The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers.
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
It's because click-bait is what attracts people who don't have the mind for using ad-blockers. It also attracts advertisers that offer more diverse (and often more malicious but profitable) ads.
I feel those are how Pandora and Last.fm (used to?) work respectively. Nowadays everything seems to just put a bunch of tags on a track and suggest you things with the same tags to the tracks you liked. Doesn't even need to match the same combination of tags, just some number of them. The problem is, you probably care about the small, specific tags, and the system cares about wide "popular" tags. If you like a couple niche genre covers of songs that happen to be featured in TV openings/OSTs, you are not getting more songs in that genre - you are getting a bunch of covers and OSTs.
I wish I had a music recommendation service built on Pandora's immense dataset of music tags that could build me a playlist that I could link back to whichever music service I happen to be using at the time. I could have it do things like require at least 3 tags in common between adjacent tracks such that it could jump around between 2 dozen genres but the transaction between any 2 given tracks isn't too jarring. It'd also be nice if I could tell it to make a playlist where every song shares one particular tag in common.
Maybe I'll build that. Sure would be nice to have.
The primary advantage of Pandora's algorithm is the human-labelled Music Genome database. I haven't seen any other company do music discovery as well as Pandora, and don't expect that to change any time soon.
I don't know from where came this idea that not having a certain thing will inevitably ruin child's relationship with the parent and cause a collapse of at least some part of their life, but if it was implanted - someone somewhere should have a pure gold Marketer of The Century award on their table.
Also, install Unhook Youtube - it allows reducing YT to pretty much just subscriptions and watch later.
The actual horrifying part is that this is more of a coping tool than a warning system, as its utility as the latter is limited even in Kyiv. If you are not at the point of accepting your fate, but have already given up on attempting to get to actual shelter, you can set this up and only hide from glass shrapnel for an hour when the cruise missiles and killer drones arrive instead of hiding for hours while they fly all over the country through the gaps of air defense.
For anywhere closer to the frontline than Kyiv this is almost completely useless. Travel time of even non-hypersonic ballistics, hell, even of glide bombs is so short you'd be listening to your alarm and the sound of explosions almost simultaneously.
Anonymous verification could be something like OAuth. Government run or certified probably. You'd need to provide an ID to OAuth provider once, but the actual service requesting verification would get as little as your age and email.
Modern internet is not in business of producing content and using ads as means of paying for said content production and delivery. Modern internet is in business of selling ads and is using content producers as means of keeping users in front of screens while ads are being shoved into their faces.
So, yeah, internet would be different, but to me it isn't obvious how it would be any worse or less in value.
I think the internet would be worse. No matter how you put it, the ads are funding content. If ads weren't viable, we wouldn't have a different kind of content. We'd simply have less content.
If there's a content business that can exist in this ad-free internet, it would already exist in the current ad-ful internet.
I don't know what kind of internet anti-ads people envision, but I'm afraid the whole thing is very damn fragile and rocking the boat will more likely break it irreparably than make it better.
The argument, I think, is that these book sales are in big (-er than historically) part driven not by their quality, but by either physical attraction to the author or admiration for their perceived success.
In somewhat related news Studio Ghibli recently released new last Miyazaki animated movie - The Boy and the Heron - with pretty much no marketing, as in not even a trailer. Its opening box office surpassed that of Spirited Away.
I do agree that in general case heavy moderation is preferable and most shitty communities are shitty because of too little moderation, not to much. But the rest of your reasoning gets destroyed by the fact that 4chan is, despite its age, infamy and continuous slide into lunacy, still an order of magnitude more popular website than HN and for a number of purposes, still the best community on the internet.
Can you explain what makes you see 4chan as "for a number of purposes, still the best community on the internet." The only purpose I can see being argued for is porn. For what other purposes is 4chan the best community? What makes 4chan the best community in these instances?
4chan maintains an up to date brief snapshot of internet consensus on represented topics. If I'm not interested in reading walls of text, watching 20 minute youtube essays, trying to discern genuine review from blog spam or infomercial, or doing 3 pass statistical analysis on rating aggregator as it's being brigaded by 3 different parties, and just want to find out what's good/bad/current - I don't really know any other place to go.
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.