Another thing I'm going to try: whenever I have an essay idea germinating, I'll post it here sooner rather than later and use this as a place to collect relevant links and thoughts, and hash out the ideas with anyone here who wants to pitch in. So "Advertising is not the enemy" is the working title for an essay I'd like to write. Another potential title: "The benefits of advertising," or "Advertising doesn't have to suck." In a nutshell, I think there's a big difference between advertising as a concept and advertising as it's currently implemented in various places. I think many of the beefs that people have with ads are with implementations. I think the best path forward is to figure out how to do advertising in ways that don't cause said beefs, rather than writing off ads altogether. to be continued

I have the same thoughts. I feel like advertising on most websites is done in the laziest and most annoying fashion and it’s just not necessary. I think podcast hosts endorsing a product in their own words that matches well with them and their audience is an example of valuable advertising

yeah, native newsletter ads also are pretty good imo

Definitely, and there's no need for tracking or data gathering in something like a newsletter ad. For example, if someone subscribed to my software dev focused newsletter, I can be pretty confident they would be interested in free Digital Ocean credits without the need for any other data