlessly consuming.
By SecretDreams 2026-02-144:023 reply Nah, advertisement in general. Just make the internet a paid sub. We don't need influencers or snake oil ads. And without ads and influencers, there is no reason for meta to try to keep people infinitely stuck to their phones. They can get their cut just from a paid sub.
By ashdksnndck 2026-02-144:48 Netflix (even before they introduced ads) optimized for watch time. Higher watch time = higher retention for subscriptions (even when prices go up).
By ThunderSizzle 2026-02-1411:281 reply Every website would then become a snake oil salesman for buying their subscription.
It'd be like streaming today. Fragmented, expensive, and useless. And no one would like it.
Beyond that, websites would still need people to be addicted to justify the sub.
And furthermore, "sponsorships" will still occur behind the sub wall.
By SecretDreams 2026-02-1416:02 What was the internet like in the early days before monetization? (Hint: I was there and it was great, albeit slow on dial up =]).
By jama211 2026-02-147:04 Are we wishcasting here or suggesting realistic policy?
By mmonaghan 2026-02-1418:00 I don't think this changes the dynamic one bit. Every subscription product still optimizes for engagement. Then there's the free speech aspect - sure it's easy to say "we don't want to see cigarette ads"- what about your local mom n pop restaurant buying ads to try and get more people to eat in?
The primordial domino tile is human nature, which you're not going to knock over. The solution is probably closer to what China does - punish companies that don't prioritize/train algos to prioritize the values we hold dear. Basically, just keep beating meta and bytedance until they decide to get their timelines out of the politics game and into the education game, for example, or the democracy game, or whatever your country's main issues are.
I think there's definitely room to regulate "divisiveness" though, and that's a little clearer than "addictive design".
By hirenj 2026-02-149:55 Even better, don’t ban it, but require companies to do age verification (above a certain age?) before displaying advertising. You get two wins in one: make the child market less attractive for algorithmic feeds, and you also can get a better product (no algorithmic feeds) without ads if you don’t age verify. Win-win situation!
By thesmtsolver2 2026-02-1323:5111 reply How will you ban that without infringing on free speech. That is a thing in the US and a lot of countries outside the EU.
"Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever.
Could one not categorize material published in a book, magazine, or on television as 'commercial speech', liable to restrictive licensing and censorship? This seems like a slippery slope which the USA is on the correct side of.
Commercial speech is not the same as advertising.
The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product.
By nickff 2026-02-141:45 I agree that commercial speech is not the same as advertising, but the comment I replied to was talking about restricting commercial speech, not advertising.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-140:283 reply I'm kind of curious how people think a new business should make its existence known to prospective customers.
It's 2026.
We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media.
We can have reviews, genuine, in websites.
We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships.
We can search on our own initiative and go to their website.
We can have online catalogs.
And tons of other ways.
By tomnipotent 2026-02-141:332 reply And not a single one of these is tenable, even when combined. How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place? Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.
Tenable for what, global business? Many local businesses do fine without advertising and/or using these methods.
Making global business harder and forcing things more local actually sounds like a great benefit.
I'm all for that as well.
We could use less 1T companies and more a few billion or 100s of millions level companies too. I miss the "focused on Mac and iPod" era Apple.
By Matticus_Rex 2026-02-143:52 Banning advertising would have the opposite effect; entrenched players would have a massive moat. The biggest gains from advertising by far accrue to newer entrants, not the big companies.
By tomnipotent 2026-02-1418:021 reply Everything single one of those local businesses is also doing advertising, and is probably how you found them in the first place. They're buying local newspaper adverts, using flyers, or participating in valpaks/coupon mailers.
Actually all of those sound fine to me... I guess it's really just Internet advertising that feels wrong to me, especially when they try to fill in as the source of revenue themselves rather than a means to drive revenue for the main product.
By tomnipotent 2026-02-1419:56 It's understandable, but it's a position that doesn't consider the large swathe of lower-income households that have access to goods and services subsidized through ads (much of my family). I know it's not a position most of HN seems to be sympathetic with, but for many ad-supported services, including Netflix and Spotify, would be inaccessible without ads. My family can't afford to go out to movies regularly, or spend money out at restaurants, or go on vacation (ever), but they still deserve some leisure time and entertainment and a non-trivial percentage of the market is funded through ads.
The idea that we should eliminate that because a higher-income bracket of consumers is inconvenienced by ads just comes across oddly haughty and privelaged to me.
Heck, I wouldn't have my successful career today if it wasn't for the ad-supported ISP NetZero CD I came stumbled upon in 1999.
>How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place?
The follow industry conventions, visit registries of industry websites, have professional lists where companies submit their announcements (and not to the general public) and so on.
>Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.
If advertising is banned, it will work just as good as for any competitor.
By tomnipotent 2026-02-1418:06 That's a lovely fantasy, but there's a graveyard of failed businesses that didn't make it because customers couldn't find them.
By BurningFrog 2026-02-142:29 They don't think of that. At all.
Many don't think businesses should exist in the first place.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-140:472 reply That assumes the customer is aware that the product exists.
It only assumes they are aware that the category of products exists, and ordinary word-of-mouth communication is sufficient to propagate that knowledge.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-141:012 reply How does word-of-mouth communication propagate knowledge that is currently in the possession of zero existing customers? Or operate for products that people have little reason to discuss with other people?
Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
People don't need to discuss specific products, they only need to be aware of the existence of product categories. If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands.
The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-141:551 reply > If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands.
Now all of the "brought to you by America's <industry group>" ads are back in. So is every pharma ad and every other patented product because they don't have to tell you a brand when there is only one producer.
> The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs.
Publication where? In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"? Also, who decides to publish it, decides what it will say or pays the costs of writing and distributing it?
An industry group is not a disinterested party. Minimum competition requirements can be imposed. As I said elsewhere in the thread, a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-143:071 reply > An industry group is not a disinterested party.
No, but they can convince a disinterested party that people aren't aware of <fact about industry that industry wants people to know> because that's actually true.
> Minimum competition requirements can be imposed.
But that brings back the original problem. Company invents new patented invention, how does anybody find out about it?
> a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.
This is the legislator's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.
If a proposal is full of problems and holes, the alternative isn't necessarily to do nothing, but rather to find a different approach to the problem.
Proposals that are full of holes are often worse than nothing, because the costs are evaluated in comparison to the ostensible benefit, but then in practice you get only a fraction of the benefit because of the holes. And then people say "well a little is better than nothing" while not accounting for the fact that weighing all of the costs against only a fraction of the benefit has left you underwater.
Advertising causes great harm. Banning advertising, or better yet, making it economically nonviable without restricting freedom of speech, solves this problem. As already pointed out by several other posts in this thread, the purported benefits of advertising are already available through non-harmful means.
But I acknowledge that there may be edge cases. My point is that the existence of edge cases does not mean we should permit the harm to continue. Those specific edge cases can be identified and patched. My suggestion is a hypothetical example of a potential such patch, one that might possibly be a net benefit. Maybe it would actually be a net harm, and the restriction should be absolute. The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Your objections to this hypothetical example are nit-picking the edge cases of an edge case. They're so insignificant in comparison to the potential harm reduction of preventing advertising that they can be safely ignored.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-144:33 No, the problem is that the "edge cases" will swallow the rule if you make an exception for every instance where advertising is actually serving a purpose, but if you don't make those exceptions then you would have created so many new problems or require so many patches that each carry its own overhead and opportunity for cheating or corruption that the costs would vastly exceed the benefits.
> The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Only it turned out to be an example to illustrate how patching the edge cases might be a quagmire.
By coldtea 2026-02-141:24 >Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
The same legit things that can cause them to realize it today. Word of mouth, a product review, a personal search that landed them on a new company website, a curated catalog (as long as those things are not selling their placements).
An ad is the worse thing to find such things out - the huge majority ranges from misleading to criminally misleading to bullshit.
By bdangubic 2026-02-142:37 how did business do before the internet?! assuming people bought things before we had the internet?
By BurningFrog 2026-02-142:28 You make your feelings clear, but don't give any arguments for it.
That won't convince anyone.
By phyzix5761 2026-02-144:251 reply 99.9% of businesses in the US are considered small businesses. If we look at all the businesses in the world small businesses make up an even larger percentage. In most parts of the world these are people with 0-5 employees; meaning they're just families and individuals trying to make ends meet.
If you remove the ability for these people to advertise there goes their livelihood. I understand the desire to want to punish big evil corporations but all this will do is strengthen them because they're the ones who have enough capital to survive something like this and scoop up the marketshare left behind by the millions of small businesses that will fail when this is implemented.
By NeutralCrane 2026-02-145:061 reply 99.9% of small businesses do little to no advertising. I can’t recall seeing an ad for a single one of the small businesses I am a customer of. 99.9% of ads I get are for megacorporations and national brands.
By phyzix5761 2026-02-148:53 I know people who do moderation for the advertising side of social platforms and they say that more than half of the advertising submissions are done by small businesses. They said that the estimate is around 90% of small businesses use internet advertising in some capacity. There's a bidding mechanism, though, so more big business ads may be shown; especially if you live in a populated region. But that's just a numbers game.
True, you can't separate ads vs sponsored content quite easily.
but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking.
Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.
Magazines made it work for decades.
Websites can too.
If you know the kind of articles your readers like, you can find ads that your readers will like.
By andwur 2026-02-143:48 It's amusing that after all this time and (hundreds of?) billions of dollars invested in adtech I still find the adverts in old magazines far more relevant and compelling than any of the "personalised" adverts of today. The industry as a whole has missed the forest for the trees by over-fitting their systems; I might be interested in the broader category, or a tangentially related one, but at no point do I want to see the exact same product I was looking at a day ago on every ad. I didn't buy it then for a reason, so I'm not buying it now.
Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit.
Free speech is a thing in the EU too.
To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it.
The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions.
The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-right...
> "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
> Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections:
In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law?
The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both.
But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is.
I can definitely imagine the Soviet Union making arbitrary rules about which genocides were recognized and ‘protected’, and which were not.
But can you imagine a Soviet court declaring a law to be in violation of human rights?
Yes, much like the EU, they would regularly over-ride the ‘opinions’ of their subordinate states.
By skissane 2026-02-145:02 The central party and state organs in Moscow would sometimes overrule decisions by the governments of the SSRs and other subordinate entities. But they didn't do this by having the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union declare laws unconstitutional. They did it by administrative fiat.
By terminalshort 2026-02-146:31 The European Court of Human Rights has upheld a conviction on the charge of blasphemy for calling Mohammed a pedophile: https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/e-s-v-a...
By admadguy 2026-02-1323:53 Outside of US free speech isn't the carte blanche it is stateside. There are guardrails, there are limitations pretty much everywhere else. Even in the US This militant application is fairly recent, post 1980s.
>How will you ban that without infringing on free speech
You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
By TMWNN 2026-02-150:43 >Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules.
The FCC regulates airwaves (and thus broadcast stations/networks), because the broadcast spectrum is a shared resource with bandwidth limits. The FCC similarly regulates cable television systems. The FCC does not regulate cable-only television networks.
Easy: free speech was never meant for and fought for advertising. Any judicial body who says otherwise is bullshiting people.
Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.
By terminalshort 2026-02-146:32 A restriction on prostitution is absolutely a restriction on reproductive rights, but there is no such right in the constitution.
It would be worth a try to outlaw compensation for advertising. The spirit of free speech is usually that you aren’t being paid for it.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-140:413 reply Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?
The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols?
By jason_oster 2026-02-142:541 reply Advertising is a monetary transaction between an advertiser and a publisher. The customer (or product) is not involved in the transaction; it is their attention that is being bought and sold.
That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-143:171 reply You're contrasting authorship with distribution. The advertising equivalent to paying a technical writer is paying an ad agency to create the ad. The customer isn't a party to that transaction either.
But now how are you distributing either of them?
By jason_oster 2026-02-144:341 reply I am not making such an error. Paying a technical writer for labor is not the same as paying a publisher for conversions. The scenario you posed was "hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it." Those are two parties, each of which is paid independently for services rendered. The customer is not selling their attention, here. The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.
Advertising is not distribution. Publishing is distribution, and advertising sometimes comes along for the ride.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-145:191 reply The proposal was to "outlaw compensation for advertising". That would presumably include paying people to create ads and not just to publish them, hence the first example. What you're arguing is that the first example is different from the second one, but they were intended to be, because they map to two different parts of the process.
> The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.
Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
And then the question is, how do they get it? There are many ways to distribute. They could pay to print it out on paper and put it in the lobby in their corporate offices, but then customers would have to come to their corporate headquarters to get it, which most won't do, so obviously some methods of distribution have a higher likelihood of being seen. Then companies will prefer the ones that allow them to be seen more.
But they're paying someone for any of them, so "is paying for it" isn't a useful way to distinguish them.
And then we're back to, suppose you pay Facebook to host your documents on your company's Facebook page. Furthermore suppose that they, like most hosting companies, charge you more money if you get more traffic. Meanwhile their "hosting customers" on the "free tier" (i.e. ordinary Facebook users) have a very small quota which is really only enough for their posts to be seen by their own friends. So paying them for distribution -- like paying for any other form of distribution -- causes your documents to have better visibility. Now you can show up in the feed of more people before you run out of quota, just like paying more for hosting means more people could visit your website before you exceed your transfer allowance.
How do you tell if someone is paying for computing resources or eyeballs when the same company provides both? Notice that "don't let them do both" is a bit of a problem if you also don't let them sell advertising, because if they can't sell ads or charge for using the service then what are they doing for revenue?
By jason_oster 2026-02-145:361 reply Indeed, advertisers would layoff or displace their marketing teams, as the role would have no value to the company if advertising was outlawed (meanwhile, technical writers would be just fine). I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing the framing you put forth that equates advertising with technical writing.
> Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
I agree with this statement, but it is irrelevant. The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing.
The test is quite simple: Is the sole purpose of the payment to make a sale? If so, it is advertising.
We don't really need to discuss documents any longer. Documentation is not an advertisement.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-155:051 reply > Indeed, advertisers would layoff or displace their marketing teams, as the role would have no value to the company if advertising was outlawed
They would obviously redeploy them to drafting or working to influence whatever means exists that still allows them to get new customers.
> The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing.
This is like saying the primary purpose of advertising is to display media content.
The only purpose of the entire company is to make a sale. They ship the product from the factory to retail stores because that makes more sales than requiring the customer to come to the factory. They write documentation because more customers are willing to buy a product with documentation. And the documentation carefully portrays the product in a favorable light and directs customers to the company's own offerings -- how often do you see a commercial product's documentation recommending that the customer use a competitor's product under circumstances when that would actually be to the customer's advantage?
