I think that a free (as in beer) Internet is important. Putting the Internet behind a paywall will harm poor people across the world. The harms caused by ad tracking are far less than the benefits of free access to all of humanity.
I think that a free (as in beer) Internet is important. Putting the Internet behind a paywall will harm poor people across the world. The harms caused by ad tracking are far less than the benefits of free access to all of humanity.
I agree with you. At the same time, I never want to see an ad. Anywhere. I simply don't. I won't judge services for serving ads, but I absolutely will do anything I can on the client-side to never be exposed to any.
I find ads so aesthetically irksome that I have lost out on a lot of money across the past few decades by never placing any ads on any site or web app I've released, simply because I'd find it hypocritical to expose others to something I try so hard to avoid ever seeing and because I want to provide the best and most visually appealing possible experience to users.
So far, ad driven Internet has been a disaster. It was better when producing content wasn’t a business model; people would just share things because they wanted to share them. The downside was it was smaller.
It’s kind of funny to remember that complaining about the “signal to noise ratio” in a comment section use to be a sort of nerd catchphrase thing.
> The downside was it was smaller.
Was this a bad thing though? Just because today's is bigger, doesn't make it better. There are so many things out there doing the same thing just run by different people. The amount of unique stuff does not match the bigger. Would love to see something like $(unique($internet) | wc -l)
Serving ads for third-worlders is way less profitable though.