I agree. Wouldn’t we all love to go back to the old old internet, where people did things a) because they wanted to, or b) because you paid them to. Both of these things make sense and are how the world has worked for a long, long time. This vague, nebulous money from ads and tracking has all the wrong incentives. It’s not “make the best hammer” anymore, it’s “make an addictive hammer that you’ll never want to leave your hand”. TV has and had the same problem to a smaller extent, and sports are infected with it too

I honestly think there’s a good case to be made for banning advertising entirely, and replacing it with a societal stipend for art and media, or at least restricting it to specific places. The back of newspapers, for example.

I’m sure there are plenty of problems with and arguments against the idea, but it’s definitely worth discussing

It’s easy to say “ban this”, but what does it mean? Government laws are nothing without enforcement, and enforcement ultimately means sending armed men to people, and if they resist and protect themselves, ultimately threatening to kill them. Ads are bad, but such force is not justified.

The same with the stipend - we actually have this is my country Sweden, called “press support”. It’s a massive political tool because of the bias of the gov agency workers who administrate it. It has also been used by one party (C) to make a newspaper empire, making the party one of the richest in the world, in large part by milking these press support stipends. The same party recently had multiple pedophilia scandals, which they don’t write about in their own publications.

“Man plans, God laughs” and this applies to any attempt to centrally plan economics.

I personally hope Offset by Freedomlayer can be the solution to micropayments online. If only I could incentivise the author of it to make an iOS version