Formalizing site policy

[Daughter of Krypton]

There's a new phrase running along the bottom of most pages on the site reading,


No Javascript.  No Pop-Ups.  No Cookies.  No Tracking.  No Targeting.  No AI.
Never had them.  Never will.
Your privacy is assured and your humanity sacrosanct.


This isn't really a new site policy, but actually a newly formalized statement of what has always been regular but unstated site policy.

Since 1995, various parties have approached me with proposals on how to monetize the site, but it always involved polluting the site content and/or the user experience in some way.  I have always declined, mainly because I wanted the site to remain an enjoyable, useful, and positive experience. When I initially studied Computer Science back in the '80s, I was attracted to the field because the philosophy was: How to make useful tools to assist and empower the user.  But now the philosophy is: How can we manipulate and control the user to get them to spend as much money as possible and do and think what we want them to?  Basically, how to get them to stop thinking.

Back then, I could see where things were headed and refused to go down that path; both with this site and with my career.  The approach here is to respect the user and the user's computing device and to follow the Golden Rule.

AI is new and has a whole new set of problems: mental, emotional, ethical, artistic, financial, and environmental. Plus, whenever I try to read any text generated by an AI, or view an image created by an AI, I feel physically ill.  Whatever AI is doing to the user, it can't be good.