[harel]

You do, and that's fine for you. But I rather have a reasonable amount of ads to support content, than have no content at all. I do use Facebook as a means to communicate with a lot of people and catch up with friends and family. I consume content form sites that do have ads. I agree the situation is not balanced at the moment, but cutting out 95% of the internet is not a solution. There has to be a balanced middle ground.

[throwawawathrow]

You're conflating 'no content at all' and 'cutting 95% of the Internet'. Honestly there's so much stuff out there that you wouldn't even notice even if 99.9% of the Internet content were removed overnight. There are always people somewhere willing to create content without serving you ads. This much content, however little (in proportion to the rest) should be enough to satiate anyone's needs. Who needs the rest.

[hombre_fatal]

Pretty good odds that the content you care about is in that 99.9%, so people would certainly notice except for those with such broad/pop tastes that they are easily satisfied with anything, which seems to be the only people you're talking about.

[Nextgrid]

Maybe 10% or less of Facebook's current per-user ad viewing time would be enough to sustain a service that allows to keep in touch with people (thanks to economies of scale) but the problem is, once you introduce ads, greed comes along for a ride and that's why we can't have nice things. Since "being reasonable" isn't a thing that ad people understand, I'm happy for their entire shitty industry to die and burn in hell.

[iamstupidsimple]

Not that I'm opposed to it going the way of the dodo, ad free Facebook just isn't viable. The product is shit and nobody would pay for it just like how the majority* would never pay for email. And why should they? They're already paying for their internet bill.

*HN users not withstanding

[Nextgrid]

Ad-free Facebook would not be viable at its current (extreme) valuation. A honest business providing Facebook-like features would be viable if they don't have to pay back billions to investors.

Note that the product is shit because it's designed to waste your time ("engagement" and "growth" and all these bullshit words). The product would improve significantly if it was paid because then the incentive would be to deliver value to their users so they keep using the product & paying for it.

> They're already paying for their internet bill.

Why can't it just be included in your internet bill? If Facebook (or whatever paid alternative replaces it) becomes mainstream I can see ISPs just including it in their packages.