By the way, here in Europe we have universal healthcare, maybe is something the US should consider?
But is funny, people want all (most?) things free, nobody wants to pay for news for example, but they don't want ads at the same time.
Makes no sense at all.
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.
Source - worked on ads for a few years at FAANG.
People prefer personalized ads. I know many friends who like Instagram ads, but don't care about ads on some random news site.
* 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.
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
Healthcare != life insurance - they're very different things. Are you deliberately conflating them because it suits your argument?
> But is funny, people want all (most?) things free, nobody wants to pay for news for example, but they don't want ads at the same time.
Again, you're conflating two groups of people because it suits your internal narrative and makes you feel superior. I don't want ads, but I'm happy to pay for things, and I'm also happy to just not use a service that wants to spy on me and sell my data like YouTube and Facebook. According to your statement I don't exist.
> Makes no sense at all.
That's because you've made it all up.
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.