I think the point is a significant number of human beings were not participating in democracy at the time because their forced labor was critical to propping up the tobacco (and other) industries.
It’s hard to claim it’s actually democracy when it only exists after stripping the rights from a large section of people who would disagree with you, if they had the power to do so.
Also seems a bit hypocritical given the screed about how such a list is necessary because the AI content might output hallucinations or damaging content without review.
But if it’s the author’s blocklist that is wrong, unverified, and causing harm to others? Cry about it.
My (possibly dated) understanding is that OpenAI/Anthropic are charging less than it costs right now to run inference. They are losing money while they build the market.
Assuming that is still true, then they absolutely have an incentive to keep your tokens/requests to the absolute minimum required to solve your problem and wow you.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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
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.
Are directors frauds because they aren’t the ones doing the acting? Is there no joy in being an architect because they aren’t the one assembling the building at the construction site? Is there no value in product engineering because they aren’t fabricating the products in the factory?
It’s fine to find enjoyment in the actual programming part of software engineering. It’s stupid to assume that is the only aspect of software engineering that is valuable or that is enjoyable for others.
It’s hard to claim it’s actually democracy when it only exists after stripping the rights from a large section of people who would disagree with you, if they had the power to do so.
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