I’m fine with ads. It costs money to run servers and build out the platform.
I’m not fine with the absolutely sleezy way spez handled the api changes and the ridiculous price. Utterly disrespectful to the mods, third party app devs, and Reddit users.
I’d rather we all pay a few bucks to not have lemmy get infested with ads.
Just because things cost money doesn’t mean that ads are the best way to pay for them, or that we have to accept advertising as part of the process. I ABHOR advertising, but I don’t mind signing up to support someone on Patreon, like I’m doing with the developer of the instance I’m on.
I honestly don’t even mind targeted ads, just sleezy ones. Targeted ads means I get ads for GPUs instead of health insurance.
What really annoys me is how many shitty off-the-mark ads I get from Google, despite the fact that they ought to know literally everything about me. LIke, if you’re going to massively invade my privacy, why aren’t you even using that information?