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Nah you don't need to decompose it. The only thing that matters is if a given FLoC has more probability to see its members click on ads, or convert on ads, from a given advertiser. This can be discovered with ML with enough data/observations. Nothing else is really necessary.

Those parasites pay for the vast majority of the internet you likely use and benefit from.

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I disagree. Those parasites are what destroyed the internet and turned it into the disaster we have now.

I don't think you are being constructive or bringing arguments that support your thesis so I'm going to stop here to reply.

> Those parasites pay for

Yes, but I don't want them to. Of course, I don't have a choice. And the people that keep supporting them keep helping them work their fingers deeper, slowly touching and corrupting everything that I might still find enjoyable there. That's what makes them parasites. They take what's good and they make it worse.

I think parasites are those that want the web to be simply free and have free access to whatever they want regardless of the infrastructure cost of running the internet. It's the actual definition of parasites to feed off of a host organism.

Pay and subscribe to all the sites you read or video sites you watch and let's see how many sites are left that you read. Incidentally I subscribe to a lot of online news sites and video sites to avoid ads where they bother me or to support the journalism, but not everyone can afford this, especially smaller publishers.

The world isn't divided into just two choices for anything, including this. The fact that you can see only two isn't anyone's problem but yours.

What are you talking about? Advertising and marketing are among the oldest concepts and jobs in history and have since the early days of tv or journalism paid for free content.

If you have a new business idea that represents this third way... What are you doing here? Build a business and become a billionaire.

Now I see the problem. You never experienced what the internet was like when it wasn't as ad-infested as it is now. It might be hard to comprehend, but people who were passionated about something and wanted to make a website about that paid for it out of their own pockets without focusing mainly on 'monetization', 'ad revenue', 'SEO' and similar garbage. Unbelievable, isn't it?

Just insisting that somebody is ignorant is pretty rude.

The internet of the mid 90s had a lot of stuff for free. Usenet was great for certain groups of people. The internet of the mid 90s also lacked a ton of products that cost a ton of money to develop and maintain.

People are frightened now of relying on Google to store their photos forever. Imagine storing your photos with a passion project operated by just some person in their spare time. We see people already getting pissed off when OSS developers stop maintaining projects. It'd be that problem times 1000.

> insisting that somebody is ignorant is pretty rude.

This person claimed ignorance of the other party once and in context it's a very reasonable conclusion. There's nothing rude about that, except maybe when you find the state of ignorance bad in and of itself. That doesn't really make sense, as all humans are born ignorant. That's just how things are and that's what teaching is for. Which is what the post being discussed attempted to do.

You do, of course. You could buy ads, put empty space and fund these sites that way. You could even target yourself (within privacy limits of course).

You could get some users together and fund this by a group.

There have been a ton of "replace ads with microtransactions" products over the years. Brave exists today. Are you using them consistently?

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