As long as that philosophy doesn’t reach FOSS philosophy, that’s fine. Imagine if Fediverse social media suddenly didn’t really want to “enshitify” their platforms, but included trackers and ads?
See that’s kind of the thing though, Ads is a broad spectrum. We can think of it as small things like the old google one blue line of text off to the side in the old days, the huge popups that force you to view them etc…
Bottom line there’s a scale there.
|few and easy to ignore] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ Many and forces you to pay attention to them before you can reach what you came for]
and the bottom line is, far left on that spectrum, is negligable profit. If you can tune out the ads easily and just focus on the content you want… that means the advertisers aren’t getting new sales/visits etc… that they want. Which means, they will pay very little for them.
Point is, the hypothetical hope of “well when their investors ask them to make it profitable, they will just put a tiny banner in the far corner”, is a no go.
Not to mention the algorithms that lock your attention to the ad. YouTube does this a lot. I just watch all the commercial, because it knows well (through diffing and other techniques) what I will watch completely. I guess I’ll get used to it. I have also been clicking more on ads around the webpages, but I don’t think this is to my liking. The technology is just getting better. This is really bad, but it’s beyond salvation right now. I believe all we can do is mitigate the effects of ads on the Internet. I’m glad we have alternatives.
