Do NOT sacrifice your principles based on short-term ranking fluctuations

I'll break down in point-form what you should NOT do: 1. Google releases an update. 2. Your site's rankings have been hit. 3. You notice a competitor's rankings improve. 4. Your competitor is a spammy website with a ton of ads, and you feel this is unfair. 5. You decide that Google doesn't care about having a ton of ads on websites, and so you decide that you, too, want to put a ton of ads on your site to make more money.

Do NOT do this.

I, myself, refused to compromise on the integrity and UX of my site, and now my competitor has been significantly downranked with the latest updates while my site went up in rankings.