I’m not willing to pay anything. The internet was built on good will, fun, and generally good intent.

Now that it’s a mechanism of commerce it’s attracted the worst of the worst who have no ethics. Ethics courses will be taught in response to bad actors, not in anticipation of.

I’m aware the cats out of the bag and all of the high paid engineers need to make a living somehow. I just don’t think it’s about the consumer anymore, if it ever was. It will get worse before it gets better and I’m checking out.

I’m an older engineer and going to school for HVAC/R. I plan to do it on the side and eventually start a business. I’m pulling the rip cord.

One thing I will say about the blue collar world: they’re better about ego management. Many young engineers I meet are highly paid and treated well, sometimes rarely disagreed with. I can’t help but think that fosters some bad habits.

As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less commercial one. That may be fine with you. But a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use every day would have to go away. Subscriptions can't replace ads, as individuals don't have nearly as much discretionary money to spend as companies have in their advertising budgets. We've already given them that money when we bought our groceries, and gas, and paid our bills for rent, internet, TV, phones, insurance, etc. It's not our bank accounts any more to reallocate to Google Maps or our favorite websites instead.

I believe you are conflating two things. AdWords and keyword-based contextual advertising was not problematic by itself. (And I say this as a person who absolutely hates ads.)

The problem is all the associated crapware, bloat, intrusion, bandwidth hogging, end-user hostility to point of abuse, dark patterns, intentional misdirection, A/B-test-optimised serendipitous confusion, SEO game-theory shenanigans, and ABOVE ALL the industrial scale stalking.

I've linked this piece a couple of times in the past three months: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html

Hell, I remember back in 2005 when I held a university course on basics of information security. The class laughed when I noted that observing everything a person does is called stalking when done by an individual, but as soon as its done by a large corporation indiscriminately and at scale, it's data-mining.

In the eyes of the law, only one of them is criminal.

I'd very much like that mythical universal micropayment platform to show up. Probably won't happen, or it will be too expensive because every site will think "We're only charging as much as a Starbucks coffee!" [Note: I don't drink Starbucks coffee, just have a faint idea that it's overpriced.]

Although, shockingly enough, one of the sites I regularly visit (ars technica) saw the light and greatly reduced their subscription price like 2 years ago. And earned my subscription as a result.

I'd pay for a couple more sites if they dropped the coffee fallacy.

> People search for the truth

People search for whatever confirms their worldview.[1]

> while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail.

Those ideas are at odds. If you “can sell anybody anything”, you can also sell them a lie. That keeps happening, so I see no basis for the argument that “the truth will prevail”.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

> I’d much rather pay a monthly fee to get the services I want.

How is that possible if you never visit the same sites? That idea appears to favor the big players.

> their business model seems unsustainable

I do agree, but if you're unscrupulous enough you can still get rich before such a business model eventually folds.