• grte@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Eh…This is a little rose coloured glasses. Anyone else remember the pre-adblock era of umpteen pop-up ads?

    • snooggums@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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
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        1 month 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
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          1 month 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
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            1 month 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@lemmy.world
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          1 month 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
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        1 month 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)

    • macniel@feddit.org
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      1 month ago

      pop-up ads? Ha… try pop-UNDER ads.

      also can’t have ads when there is no javascript to begin with. Just static content.

            • macniel@feddit.org
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              1 month ago

              Hyperlinks and Forms are static, yet they allow for interactivity (communication with the server and or url handler like mailto:, tel:, fax: etc.)

              iframes, frames (and framesets) were a fricking mistake. And that malicious practice with meta refresh yeah, that certainly was a thing back then. I loved when internet explorer just clicked on every navigation…

              img tags, are not advertisements, or what do you mean? since you probably don’t mean <img/>

              also, you can edit your commit so that you don’t have to spam comments.

              • Rain World: Slugcat Game@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                different point -> different comment?
                also ads technically are anything that promotes a product? i’m not using the definition of “visible malware added to a website”

    • simple@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      Not to mention the internet wasn’t as secure as it is now. There was lots of malicious code everywhere. Oh, and if you write a typo in any website’s name there was a 50/50 chance you’ll be redirected to porn.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      I think this entire response thread is too young. Back when you connected to the Internet with 14.4k and 28k modems (mid to late 90’s), websites were as OP described. Simply put, there was no bandwidth for too much extra crap.

      • LouSlash
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        1 month ago

        I started using Internet in 2004 (as a school kid) so i didn’t actually experience modem Internet era, but still i miss it (i’m kind of nostalgia guy as well)

        Especially in Poland, where for a long time there was only dial-up Internet connection with 3-minute impulse (where each one was kinda expensive at the time), so you wanted to open as many websites in this timeframe that interested you then disconnect

    • Rooskie91@discuss.online
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      1 month ago

      Came here to say this. They make a joke about how many adds are on the Internet in an episode of Futurama that aired in 2000.

    • Rusty@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      I remember using internet in mid to late 90s and there were no ads, maybe OP means that period?

    • brb@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      I remember hunting for the actual “Download” button. Got pretty good at it I would say.

  • KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    You are the millionth visitor to this site!! Click here to claim your prize now!

    Let’s not fool ourselves, adverts were always there and intrusive, remember those hotbars that your parents would have 100 of installed somehow? Sure things are worse, but they were never perfect.

    • Schal330@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Sure, but we had Bonzi Buddy too. These days the best we can hope for is some AI that tells us to eat rocks.

  • rmuk@feddit.uk
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    1 month ago

    Are Temu the ones who say “pretend you’re a billionaire” or something but their ads always have the most bizarre, undesirable-looking, nasty, cheap, plastic things in them?

    • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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      1 month ago

      Yep. That’s the ones. Or really pornographic or absurd. Cause buying more makes you feel like you have control of your life when you can buy a new shirt that dissolves when you wash it because you can’t afford to take a day off to walk around a park.

  • ngn@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    the biggest mistake of humanity was (and still is) javascript

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Missed the half-dozen boilerplate SEO sites that scraped the most generic and unhelpful information possible that feature links to whatever barely tangential software or product they might be selling.

  • ILikeTraaaains@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I would add that if isa News website, the 1000 words article is just a verbatim copy from Reuters.

    I want more info about [something happening], not to read the same article with minimal information again and again.

  • NutWrench@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I think the best way to make the Internet less sh*tty is to get away from Google search.

    I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.

    https://search.inetol.net/

    It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:

    https://searx.space/

    • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I switched to DuckDuckGo a while back and even that was beneficial. I can always tell when I’m on a different machine and I forget to switch the default search… It’s wild how fast they’ve fallen.

      These days I setup ollama with open webui to host my own ai. Then you can connect Searxng to that and have the AI search the web for you and return no nonsense results.

  • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    Don’t forget cookie settings notifications and a pop up asking for you to subscribe to an email newsletter.

  • go $fsck yourself@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Ad-blocker dedectors

    buy crap you don’t needed

    Inrelevant information

    SO MANY ADS, INRELEVANT INFORMATION, TRACKERS