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by mindslight 3628 days ago
The web existed long before ads. And it had higher quality content, too.

In this ecosystem, ads are parasites. If there is a workable method to filter out the parasites while leaving the rest of a site intact, one should use it.

Though I would like to see a search engine that only returns sites without ads. I suspect the results would be better.
1 comments
bigredtech 3628 days ago
Will address all comments here -

You shouldn't be "forced" to see ads. Quality content can exist with and without ads. But, ads are the price to pay to visit one of these sites with ads. My suggestion was leading towards that if you don't like a site with ads, then don't visit it. As opposed to using an ad blocker as a filtering method.

With respect to "the web existed long before ads" - Water has also existed before water companies. If you don't like to pay them, you can't just hook in directly to their water lines and syphon it off to yourself and bypass payments. You could however go out and get your own. Just like you could create your own news stories, online games, sites etc without ads.

Your search engine idea is a novel one, and it'd be neat to see that exist.

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mindslight 3628 days ago
End users having ultimate control over presentation of content is the price to pay for using the web. If a business does not like an end user having control, they can't expect to reject that aspect while still keeping its users. Instead, they can go create their own platform.

I can appreciate the idea that creating an economy makes for sustainability. But I just don't see the merit with regards to web ads. The most noble ad-driven business model is news media, which is already rife with paid placement (and other propaganda) despite the ads - the motivation to profit from both sides is too great. And the most prevalent ad-driven business model is to aggregate creations from users who are not paid. If we were talking about what's right, then such sites should not even exist - they should be users' individual federated websites or even a better non-centralized protocol. But amorally, those sites create needless centralization points in order to profit off being gatekeepers. So users should feel no compunction about also doing self-interested things, like running ad blockers and other privacy extensions.

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