• snooggums
    link
    fedilink
    English
    491 day ago

    A crummy history of ads on the internet:

    Starts out mostly used in formal fields and universities. Very usable!

    Businesses get on board and start the horrible ad infestation, leading to scammers and popup hell duw to misuse of a feature.

    Ad blockers start to reign in that shit, and the better browsers kill the popup infestation at the source. Pretty darn usable at this point, except for internet explorer.

    Google, an ad company, decides to make a browser so they can do all the malicious advertising and tracking on the backend.

    uBlock Origin is too effective at blocking the browser based tracking and advertising so google decided to do the manifest 3 or whatever that bullshit is called to openly force ads onto users.

    Based on history, I expect chrome to die a slow death due to the backlash from the manifest crap, but could be wrong since people are apparently fine with ads being forced into streaming services.

    • @Sergio@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      291 day ago

      Businesses get on board and start the horrible ad infestation

      There were a couple years where businesses were “entering cyberspace” and still trying to figure it out. Mostly this involved static webpages, since they saw the web as a kind of yellow pages. i.e. a business’ web page was their ad.

      people are apparently fine with ads

      It amazes me how accepting most people are of ads. I suspect Google’s going to win, and their ultimate contribution to humanity will be forcing ads into everything.

      • @The_v@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        131 day ago

        Why google became the dominate search engine in the first place was because every other search engine was an ad infested nightmare fuel.

        There is a limit of shit that people will put up with. Google is pushing that limit hard right now. Which is why I no longer use it.

        • @frezik@midwest.social
          link
          fedilink
          522 hours ago

          Partially. Not really. Page Rank instantly obsoleted every other search algorithm in existence. Nobody was able to get high quality results right at the top so consistently. The ad-free part was a bonus, at least for a while.

      • snooggums
        link
        fedilink
        English
        81 day ago

        It amazes me how accepting most people are of ads. I suspect Google’s going to win, and their ultimate contribution to humanity will be forcing ads into everything.

        People just eat up ‘personalized’ things so whoever coined ‘personalized ads’ was an evil genius.

    • @LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      423 hours ago

      I think the difference is that there is not really a Netflix-without-the-ads alternative for the same price. And if you are willing to pay a bit more, well, you can just pay for the higher tier of Netflix without ads.

      With browsers on the other hand, it’s all free with virtually no barrier to switching. So I think people will defect away a lot more quickly when a browser starts to worsen in quality (especially since Chrome doesn’t have Daddy Microsoft to force users to use it by default)