I don't love ads, so if you goal is to just not have ads on your product, I get it.<p>We had the same choice on Read the Docs, but didn't really have any other way to make money. We decided to build Ethical Ads, so that we could be proud of the ads we show, knowing we weren't adding to massive pool of data out there. I talked a bit more about it here: <a href="https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-marketing-money/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...</a><p>We talk about what ethical advertising is here: <a href="https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/</a> -- and if you're building a dev-focused site, know that you have an option if you want monetization without sacrificing your values.
They talk about how "current mainstream ads technology has become a pseudo-surveillance system", but I feel the same mistrust for crash reporter SDKs on iOS and Android. Unless it's an open source library, I'm very careful to include it in projects.
I did a double take. There are ads on PLATO[1]? Do they do monochrome graphics in TUTOR[2}? No, it's social media. Sigh.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUTOR" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUTOR</a>