The conventional story is that the success of the internet, and in particular, the amount of content available on the internet, especially good content, would not have occurred without the ability to package up the content with advertisements: ad revenues incentivize people to create good content; those intrusive, annoying ads serve an important purpose.
What if the internet, especially the web, were built in such a way that packaging up content with ads were much more difficult, effectively impossible; perhaps the platform makes it extremely easy to strip off ads and republish (without fear of punishment for, e.g., copyright infringement). Would we have less good content?
Altruism can go an extremely long way, as can people's egos and propensity for self-promotion.
So many clickbait websites I see nowadays are simply packaging someone else's content with ads. The original content would have been created just fine without the advertising incentive.
In the absence of advertisement-loaded aggregators, would ad free alternatives for people to share and discover good content come to exist?
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