Yeah totally agree. The central premise of Mozilla’s argument is wrong: that we need to care about what advertisers want.
No compromise is needed as advertisers problems are not users problems. Mozilla has massively dropped the ball on this.
What’s the alternative to give free sites revenue from the users who won’t donate, which is nearly all of them? Google Ads doesn’t seem to be adding an ad-free subscription anytime soon
I feel the whole “I want to earn money by having an internet page/channel/video/…” is one of the problems here.
I prefer the old way, show some, sell some. Information wants to be free too, now it’s monetised in absurdum. Look for how grep works? Get a 7.000 word AI written html page that rambles about linux and the shells history. And that’s if you can get your hands on a something else than a 11 minutes long youtube fucking video…
Well, personally I would prefer not needing to pay for information. Advertisements make it so the reader doesn’t have to pay anything while legitimate writers still earn for their work. It empowers the whole world to learn.
The obvious (but riskier ) alternative here is donations. But it’s risky, and sometimes cripples continued operation.
Personally, to combat the SEO spam you mention, I use a non-Google search engine and an adblocker by default while disabling it on sites I like.
