Yeah I want my cake and to eat it too. I get annoyed when ads are irrelevant to me, and I get creeped out when they are too relevant.

I want to be able to browse the internet for free, where the sites have a sustainable business model and can therefore make high-quality content, but I don't want to have to sign up to a subscription for everything.

I want to be able to host websites that get lots of views, but I don't want that popularity to cost me.

Can someone please come up with something that solves all of these dilemmas for me?

Ads are mostly evil. No one said that ads were inherently evil. It's bad enough that ads are mostly evil.

Let's be clear what we mean by "evil". My time is valuable. I have a finite number of heartbeats before I die. If I have to spend 30 seconds watching a damn soap commercial before I get to watch a Twitch stream, that's 36 heartbeats I will never get back. Sure, I could press mute and do something else for 30 seconds that seems more valuable, but that doesn't fit my schedule. Stealing heartbeats is evil.

I have so far optimized against wasting my heartbeats by paying subscriptions to remove ads. Spotify, Twitch, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting. Because it's worth $150/month or whatever to not waste my time with the most boring, uninteresting, irrelevant, nauseating crap that advertisers come up with.

And thank science for SponsorBlock, because sponsored segments in videos are the devil. Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model. They pay publishers practically nothing because they aren't paying for conversions, but for an estimate based on impressions and track record woo. Bad for publishers, bad for advertisers, and bad for content consumers. Everybody loses. I'm well over my lifetime quota of BS from VPNs, MOBAs, and plots of land scams. So many heartbeats lost.

I’ve never figured out what I think advertising should be. I currently do basically everything I can to get rid of it in my life.

I’m totally fine with outlining targeted advertising. But even classic broadcast stuff poses the dilemma for me.

I have absolutely noticed I miss out some. As an easy example I don’t tend to know about new TV shows or movies that I might like the way I used to. There’s never that serendipity where you were watching the show and all of a sudden a trailer from a movie comes on and you say “What is THAT? I’ve got to see that.”

Maybe some restaurant I like is moving into the area. Maybe some product I used to like is now back on the market. It really can be useful.

Sure the information is still out there and I could seek it out, but I don’t.

On the other hand I do not miss being assaulted with pharmaceutical ads, scam products, junk food ads, whatever the latest McDonald’s toy is, my local car dealerships yelling at me, and so much other trash.

I’ve never figured out how someone could draw a line to allow the useful parts of advertising without the bad parts.

“You’re only allowed to show a picture of your product, say its name, and a five word description of what it’s for”.

Nothing like that is gonna be workable.

Such a hard problem.

what if ads were displayed only on request? “hi, ad page, I need some shoes, let’s go!”