I think the ad blocking arms race is unfortunate because it's converging on recognizing/disguising ads so that they can be hidden/served despite what the other

I think the ad blocking arms race is unfortunate because it's converging on recognizing/disguising ads so that they can be hidden/served despite what the other side wants. That's lame. I don't have any need for a hyper evolved system of coersion/rejection. Wouldn't it be far better if instead we focused on identifying content and finding ways to serve it more efficiently? Why download the whole page and then hide 95% of the data? I'd like to see a system where we crowd source the identification of content. If 100 people all view a page and see 100 different ads but the same article each time, a smart browser extension should be able to conclude that the uri actually refers to the static text. Store that on ipfs or somesuch and when I click the link, don't waste my bandwidth downloading the site, just serve up what I wanted in the first place. I'm not sure how such an approach would play out--but all we're getting out of the current strategy is smarter and smarter ads. I can't imagine we're gonna look back in 100 years and be glad we aligned our incentives in such a direction, so I think trying something different would be worthwhile.