There's almost always another website that has the same thing.

Some require spoons too

Bottom line: if I'm forced to consume ads on a device belonging to me -
I will rather throw it away!

Say here’s a thought: can we sue ad companies for theft of electricity? They’re using my electricity to display their ads, without my consent.

I am used to rejecting the cookies if they are not automatically blocked by Vivaldi or Firefox, but on my phone I use Safari, which still has a decent add blocker by default so most of the time it is just a cookie banner where I have to reject them. Or put the site in reader mode

Ok, it's obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.

But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don't get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn't serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.

And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can't have democracy without free press, and currently we don't have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.

Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.

Not to mention my internet fees.

They can still fuck off.

Independent reviews are a good thing yes and they shouldn't be sponsored by a related company to keep their integrity, that doesn't mean they can't get paid from a different form of advertising.
Heck you can even check on the integrity of professionals differently. In the accountancy, we are paid by the clients who we need to audit or need to advice etc. Using things like third party audits and a high accountability for professionals.

Ratings aren't that great especially on platforms like Amazon/AliExpress and other crap offering dropshipping platforms from corrupt countries.

Corporations generally don't do anything for free, but a lot of companies do, but that is generally to get their name out there or because the owner wants to decuct his private life from his company profit ...
Even governments can't spend money or personal all they want, in the end it is money from the people. People here in NL are pissed that the government spend money on things like getting the NATO here for the last meeting or for the royal family.
The public broadcasting is also something that is under heat and not just here.

In most countries you have some kind of government funded press heck I think most press aren't even corporations, but more companies except some of the larger once maybe.

Almost nobody is going to work for free for the majority of their life. It would be better if all of us did more work for society, but most people aren't in the position I am in that they just can take an extra week off to do that.

I agree consumerism is killing our planet, but there is a huge difference between the crap a companies like Google are doing and your local plummer who has advertisement on the local radio on their van and make a slightly SEO optimised website. Advertising is often the only way to get your company visable if you are competing with a well established company.
Same reason as that there is nuance between companies and corporations.

Yes we need to promote repairing, reusing, recycling and the circular economy I agree, but somebody like iFixit wouldn't really thrive without their advertisement. We also need more financial transparency by the company we buy from and just skip on companies from China, the US and other obvious corrupt countries.

Ads today are less malicious

I disagree, ads today are way more malicious than they used to be, ads are the biggest vector for malware today, they are used to stalk users to an insane level and most ads are porn, gambling, drugs or fascist propaganda.

At least back in the day you would only get sketchy ads on sketchy websites.

Link

And the button to close it is usually tiny and mapped poorly. Which is in and of itself shitty.

Shrinkage does not mean industry death but I think we all know that.

An adblocker on your devices is equivalent to putting a Britta filter on your water tap.

Oh, haha. I thought you were telling me I should rethink using a DNS adblocker.

More necessary than that, really.

That entirely depends on the quality of your water.

Tangentially related but britta filters actually suck as far as I know; they're like the worst water filter for removing materials. Did a test myself with a fresh filter - 105 ppm tap to around 72 ppm vs 0 ppm for zero water pitchers and around 30ish for epic, it's been a bit so the numbers are rough for the britta and epic but I test my tap and ZW pitcher routinely.

Oh dear, don't ever forget your netmask.

Beautifully worded