Totally agree with this. Even if advertisers weren't tracking me everywhere (which is a whole other massive issues), advertising even at its least offensive is designed to generate a want or need I didn't have before. I don't need to be convinced to spend ever more money on the latest gadget, no matter how "cool" I might find it. It's all just advertisers revving that hedonistic treadmill.

If you live in the city, advertisers manipulate you every waking minute of your day, bombarding you from billboards, on tv, on the internet, and are constantly shoving their disgusting garbage in front of your eyes in new ways; at petrol pumps, on your tv menu, right in front of you on a taxi cab.

Worse still, the more you pay to avoid this trash, the more you become attractive to them as someone with money to spend. I can't remove the ads as a walk about the city, but for damn sure I'll remove them wherever I can in my home. Pi hole, ublock origin, sponsor block etc, all running to keep this crap out of my life. If people wont pay money for what creators are making, and they can't provide it for free, I'm fine with it going away. It probably wasn't worthwhile to begin with - only "addictive".

Ads are a scourge and make me sick. There are no "acceptable ads".

Yes this. I've had it with ads that pop up filling up the screen while I'm reading halfway through a sentence, spewing cookies all over the place, and loading megabytes of JavaScripts on a 2G connection.

They can all pay the consequences now of me blocking them.

If they had been well-behaved and stuck to inline ads with no cookies, I would have left them there.

Wholeheartedly agree. The world would be a better place without ads; less pointless consumerism and less money for companies that abuse basic human instincts to shove an ever-increasing amount of ads down our throats, without any care about societal effects so as long as it suits their bottom-line.

I'm happy to watch ads so I don't have to pay for Instagram, Google Search & Docs, Gmail, Twitch, Youtube and most of my podcasts. I wouldn't be able to afford it if I couldn't pay with scrolling of my mouse past such ad (or my data, no worries)

If it wasn't for free and if you wouldn't be able to afford it, your government might see the need to provide this as a public service, as in my opinion should be the case anyway. Or projects like peerTube would take off. Or... countless other options that currently aren't really options because some company already has a monopoly-grip on the entire market.

I would still have to pay for it, it would just cost me more in taxes. People who work for the government don't work for free. Right now I am paying with my attention/data instead of with my money which I like.

I REALLY do not want to pay for a bunch of random services with my tax dollars. In your example, once I lose interest in youtube (or peertube in this case) I would still be paying for other people to use it and I get no benefit.

Right now, when I lose interest in Facebook (as I did) I just move on to the next service, it is unbelievably friction free. I just type a few letters in a URL.

Facebook dislodged Myspace, Tiktok is competing with Facebook, Discord is a brand new social media product. Anyone is totally free to create a subscription service or alternative (see DuckDuckGo). I don't understand the monopoly case.