In my uneducated view, the main problem is that ads are served by third parties, instead of the domain’s owner. There is zero curation because said third parties literally don’t fucking care, someone paid then it gets in the rotation.

If ads were like in 1998, where the person messing with the site offered space on a specific part of the site and selected which ads would run, being responsible for them individually, offering a fixed position that didn’t get in the way of the meat of the site, things wouldn’t be such a shitshow. In other words, cut the ad server middleman. Yeah, lots of extra work on the maintainer and the ad-interested parties, but that’d result in a lot less blocking.

Gee, maybe if sites weren’t 80% bullshit scripts and ads, MAAAAYBEEEEE, people wouldn’t need adblockers so fucking much?? Crazy thought, right?

And if you don’t want to be gay, be a straight criminal and pirate all the science

Yes, but there’s no more sugar in it

I can imagine it in a situation where we effectively go back to the stone age, with little to no trade between the small (<50) communities