Take just about anything unpleasant about the Internet today and it is either directly a consequence of ads, or an indirect consequence of someon

Take just about anything unpleasant about the Internet today and it is either directly a consequence of ads, or an indirect consequence of someone trying hard to make you see ads. I largely agree but would solve it a slightly different way. The ad-supported model became the overwhelming default because payments/micropayments were hard and scary so we spent a whole bunch of years conditioning users to believe everything on the internet had to be free. Payments/micropayments still are hard/scary to a large extent. Large swathes of internet users literally would not dream of paying for content or community membership. Thus, nearly everything online remains riddled with ads or the consequences thereof. So rather than banning ads I wish we'd made somehow payments/micropayments easy, safe, and transparent and baked that right into the internet somehow. Think about how Patreon and Kickstarter (which are not without their flaws) have allowed people to support creators more or less directly. Now, imagine if we'd somehow baked something like that in to the internet itself.