All of these workarounds are temporary & flimsy --- They will not last long and will certainly not get better, as the rules put in place as well as the tech behind ad delivery are rapidly and constantly changing. We as users & consumers are being abused by these practices, and ads and monthly subscription models are being used as a weapon to get us to pay ridiculous (& arbitrarily increasing) prices for mostly unhelpful services and entertainment now more than ever that still include ads -- It's the beginning of madness & a new form of veiled consumer mass-fleecing. By accepting the ad infiltration and enrolling, we're only funding our own process of shooting ourselves in the foot. They're even getting as bold as to stop sales of physical media (DVDs and CDs) to not allow choices during the worst economy that could possibly exist for consumer opportunity.

The underlying problem is the abusive and untrustworthy way modern ads are being implemented into everything by big business & media companies. They're removing the ability to block ads, because they want to sell a new monthly subscription just to get less ads, and the price will go up until most people can't afford to be on the Internet at all... They're also secretly lobbying to prevent independents from running websites and apps in many ways too. This model was tested on Twitter, where it's gentrified the community now, and driven most past (free) users completely off the platform... Twitter is still highly unprofitable, so it's completely baffling to me as to why companies think this new ad-spam business model will actually work in the long run for their profit. We will also have no options for interaction or entertainment if the Internet goes out, save for a few people with physical media saved from a long time prior to the outage... It's Titanic-Level hubris to buy into this business model.

These ads create such an absolutely jarring experience in navigating sites now, I actually completely avoid implementing them on my sites and apps for that same reason, and to be honest, I never click on them no matter what. With the ways that social apps, and ad content is converging, the Internet, once highly useful for valid information, is now a hellscape of distraction, undesired content, and disinformation meant to drive political overload and consumerism. We need to start asking where the happy medium is in all of this. Not everything should be for-profit, and laced with ads, and the things that have ads can perhaps be less essential to serious need and function.

Microsoft embedding ads into it's OS and office apps is a perfect example of how the frenzy to capture pennies per click has turned on it's head. people are writing secure and private documentation on apps that are willing to place tracking and adware so easily into mission critical applications that it's eroding trust in products altogether. We should expect more from these very large and well profitable companies that are entrusted with mission critical services. Elon scuttling Twitter for his own personal gain was not a crime, but in many ways it was a failure of trust for the service, and I'm honestly still surprised how people are still paying for verification on the platform and buying Teslas to fund his nonsensical ego-maniacal escapades in elitism.

As a consumer economy, we need to shape up and start sending messages to these corporations to shape up and put customer service and respect back at the forefront of their operations at the risk of failure. This model of abusing customers until they pay is NOT in line with a democratic country, and apparently Congress is never going to get it's act together on tech regulation, so we need to vote in more savvy reps that will pay deep attention to tech fleecing and manipulation. Otherwise, by next year, we'll need to watch a video ad between reading each paragraph, and in 5 years we may damn well be required to watch a 3 minute ad before being able to exit our cars.