I think it's harsh to call it a bad faith argument. Say you were having a conversation with jefftk, and he makes the points in the article. Wouldn't you just say they're the start of a conversation, with room to move? Also, do you normally downvote articles that don't have a fresh perspective? There's not that many things new under the sun.
Anyway one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about ads is that it encourages the unrestrained growth of ad space itself. There are just a billion articles on the internet written for the sole purpose of grabbing your attention and selling it. A lot of these sites have no real value, one of each ("How do I do X") on the internet would be more than enough. A lot of them ought to just be headlines that I can skip ("Man Utd interested in a teenager" would in the old days just say the guy's name).
The real argument against the article is that the calculus of paywall vs ads is not quite as straightforward as proposed. Either mode of operation has reflexive influence on what the internet looks like, and that's maybe where to dig deeper for an argument. How do the different options encourage different interests to behave?
Anyway one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about ads is that it encourages the unrestrained growth of ad space itself. There are just a billion articles on the internet written for the sole purpose of grabbing your attention and selling it. A lot of these sites have no real value, one of each ("How do I do X") on the internet would be more than enough. A lot of them ought to just be headlines that I can skip ("Man Utd interested in a teenager" would in the old days just say the guy's name).
The real argument against the article is that the calculus of paywall vs ads is not quite as straightforward as proposed. Either mode of operation has reflexive influence on what the internet looks like, and that's maybe where to dig deeper for an argument. How do the different options encourage different interests to behave?