Comment by bubblewand
2 days ago
Actually-free gets suppressed by free-with-ads. We don’t know how much the truly free hobbyist-volunteer ecosystem would pick up without competition from ad-supported options (often with deep pockets for advertising and promotion, plus monopolist positioning to cross-promote with other products in some cases). Ad-supported options suppress usership of truly free options, which suppresses interest in volunteering time and resources.
It also suppresses open protocols. Protocols stagnated as the Internet centralized and commercialized for a reason. Some of these things could just be protocols.
Not saying that would cover everything, but I am sure those two factors would “step in” to replace some aspects of the ad-supported Internet, if the ads went away. How much, I don’t know.
All you are saying here is that the sites with ads are so much better than the actually-free sites that people still use them despite having ads. Which is maybe not a signal that ads need to be banned.
I’m saying that actually-free services and sites have no budget for promotion and become very hard to discover when drowned out by tons of ad-supported options, which drives down use, which discourages participation in improving them which suppresses how good they tend to be.
In a world with add it's not the best site that wins but the site that games mass psychology the best.