If we want to stay out of the hands of Big Tech and want information / discussions to be distributed and replicated, why are we going back to using Usenet?
Reading "Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34374725" and personally being awfully annoyed by ads everywhere I was wondering how effective these ads really are.
So this guy bought an LG TV and got so swamped with ads that the TV gets slow and horrible to work with, up till the point where he had to dedicate resources to build something that eliminates them.
We have ads on TV, where i live you get ads before a program, 5 minutes the program itself, 20 more minutes ads, 20 minutes program, etc.
On the Internet even the FBI (I think it was) suggests using an ad-blocker for regular surfing because ads are not only annoying, but also dangerous.
Spam.
New Years eve celebration is sponsored to the point where you lose the celebration mood because you have to watch ads.
Pay TV, where you already pay to watch, still presents you shitloads of ads (except Netflix, for now). Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, they all are so swamped with ads that you don't recognize anymore what is promoted and what is what you were actually looking for.
Ads, ads, ads everywhere.
Now my question is: How effective are they really? How many times did you actually buy a product because an ad for this product ruined your sports watching, online shopping, internet surfing experience?
