It's only when you look into the Black Hat world that you realize how deceptive the Ad world is... Major Record labels botting their music videos to make them l

It's only when you look into the Black Hat world that you realize how deceptive the Ad world is... Major Record labels botting their music videos to make them look extremely popular, social media profiles with millions of followers for sale providing instant impressions of fake fame, and the majority of ad-based revenue being eaten up by scammers. Even Google analytics are so convoluted now that they really make a simple process of tracking real engagement into a maddeningly confusing bowl of spaghetti. The people that seek to overcomplicate the web also create wild pyramid schemes for profit that really corrupt purpose and utility of the Internet. It won't be long before we begin to see completely fabricated statistics everywhere, and it will feed into misled investors and more deception. I'm glad we still have the ability to create our own web sites and resources, many companies have been lobbying to take that ability away from us, to drive costs of doing so up wildly, and to cripple our ability to have an even playing field. I don't run ads on my personal web sites though, it's better I don't contribute further to the problem. My friends and family don't realize why I'm such a pessimist when I speak about the Internet and Social Media now, I worry about them being scammed and influenced by the fake aspects of certain business and celebrity online. If there's one thing that the Pandemic has shown, it's who had money and who was faking. There were many people using black hat techniques to fake popularity, success, and fame and that began to dry up quick every time Google pushed an algorithm update. The sad reality is that normal creators, and business owners that don't participate in the ad/manipulation madness can't ever make it to a point where they'll be visible, and the Internet can't ever return to the point where equal opportunity existed because of all of the now embedded ad-based revenue culture that we all let take hold of it. The only way to thrive moving forward will be to create small (focused) communities that avoid the current pitfalls of ad based communities, and to be able to sell valuable and highly useful products and services within them that fund reasonable expansion and operation of those communities.