Wherever I go, I often see the sentiment “This website has ads, so it’s trash” pop up in conversations. And honestly I don’t quite get why. 90% of the internet has always had ads, you just scroll past them and mind your business. At least they’re personalized now so you can pick a topic you like instead of diapers and miscellanous spammy trash as there once were.
For most people it isn’t the ads, it’s the way ads are implemented. They harvest insane amounts of data to track and identify you. Then the ads in social media are inserted deceptively, or you get popups that deliberately make it difficult to dismiss them, or you’re trying to read an article but there’s an ad between evwry sentence. Most people would be ok with small, non deceptive ads that didn’t require you to sogn away your entire life to target them to you, but most ads these days are not that.