The "clearly marked as ads" is such an important point that it bears repeating. My older brother is as luddite as they get and he has developed an extreme mistr

The "clearly marked as ads" is such an important point that it bears repeating. My older brother is as luddite as they get and he has developed an extreme mistrust of the internet and technology in general to the point that he only visits 3-4 domains he knows he trusts and doesn't do anything else without asking his wife if it is safe. One of the examples he shared with me was the fact that he went for a long time without knowing the top results on Google until he found out they were ads shown before the actual results. He basically stopped using Google wholesale when that happened. He (I believe) is an extreme example of what happens when you abuse the user's trust and try to trick people. Commerce functions best on trust and between shady advertising patterns like this and dark patterns like opting into subscriptions, a lot of bad actors are destroying trust on the web for luddite users. There is probably a startup in here somewhere in making a Google Chrome or Safari extension that looks out for dark patterns and highlights them on the page for the user. i.e. spot ads and place a semi-transparent overlay stating "possible ad, click to reveal and interact" or looking for check boxes with whose default is being checkmarked and analyzing the text next to them to see if they match the dark patterns of opting into services you probably don't want.