> The overwhelmingly mentality on HN is that All Ads are bad.

Ads will at best waste my time/bandwidth/processing power and at worst compromise my privacy and/or convince me to make a bad financial decision.

I don't see why this mentality is wrong?

Ads are micropayments that work. I don’t like them per se and run an ad blocker and PiHole, but the fact that others don’t allows me to micropay for a lot of content with my time.

> Ads are micropayments that work.

One thing if those micro-payments end up enriching the creators, but another when blackholed into the coffers of a few tech cos.

Surely you meant to say:

> but the fact that others don’t allows them to micropay for a lot of content with their time.

I'm not objecting. I do the same. But in what sense are you paying? I'm sure I'm not.

When I read a 5 minute Medium article, I'm paying with 5 minutes of my time. If I decide to bail out 1 minute into the article, I have still lost 1 minute of my time.

The creator isn't getting any benefit from it, but I'm still paying.

＞ Because by their definition, All ads are tracking ads.

John Gruber has an ad at daringfireball.net, currently for a company called Simris. IIRC the ad is pure text, not loaded by a script, and does not track you. Other blogs (usually security professionals ime) have text-based ads that are probably part of the theme in a static site generator.

I should have put /s at the end of that sentence.

I know all of what you said, but somehow HN still thinks Ads are bad.