As a consumer: I hate cookie banners. Ads are a menace to society and the banners are a manifestation of a toddler fighting against the rules by being a total nuisance. When there's something I need from a site, I will always go into the "manage" route and save the disabled cookies. I also use duckduckgo's privacy browser and burn my session often.
Thanks for including your own privacy policy. We're starting our own effort and our top line was "we won't make data or the user the product" and were trying to structure something as simple as your policy.
normalizes expectation of others inserting ideas in ones head instead of critically assessing concepts with available observations and deriving one's own opinion for starters
Most ads have no content that can be subjected to critical assessment.
Geico's terrible comedy sketches are not designed
to convince you that they have a good product –
they're designed to rattle around in your mind and influence you subconsciously.
To the extent that they succeed in that,
they make people behave less rationally,
and are of negative social utility.
And if they don't succeed,
then they're just a pointless
drain on society's money, time, talent, and attention.
You can assess their comedic and social value, but you can't assess their argument about car insurance, because there isn't one. They're trying to manipulate how you feel, not convince you of some point. It's like if, rather than making an argument in this comment to convince people of my point, I just said "Lol, imagine being such a corporate beta cuck." Some not-particularly-mature people might be influenced by that statement, perhaps more than by an actual argument, but it would be an inappropriate and underhanded tactic.
Their sheer volume. Drive into a major city in some country where ads are entirely unregulated. There will be billboards everywhere, impossible to take it all in or critically assess it.
as opposed to the internet, where the content is bounded and manageable? I fail to see how you can square such disdain for ads while taking part in an online forum like hackernews
My head has limited capacity. I'm happy to filter out ads. Thankfully, HN doesn't need the filter.
I also think constant lies on TV is a problem. I of course believe somewhat in my own ability to filter through, but at the end of the day, it is reality-distorting when it goes on in large scale and a societal problem!
The voting and moderation system on HN essentially distributes the load of managing & sorting all the information across many people, so that overall the workload is manageable. Most of us wouldn't be browsing HN if it was a free-for-all unmoderated cesspool.
As a provider: I don't use cookies. Here's my privacy policy: https://max.io/privacy.html