It's not ads. We have ads in paper magazines and newspapers and no one went around with scissors to remove them. It's obnoxious ads, designed to violently grabs your attention and trackers (malware). It's like a newspapers giving your address to a whole crew of salemens that intrudes on your property at 3am and looking at you sleeping and installing cameras in your bathroom. All so that they can jump at you in the street to loudly claim they have the underwear you told your partner you like. If you're going to be that invasive about my person, then I'm going to be that forceful about restrictions.

This is one of the dumbest things about ad networks. Google has enough data about your watching habits on Youtube and their algorithm is basically as good as it gets in terms of showing you what you want to watch and getting you hooked on it, but the moment they show you ads, all that technical expertise appears to have vanished into thin air and all they show you is fake mobile ads?

People hate obnoxious ads because the money that pays for them is essentially a bribe to artificially elevate content above its deserved ranking. It feels like you're being manipulated into an unfavorable trade.

> their algorithm is basically as good as it gets in terms of showing you what you want to watch and getting you hooked on it

It is? Are we talking about the same YouTube? I get absolutely useless recommendations, I get un-hooked within a couple videos, and I even keep getting recommendations for the same videos I've literally watched yesterday. Who in the world gets hooked by this??

> We have ads in paper magazines and newspapers and no one went around with scissors to remove them.

I never saw people bother with scissors but I've seen people pulling the ads out of the newspaper countless times.

> And yet people install ad blockers and defend their freedom to not participate in this because they don't want to be annoyed by ads.

I think this is a pretty different scenario. Here the user and the news website are talking directly to each other, but then the user is making a choice around what to do with the content the news website send to them. With AI agents, there is a company inserting themselves between the user and the news website and acting as a middleman.

It seems reasonable to me that the news website might say they only want to deal with users and not middlemen.

I understand; but as an excercise to better understand this problem I'll keep doing devil's advocate and I'll raise with:

What if my executive assistant reading the news website and giving me a digest?

Would the website owners rather prefer me doing my reading directly?

Yes. Because they want to own your attention and that only works if they are interfacing directly to you.

I remember that Samsung was at one time offering to play non-skippable full-screen apps on their newest 8K OLED TVs and their argument was precisely that these ads will reach those rich people who normally pay extra to avoid getting spammed with ads. Or going with your executive assistant example, there are situations where it makes sense to bribe them to get access to you and/or your data. E.g. "evil maid attack".