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11 points

They could just use non-personalized ads instead tbh. They do need to earn some money after all

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3 points

They do need to earn some money after all

If every ad-supported website went dark today, nothing of value would be lost.

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15 points

I don’t agree. As a single counter example of many YouTube has a huge wealth of information and content.

Maybe that value isn’t worth the ads, that is much harder to say for certain. But it is clear that there is some valuable information on some sites that are supported by ads.

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9 points
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Duckduckgo manages to have privacy respecting ads. I really value that. If you’re searching cars, cars pop up, they don’t look at your history or anything else. Unobtrusive and you can look away

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8 points

And you can just… Turn them off. No questions asked. DuckDuckGo is a great example of how an advertising company can be both financially viable and respecting of user-choice.

Google could let users choose to opt out of seeing any ads across their network for free today and still be one of the most profitable companies in existence. A huge percentage of users wouldn’t know or care to turn ads off, another percentage actually wants them, and for advanced users they could offer more advanced, useful features for money.

But try pitching that to stakeholders and upper-management lol

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6 points

Wikipedia’s source links? Lemmy’s news links? KnowYourMeme, GIF websites?

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-5 points
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That’s a nice thought.

Then you suddenly realize no one knows up from down or down from up. Society would shift on such a massive scale people would probably just stick their smartphones in a drawer and only use them to message people they already know personally and check them a few times a day like an answering machine.

Then suddenly you realize you haven’t heard about Ukraine, Russia, Israel or Palestine in months. It’s November 28th and you heard someone mention a ‘new president’ but you didn’t even vote. Shit, you forgot to vote. There were no social media or news websites reminding you about the election and you didn’t have it on your new wall calendar yet! Ah that’s what all those “Vote Now!!!” yard signs were about, fuck…

It’s a nice thought, but the internet is powered by ads. (Almost?) Every subscription-supported website is also ad-supported. The internet would basically go under. AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too. It’d be a nice change to get back to get a force shove back to the early-mid 90’s. Maybe we’d do things differently. People would certainly be outside talking to each other a lot more.

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10 points
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This sounds like the kind of thing a Zoomer who has no memory of life before the Internet – or the Internet of the '90s before the advertisers got a hold of it, for that matter – would write.

AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too.

LOL, nope. Try getting your apps from F-Droid instead of the Google Play Store.

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