Ask HN: Is it possible to divorce ads from content, and should we try?

Now that Reddit and YouTube is clamping down more and more, and Twitter is reeling from the lack of it I see a lot of interest in federated clones, but I can't help but wonder if it's really a cultural rather than a technological problem.

So how did we get here in the first place? As far as I can tell there seems to have been a watershed moment back in the 1990s when Christian conservatives found out that they could get their way by complaining to the advertisers when they saw something they didn't like on TV, but in retrospect this seems to have been a Faustian bargain, since the same Christian conservative values is precisely what's being clamped down on now in the name of advertiser friendliness.

But does it really matter to the average consumer that your brand takes a strong political stance one way or the other? I'm pretty sure Bud Light tastes the same no matter which way they let the pendulum swing. So maybe we need to focus on negotiating a truce between advertisers and platforms, for the benefit of both sides, rather than trying to cut either one out of the loop.