Online ads are a scourge, but it seems really unfair to compare this to #metoo beyond the most superficial aspects.

It is not unfair, it’s the crux of “consent”. Consent does not mean “keep pestering until they give in”. When technology does not respect user consent by presenting them a false dichotomy of “yes or later”, that is bad. Not all ads do this, but many dark patterns do, it’s even built into the OS like in iOS and Windows.

The irony is that a lot of the Firefox people who are probably responsible for this would also be supportive of #metoo.

They may not have ever thought of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".

The irony is that there are folks that think, in earnest, that seeing an ad and rape are comparable. Wait. Nope. It's not irony, but that speaks volumes about how me too came about.

Nobody is saying ads are just as bad as rape. At least what I’m saying is that the repeated “yes or not-now until you cave in” design anti pattern is bad for the same reason as other things that don’t respect consent are bad. Because consent is important.

Let me be clear, if you implement these as a dev, you are doing a bad thing. No it’s not as bad as rape. Is it comparable? Yes, because it’s bad for the same reason as rape is (violating consent), just obviously at a different magnitude.

I didn't consent to you replying to my comment. Should we compare the ways in which you're like a rapist? Should we call you a killer because you've killed a mosquito (an animal that serves no environmental purpose)? No, because your entire premise is absurd on its face.

You explicitly consented to the ads you dislike when you installed Firefox – Mozilla has been putting ads in Firefox in one form or another since at least 2015 and they've been very transparent about the whole thing. You can revoke your consent without penalty or lasting damage any time by uninstalling Firefox. You cannot do that with rape. You cannot uninstall rape and you cannot undo rape. These ads are not in any way comparable to rape.

Let me give you an example. Someone I know was raped in 2010. She never came forward to the police, but three other women, none of whom knew each other, did come forward to SFPD. Two of the three didn't even speak English. Despite all four of these women telling virtually identical stories all of the charges were dropped. How's that work? Turns out that without their knowing (and thus without their consent) this guy recorded everything including the initial implied consent. That all four of these women revoked their consent when things got way out of hand was ignored by the rapist and the court. No charges (e.g. illegal wiretapping) were ever brought against the rapist for illegally recording these women.

The woman I knew? She tried to kill herself shortly after. If I look back to 2010 I'd need more than one hand to count the number of women that have either attempted or succeeded in killing themselves as a result of rape. Go survey Firefox users and see how many have attempted suicide due to the harm these "non-consensual" ads caused. I'll wait.

You don't own the comment as in the replyable entity. That's part of HN. You explicitly chose to look at replies. There aren't even reply notifications here.

Since it's too late to edit my other reply, I forgot to qualify this sentence:

  If I look back to 2010 I'd need more than one hand to count the number of
  women that have either attempted or succeeded in killing themselves as a
  result of rape.

The correctly qualified sentence should be:

  If I look back to 2010 I'd need more than one hand to count the number of
  women *that I know* that have either attempted or succeeded in killing
  themselves as a result of rape.

They're both about the concept of consent.

No means no, not "maybe later".

The colloquialisms "earrape" and "eyerape" have also come into use to refer to the same lack of consent.

Coincidentally, there was the recent TV show, Anatomy of a Scandal, about a fictional rape case where the defense tried to argue that “not now” wasn’t sufficient to withdraw consent for sex.