Meanwhile advertising also has secondary functions as well, like informing customers of product features they might not have been aware of, or informing them of risks or drawbacks of competing products, or providing active rather than passive notification for time-sensitive information like that a sale is happening, etc.
By jason_oster 2026-02-1520:561 reply > This is like saying the primary purpose of advertising is to display media content.
No, the only purpose - and therefore the primary purpose - of advertising is to make a sale.
You are arguing economics. And while that is a valid stance, it is not the only point of view. You might even be arguing that word of mouth is advertising. That doesn't fit the definition of paying some party with an expectation of a larger return. That's the only part of advertising that needs to be addressed (e.g., banned or reformed). The part that is most harmful. Word of mouth and other means of non-exploitative ways to gain customers are completely reasonable.
You're trying to weasel your way to finding some inescapable loophole for some reason that I cannot understand. There's no need to protect predatory behavior like advertising.
> how often do you see a commercial product's documentation recommending that the customer use a competitor's product under circumstances when that would actually be to the customer's advantage?
Since you are really digging into semantics, here, I'll bite. The documentation doesn't need to explicitly say this. It implies that the product's feature set may not fit the user's needs by their very descriptions. The user will go to a competitor on their own accord when those features do not meet their needs.
> Meanwhile advertising also has secondary functions as well, like informing customers of product features they might not have been aware of, or informing them of risks or drawbacks of competing products, or providing active rather than passive notification for time-sensitive information like that a sale is happening, etc.
The products themselves do that. The company's website, brochure, or product catalog have the information. They don't need to broadcast the widest net possible with the MicroMachines guy speedrunning their feature list to fit a 60-second ad spot. In fact, ads have such space and time constraints that the pertinent information literally cannot fit the allocation. Ads can only give very brief and very high level tidbits. It's a terrible model for information dispersal.
On the other hand, infomercials are 30 or 60 minute advertisements that tend to repeat the same thing ad infinitum. There's only so much you can say about knives, sunglasses, or exercise equipment. And yet, we have QVC. But here's the thing: I don't have to watch QVC. QVC isn't embedded into every website.
Although, plenty of low effort news sites really like to pin an autoplay video to the corner of my screen when I scroll down. These are nuisances. Somebody paying someone else to force me to watch or read something in the hopes that I will make a purchase. No. Just no. There's a good reason popups have been blocked on browsers by default for 20 years. Advertising is overly aggressive, and the margins are so piss poor that publishers are effectively getting ripped off by ad revenue. It's insulting to publishers and much worse to consumers.
At least on Twitch, the largest contributors to a streamer's income are donations, subscriptions, bits, and Twitch Turbo viewers. Possibly in that order. Ads are worth practically nothing.
Shroud is one of the most highly paid streamers on Twitch/YouTube. He recently described that his YouTube ad revenue nets between $5,000-$9,000 per month [1]. This might seem like a lot, but his gross income is estimated to be up to $10 million to $12 million per year [2]. YouTube ads account for approximately between 0.5% and 1% of his income.
Smaller publishers (e.g., content creators) don't even break double digit ad revenues per month [3].
Please, stop defending advertising. It is indefensible. It's bad for everyone.
[1]: https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/shroud-leaks-youtube-revenue...
[2]: https://www.msn.com/en-in/sports/other/michael-grzesiek-s-ne...
[3]: https://www.mogul.club/blogposts/how-much-do-twitch-streamer...
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-165:311 reply > No, the only purpose - and therefore the primary purpose - of advertising is to make a sale.
Even this isn't true. There are ads like this whose purpose is to encourage girls to learn to code:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o5fd7l2Uz0
In general there is the entire category of issue advertising where someone is trying to convince someone to do something rather than buy something. Non-profits also advertise to solicit donations, without which they would have a lot of trouble existing.
There are also ads for things like jobs where they're trying to hire someone rather than sell something and it's easier for everyone for the employer to take out a help wanted ad and the job-seeker to read the help wanted section than for everyone who wants a job to each try to identify who is hiring by visiting the listings page of every company in the world. In modern day people use job search sites rather than newspaper classified sections, but those are the same thing -- the revenue of those sites is from listings or placement, i.e. the listings are ads, and if they weren't charging for that they would have no revenue to cover their expenses. Even Craigslist charges for job postings and car listings etc. and indeed that's how even they keep the lights on.
Likewise, eBay is an advertising company by your definition. You pay them in order to make a sale, they display the ad for your product on their website in exchange for money. Are we banning eBay, or how are you going to distinguish it from Facebook Marketplace?
> Word of mouth and other means of non-exploitative ways to gain customers are completely reasonable.
That's pretty quickly going to lead to atroturfing which is even worse than advertising because at least ads tell you they're ads.
> The documentation doesn't need to explicitly say this. It implies that the product's feature set may not fit the user's needs by their very descriptions. The user will go to a competitor on their own accord when those features do not meet their needs.
Would you accept that line of reasoning if it was applied to "advertising"? The company knows better than a neophyte prospective customer the areas where their product is lacking or a competitor's is superior and is choosing to tell you the things that benefit them and not the things that don't.
> They don't need to broadcast the widest net possible with the MicroMachines guy speedrunning their feature list to fit a 60-second ad spot.
What if sometimes they do?
Suppose you overstocked some product and you need to get it out of your warehouse to make room for other products that will be delivered next week. So you lower the price, and you can publish the lower price on your website, but you need prospective customers to know about the lower price right now, not in six months when they next visit your website, because you need that stuff out of your warehouse in the next 7 days. And they need to know about the lower price right now because that stock will only be available for a week, so checking the website twice a year would cause them to miss the discounted price. So how do you make thousands of prospective customers aware of a time-sensitive discount without making them check prices every day?
> Advertising is overly aggressive
That seems like a different problem, i.e. you need a better ad blocker rather than a ban on advertising.
> the margins are so piss poor that publishers are effectively getting ripped off by ad revenue.
This again seems like a separate problem. Nobody is requiring publishers to use advertising instead of charging for subscriptions in order for companies to be able to buy ads on search engines or billboards or television.
By jason_oster 2026-02-1622:52 Sorry for the wall of text. This is going to be really bad to read on mobile. I should probably be more selective about how I reply to the points raised, but it was hard to leave some stones unturned.
> Even this isn't true. There are ads like this whose purpose is to encourage girls to learn to code:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o5fd7l2Uz0
Not an ad. They aren't paying the publisher (YouTube) to advertise the service.
This is the biggest issue I have with this thread. You are conflating "everything can advertise things" with the harmful behavior of paying for the privilege to place an advertisement in what is generally unrelated content. I'm aware that everything can advertise, and I'm unconcerned with that.
> There are also ads for things like jobs where they're trying to hire someone rather than sell something and it's easier for everyone for the employer to take out a help wanted ad and the job-seeker to read the help wanted section than for everyone who wants a job to each try to identify who is hiring by visiting the listings page of every company in the world.
Classified ads are in a different realm entirely. If you want to find a list of businesses that are hiring or a list of contractors willing to work, what better way than going to a classified ads directory? The act of intentionally looking for a directory is different from product placement and promotions. The latter are things that just materialize out of greed because advertisers want to steal attention away from the task the consumer intended.
In my book, advertisers could continue paying for all the classified ads they want! I don't have to look at the classifieds. They aren't being blasted to my screen or landing in my inbox until I intentionally go looking for them.
Alright, so the simple definition could use some work if exceptions like classified ads are wanted. (I'm not opposed to banning them, too, but what the heck. Let's complicate matters for no good reason.) Add some more constraints like, "Is the advertising embedded into content that is not solely a directory of ads?" until satisfied.
Eventually, it will contain so many exceptions that it will be useless. Which is perhaps your point. But I reject that point because I would just ban all ads without exception. No problem.
> Likewise, eBay is an advertising company by your definition. You pay them in order to make a sale, they display the ad for your product on their website in exchange for money. Are we banning eBay, or how are you going to distinguish it from Facebook Marketplace?
eBay is not an advertising company by the definition. eBay charges sellers to sell on the eBay platform. That is a service charge. Consumers must go to eBay to find things they wish to buy. The advertising part comes in from sellers who advertise by promoting their products in search results.
eBay is much closer to a brick-and-mortar retail store than an advertising company.
I know most people agree with the statement that "Google is an advertising company". But it's hard for me to fully accept that framing. Google has email, document storage, YouTube, phones, and hundreds of services and products that are not advertising. The fact that their primary revenue stream is siphoning from advertisers is concerning. But that doesn't make Google an advertising company. They mostly act as a publisher in that relationship. They also take a cut off the top of other publishers through AdSense and related advertising products.
> because at least ads tell you they're ads.
Yeah, that wasn't always the case. FTC's Dot Com Disclosures guide was originally written in 2000 and significantly updated in 2013. It's been more than 12 years since, and publishers are still trying to make ads appear "more natural" in content feeds, blurring the lines between disclosure and deception [4].
If you still have a landline, telemarketers are relentless and many of them to do say who they are advertising for, even if they are required. (My first job was in telemarketing as a teenager. I lasted one whole week before quitting. This might have something to do with my absolute opposition to advertising. Who knows.)
> Would you accept that line of reasoning if it was applied to "advertising"? The company knows better than a neophyte prospective customer the areas where their product is lacking or a competitor's is superior and is choosing to tell you the things that benefit them and not the things that don't.
I am unsure what you are asking. Companies always want to make themselves look better than competitors. Which is why their technical documentation reads the way it does. (E.g. not saying "don't use Acme products!" or "our product is superior to Acme's!") So, I agree with you, but I don't see how this line of reasoning applies to advertising.
Ads are incentivized to say things like "better than the leading brand" because the short form content doesn't give a lot of room to provide actual sustenance. Is that what you are getting at?
> What if sometimes they do?
First of all, "not my problem". But realistically, if I overstocked a product that isn't selling, that's a good teachable moment. A wise conclusion would be to not overstock risky investments in the future.
As for how to correct it without advertising your horde to every possible consumer, there are a few options. 1) Make it all someone else's problem. Sell it in bulk at a discount to a liquidator, bin store, or auction house. 2) Put the products into more marketplaces. eBay, Amazon, Newegg, even Wal-Mart has a marketplace [3] you can sell on. 3) File it as a loss and trash it. Landfills are filled with unsold goods. That's a cost of chasing the consumerism dream on the back of advertising.
Secondly, if the company is selling this stock on their own website, as you posed in this scenario, they can do all of the "SALE!" advertising on their own website that they want. This is like seeing "SALE!" signs when you go to Wal-Mart. You expect to see those inside Wal-Mart. You don't expect to see them in restaurants, on the sides of buildings and buses, or while reading the news. Let me make a small correction: I don't expect to see "SALE!" signs in places that are unrelated to buying whatever product is on sale. That's the problem to solve. Always has been.
> That seems like a different problem, i.e. you need a better ad blocker rather than a ban on advertising.
Ad blockers are sufficient for removing ads. I don't have a gap in my capability to block ads, including aggressive ads. I just hate ads. There is a gap with devices outside of my control, however. Some of those gaps can be covered by blocking at the network layer. Some cannot.
But are we really having this conversation? I'm the problem, not advertising? That gives me a lot more credibility/accountability than I would expect! I am in fact not more powerful than global syndication. So, I can't be the problem.
The fact that ads are overly aggressive is not my fault. Nor is it my problem that I have already blocked them all. My problem is that I just don't want ads polluting otherwise good spaces for leisure or intellectual pursuit. That's it. Ad pollution = bad.
> This again seems like a separate problem. Nobody is requiring publishers to use advertising instead of charging for subscriptions in order for companies to be able to buy ads on search engines or billboards or television.
Not a different problem. Same problem. Twitch [1] and YouTube [2] do not give content creators a means of opting out of running ads.
Search engines are publishers, and advertisers pay them to promote their products in search results. Billboards are built on private land, and advertisers pay the landowners to advertise on their billboards. These are the same business model. Publishers take a small cut and advertisers hope to take a big cut. But in some cases ([1] and [2]), Twitch and YouTube are the publishers, the content creators are not the publishers in these "forced-ads" relationships. (There are cases where the content creators are the publishers. E.g., becoming a parter to take a small cut of an already small payment for ad revenue; the Shroud case we explored earlier in the thread. And sponsored segments.) Twitch and YouTube take all of the ad revenue. That's the Google/Facebook model, lovingly referred to as enshittification.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/1j0k99n/comment/mff...
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube...
[3]: https://marketplace.walmart.com/
[4]: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-tests-new-ad-display...
>Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?
Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when there's no payment or compensation of any kind involved for that.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-141:451 reply It's a corporation though. It can't do anything without paying someone to do it, unless someone volunteers to do it for free, which isn't very likely. And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that.
>And how do you self-host distribution?
You have your own website and your copy on it. Don't start that "but if you pay some hosting provider to host that website that would be advertising", or the
"And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that."
that borders on being obtuse on purpose.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-142:111 reply If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone, and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.
>If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone
Yes. You're still allowed to pay someone - for YOUR OWN corporate website. Still your copy is not on my fucking social media, news websites, forums, tv programming, and so on.
>and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.
They can go into the hosting business all they want. If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law. What they host should only be accessible when somebody consciously navigates to it in some hierarchical scheme or directly enters the address/handle.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-143:261 reply > If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law.
They're already hosting everything in your feed, and if there were actually no ads then everyone on the site would be paying them to do it, at which point what do you expect to be in your feed?
There are legal definitions of advertising, I’m sure the courts will be able to figure it out.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-141:102 reply The "legal definition of advertising" is the thing you have to write into the law you want to enact. If you can't answer the question as the proponent of the proposal then how is a judge expected to do it?
What the parent is getting at is it's not a mystery, such definitions already exist in all kinds of jurisdictions.
In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended.
We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-141:341 reply > Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it.
That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.
> We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
>That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.
Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. I'd take a relative improvement even if it's not 100% over free reign.
>You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
I don't consider it a "hopeless disaster" (except in it's effects on society). As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. The existence of dark illegal versions of it, or exploitation in the industry, doesn't negate this.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-142:59 > Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective.
For the most part they're trash. There is a narrow range of effectiveness where the cost of compliance is low and thereby can be exceeded by the expected cost of reasonable penalties imposed at something significantly less than 100% effective enforcement, e.g. essentially all gas stations stopped selling leaded gasoline because unleaded gasoline isn't that much more expensive.
The cost of complying with a ban on advertising is high, so the amount of effort that will be put into bypassing it will be high, which is the situation where that doesn't work.
> As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations.
