the government's goal should be to protect the population not to be fair to one person who enjoys the odd $5 bet.

Are we banning cars then? What about unhealthy food? Heart disease is the number one killer in this country so if the gov wanted to protect people it would make sure everyone was skinny.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. Cars are a form of transport which has obvious benefits. Even unhealthy foods are food which is y'know the thing people consume to live.

What are the benefits to keeping gambling? Does the entertainment value offset the societal harms?

> Does the entertainment value offset the societal harms?

yes. Just like the entertainment value of unhealthy food outweighs the social harms it creates.

Brave breaks too many websites.

What you don't realize is YouTube would rather have half the users if all of them watched ads vs AdBlock users, so they actually want you to stop using YouTube. Most people will just white list it, I mean the bulk of users use mobile anyway and cant really use AdBlock.

You can block ads on mobile.

chicken and the egg problem

Couldn't you do this implicitly if I rate book A an 8 and book B a 7 then I have technically said book A is better than book B, so ignore the numerical value and take the better reading. Now put the rating out of 100 as out of 5 or 10 would lead to too many ties.

This reminds me of my favourite scene from the social network when movie Zuck gets the idea for facemash:

Billy Olson’s sitting here and had the idea of putting some of these next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on who’s hotter. Yea, it’s on. I’m not gonna do the farm animals but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very “Turing” feel since people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The first thing we’re going to need is a lot of pictures.

Without some level of recommendation engine wouldn't you need to pre-emptively know the blogs you want to follow already in which case what is the point of the site. What you are saying applies to a social network like facebook but could never work for blogs or youtube where you actually want to be exposed to new and interesting content.

Lost me as in I’m not interested personally in this as a user.

You know what sufficiently works for serving up new and interesting content? This site. And the community drives this, not “recommendation engines”.

And if there was a real problem to be solved here, there are plenty of people who would try to monetize it and automate it.

I guess my central point is that OP wants to go into typical Red Sea territory.

The only way to stop a blogging site from being filled with crap is to limit uploads to lets say 12 per account , but give extra upload credits to blogs that get views or read time (however you calculate that). That way someone who wants to spam without providing good content is limited to only 12 posts.

If the tip is mandatory include it in the price or shut up

This is fair, how it is done in some places, and ideally how it would be done in the United States.

ad blocking is not as popular as you think , I think 70-80% of people don't even use it especially on mobile.