[rewq4321]

Ads aren't a problem if there are multiple competing services to choose from. If customers care about the ad-related UX then they'll switch to a better competitor. The problem is monopoly (as usual).

I recently switched to a new tech publication because the old one had a "page jumping" problem (related to ads) that they didn't fix for a while even after I sent them a message. No big deal - this is how a good market works.

Another problem is bad discovery mechanisms. Google search should de-rank pages with to many spammy ads, but that's not in their interests due to their control of the ads ecosystem. This does kind of come back to being a monopoly problem.

A cool feature of ads that's not mentioned in the blog post is that they automatically price discriminate. Rich people effectively pay more and subsidise the content for those from developing countries. This probably angers rich people more because they (somewhat subconsciously) value their attention at a rate which makes the content seem expensive.

Of course, there are still problems to solve with malware, excessive tracking, etc. but these don't seem intractable.