It essentially bifurcated content creation and distribution into "this is 100% porn" and "this company will not produce or carry anything that would cause it to have to comply with those rules" which inhibits quality for anything that has to go in the "porn" box and pressures anything in the "not porn" box to be sufficiently nerfed that they don't have to hire more lawyers.
The combination of "most human communication now happens via social media" and "expressing your own sexuality is effectively banned on most major social media platforms" is probably a significant contributor to the fact that people are having less sex now and the fertility rate is continuing to decline. "All the boobs you could ever possibly look at but only on the sites where there is no one you will ever marry" is not a super great way to split up the internet.
The ambiguity in the definition frequently causes people to be harassed or subject to legal risk when doing sex education, anatomy, etc. when they're trying to operate openly with a physical presence in a relevant jurisdiction. Conversely, it's the internet and it's global so every terrible thing you'd want to protect anyone from is all still out there and most of the rules are imposing useless costs for no benefits, or worse, causing things to end up in places where there are no rules, not even the ones that have nothing to do with sex.
It's now being used as an guise to extract ID from everyone for surveillance purposes.
It's a solid example of bad regulations setting fire to the omnishambles.
By layer8 2026-02-144:02 I’m saying that these definitions already exist, and are being appllied by courts. It’s not a novel concept. I’m also not interested in arguing about exact definitions. We all know well enough what an ad is, in particular the kind we don’t want to see when browsing the web. My main point was to illustrate how I don’t consider this to be a free speech issue.
By terminalshort 2026-02-146:331 reply The spirit of free speech is that I can say whatever I damn well please for any purpose that suits me including that someone paid me to.
By layer8 2026-02-1414:02 I would dispute that.
You don't need to ban advertising, you just need to ban paying for advertising. That doesn't harm free speech. When there's no money to be made the problem will sort itself out.
By initramfs2 2026-02-141:112 reply That's gonna probably just create a bunch of loopholes or hacks like paying with favors instead of cash
Loopholes can be addressed on a case-by-case basis. A solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem completely unaddressed.
By MBCook 2026-02-141:34 This by the way is my understanding of why the EU writes laws the way they do.
If they just banned infinite scrolling someone would come up with something equivalent that works slightly differently. Now they need a whole new law. It’s just constant whack-a-mole.
So instead they seem to ban goals. Your thing accomplishes that goal? It’s banned.
It’s a pretty different way than how we seem to do things in the US. But I can see upsides.
By coldtea 2026-02-141:30 That's the same in every domain when there's a profit. Doesn't mean laws and bans don't reduce the related activity dramatically.
Ok, then I don't pay you for advertising. On an entirely unrelated note, could I buy a spot on your website(e.g. at the top) to put a piece of my own website on it? You have a news website, right? And I also have some news to share.
By paltor 2026-02-1414:19 I don't think that would be much different from "renting a billboard to place whatever you want on it".
If what you put up on that billboard is an ad, then it's advertising and would be covered. If not, it wouldn't. So you could rent a spot on the website, but you couldn't put promotions on it.
This would be distinct from ordinary web hosting because you're not just renting a space on a site, you're also renting exposure (a spot on some other website).
Sure, you could probably find edge cases - "what if I put a table of contents on my page with every page URL on every site on my web host on it" - but the distinction would be clear most of the time.
By WinstonSmith84 2026-02-140:04 I'm not following the relationship - because you'd have to pay, thus it's not "free" speech? It's hard to argue that having to pay a minimal fee (of let's say $1 per month) would be something against free speech. But the payment shall remain anonymous obviously.
By whackernews 2026-02-140:46 What are you on about? Who’s speech? The speech of a massive multinational corporation? No thanks. I want the freedom to browse without getting pointless products shoved down my throat.
I'd say the first amendment is due for an overhaul anyway for a variety of reasons. (Heck, the whole constitution is.)
By initramfs2 2026-02-141:111 reply You can't say something like that and refuse to elaborate
By BrenBarn 2026-02-149:47 Sure I can, we've got free speech. :-)
By whackernews 2026-02-140:481 reply Which parts specifically?
Obvious examples of negative consequences of the first amendment include the profusion of false and misleading advertising, the scourge of political campaign spending, and the disastrous firehouse of misinformation being pushed out in various online forums. The idea that an abstract carte blanche for free speech outweighs those real and present ills is misguided. At the same time, we see that the limitation to only protection from government action enables effective quelling of speech by private actors.
At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.
By bigstrat2003 2026-02-143:081 reply I think you would find that the cure is far, far worse than the disease. We speak of rights, and those are important, but there's also a very important practical reason why we have freedom of speech: because you cannot trust that future government officials will stick to banning speech that is justly banned. Once you open that door, sooner or later someone is going to start abusing the power. How would you like it if the Trump administration was able to (with complete legality) declare that claims Biden fairly won the 2020 election are "misinformation", and punish people who make those claims? Or if you're a Trump guy, how would you like it if the next Democrat administration declared it to be "misinformation" to claim that Trump fairly won the same election, and punish people for it?
The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal.
By BrenBarn 2026-02-147:12 The thing is that that same argument can be used to justify just about anything. If the scum of the earth is in power, they will ignore whatever rights you thought you had put into the constitution anyway. We are seeing that now. And I am already cursing the day that we decided on the restrictions we currently have. The Trump administration is declaring with complete legality that Trump won the 2020 election and is punishing people who believe that. Right now they're not taking the direct route, but it's abundantly clear that government power is being used to punish people who say things that Trump doesn't like.
There is no way of listing rights on paper that can protect you if truly evil people get into power. But there are ways of listing rights on paper that can allow good people who believe in those rights to defend them in ways that involve preventing evil people from getting into power. Free speech is not a magic bullet in either direction.
Perfect idea, the internet should only be for rich people. After all, who cares about the 50% of the planet that can barely afford a coffee? Or the millions of small businesses that are only able to survive because of targeted ads? Fuck 'em all, because people can't be trusted to use their own devices properly!
By coldtea 2026-02-141:17 Poor people pay more for ads (as part of product price), and suffer more because of ads (from misleading advertising for shit products like junk food and drugs, to having certain out of reach lifestyles based on purchasing crap they don't need hammered on them and getting in debt). They also pay with having a worse media landscape, worse social media, and many more (not to mention the influece big companies with big spending budgets get).
People would also be better of without 90% of the ad-driven internet.
By mrob 2026-02-141:19 Plain text with no tracking is cheaper than coffee.
This is a brilliant idea, really, but unfotunately it is not a fit for the society we have constructed so far. There are little to no governments around which would willingly hit the brakes on Consumerism — it is having a hypnotic effect on the people they herd as well as being very profitable for them
By permo-w 2026-02-1413:52 And it's part owner of the forces keeping fundamentalist religion under wraps too. Why fight over god when you can fight over your football team or your games console or your phone brand or your car
By permo-w 2026-02-1413:49 The major loss would be Youtube. Youtube is possibly the greatest educational tool the world has ever seen. Yeah there's some bad stuff, but you want to know how to do almost anything from tying your shoelaces to building a mega laser first-hand from an expert, and watch it be done? It's on Youtube, for free. Remove advertising and it dies and all of that goes with it. Even if the EU, say, buy it off Google and take it into public ownership, which the US government very probably wouldn't allow and also isn't really part of the EU's philosophy, you're still going to have to continuously pay creators for their work and hosting costs, forever. Otherwise I think it's a great idea. Maybe just carve out an exception for educational content
By virgildotcodes 2026-02-147:194 reply I’ll probably be crucified for this but I think the free w/advertising model is not fundamentally evil, and gives poor people access to lots of shit that they otherwise wouldn’t have, keeps the rest of us from death by 1,000 monthly subscriptions.
By AlecSchueler 2026-02-147:251 reply > gives poor people access to lots of shit that they otherwise wouldn’t have
Addiction is a precursor to poverty. If we accept the domino theory of "online advertising -> addictive design" then the fundamental evil becomes clear. Holding people in poverty in order to profit from their time and attention.
But the most valuable ad targets are people with money unless my product specifically targets low-income individuals (pay day lenders, etc).
By ndriscoll 2026-02-1412:53 Most of the people I know with money are difficult to convince to spend it. e.g. rich people don't buy designer bags; poor people do. My wife makes all of our food; we do delivery or go out to eat maybe once every year or two. We have no recurring subscriptions (other than utilities). Our phone bill is $20 for both of us. etc.
We also live in an area where outdoor ads are banned (which tends to be the case in wealthy areas IME), and I block ads on our computers, so we rarely encounter them. Consumerism is gauche.
By AlecSchueler 2026-02-147:56 I think that's debatable, there's arguments like quantity over quality to be made, but I also think it's somewhat beside the point of "ad supported services are a favour to the poor."
By saalweachter 2026-02-1411:46 Which is why a lot of things are moving to "pay w/ ads". Not only do you get paid twice, your ad space is more valuable because you've weeded out the people who can't pay.
By mschild 2026-02-147:28 I agree. I think the main problem is personalized advertisement that incentivizes companies to record as much data as possible. I'd prefer if they worked like they do in print magazines. Every reader sees the same.
Lets say I'm reading a laptop review. Show me adds from the laptop manufacturer or of websites that sell said laptop. People reading the review are likely in the market for a laptop so it makes sense to show it. At most you could probably narrow it down to the country so a German doesn't get shown a Best Buy ad but thats as far as I would go.
By CuriousSkeptic 2026-02-1410:29 > death by 1,000 monthly subscriptions
Is another area needing new legislation. Changes to copyright, interoperability requirements and such, we can change more than one parameter
By thfuran 2026-02-147:56 >I think the free w/advertising model is not fundamentally evil
I think it's fundamentally anti-competitive.
By phyzix5761 2026-02-144:14 If these companies fail because their quality isn't good enough to support paid subscribers isn't that effectively the same thing as people choosing to not use their platform?
Those of us who dislike these practices already have a choice. We can simply not use the service. So why remove that choice from others who don't mind ads and are willing to use the free version?
Also, forcing a paid only model raises the barrier to entry. Most of the world lives on less than $10 a day, so a subscription would effectively limit access to relatively wealthy people by global standards.
By thaumasiotes 2026-02-1412:17 > They'd need to change their top priority from "maximizing engagement by fostering addictive behavior" to "offering a product with enough quality for someone to pay a fee in order to be able to use it".
You know, we used to have Flash games that were free to play and ad supported.
With the iPhone, those died, and now we have mobile games that support themselves with microtransactions.
The method of collecting fees on the games was to lower their quality, not to raise it.
There has never been a mass information medium to survive on subscriptions. This includes everything since news papers in the 18th century.
By dehrmann 2026-02-142:47 Maybe this would be the nudge people need, but there are a handful of well-researched, reputable newspapers out there that you can subscribe to and support quality journalism. For the most part, people don't. They'd rather have entertainment news for free with ads than quality journalism they pay for.
By derektank 2026-02-144:37 You don’t even have to move towards a full ban. Instead, simply tax companies that offer ads in proportion to how long users spend on their site. This will naturally encourage websites to get users in, experience whatever content it is that they’re offering ads against, and then GTFO.
By amelius 2026-02-1412:30 Yes, and advertising drives mass overconsumption. So banning it will solve problems in that area too.
By normie3000 2026-02-142:41 How would you ban advertising? Would astroturfing be banned? Would LLM-assisted astroturfing be banned?
Using an ad-blocker gets rid of most visible ads online, but there's still paid content in various forms which may be more effective than straight adverts anyway.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-144:59 So for the people who couldn’t afford it? Let them eat cake?
Are you going to put up a “Great Firewall of America” to keep non US sites advertising sites from being seen by US citizens? Are you going to stop podcasts from advertising?
By fsflover 2026-02-1411:54 > banning advertising on the Internet
This. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
By cyanydeez 2026-02-1416:06 Wpuldnt it be better just to create a .noad ICANN domain and let see if that gets any traction?
By jaredklewis 2026-02-152:28 I’m sympathetic, but I think this idea seems pretty clearly a political non-starter.
“Good news voters! You now have to pay for your email, search engines, and social media accounts.” Privacy and healthy digital habits are issues dear to my heart and issues that I think are gaining some modest traction, but they just can’t compete with a core pocketbook issues like making everything cost more. In the US, we just elected a guy that campaigned on, among other things, ending democracy, because (at least according to some political pundits) egg prices went up under Biden.
“But you pay that cost now, it’s just hidden!” I know, I know. But that doesn’t strike me as a politically winning argument. It’s like trying to explain to people that inflation is ok as long as if in adjusted terms wages outpace it; technically correct, but a political loser.
I would be happy to be wrong of course.
By thfuran 2026-02-147:51 Not just the internet. Ban third-party advertising everywhere.
By kaycey2022 2026-02-141:432 reply If you want to ban something, then ban free social media. There has to be a minimum charge like 100$ or something a month (keep it tax free for all I care), to access any social media service with more than a 1000 members.
By kuschku 2026-02-142:10 Microfiction:
Today, on June 1st 2030, I'd like to announce the launch of the fediverse cooperative, the first cooperative social media platform.
We pay out all our membership fees (minus hosting costs) to our entire cooperative.
To use our servers, you'll obviously have to become member of our cooperative, paying $100 a month in membership fees, and earning $99.50 a month in dividends.
By charcircuit 2026-02-144:43 How does one start a new social media network in that world? Cover the $100 fee, essentially making it free to use? It would kill any competitors from being created, at least until inflation makes $100 worthless.
By samrus 2026-02-1411:49 Positively luddian proposal. I kinda like it
By yallpendantools 2026-02-140:304 reply Ads per se are not evil. The motherfucker we'd want to shoot, however, is targeted advertising and especially those that rely on harvested user data.
In a sense, I'm just agreeing with a fellow comment in the vicinity of this thread that said GDPR is already the EU's shot at banning (targeted) ads---it's just implemented piss-poorly. Personally formulated, my sentiment is that GDPR as it stands today is a step in the right direction towards scaling back advertisement overreach but we have a long way to go still.
Ofc it's impossible to blanket ban targeted ads because at best you end up in a philosophical argument about what counts as "targeting", at worse you either (a) indiscriminately kill a whole industry with a lot of collateral casualties or (b) just make internet advertising even worse for all of us.
My position here is that ads can be fine if they
1. are even somewhat relevant to me.
2. didn't harvest user data to target me.
3. are not annoyingly placed.
4. are not malware vectors/do not hijack your experience with dark patterns when you do click them.
To be super clear on the kind of guy talking from his soapbox here: I only browse YT on a browser with ad blockers but I don't mind sponsor segments in the videos I watch. They're a small annoyance but IMO trying to skip them is already a bigger annoyance hence why I don't even bother at all. That said, I've never converted from eyeball to even customer from sponsor segments.
