[bm3719]

I do this because I have to protect my brain from marketers that are working against my financial interests, time management goals, and general mental hygiene. If I'm searching for, like in your case, tech info, it's because I want a solution to a problem that has nothing to do with getting sold crappy VPN services or mobile games.

We could have a decentralized and open medium for global information exchange. Instead, the web is a cesspool, and a large part of why is because we've commercialized everything.

[koube]

Sundar has made the case before which I think is pretty good point: The open web is basically an ads driven model. Without ads the open web would be very different.

(Opinions are my own.)

The alternative is paywalls everywhere, or existing on donations. Try reading the Atlantic/NYT today and see you like the ad free model. Or try lemmy if you want to see the donation model.

Hacker news is based around tech and entrepreneurship still yes? What is the current audience that drives the upvote consensus that everything needs to be free AND ad-free?