Advertising is not inherently evil.
When it becomes evil is when it intentionally tries to deceive us, capture and processe insane amounts of information about us, and influence the display of information for its own ends. If I did that to my wife, it wouldn't be OK.
Evil isn't an objective measure. However ads want to get some attention away from the content I care about to the ad.
One can argue that the "classic" Google ad, where I search for a pan and Google showing me ads for shops selling pans serves my request, at the same time I can argue that I was looking for a somewhat objective (while that's a lie - the algorithm showing search results has some biases) listing, while I get the one paying most.
In my judgment the ad is bad, but the attention it drags is my payment for the information.
If your single purpose in life was to play board games with your wife, you would probably also observe these tendencies in your questions.
The same can be said about any negotiation or even any interaction, can't it? Yet there are some people and some companies you like and some that you don't like.
I've been a customer liaison at a place where the customer actively went out of their way to see our sales guy; yes, it cost them money but he'd get them a better deal the they could on their own or with any other vendor they knew. He'd actively reduce his sale if possible without even mentioning but the customer had been with us for years and had noticed the pattern.
There's no reason why ads aren't a spectrum as well:
I see nothing wrong with a link to "this is the gear that I use" on a clearly marked page as long as they actually use it.
Or a couple of books. ("You must read these 30 books to be a successful <x>" is of course another thing entirely.)
No single snowflake is responsible for the avalanche. Even if a single ad is not inherently evil, in aggregate they have become a problem.
1. Not all snowflakes become avalanches.
2. If we didn't have snowflakes, we wouldn't have snow, and that would cause huge problems as well.
What resulted is that they turned off ads altogether[2]. I haven’t seen them post about a retrospective, but since they’ve never looked back. It seems like turning off ads was a good decision for both the users of OGS and the platform as a whole.
1: https://forums.online-go.com/t/speeding-up-ogs-around-the-wo...
Why more? If donations are enough why ads?
"Advertising is the way we grant power to the machine" - said Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872).
I'm thinking a lot about the nature of advertising. I guess, after all, it sells excess, stuff which shouldn't exist. It propels low quality, overproduction, unlimited and unnecessary growth. The pain-points of this current era.
Just take a look at our / tech / programming sector. We are well done without ads. I've never seen a Clojure or a CSS ad in my life, nor Atom, nor Linux. Nor Gmail, nor TakeShape, nor Vercel and the list is endless. Yet still using them and happy with them. And they are happy with me.
No ads work. In change, this market requires educated participants, not just blind consumers.