• 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.