Reply to post: I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable fee..

I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable fee..

..to not be bombarded with ads. I'm far from rich, but we don't all have to accept the lowest common denominator just because it's free, do we?

Mostly I will go out of my way to block every ad I can though. I don't mind the quiet, relevant ads such as on this site. I mean the blinking, aggravating atrocities that block content you're trying to view. And I hate the way you go to a site looking for software only to find 10 giant buttons to download worthless crap while the actual link to what you're looking for is about 1mm in size. Also hate when you're on a mobile device and navigating a minefield just to get to the next page of your article without inadvertently clicking on the trash that surrounds what you're trying to read. News sites that do that or that won't display content without turning off an ad blocker either get their ad scripts blocked by me or if too inconvenient, I can just find content elsewhere. The companies that allow these ads for a little revenue boost are scamming the system too--they only care that the ad shows as delivered, even if you instantly closed the popup before it finished loading, so they purposely make it easy to inadvertently click something you don't want. Which is just shitty.

I make a point of utterly avoiding anything aggressively marketed in these ways, even when the product would be useful to me. And I think everyone should. People's acceptance of continual annoyances is why the Internet is a swamp that must be waded through to get to the clear water. Avoiding marketing and the capture of personal data is also one of the reasons that I use Linux everywhere I can.