@suspended would approve. you'd get the most relevant online ads thrust upon you at every turn, which is really all that matters.
Let me state my apparently objectionable beliefs, which somehow run against the eternal anti-tech narrative:
(1) That servers for data storage and compute cost money to run. This one is pretty uncontroversial.
(2) That websites require engineers to build. Pretty uncontroversial also.
(3) Engineering is both relatively difficult and in-demand, so wages are high. More controversial, but still I think roughly correct. Might change in the future with machine learning.
Now, given these starting points, it seems clear that someone has to
pay for websites. You could socialize/nationalize everything and have taxpayers pay it! Or, less dramatically, you could just run it in our current market economy and charge users.
Some websites have decided to charge for their services. This has worked OK for media providers (music + vid streaming) but for whatever reasons, has worked abysmally for social media. I worked at Are.na, and we desperately pushed very affordable subscription prices ($5/month), and their engineers were paid abysmally & did it for the love of the product/users, and we still could barely break even. People do not like paying for websites. This is another belief/premise of mine, feel free to argue it.
So, if we aren't going to nationalize the web, and everyone refuses to pay for it, where does the money come from? Users have voted with their feet: consumers have
already voted their preferences. It's not that *I* like ads. It's that users have, through their behavior, demonstrated that *they* prefer ads. This is just how it is.