Hmm, I'm very anti-ads; they're a scourge on society. However, a genuine report of "I read this book, you can get it here" isn't really any different attention-wise if it has a referral code.
Now, the problem is there's no way to know if it was motivated at all (nor to what extent) by the promise of a referral fee. So it could be noise and not a genuine referral based on intrinsic qualities of the product.
I've advertised things on my blog, using referral codes, because that helps me defray hosting charges (I've largely stopped as the income is far too low in recent years; I've also mostly moved my content to third party sites with open licenses) but they've always been genuine either comparative reviews (which I was doing to help me decide what to get) or recommendations based on something I use. I'm putting that link there anyway, the company might as well pay me if anyone follows it.
"For example I used to use Digital Ocean to spin up a Minecraft server for occasional use, recently I've been using Vultr for the same - it seems substantially cheaper, and there was a good deal on for a free month."
Suppose that true comment had referral links, would it really be intrinsically worse?
