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No, ads mean bad incentives, you have to please advertisers, not just your audience. It also encourages to ignore externalities.

Then it gives more power to those who already have the most of it.

It also normalizes lying, being intrusive, and manufacturing damaging social norms.

Tracking is worse, but all ads are toxic.



I was fine with ads in newspapers, in my TV news and on the sides of buses. While it always created incentives and questionable relations (E.g. do yo report the grocery chains' salmonella disaster in your news when the same chain advertises between that segment and the weather? What if they give you an angry call after the broadcast? does your news desk ever worry about what they should publish? as soon as they worry the damge is already done). I get that. But I'm not going to even hope we'll get the web to live up to higher standards than print and broadcast did for the last centuries. After all, internet media had significantly worse standards in this regard for as long as it existed. I'd be happy for it to just have normal media standards.




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