I'd call this the "pre-algorithmic" advertising approach. It's how your eyeballs crossed ads in the 90s and IMO if we can impose this approach/model in the internet, then we can strike a good balance of having corporations make money off the internet and keeping the internet healthy.
By magarnicle 2026-02-142:391 reply Yeah I want my cake and to eat it too. I get annoyed when ads are irrelevant to me, and I get creeped out when they are too relevant.
I want to be able to browse the internet for free, where the sites have a sustainable business model and can therefore make high-quality content, but I don't want to have to sign up to a subscription for everything.
I want to be able to host websites that get lots of views, but I don't want that popularity to cost me.
Can someone please come up with something that solves all of these dilemmas for me?
By magarnicle 2026-02-158:13 I realise this comes across as a sarcastic defence of ads. It's sincere - I don't like ads but I want everything the provide.
By jason_oster 2026-02-143:291 reply Ads are mostly evil. No one said that ads were inherently evil. It's bad enough that ads are mostly evil.
Let's be clear what we mean by "evil". My time is valuable. I have a finite number of heartbeats before I die. If I have to spend 30 seconds watching a damn soap commercial before I get to watch a Twitch stream, that's 36 heartbeats I will never get back. Sure, I could press mute and do something else for 30 seconds that seems more valuable, but that doesn't fit my schedule. Stealing heartbeats is evil.
I have so far optimized against wasting my heartbeats by paying subscriptions to remove ads. Spotify, Twitch, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting. Because it's worth $150/month or whatever to not waste my time with the most boring, uninteresting, irrelevant, nauseating crap that advertisers come up with.
And thank science for SponsorBlock, because sponsored segments in videos are the devil. Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model. They pay publishers practically nothing because they aren't paying for conversions, but for an estimate based on impressions and track record woo. Bad for publishers, bad for advertisers, and bad for content consumers. Everybody loses. I'm well over my lifetime quota of BS from VPNs, MOBAs, and plots of land scams. So many heartbeats lost.
By yallpendantools 2026-02-154:221 reply The parent post I was replying to:
> banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions.
You, jason_oster, a clown:
> Ads are mostly evil. No one said that ads were inherently evil. It's bad enough that ads are mostly evil.
Also you in the same clown breath:
> sponsored segments in videos are the devil. Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model.
I'd lol but I'm already lmao.
> Stealing heartbeats is evil.
Appeals to emotion like that, you not only have a prospect in stand-up comedy but a long and prosperous career in political communications, if not being a politician yourself. Your two skill sets complement each other rather nicely judging by the current zeitgeist.
The only way someone could steal your heartbeat (or, frankly, anything) is if they made it unavailable to you. If your heartbeat were unavailable to you for the length of time you mentioned, you'd be dead. The only thing you should worry about stealing your heartbeat is your diet (and that includes diet coke) and sedentary lifestyle. You can't blame ads on this one.
I'll grant you a good faith interpretation of your Valentine's-worthy sentimentality. Replace "heartbeats" with "time" or "attention" and you have an argument at least worth considering.
But the thing is, you can't really prevent spending these resources; they tick away regardless. You can only choose where and how to spend them to make it meaningful. Your time is there to be spent, your attention exists to be called. All I'm really advocating for is that ads be moderated so they don't detract from anything else unfairly. Ads are information too and we need information to function. And like any form of information, they only become toxic and detrimental if they purport to be any more important than they really are.
That said, it makes your example all the more ridiculous, complaining about a thirty second ad when you are about to, excuse me, watch a livestream which would eat at your set amount of time/attention/heartbeat in far greater magnitude.
> Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model. They pay publishers practically nothing because they aren't paying for conversions, but for an estimate based on impressions and track record woo.
You also seem horribly misinformed about how sponsored segments work. Sponsorships are tracked heavily though differently. That's why they always ask you to use their sign-up/discount code or click the link in the description. It's how publishers/content creators prove to advertisers the reach of their channel.
Go watch some ads so you can make an informed opinion on them yeah? It won't kill you and I then wouldn't have to respond to gasp human-generated slop post. Pepsi had some banger ones in the 2000s.
In conclusion, this all really reminds me of my favorite poem:
> Hey, Jason Oster, quit your bullshit
> Stop pulling things out of your ass!
> You won't find gold there
> Just shit and curly pubes
Not quite Shakespeare but rolls off the tongue quite nicely, especially that last line.
By jason_oster 2026-02-1511:06 Crass and futility irate. What an unusual way to engage. It wouldn’t hurt to moderate your tone.
The thing about sponsored segments is that they pay publishers much less than what they would make with microtransactions. A 1 cent tip per viewer would be 100 times more lucrative than any ad placement.
But it sounds like you want to do some more explaining.
By MBCook 2026-02-141:43 I’ve never figured out what I think advertising should be. I currently do basically everything I can to get rid of it in my life.
I’m totally fine with outlining targeted advertising. But even classic broadcast stuff poses the dilemma for me.
I have absolutely noticed I miss out some. As an easy example I don’t tend to know about new TV shows or movies that I might like the way I used to. There’s never that serendipity where you were watching the show and all of a sudden a trailer from a movie comes on and you say “What is THAT? I’ve got to see that.”
Maybe some restaurant I like is moving into the area. Maybe some product I used to like is now back on the market. It really can be useful.
Sure the information is still out there and I could seek it out, but I don’t.
On the other hand I do not miss being assaulted with pharmaceutical ads, scam products, junk food ads, whatever the latest McDonald’s toy is, my local car dealerships yelling at me, and so much other trash.
I’ve never figured out how someone could draw a line to allow the useful parts of advertising without the bad parts.
“You’re only allowed to show a picture of your product, say its name, and a five word description of what it’s for”.
Nothing like that is gonna be workable.
Such a hard problem.
what if ads were displayed only on request? “hi, ad page, I need some shoes, let’s go!”
By knowriju 2026-02-141:17 So basically what Google & Amazon does and ban what Meta & Apple does ?
Banning ads is not possible.
But we can build a culture that knows how to avoid ads and the technology to enable it.
By foxygen 2026-02-144:03 Don't you realize that those with money are the ones who have the means to build a culture? How do you propose we compete with Jeffrey Epsteins who have a shit-ton of money to spend on pushing whatever narrative they want to? Just look around and see the "culture" we're in.
By alsetmusic 2026-02-145:06 I agree with you. Advertising corrupts companies. It’s also annoying and I hate it.
I don’t know how we’d ban advertising without impinging on free speech laws in the USA, where a lot of huge companies reside.
How would you do it?
By iamacyborg 2026-02-1323:461 reply They already effectively banned the mechanism behind most online advertising with the GDPR, it’s just been really, really poorly enforced.
By biztos 2026-02-140:12 So much so that one wonders whether that was the point.
Make a lot of noise about privacy, force massive spend in the general direction of the EU, fund a new layer of bureaucracy, and actually do nothing to harm the toxic business models that were nominally the impetus for all this. Because someone’s gotta pay for all this new “privacy” infrastructure…
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2026-02-1422:151 reply Thankfully that absurd comment about "vibes" dropped from the top spot
"It's the primordial domino tile."
FWIW, I believe this is correct
However when using the term "banning" this needs to be placed in context; advertising might be "banned" only in certain circumstances.. Mind you, advertising has been banned whole cloth from computer networks in the past. It is still banned on many computer networks.^1 Before the internet (an interconnected network of computer networks) opened to the public there was a rule, i.e., policy, against advertising
A better term than "banning" might be simply "regulating". Online advertising is not regulated in the same way that advertising is regulated on billboards, in print publications, radio or television. For example, regulating the time (electoral campaigns), place (billboards), subject matter (cigarettes)
Whenever this topic comes up on HN, it draws inane replies about people being unable to distinguish advertising from anything else
But there is zero evidence to support this theory in practice. Everyone knows what advertising is, and how to identify it. That's why and how people are capable of complaining about it
Even this forum, Hacker News, places limits on advertising. YC may promote its participating companies but others are generally not permitted to advertise. Submissions that are deemed to be ads are killed. If advertising was undefinable, then how is HN able to define it
If advertising was impossible to define then how could anyone design a so-called "ad blocker"
1. If advertising were undefinable then why would any computer network have a "Network Use Policy" that prohibited using the network for disseminting advertising
The suggestion that advertising is undefinable, that either everything is advertising or nothing is advertising, is pure nonsense
It's only when the subject of tampering with the sole "business model" of the so-called "tech" company having nothing else to sell, or the means of substinence for the low quality website operator republishing public information in pages crammed full of ads and tracking, that HN commenters try to argue that advertising is beyond definition
A large percentage of internet users, perhaps a majority, have never experienced the internet without ads. Hence it may be difficult for these people to understand the place of advertising on a computer network. Let's be clear, originally, there was _no place for it_
Some people alive today did experience the internet without ads. Sadly, many of them are now engaged in providing internet advertising services for financial gain. Others are not. I'm in the later category
Some of the loudest voices defending internet advertising will be people in the former category. They have cashed in at every internet user's expense
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2026-02-154:11 s/disseminting/disseminating
s/substinence/subsistence
By jama211 2026-02-147:04 lol good luck with that
By almostdeadguy 2026-02-140:35 Can I get an amen.
By burnto 2026-02-141:36 That’s a thought-provoking suggestion. Most services would go out of business, and there would be a cascade of change. I wonder what would remain?
Isn't this the standard EU way? First, they publish a statement, declaring what they want to see. 'Deal with addictive design', in this case. We've had 'Deal with the zillion different connectors on cell phones' in the past. It is now up to the industry to do this, in whatever way they see fit. If this happens, no law will be written. However, if the industry doesn't deal with it adequately, Laws will Follow, and the industry will not like them.
European companies know this pattern, and tend to get the hint. US companies tend to try and maximize what they can get while claiming there is no law against it, then go very pikachu-faced when the consequences hit them.
By paulddraper 2026-02-1417:281 reply > claiming there is no law against it
Is there a law against it?
No, that's the entire point.
There's a strong hint that something's wrong, and that good corporate citizens would change course and try to become positive forces for the world.
Or else.
By paulddraper 2026-02-1422:04 Ah is sounded like it was claimed but incorrect
>The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes"
This is not such an unusual thing in law, as much as us stem-brained people want legal systems to work like code. The most famous example is determining art vs pornography - "I know it when I see it" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)
By rambambram 2026-02-1413:59 This exactly. The post you reply to implies they have discovered something very novel, which they did not. I don't remember which ancient king it was, but they already tried thousands of years ago to make codes of law with every situation described in it. They failed. Just leave the final interpretation to the judge, and let the politicians make broad laws (in good faith, I hope).
> as much as us stem-brained people want legal systems to work like code
I see this a lot on HN, and it makes sense to think like this if you're a programmer. It's also a sign these programmers should open up their world view a bit more.
By idiotsecant 2026-02-1323:531 reply Which is of course the only way it makes sense to write laws, since code can't model infinite reality.
Not, at least, until our machine overlords arrive.
By wellf 2026-02-142:36 Not just reality. Adversaries trying to find loopholes. Luckily the git history of law goes back millenia so its had some time to adapt to humans.
"I know it when I see it" notoriously does not work in law, either. Instead, we have the Miller test.
By johannes1234321 2026-02-140:161 reply > The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
The issue is: If you do a precise wording of what you don't want a lawyer will go through it wird by word and the company finds a way to build something which violated the spirit, but not the exact wording. By being more generic in the wording they can reach such cases and future development with very little oversight for later corrections and courts can interpret the intention and current state of art.
There are areas where law has to be precise (calculation of tax, criteria for criminal offenses, permissions for authorities, ...), but in many cases good laws are just as precise as needed and as flexible as possible.
By piva00 2026-02-1415:26 I think it's a general misunderstanding of Americans about other law systems, the American way of codifying laws leaves a lot of loopholes (intentionally or unintentionally) due to it being a game to be played, the spirit of the law is second to the letter of the law. They expect precise and well-defined constraints in the letter of the law.
Most European countries, and the EU as a legislative body, work with the premise of the spirit of the law. It is less precise and requires real world judgment to determine its boundaries but it can be much harder to side-step with technicalities and "gotchas" using loopholes in the letter of the law.
It's just a different system, in my opinion it's less exploitable even though it's riskier. I prefer the spirit of the law to be defended instead of a whole system of gaming technicalities, really don't like the whole vibe of playing Munchkin the USA has in its legal system. Makes some good legal drama though.
By randomNumber7 2026-02-1323:355 reply Life is complex and beautiful and trying to regulate every possible outcome beforehand just makes it boring and depressing.
We should just let people with overwhelming amounts of money research and fund new ways to trick people's lizard brains into giving them even more money.
If you’re going to organize your society around the theory that humans don’t actually possess free will, you’re going to produce a fair number of outcomes that a classical liberal would find abhorrent.
By mrob 2026-02-141:33 It's only assuming that free will requires effort to exert. They shouldn't be required to waste that effort on defending themselves from attempts to trick them into buying things they don't need.
By jbxntuehineoh 2026-02-143:53 Yeah, good, okay
By keybored 2026-02-1414:49 The reason why we are even talking about it is what they said: people with a lot, lot of resources can prey on people. What’s one individual against an industry of psychological research?
But yet again we can’t do anything about it because it would interfere with the freedoms of corporations, effectively. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46870147
By replooda 2026-02-140:05 People aren't lizards, however. You demonstrate that by engaging in the distinctly unlizardlike behavior of employing a false dichotomy to imply the opposite.
By Unai 2026-02-141:59 Laws should protect what's beautiful about life. And life is less beautiful when trillion dollar companies abuse the human nature to extract value, damaging society and individuals for the benefit of the very few.
By ApolloFortyNine 2026-02-1323:521 reply What it does is allow for selective enforcement, making it possible to go after any company at will.
When rules are vague enough you can pretty much always find a rule someone is 'breaking' depending on how you argue it.
It's why countries don't just have a single law that says "don't be evil".
By idiotsecant 2026-02-1323:542 reply No, that's what case law is for. Modelling the zillion little details. One party claims something breaks a law another claims it doesn't, and then we decide which is true. The only alternative is an infinitely detailed law.
