I hate ads as much as anyone but providing a free service that runs ads and shares part of that income with content creators is hardly particularly evil.

You make it sound like an old fashioned newspaper.

But in reality it's more like the newspaper publisher would then follow you around all day wherever you go and interrupt you every time you try to have a moment's thought or talk to your children, so they could perhaps interest you in this product they're advertising. Not only would they passively follow you around but instead direct you to places where you find the most outragous people you can think of. When you're all worked up they could put you in touch with the higest bidding political operative that promises to ease all your pains.

I mean sure, maybe the publisher is not evil but I don't know what to call them.

Lately I started getting shocksites kind of ads (think goatse.cx) of horrific cases of fungus in the legs or whatever. I pressed x on several occasions, naively thinking that anyone cares. Then I decided I don't want to see an ad in my life again. I got ublock origin on firefox and moved to Vivaldi browser in my android (which is a really good browser, coming with an adblocker out of the box). The hardest thing is in the non digital world though, walking in the streets it is hard to look away from the shiny big ass screens everywhere. But with AR vision in the next 5 years it would become obsolete as well.

And if you happen to be a tech giant that can drive the industry literally to every direction you want for decades, and what you choose to innovate is ad tech and NOTHING else, you're not evil, just stupid. Well maybe both. Or either. But definitely stupid.

… And arrogant enough to tell yourself you are the cool guy on the internet.

It’s the arrogance that kills me.

Well I don't tell myself anything like this because honestly I don't think anything about it is "cool". It's much cooler to not understand it, which makes you the cool guy :)

People were quite ok with the ads when they were not as obnoxious as today. Apart from techies, few people would put the effort to block them.

But these days, you want to watch a 2' video on YouTube you are subjected to 20-30" of unskippable ads. Discounting the privacy (and even security) concerns, this alone pushed a lot more people to start ad-blocking were they can.

I hate it as well, but you have the option to pay for the service instead.

If Netflix introduced a freemium mode where you can watch their content with injected ads for free, would that be evil as well?

Big differences between the two platforms.

People pay for Netflix because they want to watch the specific content, for which the platform has already invested money. It feels natural and fair to pay them. For the same reason, if they had a perhaps limited in content, but not obnoxiously annoying ad-supported options, people would be more likely to respect it.

On the other hand, YouTube wants you to pay to get rid of the annoyance they intentionally planted in their platform, while they have invested 0 of their money on content. Also, most creators don't seem to be paid enough from YouTube, and appear to make their living off of 3rd party sponsors, sales, referrals, etc. With this model, it is not surprising that people aren't very keen in having a YouTube subscription.

Those short forms are for degrees, not time.

An internet where ads take over is a dystopian nightmare.

I would accept ads more easily with if they were not a privacy disaster.

I’m watching a video about cars, sure show me the ad about this crappy car brand I will never buy. I’m reading an article about Prometheus, sure show me an ad about your greatest SaaS metrics platform that cost more per monitored machine than my machine.

No needs for cookies and tracking.

>I would accept ads more easily with if they were not a privacy disaster.

Would you really? I mean I keep hearing this but it doesn't ring true to me. People don't like ads in content because it interrupts what they are trying to consume and tries to leverage them away. This seems like a far greater motive to install an ad-blocker than some hand wavy tracking that probably doesn't even work that well.

> People don't like ads in content because it interrupts what they are trying to consume and tries to leverage them away.

Here you answered it yourself why people adblock. If ads were served on either side of the holy grail layout like the good ol days it wouldnt have been such a pain in the ass.

I remember jumping on the ad-blocking wagon when google started serving their shitty ads in between scroll content, serving diseased peoples photo ( ketto.org ) and getting frighteningly accurate/curated ads of what I searched for previously. Literally fuck google for having a digital private investigator on my ass 24/7 just to sell me shit. I am gonna use ad-blocker till the end of time.

I agree that I may not represent the average persona very well.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page's original search engine paper fell short of calling it evil. But they did use phrases like "incentive to provide poor quality search results", "particularly insidious" and "inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers".

well, the whole concept of "ads" is a bit evil by itself

It really depends on whether you see ads as "bringing to the user's attention that there is a product out there that might improve their lives" or if you see them as "attempts to manipulate people into spending money on things they don't need or want".

I'm definitely in the latter group, but I can see how some market purists might believe in the first version.

Could you please elaborate?

emotional brainwashing(entertaintment, fear etc) people to buy stuff that they don't need. taking advantage of people's weakness. it's not like "this is our product, this is what it does, and this is the price of it" instead "your neighbour has this cool stuff but you don't means you are lesser person if you don't buy also", "if you don't buy this stuff, you won't get a girlfriend and die alone", "if you don't buy this stuff, you will miss out amazing opportunity of becoming rich and stuck as poor"

Ads per se are a fine alternative to pay for a website, the problem is when they are the most attractive option. Because them being the most attractive option usually means they are the only option, meaning they are also the only option for people that would be willing to pay to see no ads (me).

I see it like smoking. It should be legal, but there need to be laws in place preventing smokers from harming and annoying anyone that chooses not to smoke. Ads should be legal, but there need to be laws in place allowing people to completely avoid them by paying a fair price. Until this is the case and everyone can choose, making them unavoidable is morally wrong.

That is not what the article is about though. The article is about a new proposal which people are concerned would give Google even more leverage over how the web functions.

True, but it just isn't that simple.

We have all seen that there are absolutely no boundaries on how many adds and pop-ups sites get plastered with.

They aren't trying to balance it out on their sites, they just try to make as much money as possible. That isn't an acceptable user experience.

Now pair that with the world's most used search engine rewarding the most amount of (their) adds. It is a hellscape.