• grte@lemmy.ca
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    18 hours 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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      18 hours 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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        18 hours 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.

        • snooggums@lemmy.world
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          17 hours 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.

    • macniel@feddit.org
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      18 hours 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.

    • Rusty@lemmy.ca
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      11 hours ago

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

    • simple@lemm.ee
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      18 hours 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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      17 hours 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.

    • Rooskie91@discuss.online
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      17 hours 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.