By dredmorbius 2026-02-142:481 reply Case law, also known as common law, is a British legal tradition. Most of the EU does not follow the common law tradition. There may be supreme courts, but the notion of binding precedent, or stare decisis as in the US legal system does not exist. Appeal and Supreme court decisions may be referenced in future cases, but don't establish precedent.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent>
The equivalent doctrine under a civil legal system (most of mainland Europe) is jurisprudence constante, in which "if a court has adjudicated a consistent line of cases that arrive at the same holdings using sound reasoning, then the previous decisions are highly persuasive but not controlling on issues of law" (from above Wikipedia link). See:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence_constante>
Interestingly, neither the principle of Judicial Review (in which laws may be voided by US courts) or stare decisis are grounded in either the US Constitution or specific legislation. The first emerged from Marbury v. Madison (1803), heard by the US Supreme Court (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison>), and the second is simply grounded in legal tradition, though dating to the British legal system. Both could be voided, possibly through legislation, definitely by Constitutional amendment. Or through further legal decisions by the courts themselves.
Yeah I'm really glad we don't have common law where I live. It makes the law way too complicated by having all these precedents play a role. If the law is not specific enough we just fix it.
Also it breaks the trias politica in my opinion. Case in point: the way the Supreme Court plays politics in the US. It shouldn't really matter what judge you pick, their job is to apply the law. But it matters one hell of a lot in the US and they've basically become legislators.
>Case in point: the way the Supreme Court plays politics in the US.
Ah yes, since controversy over how judges decide only exists in the US.
In any case, you're confusing cause and effect.
The US system of having legislators approve/reject nominated judges is not the norm elsewhere. The only restrictions on choices for the Canadian Supreme Court are a) being a member of the bar for 10 years, and b) having three judges being from Quebec; otherwise, whoever the PM chooses becomes one of the nine sitting judges on the court. End of story.
If the Canadian Parliament had to give an up/down vote for a nominee, there would absolutely be far more attention paid to each nominee's opinions and qualifications ... and far more attention paid to that nominee's subsequent decisions.
> Ah yes, since controversy over how judges decide only exists in the US.
Well, pretty much, yes. I've not lived in a country where judges really differ that much. And usually we don't even know their political affiliation. Because it really doesn't matter. This goes even for our supreme court (we call it the high council). Which isn't really that important to our daily lives anyway. They are just a last resort when people can't stop appealing.
In Holland they also don't rule on big things like this. They're not allowed to play politics. Just to apply the law in specific cases only. Something like the supreme court deciding to overturn abortion legalisation is really unthinkable. Besides, if they rule on one case it has zero effect on anyone else, because we don't have precedent-based common law. This is exactly the kind of issue I have with common law.
> The US system of having legislators approve/reject nominated judges is not the norm elsewhere. The only restrictions on choices for the Canadian Supreme Court are a) being a member of the bar for 10 years, and b) having three judges being from Quebec; otherwise, whoever the PM chooses becomes one of the nine sitting judges on the court. End of story.
Isn't that a similar process to the US? Basically the currently ruling party gets to pick the supreme court judges. There's congress validation but they rarely would take the pick of the non-majority party.
Though in our case we don't really have a 'ruling party'. We have many parties and one is never enough to gain a majority so there's always a complicated coalition. It is a bit of a stumbling block forming a government but I abhor the first-past-the-post system like in the US because it makes politics a zero-sum game: A loss for one party is a win for the other. That stimulates dirty politics, smearing, and of course there's the risk of a bunch of nutcases coming to power and nothing being able to be done about that. Most of our governments collapse before their 4 years are up and in most cases this was not a bad thing (especially our last one that was full of populists, they were definitely a ton of nutcases and they didn't manage to stick it out a year before they collapsed in infighting lol).
By TMWNN 2026-02-162:59 >Isn't that a similar process to the US? Basically the currently ruling party gets to pick the supreme court judges.
The US Senate must approve all federal judges (among many federal posts, including the cabinet). If the president's party does not have a majority in the Senate, that means the president must nominate someone that at least some Senators from another party will vote for.
In Canada, UK, etc., whoever the PM says will be a judge becomes a judge; Parliament has absolutely no control over the process.
>Something like the supreme court deciding to overturn abortion legalisation is really unthinkable.
You seem to think—likely based on Reddit and Dutch reporters that just copy whatever the New York Times and Washington Post say—that abortion is "illegal in the US". The Dobbs decision in 2022 reversed the Supreme Court's own 1973 decision in Roe that abruptly voided all state laws banning abortion of any kind. In Dobbs, the court ruled that it had exceeded its remit, and returned the ability to legislate on abortion to the individual states.
By sophrosyne42 2026-02-141:29 No, case law is when the interpretation of the law is ambiguous in specific cases where the law as written intends for a specific meaning.
This is different, it is intentionally ambiguous precisely so bureaucrats get to choose winners and losers instead of consumers.
But how do you stop the boring and depressing - and abusive and manipulative parts?
I'm not saying legislation is a good solution but you seem to be making a poetic plea that benefits the abusers.
By saidinesh5 2026-02-1323:552 reply >I'm not saying legislation is a good solution but you seem to be making a poetic plea that benefits the abusers.
Only if you believe everyone else has no agency of their own. I think most people outgrow these things once they have something more interesting in their lives. Or once they're just bored.
Back when this thing was new, everyone was posting pictures of every food item they try, every place they've been to etc.. that seems to slowly change to now where there are a lot more passive consumers compared to a few polished producers.
If you're calling people delivering the content "abusers", what would you call people creating the content for the same machine?
I don't believe people have no agency.
But I do believe we overestimate our own agency. Or more importantly society is often structured on the assumption that we have more agency then we actually do.
By fatherwavelet 2026-02-1415:37 We have agency but it is almost trivial to hijack.
Setting up the argument between agency/no agency misses the point IMO.
By 2muchcoffeeman 2026-02-140:331 reply because some people suffer from mental health issues and need help and encouragement to break these behaviours.
And companies should not be allowed to predate on the vulnerable.
where does it stop though? I suffer from cant-stop-eating-nutella but should we shut down ferrero? it is simply not possible to protect the vulnerable in a free society. any protection only gives power into the wrong hands and will eventually get weaponized to protect “vulnerable” (e.g. our kids from learning math cause some ruling party likes their future voters dumb)
By 2muchcoffeeman 2026-02-144:562 reply Dumb argument. They don’t intentionally make Nutella addictive and then test out recipes on the public to make it even more addictive. Other people can’t stop eating ice cream or oranges or salami.
By TeMPOraL 2026-02-1410:03 Except that's sort of... exactly what they do.
The food industry has pretty much invented the whole process of making "addictive" products and then "test[ing] out recipes on the public to make it even more addictive". Of course, we usually call it making products that taste good, and running taste panels with the public for product development (making a new tasty thing), quality control (ensuring the tasty thing stays tasty), and market research (discovering even tastier things to make in the future). Each part of it employs all kinds of specialists (and yes, those too - nutrition psychology is a thing).
The process is the same. The difference between "optimized for taste" and "addictive" isn't exactly clear-cut, at least not until someone starts adding heroin to the product (and of the two, it's not the software industry that's been routinely accused of it just for being too good at this job).
Not defending social media here in any way. Cause and effect is known these days, and in digital everything is faster and more pronounced. And ironically, I don't even agree with GP either! I think that individuals have much less agency than GP would like it, and at the same time, that social media is not some uniquely evil and uniquely strong way to abuse people, but closer to new superstimulus we're only starting to develop social immunity to.
By bdangubic 2026-02-170:06 Nothing like reading Dumb argument followed by the dumbest sentence I've read here this month (which is ... something :) )
By randomNumber7 2026-02-1323:52 I would say the core problem is that we lack a goal as society. If you only care about making money stuff like this happens regardless how many regulations you do.
By samrus 2026-02-1411:56 Yeah. I would have liked to have fun with all that asbestos in my walls
I thought about it for only a few seconds, but here is one way to do it. Have users self-report an "addiction factor", then fine the company based on the aggregate score using a progressive scale.
There is obviously a lot of detail to work out here-- which specific question do you ask users, who administers the survey, what function do you use scale the fines, etc. But this would force the companies to pay for the addiction externality without prescribing any specific feature changes they'd need to make.
By zestyping 2026-02-1419:50 I like this approach.
Specifying the requirement in terms of measured impact is a good strategy because it motivates the app companies to do the research and find effective ways to address addiction, not just replace specific addictive UI patterns with different addictive UI patterns.
Building measurement into the law also produces a metric for how well the law is working and helps inform improvements to the law.
And what about games that are actually just great fun? That would be easy to confuse with addictive, right?
By zestyping 2026-02-1420:17 The important indicator is "I spend more time on this than I myself want to." That applies equally well to games or anything else.
By bjackman 2026-02-1410:29 The thing is, I doubt anyone at TikTok ever says "this design choice is good because it's addictive". Almost certainly, their leadership gives them metrics to target, like watch time, and they just hypyothesise and experiment on changes with those metrics in mind. Almost certainly the design of TikTok is almost entirely emergent. Just like the scientific method is "revealing" truth I think TikTok is just "revealing" the design that maximises its target metrics.
So what we have is a machine designed to optimise for something adjacent to addictiveness, and then some rules saying "you can't design for addictiveness"...
What happens when an underspecified vibe rule clashes with a billion dollar optimisation machine? Surely the machine wins every time? The machine is already defeating every ruleset that it's ever come up against.
Feels like the only way regulation could achieve anything is if it said "you can't build a billion dollar optimisation machine at all".
By astrobe_ 2026-02-1410:26 France is considering a ban on certain social media for minors, and parental consent on all social media for minors under 15, pretty much like Australia. They had work around EU laws that prevented them to force service providers to do things, the trick they used is to make it illegal for those services to let minors register on the platform, because EU law acknowledge that local laws on forbidden content apply.
If this law passes and they "blacklist" some of these design-for-addiction (sorry, "engagement") platforms, I believe it should send a strong signal for adults as well. Most adults are pretty much aware that these platforms are bad for everyone; according to some polls, the public opinion is unambiguously in favor of these laws.
By braiamp 2026-02-1415:28 > "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"
You can't. You don't need to specify how to comply with the law, just that generally a goal must be met. That's good lawmaking there, since it's flexible enough to catch all future potential creatives way to break it. I remember someone comment about how working at MSFT as a compliance officer, dude was going around saying that it's not the letter of the law that must be followed, but the spirit of thereof. They rolled over him and released the product nonetheless. Almost immediately came the EU investigation and that crap had to be reversed an put in accordance to what the stated goal of the law is.
By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-1413:24 > The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes".
That's not really accurate. The EU actually legislated in a way which is very typical of how countries regulate things which are now to carry hard to characterized and varied risks.
Companies have to carry out a risk assessment and take appropriate preventive actions when they find something. The EU audits the assessment. That's how finance has been regulated for ages.
It's all fairly standard I fear.
By Someone 2026-02-148:52 > They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
The EU, in general, phrases laws and regulations more in terms of what they want to accomplish with them than in terms of what you can’t do.
In contrast, common law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law), over time, more or less collects a list of all things you may not do.
By sriku 2026-02-142:40 "what specific laws ...?"
If a company chooses a design and it can be proved through a subpoena of their communications that the design was intended and chosen for its addictive traits, even if there has been no evidence collected for the addictiveness, then the company (or person) can be deemed to have created a design in bad faith to society and penalized for it.
(Well that's my attempt. I tried to apply "innocent until proven guilty" here.)
By roenxi 2026-02-145:22 > My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found...
This doesn't solve the problem though - the enforcers still have to come up with a standard that they will enforce. A line has to be drawn, letting people move the line around based on how they feel today doesn't help. Making the standard uncertain just creates opportunities for corruption and unfairness. I haven't read the actual EU stance on the matter but what you are describing is a reliable way to end up in a soup of bad policy. There needs to be specific rulings on what people can and can't do.
If you can't identify the problem, then you aren't in a position to solve it. Applies to most things. Regulation by vibe-checks is a great way to kill off growth and change - which the EU might think is clever, but the experience over the last few centuries has been that growth and change generally make things better.
And what they actually seem to be doing here is demanding that sites spy on their users and understand their browsing habits which does seem like a terrible approach. I don't see how their demands in that statement align with the idea of the EU promoting digital privacy.
By luplex 2026-02-1413:52 What will probably happen is that someone will develop an industry standard for "non-addictive design" and go around certifying products or product development practices. Like for example, they might disallow optimizing time spent, or they might require more transparency or customizability for your recommendation algorithm.
By RamblingCTO 2026-02-1413:18 Breaking infinite scrolling on these apps is one good step, but for me it's something else that would be more important.
I'm recovering from a surgery and can't do much besides existing. So I'd like to scroll to keep me occupied and numb the pain in my face. But instagram tries to shove content down my throat that I don't want to see. It's always only a matter of time until I see THOT/incel content. No matter how often I click "not interested", they try again and again. If it's not playing genders out against each other, it's politics. It's brain rot. I don't wanna see that. I have interests and they know what they are. But no, they show me this garbage. The algorithms need to be the second thing we need to regulate imho
By henrikschroder 2026-02-149:591 reply I remember the GDPRpocalypse which had a lot of Americans up in arms because of the wildly different approach to lawmaking that the EU has. Everyone on the US side was screaming for a checklist they could implement, and assumed they would get maximum penalties if they didn't cross every t and dot every i. But it just doesn't work like that, EU laws are generally not very procedural, they are a lot more about intent.
These findings are very much in line with that, they bring up a feature, a checkbox, a specific thing TikTok did to pay lip-service to protect minors, and then they're simply saying that it doesn't appear to work. So it doesn't matter that TikTok checked the box and crossed the t.
By anomaly_ 2026-02-1413:26 GDPR is in the process of being unwound by the EU as it has been an unmitigated disaster.
By danpalmer 2026-02-1410:37 This is the EU digital strategy for legislation: vague but reasonable, so that you have to comply with the spirit of the law not the letter of it.
They haven't nailed it every time, but on the whole it's a good approach. It's hard on companies, but rightly so.
By svara 2026-02-148:58 > The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes".
A very common tension in law everywhere.
In the US you now have a 'major questions doctrine'. What the hell is a major question?
Assuming it was "just" about banning infinite scrolling. Not saying it is a good idea, but right now I cannot think of a legitimate use case where you would need it, unless your goal is engagement.
By Springtime 2026-02-141:22 I've seen it used in non-addictive ways for search results (both specialized[1] and generic global search engines) and portfolios (for showcasing work progressively not merely constantly appending content to the end of singularly viewed work like say news sites do now), off the top of my head.
[1] Eg: printables.com (for open source, 3D print files)
By saidinesh5 2026-02-1323:58 Or just help you avoid clicking next next while searching for something you want.
Although there is a special place in hell for those who put a website options for customer care at the bottom of an infinite scrolling page...
By rolph 2026-02-1323:36 a webgame or a document browser, e.g. side scrollers, topdown/bottom up scroller, continuous page view.
