I'm a paying NYT subscriber for years. NYT has a ton of ads, even for subscribers. They don't offer an ad free version despite it being totally viable at a few more bucks a month based on their finances. Their ads are super disruptive to reading and their privacy policy appears to indicate they buy and sell your data.

I dunno. That seems like a pretty big fuck you to a paying customer already when all they have to do is provide a sub for a few more bucks a month. But I guess I'm a child of the Internet.

How about we go back to the era of humanity where modern marketing didn't exist?

How much faster would consumer software be if adware was made illegal? How much faster would our devices be if we didn't have half the code base supporting malware?

Acting like an ad enabled internet was the only option is extremely foolish, especially when the ad enabled internet was fully chosen and pushed onto the public by very specific people (thanks Newt Gingrich!).

>cut them out and let intellectually honest people have a decent internet.

Ah, so, take the money out of it completely? No subscriptions, and no ads? Sounds like a good idea to me.

> Can we just go back to ads and normalize blocking people who ad-block?

Nope, two problems

1- Ads is privacy issue not only convenience issue. Targeted ads should not normalized.

2- Companies figures out that even paying doesn't means you don't get ads. You probably are bigger target with more disposable income than average in such case.

We can't - LLMs don't proxy ads.

I'm fine with ads as long as they are integrated with the page. What I hate is the typical Google Adsense garbage where the same ad is plastered in 4 different places on the page, with a video ad playing in the corner, and if you're lucky, a popup ad as well.

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