You're defining "good" here to mean "effective at manipulating me to spend money", which is strange! I'd rather not be manipulated into buying things I didn't realize would finally fill the gaping hole inside my soul until two seconds ago. Would be perfectly content seeing ads for, I don't know, farm equipment until I happily perish of old age never once experiencing the fomo of not possessing a theragun.

I'm defining good as "informing of things I didn't know existed". I consider advertising just another news channel.

Copying from my comment above, here are some examples of things I've bought. I like trying out new things because I can afford it, but I don't always have time to go out and look for them.

So examples of things that I've bought from Instagram ads:

The comma2 (autopilot for my Honda van). I knew OpenPilot existed, but until I saw that ad, I didn't know there was a product I could buy with it already installed. I liked the idea but didn't have time to get it all set up on my own. The existence of a commercial product vastly improved my life. I've already used it for over 1000 miles of self driving in just a couple weeks. It's a night and day difference when driving. I suppose I would have eventually heard about the product, but I'm glad I heard about it when I did.

The most recent Pride lego set. I would have never known it existed, but I'm glad I know now, because I want to give my kids something fun to build that sparks a conversation about Pride and what it means and why it's important.

The end doesn’t justify the means. Finding out about some cool stuff doesn’t justify the insane amount of collection of ones personal data by hundreds of companies in a manner which is basically impossible for a person to reasonably prevent.

And if they could do it workout gathering that much personal data? Isn't that what FLOC is trying to do?

That's what FLoC is trying and failing to do according to basically every analysis, including this one. Ads can exist without having to be based on users' personal data, as they were for 100+ years before (even on the internet itself, they used to be based on the content of the site rather than users' personal data)

An internet with no ads will have much less content.

Most content is being produced by end users that are paid nothing. In the early says of the internet, when there was no advertising, there was plenty of content. But what made the internet truly exciting was not the "content" but the potential ability to communicate and share with people anywhere in the world without expensive telephone calls or slow postal service. Think of the internet not as a "destination" but as a medium. It is a way to reach someone, like a telephone line, but with much greater capabilities. (Originally, that is how we accessed it, over telephone lines.) The internet is not a collection of popular websites run by companies that spy on you for the purposes of online advertising. They are just middlemen exploiting that desire of users to connect with each other. They sit in the middle and spy on everything. The internet is a medium, not a collection of middlemen. When you remove the ads, the "business model" of the middlmen disappears, and the incentive for spying is reduced.

True but probably a lot better content. It would disincentivise clickbait.

Imagine a world where OpenStreetMap is financially sustainable but Google maps were not. That's where we would be without ads, and it's beautiful.

That's a false dichotomy. You can have ads without tracking user activity; for example, contextual ads.

OK, so someone has "my data", ie a partial list of websites I may have visited. Now what? What harm has been caused to me?

It'd just be nice to have a little more control, for starters. So advertisers try to figure out what we want by what websites we visit and are not too good at it. They could also just ... ask? I'd like to have an ad service that I can tell what I'm actually interested in these days, and that forces the companies to provide lots of information about the product they are advertising for (documentation and stuff). So if I see an interesting ad, I can easily find out if its actually something I want. And money only flows if I actually buy something, affiliate-link style.

Unfortunately asking users doesn't usually work out well. My favorite example is from Netflix. They asked users, "What movie needs to be on the service for you to consider it a good service with good movies that you would want to see repeatedly". A lot of people answered "Schindler's list". But when you looked at those same user's actual viewing, they never once watched Schindler's list, but they watch Jackass multiple times. So what they really wanted was Jackass, but either were too ashamed to admit it, or didn't actually understand their own preferences.

FWIW, I feel like a good restaurant serves wine. I don't drink wine, but if your restaurant doesn't serve it, and I am tasked with choosing between two restaurants based on some quick glance at their menu sections and photos of their interior (as of course I am not informed about either: I am supposed to come up with some quick heuristic), it might not matter if you have the world's best hamburger (what I am actually going to order at your fancy restaurant, along with a glass of plain soda water, as I am a philistine). So I dunno: that could still be consistent, given the question phrased the way you did.

That may be true but what the advertisers do doesn't work well at all either.

Yeah the difference between the things we know we should want, and the things we actually want in the moment. Its incredible in how many ways the brain can be annoying ;-)

But then it seems the problem is not ads, but the gaping holes in peoples souls?

The ads are opening those holes. It doesn't take long for them to close again, but by that time you've decided to buy the thing.

I strongly believe that gaping holes did exist in peoples souls waaaay before ads were invented.

Don't know, though ... when I asked the all-knowing internet if "gaping holes did exist in people's souls before ads were invented", the first search result is a link to the Harry Potter Fandom-Wiki article about Dementors:

"Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them... Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself... soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life."