But they ain't infinite (I assume). Maybe long, but finite. That is a big difference as it still gives meaning to the scrollbar. Infinite scroll is endlessly adding new content so you simply cannot scroll to the bottom.
By c7b 2026-02-1323:54 Technically, infinite scroll is of course finite, too. Unless it adds newly created content, but if you count that as infinite then logs can be infinite too.
That's exactly why you don't write legislation to ban infinite scroll but 'addictive' design. Then it's ultimately up to the courts to decide, and they have the necessary leeway to judge that journalctl -f isn't addictive but TikTok is, even if they both use a version of infinite scroll.
By nradov 2026-02-141:19 I dunno, have you tried? Maybe you just need to scroll faster.
By rolph 2026-02-1323:37 if your systemlog is very active or very verbose, this will happen.
i do get the idea though. abusive infinate scroll games/exploits, the compulsion to "finish" the feed.
By KPGv2 2026-02-146:54 In the US we often use a "reasonable person" standard to get around trying to write super precise descriptions of things. "don't do X where a reasonable person would think Y."
By johnnyanmac 2026-02-143:50 >My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?".
I'd make the algorithms transparent, then attack clearly unethical methods on a case by case basis. The big thing about facebook in the 2010's was how we weren't aware of how deep its tracking was. When revealed and delved into, it lead to GDRP.
I feel that's the only precision method of keeping thins ethical.
By dakolli 2026-02-145:12 fracture all the services, idc.
3 hrs a day on your phone is equivalent to 15 years of your life (accounting for a 16 hour waking day). I know people that do a solid 6... That's 30 years of their life scrolling, getting their brains completely fried by social media, and soon the infinite jest machine that is generative AI.
Sorry, we don't let people fry their brains with drugs, well we at least try to introduce some societal friction in between users and the act of obtaining said drug.
By bojan 2026-02-149:34 For Discord the regulation is just an excuse to gather as much personal information as possible: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-...
By InsideOutSanta 2026-02-1412:30 Many laws work like that. They don't have very precise definitions of things, but instead depend on what an average, reasonable person would think.
An example of this is contract law. There is no clear definition of what a legal contract must look like. Instead, a contract's validity can depend on whether an average, prudent person would have entered into it in similar circumstances.
By iamflimflam1 2026-02-147:25 This is a classic play book by anyone who is anti regulation. Present it as something that appears to be ludicrous - eg “they are banning infinite scroll!” and rely on the fact that very few people will actually dig any deeper as you’ve already satisfied their need for a bit of rage.
By sophrosyne42 2026-02-141:26 No, this is far worse. This is just a license for bureaucrats to selectively choose winners or losers in social media. Once regulatory capture happens it merely turns into a special privilehe for pre-established businesses or a vehicle for one business to destroy another without outcompeting it
> I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?".
Only allowing algorithmic feeds/recommendations on dedicated subpages to which the user has to navigate, and which are not allowed to integrate viewing the content would be an excellent start IMO.
By trhway 2026-02-1323:45 to me it isn't about addictive design, it is about infinite scrolling jerking/straining my eyes (and thanks to that strain, it brings me back to reality, and i immediately disconnect from the content thus avoiding whatever addiction it could have sucked me in).
That actually makes me think that any page containing addictive design elements should, similar to cigarette warning, carry a blinking, geocities style, header or footer with "WARNING: Ophthalmologist General and Narcologist General warn about dangers of addictive elements on this page".
By ArchieScrivener 2026-02-141:54 In the USA at least, we need a nation specific intranet where everyone on it is verified citizens and businesses where the government cant buy your data but instead is tasked with protecting it, first and foremost, from itself.
No more for profit nets. Time for civil digital infrastructure.
By Waterluvian 2026-02-145:11 > The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
“You know it when you see it.”
By grumbel 2026-02-147:34 > "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"
Expand the GDPR "Right to data portability" to publicly published content for third parties, i.e. open up the protocols so you can have third party clients that themselves can decide how they want to present the data. And add a realtime requirement, since at the moment companies still circumvent the original rule with a "only once every 30 days" limit.
Also add an <advertisment> HTML tag and HTTP header and force companies to declare all their ads in a proper machine readable way.
The core problem with addictive design isn't the addictive design itself, but that it's often the only way to even access the data. And when it comes to communication services that benefit from network effects, that should simply not be allowed.
By kawera 2026-02-1323:59 > having a few large companies to watch over is better than millions of small micro-niche ones
Not necessarily. The consequences of a few bad micro-niche ones would be, well, micro.
By SllX 2026-02-140:37 > It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling, but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it.
If the EU passes a law that seems general but start giving out specific examples ahead of time, they’re outlawing those specific examples. That’s how they work, even if you read the law closely and comply with the letter of the law. And they’ll take a percentage of your global revenue while people shout “malicious compliance” in the virtual streets if they don’t get their way.
I’m trying to think of what use I’d make of infinite scroll that would specifically not be for addictive purposes. Maybe ticket backlogs?
By akersten 2026-02-145:00 I'm also trying to think of what use I'd make of sugar that would specifically not be for addictive purposes. Maybe keeping down medicine?
Point being, the internet is the clutchable pearl de jour for easy political points. There's far more proven addictions and harm elsewhere, but those problems are boring and trodden and don't give a dopamine hit to regulate quite like the rancor that proposals like this drum up. Hey, aren't dopamine hits what they're trying to mediate in the first place?
By direwolf20 2026-02-1412:21 It seems like most EU tech rules are about vibes. Like the well–known GDPR, which doesn't say thou shalt have a cookie popup, but says users shalt notify users and gain their consent for all unnecessary processing of personal data. Websites were the ones that chose to spitefully use cookie popups.
By KolibriFly 2026-02-1417:33 The Commission seems to be saying: not without guardrails
By paulcole 2026-02-144:05 Laws should be strict!
By atoav 2026-02-149:44 I am betting people would quickly ignore the spitit of the law and make it about "inginite scroll verboten" like with the GDPR where some people quickly moved to make it mean "you have to have a cookie banner!"
No you don't have to have a cookie banner. The law means you need to ask for informed consent for each purpose where you collect and or transfer personal data from your users. So (1) if you don't collect the data, you don't have to ask for consent at all and (2) it doesn't matter too much if cookies are involved (or you use some other client side storage for tracking) and (3) you need to have their informed consent, meaning just having them click OK somewhere is absolutely useless unless you explained which data you collect for what purpose. Good luck doing that for your 300+ "partners".
The ad industry and self-declared SEO experts have displayed an astounding inability to read the text of the law and follow its spirit. One could argue, probably on purpose. The same will happen here. This is clearly about giving users an way to sue against addictive designs and giving the EU a lever to protrct consumers from particularily bad actors. Now anybody who still profits from using these dark patterns will try to make it about one thing "infinite scroll verboten" and then proceed to violate the spirit of the law.
By Valakas_ 2026-02-167:50 Dude, if you have a page with 10 000 elements, it's practically as if it was infinite. Obviously addiction is a spectrum, but we can and should have some boundary that is 'good enough'. If a computer screen is usually 20-40cm, it can simply be defined on allowing max 2-4 screens for laptops and 2-4 screens for mobile phones. Of course the problem in the future might be proving whether something is addictive. But that's another story, I think the intention is good.
By paulddraper 2026-02-141:57 This is everything terrible about laws.
Laws are supposed to be just that — predictable, enforceable, and obeyable rules, like the laws of physics or biology.
Bad laws are vague and subjective. It may be impossible to remove all ambiguity, but lawmakers should strive to create clear and consistent laws for their citizens.
Else it is not a nation of laws, but a domain of dictators.
By shevy-java 2026-02-148:16 > but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it
I still don't like that explanation at all. They imply that infinite scrolling is a sign of addictive design. How do they reach this conclusion? I can think of other ways that don't necessitate an addictive design. Some art form for instance. It may not be your cup of tea but that is art in general. I just don't see the logical connection.
Not that I am against taxing these greedy and evil US corporations. But that argument by the EU is simply not sound.
> Regardless of your take around whether this is EU overreach, I'm glad they're not implementing strict laws around what you can/can't do - there are valuable situations for these UI patterns, even if in combination they can create addictive experiences.
But why would you be in favour then? Does this make sense?
> but the regulated friction of major platforms (ie discord w/ ID laws) is on a collision course
This will happen anyway. Trump and his TechBros leverage the US corporations for their wars. You only need to listen to Vance, or Rubio doing his latest dance. Sadly the european politicians are also too weak to do anything other than talk big.
By asdfman123 2026-02-1323:10 > My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent
These laws are harsh... but, as much as I hate to say it, the impact social media has had on the world has been worse.
By lylid2016 2026-02-148:37 [dead]
By golemiprague 2026-02-1322:42 [dead]
I wouldn't worry about that. You're ignoring politics, and what this actually is. If the EU had a real problem with addictive designs and social media the time to move against it was of course 10+ years ago. They do not intend, not even remotely, to sabotage the profit machines that those companies are, they just want political weapons against the companies. The intention here is not to cure addiction, destroy profits, the intention is to use economic power to achieve political ends. The EU is built on this, it just didn't use to involve that many private companies.
Like most famous EU laws, this is not a law for people. Like the Banking regulations, the DMA, the GPDR, the AI act, this law cannot be used by individuals to achieve their rights against companies and certainly not against EU states, who have repeatedly shown willingness to use AI against individuals, including face recognition (which gets a lot of negative attention and strict rules in the AI act, and EU member states get to ignore both directly, and they get to allow companies to ignore the rules), violate GPDR against their own citizens (e.g. use medical data in divorce cases, or even tax debt collection, and they let private companies ignore the rules for government purposes (e.g. hospitals can be forced report if you paid for treatment rather than pay alimony, rather than pay your back taxes)). The first application of the GPDR was to remove links about Barrosso's personal history from Google.
These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies. Here's how the process works: someone "files a complaint", which is an email to the EU commission (not a complaint in the legal sense, no involvement of prosecutors, or judges, or any part of the justice system of any member state at all). Then an EU commissioner starts a negotiation process and rules on the case, usually imposing billions of euros in fines or providing publicly-backed loans (in the case of banks). The vast, vast, vast majority of these complaints are ignored or "settled in love" (French legal term: the idea is that some commission bureaucrat contacts the company and "arranges things", never involving any kind of enforcement mechanism). Then they become chairman of Goldman Sachs (oops, that just happened once, giving Goldman Sachs it's first communist chairman, yes really. In case you're wondering: Barrosso), or join Uber's and Salesforce's executive teams, paid through Panama paper companies.
In other words: these laws are not at all about addictive design, and saving you from it, they're about going after specific companies for political means. Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, ...
Ironically the EU is doing exactly what Trump did with tariffs. It's just that Trump is using a sawed-off shotgun where the EU commission is using a scalpel.
By wasabi991011 2026-02-1322:171 reply > If the EU had a real problem with addictive designs and social media the time to move against it was of course 10+ years ago.
Addictive designs and social media have changed a lot in the last 10 years, for one. But more importantly, there's no statute of limitation on making laws.
By jimnotgym 2026-02-1410:14 Also, 10 years ago the US government used its almost unlimited soft power over Europe to stop them regulating tech firms.
The US doesn't have any soft power any more.
By tehjoker 2026-02-1322:43 You are in all likelihood correct, it's the more realpolitik reading of it. One other more charitable interpretation would be that the EU was under the US's thumb so they never took action, but now that there is some more separation, they are willing to act against these design patterns. It's probably some combination of both elements, weighting each according to how cynical you are, and high cynicism is justified.
By ginko 2026-02-1323:08 Is it really so hard for you people to imagine that MAYBE, there's politicians that see what social media look like these days and think they might want to do something against that?
The fact that all of these companies aren't European certainly doesn't help, but if you think this and GDPR, DMA etc. are purely schemes to milk foreign companies then you've been drinking way too much cynicism juice.
By foldr 2026-02-1322:31 > These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies.
In the UK at least, the GDPR was incorporated into UK law (where it remains, essentially unmodified, even after Brexit). So it is certainly not necessary to get the EU commission involved to enforce the law. In the UK, the ICO is the relevant regulator. There are other national regulators that enforce the GDPR, such as the French CNIL.
> Like the Banking regulations, the DMA, the GPDR, the AI act, this law cannot be used by individuals to achieve their rights against companies
Of course the GDPR gives individuals rights, counter example:
> The first application of the GPDR was to remove links about Barrosso's personal history from Google.
By drnick1 2026-02-1323:16 The GDPR is a joke. Such a law should have prevented companies from collecting data in the first place. All we got are annoying pop-ups that do nothing for our privacy.
By JoshTriplett 2026-02-1323:08 > They do not intend, not even remotely, to sabotage the profit machines that those companies are
I think you are projecting values on entities that don't share those values. I don't think they'd have any problem destroying a pile of companies and not enabling replacements; they are not pro-business, and they have not shown a history of regulating in a fashion that's particularly designed to enable home-grown EU businesses. Predictability and consistency of enforcement are not their values, either. They don't seem to have any problem saying "act in what we think the spirit of the law is, and if you think you can just understand and follow the letter of it we'll hurt you until you stop".
By jamestest2e4p6x 2026-02-1322:382 reply One of the best replies on hackernews in years. Hear. Hear.
The EU realized they can extort the US big tech. The EU will now just focus on laws and taxing (the war in Ukraine isn't their problem). And frankly, we should just ignore EU laws in the US.
By theshackleford 2026-02-1323:07 And the rest of the world should ignore US laws. Drug law, copyright law and of course, patent law. Let's throw it all in the bin, where it belongs.
By Manuel_D 2026-02-141:27 Companies that exist in the US don't have to obey EU laws. For instance the UK tried to tell 4chan that it needs to obey the UK Online Safety Act, and 4chan replied with, essentially, "fuck off".
Companies that try to do business in the EU have to follow EU laws because the EU has something that can be used as leverage to make them comply. But if a US company doesn't have any EU presence, there's no need to obey EU laws.
The wording is vague enough so they canm milk american/chinese companies for fines in a few months. EU being sad again
By deaux 2026-02-147:03 Those companies are incredibly welcome to stop doing business in the EU.
Or abide by the laws, which truly isn't that difficult.
The fact that no one at Meta lets their own children use their platforms on its own justifies these laws a hundred times over.
America forced the sale of Tiktok and China doesn't even allow American social media companies. I would argue the EU is late to the game.
By seydor 2026-02-147:53 you can't milk it if you ban it
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2026-02-1323:571 reply "The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes"."
Wikitionary (2026) Noun vibe (plural vibes) 1. (informal, originally New Age jargon, often in the plural) An atmosphere or aura felt to belong to a person, place or thing. [c. 1960s]By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2026-02-142:00 s/Wikit/Wikt
By poncho_romero 2026-02-1321:097 reply I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.
