• @grue
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    135 months ago

    The truth is that the internet kinda needs at least some ads to be viable.

    It really does not.

    • Wikipedia does not need ads (it’s supported by donations).
    • Bittorrent does not need ads (the load is distributed to the users themselves).
    • Labor-of-love amateur websites from the '90s (that had more actual useful information than the SEO-optimized lazily-copywritten (or increasingly, AI-generated) bullshit we have today does) did not need ads.
    • Fediverse services do not need ads (being a combination of donation-supported nodes and, in the case of PeerTube, Bittorrent-style load distribution).

    Frankly, if all the corporate content that exists only to make a buck off advertising were deleted tomorrow, the Internet not only would remain viable, it would be better off!