Realistically speaking, I think we need ads. We can't sustain this growth without real revenue from mainstream adoption. You can hold your ideology only as long as you get fed. I can see that popup and forced watch ads are shit but you can use it like Quora or any blog sites. Promoting products by giving review/recommendation is a kind of advertisement.

Not all ads are bad. How we use them to their full extend without being greedy is the key. I don't see how we could stay separately from mass adoption and still expect to overturn the current digital tyrants that are Google/Youtube and Facebook. I think a compromise between what we want and what they want would be better for us as we cement our place in the social network ladder.