As a person working at social media I support this as well. I'm a hypocrite. I admit, but the pay is too good to find alternative.
Terms like "DAU" or "engagement" is common in our field and the primary objective is how to make users spend more time on our platform. We don't take safety or mental health seriously internally but only externally for PR reasons.
CEOs won't change that because the more time user spends on the platform, the more ad revenue it brings.
Only way is to regulate it.
> . I'm a hypocrite. I admit
Great, admission is the first step.
> but the pay is too good to find alternative.
Yet then you immediately undo it!
Try "I'm too greedy". You're the actor with the free will here. The subject of the sentencd shouldn't be "the pay". That is just an amount, a sum, that exists - neither too high nor too low. That is all in the eye of the beholder.
By oompydoompy74 2026-02-1415:012 reply Individual action means absolutely nothing. This person shouldn’t be disparaged for making money for themselves and their family. Every single big corp that pays well is creating the torment nexus. You have to pick your poison. I personally draw the line at missiles and mass surveillance.
> Individual action means absolutely nothing.
You may want to view action and sphere of influence. Does an individual have international or national influence? Probably not. How about within their community, home, or person? Probably, yes.
I want a good society and I think that’s will be made up of good individuals making individual action. So to me, this all starts at home with the individual’s sphere of influence.
By oompydoompy74 2026-02-150:42 I largely agree with you. I should have clarified that I don’t personally believe individual action matters in this specific scenario.
By jameson 2026-02-256:55 I left the company as of today btw :)
By andyferris 2026-02-1410:23 Honestly, the EU is more likely to change the behavior of e.g. Facebook than a single employee would.
(IMO if the US federal government spent more time caring for it's citizens it would consider doing such things more seriously itself).
Give them a break. People want to live a good life. We as a society shouldnt incentivize bad behavior with capital
Engaging in bad and immoral behaviour for capital is still bad and immoral behaviour, particularly when one has other choices.
The point of capitalism is that it incentivizes behavior at a large scale through the allocation of capital. That behavior could be bad or good.
The way to make sure that behavior isnt bad is to regulate the economy to ban it. Not to scold people who follow those incentives but then do nothing about the actual incentive structure
By justacrow 2026-02-159:33 I'm all for banning social media as well as tracking in general, and will also happily work to those effects.
It's also prudent to shame those who allocate and greedily take that capital.
This is so sad to read. Knowing that the people actively making every aspect of life more monetized and addictive are acutely aware of the harm they create, yet are motivated by such base selfishness that they can ignore all that for the paycheck.
By CuriousSkeptic 2026-02-1410:58 Could your observation be any other way though?
It recognise addiction (limited agency vs influence) and monetisation (economic rewards the primary means to influence behaviour) as problematic. It kind made “doing bad for pay” a premise of the system.
Large pay-checks incentivising bad behaviour is exactly another observable outcome of the same systemic issue.
By Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2026-02-1419:11 I have yet to find examples of high pay where the pay is not actually to compensate for an immoral job, one way or another.
If you had to choose between two identical jobs and salary at a company but at big tobacco vs a hospital, which would you choose? I think most people would pick the hospital. Hence the only reason people work at big tobacco is either because of a genuine interest in their product (rare IMHO) OR because the pay is higher.
This applies to big tech too.
I am very curious if people here agree with my reasoning.
By grishka 2026-02-165:53 I worked at Russia's largest social media company as the founding Android developer. I quit as soon as I realized it was only going to get worse from now on after an acquisition and a very noticeable shift in user treatment. But that job was never about the money for me. The salary was just a nice yet optional bonus.
By Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2026-02-1410:471 reply > the pay is too good to find alternative.
You don't sound psychopathic so I'm genuinely curious what you do with your money to keep your conscious clean.
Bevause I think your salary is practically blood money at this point.
Blood of the additional instagram girls with anorexia.
The additional children with severe myopia.
The additional people murdered by persons radicalized by media that had to polarize news to survive the loss in readership or by the false advertising of quality control on hate speech.
The list goes on and on.
Idk man, amongst thousands of layoffs (assuming op is in the USA) I'd take "blood money" over uh... starvation
By Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2026-02-1419:02 If it was the choice given, I can understand.
But I don't think people having the skills needed by FAANGS are at risk of starvation, even if not working for a large conglomerate. Do you?
That's why I am genuinely asking OP their reasons.
By erxam 2026-02-1321:18 I do so too. Dark patterns should never be acceptable.
The amount of paid shills opposing this is a good indicator that it's the right move.
I installed a Firefox plugin that makes YouTube shorts display as normal videos. I was genuinely shocked how much of a difference it made to my habits.
By reycharles 2026-02-147:401 reply Would you mind sharing the name of that plugin? Thanks!
By s_dev 2026-02-1412:06 youtube-shorts-block
This is the one I use.
By KolibriFly 2026-02-1417:35 The tricky part is defining harm without sliding into paternalism
By ben_w 2026-02-1321:22 I imagine there was a similar argument a century ago about how if alcohol kills your marriage, it wasn't a very strong marriage.
I wonder if we'll get speakeasies where people can get endogenous dopamine kicks from experiencing dark patterns?
This. If all it took was a $300k ad campaign on tiktok to get the population of a country(Romania in this case to be specific) to vote for a shady no-name candidate that came out of nowhere, instead of the well known candidates of the establishment, that should tell you the politics of your country betrayed its electorate so badly that they would rather commit national suicide instead of voting the establishment again to screw them over for the n-th time. Tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that.
I'm not saying social media isn't cancerous and shouldn't be regulated, because it is and it should, I'm saying that in this specific case it's a symptom of a much bigger existing disease and not the root cause of it.
What I'm mostly afraid of now, is that the lesson governments took from this is not that social media should be regulated and defanged of data collection and addictiveness, but instead that governments should keep and seize control of said data collection and addictiveness so they can weaponize it themselves to advance their agendas over the population.
Case in point, the now US-controlled tiktok does more data harvesting than when it was Chinese owned.[1] At least China couldn't send ICE to your house using that data.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-new-terms-of-service-pri...
> tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that
Actually both can be true.
By joe_mamba 2026-02-1321:22 Not in this case. Romanian people hated their corrupt politicians since way before tiktok was invented, so much so, that it's not even a partisan issue, all of them are equally unpopular. Tiktok only acted as release valve for that pent-up anger, but it's not the cause of it. The cause is 35+ years of rampant theft and corruption leading to misery and cases of death of innocent people.
So blaming of tiktok is a convenient scapegoat for Romania's corrupt establishment to legitimize themselves and deflect their unpopularity as if it's caused by Russian interference and not their own actions. NO, Russian interference just weaponized the massive unpopularity they already had.
So here's a wild idea on how to protect your democracy: how about instead of banning social media, politicians actually get off their kiddie fiddling islands, stop stealing everything not nailed to the ground and do right by their people, so that the voters don't feel compelled to pour gasoline on their country and light it on fire out of spite just to watch the establishment burn with it.
Because when people are educated, healthy, financially well off and taken care of by their government who acts in their best interest, then no amount of foreign social media propaganda can convince people to throw that all away on a dime. But if your people are their wits end and want to see you guillotined, then that negative capital can and will be exploited by foreign adversaries. Like how come you don't see Swiss or Norwegians trying to vote Russian puppets off TikTok to power and it's not because they have more control on social media than Romania.
This isn't a Romanian problem BTW, many western countries see similar political disenfranchisement today, and why you see western leaders rushing to ban or seize control of social media and free speech, instead of actually fixing their countries according to the pains of the voters.
That only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties.
They use a two-round system to elect their President that works like this:
1. If a candidates gets more than 50% in the first round they are the winner, and there is no second round.
2. If there is no clear winner in the first round, the top two from the first round advance to the second round to determine the winner.
In that election there were 14 candidates. 6 from right-wing parties, 4 from left-wing parties, and 4 independents. The most anyone got in the first round was 22.94%, and the second most was 19.18%. Third was 19.15%. Fourth was 13.86%, then 8.79%.
With that many candidates, and with there being quite a lot of overlap in the positions of the candidates closer to the center, you can easily end up with the candidates that are more extreme finishing higher because they have fewer overlap on positions with the others, and so the voters that find those issues most important don't get split.
You can easily end up with two candidates in the runoff that a large majority disagree with on all major issues.
They really need to be using something like ranked choice.
Ranked choice is very similar to what you just described, has the same downsides, and is much more difficult to understand. What you want is approval voting which has all of the upsides ranked choice claims to have, none of the downsides, doesn't have multiple rounds, and is trivial to understand. On top of that approval voting has an additional benefit where voting third-party/moderates doesn't feel like throwing any vote away so you can just include them and they're much more likely to win.
By ClayShentrup 2026-02-152:45
>That only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties. [...] They really need to be using something like ranked choice.
Firstly, there's many forms of elections, each with their own pros and cons, but I don't think the voting method is the core problem here.
Let's assume Norway would have the exact same system and parties like Romania. Do you think Norwegians would have been swayed by a an online ad campaign to vote a Russian puppet off tiktok to the last round?
Maybe the education level, standard of living of the population and being a high trust society, is actually what filters malicious candidates, and not some magic election method.
Secondly, what if that faulty election system, is a actually a feature and not a bug, inserted since the formation of modern Romania after the 1989 revolution, when the people from the (former) commies and securitatea(intelligence services and secret police) now still running the country but under different org names and flags, had to patch up a new constitution virtually overnight, so they made sure to create a new one where they themselves and their parties have an easier time gaming the system in their favor to always end up on top in the new democratic system, but now that backdoor is being exploited by foreign actors.
By tzs 2026-02-142:08 > Let's assume Norway would have the exact same system and parties like Romania. Do you think Norwegians would have been swayed by a an online ad campaign to vote a Russian puppet off tiktok to the last round?
> Maybe the education level, standard of living of the population and being a high trust society, is actually what filters malicious candidates, and not some magic election method.
My point isn't about filtering malicious candidates. My point is that a "top two advance to runoff if no one wins the first round" system often does a poor job in the face of a plethora of candidates of picking a winner with majority support.
Yes, there are many forms of elections each with their own pros and cons, and that is one of the main cons of that system (and of one round systems where the winner is whoever gets the most votes even if it is not a majority).
Consider an election with 11 candidates and where there is one particular issue X that 80% of the voters go one way on and 20% the other way. The voters will only vote for a candidate that goes their way on X. 9 of the candidates go the same was as 80% of the voters, and the other 2 go the other way. All the candidates differ on many non-X issues but voters don't feel strongly on those. They will pick a candidate that agrees with them on as many of those as they can, but would be OK with a winner that disagrees with them on the non-X issues as long as they agree on X. This results in the vote being pretty evenly split among the candidates that agree on X.
The 9 candidates that agree with the 80% that go one way on X then end up with about 8.9% of the vote each, and the 2 that go the other way end with 10% each. Those two make it to the runoff and wins.
Result: a winner that would lose 80-20 in a head to head matchup against any of the 9 who were eliminated in the first round.
Note I didn't say that the 2 on the 20% side of issue X were malicious. They just held a position on that issue the 80% disagree with.
Such a system is also more vulnerable to manipulation like what happened with TikTok in Romania, because with a large field of candidates with roughly similar positions you might not need to persuade a large number of people to vote for an extreme candidate to get that candidate into the runoff.
By ClayShentrup 2026-02-152:49 the voting method is HUGELY important.
By mym1990 2026-02-1321:16 Eh, its not like it is happening overnight. Its like a cancer that slowly spreads without much notice and then one day the democracy collapses and its too late to do anything about it.
By thinkingtoilet 2026-02-1321:25 No. It's us humans that aren't very strong to begin with. To not admit it is to deny reality at this point.
By dataflow 2026-02-1321:18 Ah yes, let's destroy all the weak democracies; they're not strong to begin with.
By lm28469 2026-02-1323:12 It's like saying ww2 started because of a few grams of lead and ended because of a few kilo of uranium
You'd be technically true but your missing 99.9% of the point, you can't dilute these complex topics in such dumb ways and use it as an argument
By tokyobreakfast 2026-02-1321:1513 reply > Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive.
Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.
By ahhhhnoooo 2026-02-1321:191 reply Just stop using heroin. Just stop eating fast food. Just stop going to the casino. Just don't smoke anymore.
We know plenty of things are quite bad for us, and yet we find them difficult to stop. Somewhat famously difficult to stop.
I think telling people, "just don't..." trivializes how difficult that is.
By tokyobreakfast 2026-02-1321:248 reply It's a phone. Put it in the trash. You will not go through physiological withdrawal symptoms.
The amount of people in here right now clamoring for legislation to keep them away from electronics which they themselves purchased is mind-bogglingly insane.
By ahhhhnoooo 2026-02-1322:213 reply Oooooof. Can I recommend you spend some time developing some empathy?
The world is complicated. People's lives are complicated (and often meditated by their phones). People's emotional and social wellbeing is complicated, and simply ghosting all your social groups on a random Tuesday is likely to cause significant problems.
By randomNumber7 2026-02-1323:391 reply It's already annoying to buy drugs just because some % of people get too addicted. Now you also want to forbid doomscrolling?
By happytoexplain 2026-02-1323:412 reply Yes. To be clear, the implication of this comment is that you would like to deregulate addictive drugs...?
By lII1lIlI11ll 2026-02-148:06 I would assume any sane person would have them regulated the same way as alcohol and tobacco so that people who want them could at least get those compounds clean and not die because their "heroin" turned out to be some mixture of fentanyl with god-knows-what.
By randomNumber7 2026-02-1323:57 If ~20% of users get an addiction problem I think its not that clear it should be forbidden for everyone.
If basically everyone who takes it for a while gets addicted and dies of course it should be forbidden.
So I would argue that cigaretts should not be allowed but we could discuss cocaine.
By lII1lIlI11ll 2026-02-148:103 reply > People's emotional and social wellbeing is complicated, and simply ghosting all your social groups on a random Tuesday is likely to cause significant problems.
You are in a great place in your life, if your most significant problem is caused by not liking a stupid meme and a breakfast photo your friends posted on a random Tuesday...
By avianlyric 2026-02-1413:33 > You are in a great place in your life, if your most significant problem is caused by not liking a stupid meme and a breakfast photo your friends posted on a random Tuesday...
Or you’re in a terrible place in your life, and the small endorphin release from liking stupid memes and breakfast photos is how you try and escape from terrible things that haunt you day-to-day.
By happytoexplain 2026-02-153:08 Stop playing the suffering comparison game. It's crabs-in-a-pot behavior.
