Banning personalised ads does not mean banning all ads. Although personally, I'm no fan of any kind of ads, and I wouldn't mind if the entire ad industry disappeared.

And if that means ad-driven websites disappear too, I don't see that as a big loss. The best websites are not ad-driven.

Do you think a generic ad has the same value as a personalzied ad?

I think they're all worthless.

You are wrong. Personalized ads are worth far more to advertisers and publishers. Also to the end users based on their actual behavior.

Source - worked on ads for a few years at FAANG.

Yeah, but they're worthless to me. I don't think I've ever clicked one of those personalised ads. Their personalisation sucks, they generally show stuff that's not remotely relevant to me, and I've long ago learned not to click any ads.

> Banning personalised ads does not mean banning all ads.

People prefer personalized ads. I know many friends who like Instagram ads, but don't care about ads on some random news site.

Many websites don't have ads, and I'd be happy if all others disappeared.

Ok but you’re not the only person on the internet. Other people have different preferences, and in fact some even enjoy personalized ads. Nobody is forcing you to look at ads on the internet, so why is it fair to force others to not look at ads on the internet?

The solution is obvious: make personalised ads and ad profiles opt-in. Those who want them can choose to give up their privacy and eye-ball capacity, while the rest of can be free from those intrusions.

If some people like being spied on and some don't, why would you oppose the legislation that websites should let people choose for themselves if they want to be spied on?

And I’m sure that some people like being paid sub-livable wages in company scrip. But that the preference exists doesn’t mean it’s in society’s best interest to let those people get what they want.

Can you please share the list of websites you use which don't serve ads? Would love to see an internet experience without ads and without stealing the content via adblockers.

It's not possible to provide an exhaustive list, but for example:

* Hacker News (has promoted content, but without tracking) * Lobste.rs * Wikipedia * Mastodon * Project Euler * Notabug.org * Lingva Translate * Documentation for numerous FOSS projects * Various personal blogs

Honestly, it's hard for me to find websites that I regularly voluntarily use and do contain ads.

What do you use for - search, emails, online shopping, news (you mentioned HN but links submitted on HN have ads on them, unless you read only the HN comments)

Search: Kagi

E-mail: Disroot (but with any provider that supports IMAP, you pretty much never have to visit their website)

Online shopping: while some of the sites may have ads, they could easily survive without ads because, well; they literally sell products

News: if HN stopped allowing links to websites with ads, I certainly wouldn't miss them

HN won't exist if there are no news sites and almost every site has ads on it.

Many of the best sites I've discovered through Hacker News are ad-free.

Mind sharing a few examples? Would be great to know a few ad-free sources.

Sorry, in my massive list of bookmarks, I have no way to tell how I found out about the sites.

I am not asking about how. I am just asking which ad-free news sites do you use.

I use a mailreader to read email. No ads unless someone is spamming me, but that's pretty rare these days. Online shops don't need ads because they already sell their own stuff. I have my own news subscription. Admittedly many shared news links do have ads. For search I use DuckDuckGo; they don't seem to have ads most of the time, but if they do, at least they don't track.

I'm not going out of my way to avoid sites that use ads, but I also don't feel obliged to enable their business model; that's their business, not mine. I care about controlling my own desktop.

Keep in mind that there is a lot of content out there that's funded by Patreon rather than ads. And I think the quality of Patreon-funded content is generally higher, because people consciously choose to support it, rather than it having to use clickbait and other dark patterns to lure your eyeballs in.

I think the prevalence of free-to-use websites is a collosal market failure. They're a massive distortion to markets, far bigger than Uber running around losing billions a year, and they also put their thumbs on the scale more directly by deciding that certain things/topics can't be advertised or advertised on.