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> The result of an ad-driven web is newspapers which have deteriorated into machines for generating a constant stream of listicles, written mostly for free or a pittance by an army of writers.

Amen. A lot of people talk about the "web we wouldn't have", yet would we really be worse off without the low quality trash from the thousands upon thousands of content farms that pollute it?

And yes I realize some would get caught in the cross fire. Ads did enable some good possibilities. Are they in the majority? Would they really have had no alternatives?

Maybe we would have had kickstarter a decade earlier. For all we know, ads set us back 10-15 years.