By ahhhhnoooo 2026-02-151:25 Can you point to where I said "most"?
If not, please don't put words in my mouth.
By tokyobreakfast 2026-02-140:181 reply [flagged]
By happytoexplain 2026-02-140:342 reply Why write like this? This is what sick internet communities look like. Mocking people for their account age, advocating for hating people for the sin of being addicted to social media. This is antisocial behavior, and we should do everything in our power to eject it from the small remaining pockets of sanity on the internet.
By ahhhhnoooo 2026-02-151:17 Someone hurt this person, I suspect. And it has left them bitter, resentful, and angry at anything that gets in their path.
They probably don't like that someone is challenging their ability to be neighborly, follow the golden rule, etc. because it conflicts with their mental model of themself.
I hope someday they will introspect and realize that we are all humans, and all humans deserve wellbeing, even those whose choices, opinions, or situation we disagree with or find unpleasant.
By tokyobreakfast 2026-02-141:081 reply [flagged]
By thunderfork 2026-02-141:37 By this logic, you can cure alcoholism by simply not buying alcohol, surely.
By shimman 2026-02-141:22 If it's so easy to do this, then it should also be easy to not make addictive apps right? Why are multi billion dollar companies unable to make a compliant app? They clearly have no issues paying for labor and since this is software, the labor is the true cost for compliance. Are they unable to hire devs that are unethical or what?
Shesh, maybe we should start fining individual developers too if companies aren't able to do it themselves.
By benbristow 2026-02-141:30 I think it's really bigger than that. I'm hooked myself scrolling reels, but I go to the pub after work and see retired or 50-70 year old men (barely know how to work a phone) scrolling through them as well. That's when you know they're addicting as anything. Can't go anywhere nowadays in public without hearing someone scrolling through reels who don't know how to behave themselves in public by turning down the volume or wearing earphones.
By direwolf20 2026-02-1415:29 The fact that you had to prefix "withdrawal symptoms" with the modifying adjective "physiological" means you are perfectly well aware there are withdrawal symptoms and other problems with your plan.
> It's a phone. Put it in the trash.
Dude, it's 2025.
A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
I'm fine without doomscrolling. I've gone from the minimum possible service with internet, to pure PAYG with no internet, and I'm fine with that. But society has moved on, and for a lot of people, phones are no longer an option.
And for a meaningful fraction of people, somehow, I don't get it either, TikTok is the news. Not metaphorically, it's actually where they get news from.
By tokyobreakfast 2026-02-1321:393 reply > Dude, it's 2025.
Actually, it's 2026 and has been for six weeks.
> A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
Sounds like a personal problem. There are many other 2FA authenticators available. Yubikey, TOTP tokens, smart cards, etc. Using a smartphone (which can lose power at any time) for critical authentication was a silly idea to begin with. I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
By ben_w 2026-02-1321:54 > Actually, it's 2026 and has been for six weeks.
D'oh. But fair.
> There are many other 2FA authenticators available.
Specified by job, so no choice in this matter.
> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
Quite reasonable as a general rule, though my then-employer only required the 2FA app and nothing else, and in this case it would've just meant "get an additional phone".
We were literally not given the choice in the matter, in the case of $JOB. Plenty of people complained about having to use their phones to access the buildings, but that was the policy.
I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
> I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
I mean even that might not work out. We just switched to MS Teams last year and Microsoft uses a push-based app, not TOTP or other offline keys like we'd used before. And Teams just seems to be getting more popular...
By kuschku 2026-02-142:16 Microsoft can actually use TOTP, Push, or offline keys.
Which of them are available depends on what your company has configured.
If the push version is configured, it's possible it has also installed an MDM profile on your device. Avoid that, or your phone will get wiped when you leave the company in the future.
By theshackleford 2026-02-1323:131 reply > I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
What a wonderful privileged position you hold. If only everyone could afford to tell their employer to pound sand in the same heroic manner you have undertaken.
So brave.
By kuschku 2026-02-142:16 Join a union. That's what they are for.
By MBCook 2026-02-141:49 And what about the increasing number of things in society that basically demand you have a phone to participate?
By happytoexplain 2026-02-1321:311 reply This is unrealistic.
By tokyobreakfast 2026-02-1321:334 reply It's unrealistic to not install TikTok?
Laws are not created to be malleable about the population's trivial mental illnesses.
We don't need new laws on the books because some people are incapable of turning their phones off. They have addictive personalities and will fulfill this by other means, while everyone high-fives claiming success.
By ahhhhnoooo 2026-02-1322:241 reply For many people, it is unrealistic to uninstall Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Bluesky, whatever the fuck else all at the same time.
I'm proud of you that you are as disconnected as you are. I'm the same -- ditched my addictive social media accounts back in like 2011 -- but not everyone is like us.
By chickensong 2026-02-1323:223 reply > but not everyone is like us
There will never be anything close to uniformity, so we must decide if we cripple freedom to protect the weak while increasing bureaucracy and authoritarianism, or allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction, which is a real and terrible thing, but I don't think we should create vague nanny laws as a solution. Even if you're an addict, personal responsibility is still a thing.
> allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I have a feeling natural selection will take its course at the level of nations, with nations that do protect their weak surviving and the ones that let profit extractors exploit and abuse theirs dying off.
Darwinism exists at the level of nations, but I think you may have the outcome exactly backwards.
By TFYS 2026-02-149:01 I don't think so, because it's not only the truly weak that get exploited and abused in an "every man for himself" system. It'll also destroy the lives of many who could become strong in an environment that protects them when they're weak.
By ImPostingOnHN 2026-02-141:031 reply > we must decide if we cripple freedom to protect the weak
Well, we do want to protect the weak (that's a function of society, after all), and I'm totally okay with removing infinite scrolling from social media apps (or "crippling freedom" as you put it). I don't see any significant benefit it provides to individuals or society. Indeed, it has a negative impact on both. So it sounds like a win/win.
By chickensong 2026-02-145:141 reply It's not that infinite scrolling is good, I'm just not a fan of the legal solution because it sets precedent and is yet another law. I'm not an anarchist, I think some laws are needed, but I want society to be more engaged and responsible for our collective future, not helpless and dependent on laws and government to save us from ourselves.
By ImPostingOnHN 2026-02-1415:27 > I'm just not a fan of the legal solution because it sets precedent
The precedent for "creating a law against an ongoing problem which is bad for societies and individuals and has no redeeming qualities" was set thousands of years ago.
> I want society to be more engaged and responsible for our collective future
Unfortunately, some members of society resist that, like here. Companies have thusfar failed to eliminate the 'infinite scroll' dark pattern out of engagement and responsibility for our collective future. "Plan A" has failed. So now we try "Plan B".
This isn't to say that we shouldn't strive for everybody to be more engaged and responsible for our collective future. Just that the appeal to decency doesn't always work (e.g. here).
By happytoexplain 2026-02-1323:431 reply >cripple freedom to protect the weak
This is an exaggeration intended to provoke.
>allow natural selection to take its course
This is hideous.
>I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction
You are very strongly implying that this is untrue.
By chickensong 2026-02-146:57 > This is an exaggeration intended to provoke.
No, I consider adding laws that ban a simple navigation technique as overreach and a reduction in freedom. To me it feels like banning candy bars because some people eat way too many candy bars. My intention wasn't to provoke, and you shouldn't make statements based off assumptions of someone else's thoughts. My intention is to point out that there's no one-size-fits-all solution, and that there are negatives associated with the top-down legal approach. I want to promote personal and societal responsibility instead of banning every harmful thing.
> This is hideous.
Yes, humans and life in general are filled with terrible things. Doom scrolling was created by us. We allow irresponsible and uncoordinated people to drive cars.
> You are very strongly implying that this is untrue.
So I'm lying because I don't think banning scrolling is the best solution? And you say I'm the one provoking... Have a nice day.
By direwolf20 2026-02-1415:30 Actually, yes. Phones come with pre–installed apps which can't be uninstalled. Some of them come with TikTok pre–installed.
By trymas 2026-02-147:42 Let’s make crack/heroin legal then.
Why waste space on the law books about population’s trivial illnesses (addiction).
By happytoexplain 2026-02-140:36 Don't put words in my mouth. I called your comment unrealistic, holistically.
By danny_codes 2026-02-1323:26 The brain is part of your physiology. And people do go through withdrawal symptoms when they stop using social media that’s been designed for addiction.
Engineering addiction should be a punishable offense. It already is if you’re a chemist.
By jimnotgym 2026-02-1410:22 That should be the top comment
By happytoexplain 2026-02-1321:20 "Just" is the all time champion weight lifter of the English language.
By kelseyfrog 2026-02-1321:181 reply Drug stores should stock morphine available without age restriction and if you don't want it, just don't buy it.
By tokyobreakfast 2026-02-1321:232 reply [flagged]
By ben_w 2026-02-1321:50 Endogenous drugs, exogenous drugs. Same effect on the brain, and in some cases the actual literal same substances. The difference is that endo-/exo- prefix, the former is made in your body, the latter is supplied from outside.
We have been learning how to induce certain experiences, which correspond to certain substances, for a long time; we're getting more competent at it; this includes social media A/B testing itself to be so sticky that a lot of people find it hard to put down; this is bad, so something* is being done about it.
* The risk being "something should be done; this is something, therefore it should be done"
By kelseyfrog 2026-02-1321:29 Yes. The amount of emotional deregulation apparent in your response only advances my point.
By manuelmoreale 2026-02-1321:21 You could say that about literally every single type of addictive behavior present on the face of the planet. You could just stop smoking and/or not buying cigarettes. You could just stop drinking and/or stop buying alcohol. It's a completely pointless observation. There's a reason why these are addictions.
By neop1x 2026-02-1423:25 It started with apps pre-installed on many phones. No one cared. People can easily waste unlimited amount of time watching content from unknown creators which they don't even follow.
By Findecanor 2026-02-143:45 People start using these apps and sites to stay in touch with friends and with current events — and those things are real needs. People should not be exploited for them.
By stodor89 2026-02-145:13 "If you're homeless, just buy a house" ahh statement
By camillomiller 2026-02-142:20 Honestly, at this point, just ** OFF to all the useful idiots that just relentlessly block any possible solution to the overbearing power of social media companies with this crooked vision of individual responsibility.
They are trying to block a harmless mechanism, that has proven to be addictive, and that companies have willfully exploited for this very reason, proceeding to wreak havoc to various facets of society while concentrating never before seen levels of wealth in the process.
Wealth that in many case makes them more powerful than the government that should regulate them, which in many cases drank the kool-aid of self-policing these companies have gleefully distributed and lobbied for for years. So, enough with this fine principled arguments about slippery slope that don't exist. What is your comment good for, if not for maintaining a status quo that makes these companies even reacher at the expense of everyone?
By 2OEH8eoCRo0 2026-02-1322:53 Or the people can decide how their society functions.
This learned (or lobbied) helplessness of never changing any laws and we are just stuck with this way of life is silly.
By Aerbil313 2026-02-1423:00 Found the guy who won the genetic lottery AND the healthy childhood lottery!
Dude, in case you don't know, you are the anomaly. Most people don't have the amount of free will as you do. They can't "just put down the phone". You can. They can't.
By sensanaty 2026-02-1323:36 The whole point is that these companies are spending a lot of cash making sure that their products are as addicting as possible to as many people as possible, so "just" shutting the phone off isn't a viable strategy.
It's as idiotic a statement as saying "Just stop smoking" around the time when big tobacco was lobbying politicians and bribing scientists and doctors to straight up lie about the deleterious effects of tobacco. It's engineered in such a way as to make it basically impossible for a large swathe of the population to "just not use" the apps.
It's interesting how there may be an implicit assumption that imposing more rules on tech will lead to positive outcomes. From my perspective, technology is like reality itself: very difficult to control, with countless ways to achieve the desired result while circumventing the rules. And what's the actual result? Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies... Or maybe it just feels good to add new rules and engage in virtue-signaling contests. Or maybe it's just a way to make everything illegal—'find me the person, and I'll find you the crime' type of control. Maybe a combination of all those. Who knows? From my experience, the farther you get from the influence of bureaucrats, the happier life becomes...
The regulatory frameworks in the EU are intentionally not designed like the US, to maximize company profits over e.g. human rights and health.
It is thoroughly documented that social media and the modern web are designed to be addictive, by psychologists who specialize in this. We regulate access to other addictive things, because addictive things break humans' normal control systems.
> "the farther you get from the influence of bureaucrats, the happier life becomes"
only when things are "normal" and if you're a default power-holder in a community. For everyone else, really no.
By pyrale 2026-02-146:21 > Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies...
Counterexample: just look at the state of EU tech companies compared to Chinese tech companies.
I’m not saying China is an attractive example, but chalking up Europe’s tech issues to a regulation problem fails to address europe’s digital woes.
By Tade0 2026-02-1416:07 > Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies...
A huge portion of that market cap exists only because the companies in question are allowed to act unethically. Aside from that, all this wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority.
Ultimately the economy exists to serve us, not the other way around. What good all that market cap does for the average American?
By Nemo_bis 2026-02-147:31 Indeed the cat and mouse game is tedious... There's a case to be made that you should just act on the root cause of all these issues with a neutral policy tool. The best tested of all regulatory tools is taxation. Reduce the profit motive slightly and many of these aberrations nobody likes will go away.
Instead of market capitalization, have you looked at comparisons for happiness?
By nullderef 2026-02-1413:00 Or even lifespan… It’s crazy that USA is so ahead in tech yet life expectancy is 78 versus 81 in Germany or 84 in Spain
By jeandejean 2026-02-146:29 Aren't you happy that when you buy food, it doesn't contain cocaine? Regulations are totally necessary and addictive online social media is a well documented plague in our youths especially.
This very US lobbyists narrative that Europe regulate while missing out on the economy is used and abused anytime something look like contrary to US interests in MAGA land.
> And what's the actual result? Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies..
Europe is actually doing quite well at the moment. The European stock markets have over-performed quite decently vs. the US ever since Trump became president, despite the various curveballs thrown at Europe in recent years. Market capitalisation in the US is held up primarily by the Magnificent 7 who are great outliers in the American stock market.
By Saline9515 2026-02-1410:431 reply There is a recency bias here. The Sp500 has outperformed the Stoxx600 every year for the last 5 years, except 2022.
Cumulative returns are around 100% for the american index, vs 60% for the EU one.
Maybe the momentum of Stoxx600 will last the next 4 years? Or maybe the S&P500 will come crashing down soon? Who knows.
The Shiller PE ratio is insanely high. At least the European market isn't completely overinvested in just 7 companies who are spending a lot of their money on the exact same thing, so it has that going for it.
