I feel like Arc is just exposing a problem users have felt for a long time, but has been ignored: most of the web is now spam.
Ads everywhere, deceptive and janky cookie pop ups, low quality click bait journalism lacking substance (ie using hundreds of words to say very little) and publishing platforms charging for that garbage, sites that steal/scrape content and rank higher because of black hat SEO, people inflating content (like recipes, but that's always been a meme I suppose) so there's more breakpoints where ads can be injected, now there's also AI generated posts/articles (don't mean Arc using them to distil content)
The web has become toxic, and Arc just feels like a gas mask.
I use Arc for a few months now, and using this feature recently has been a breath of fresh (or filtered) air. On the other hand I also don't know how I feel about it in the long run. Some of the points in the article make sense, but also how long before Arc gets poisoned itself (which seems inevitable in tech)
The point that Arc isn't really a "gas-mask" so much as it is a "coal-powered air filtration system." It makes your air clean but it poisons the rest of the environment.
tbh; blocking Arc's browser may give a little respite, but using AI enhanced browsing and search is so compelling that it will be everywhere (already elements of it in Edge) and there will be no blocking it.
This is essentialy what Google figured out when ChatGPT turned up; having a business model reliant on the bulk of your ad viewers continuing to use technologies that are 10-100x worse so that they can carry on seeing your ads has zero future.
Similar logic applies to every other website reliant on ads.
Going forward the only viable options appear either paywall, or hope for some form of as yet undecided redistributive pay-per-use arrangement to come through from OpenAI/Google/MS/Apple/Facebook/Government in the way that happened with music.
Ads everywhere, deceptive and janky cookie pop ups, low quality click bait journalism lacking substance (ie using hundreds of words to say very little) and publishing platforms charging for that garbage, sites that steal/scrape content and rank higher because of black hat SEO, people inflating content (like recipes, but that's always been a meme I suppose) so there's more breakpoints where ads can be injected, now there's also AI generated posts/articles (don't mean Arc using them to distil content)
The web has become toxic, and Arc just feels like a gas mask.
I use Arc for a few months now, and using this feature recently has been a breath of fresh (or filtered) air. On the other hand I also don't know how I feel about it in the long run. Some of the points in the article make sense, but also how long before Arc gets poisoned itself (which seems inevitable in tech)