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.
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.
Eh…This is a little rose coloured glasses. Anyone else remember the pre-adblock era of umpteen pop-up ads?
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.
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.
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.
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.
People are accepting of ads because ads are literally everywhere. A world without ads would be very strange indeed!
Every logo that exists and every product that has its own name/brand printed on it is an ad. Every product name in a catalog or simple list is an ad.
A world without ads would be like hundreds of years ago when you could buy soap that just looked like soap with no labels and no packaging at all. When the only food you purchased was bare produce/meat (or the whole animal). But even then any assembled/manufactured product would have some sort of “maker’s mark”.
I mean, how long have humans been branding cattle? That’s the original use of that term!
A logo’s very different from what I would consider an “ad”. I don’t mind logos existing, but anything pushed in my face is horrible and I hate it.
pop-up ads? Ha… try pop-UNDER ads.
also can’t have ads when there is no javascript to begin with. Just static content.
hah, forgot img tags?
still static content.
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.
It was such a time saver…
There’s vastly more malicious code now than there was back then. Every company that has an online presence is constantly under attack. Constantly. There isn’t an IPv4 address that exists that isn’t scanned and have an attempt at hacking performed within seconds of being connected.
Not only that but today’s malicious code is much better at what it does with hundreds of amazing features and methods of branching out using different attack methods. Today’s malware is so good it updates itself very carefully/as secretly as possible so that some old compromised machine that no one thinks about anymore can become the next vector of attack inside your network.
All it takes is one active vulnerability
Keep all your shit up to date, people! When was the last time you checked your router to see if it had updates? Hmm‽
Imagine my surprise when Spider-Man.com lead to marvels website but Xmen.com lead to porn
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.
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.
Also:
Endless redirects that attempt to keep you on the site when you want to nope right out and click the back button
Trying the back button to get out of an ad infestation? You get a new ad! Trying again? Believe or not, straight to another ad!
Apart from usual ubo, reader mode and friends trained eyes are very effective content filter. We all can glance on a search result page or an article and immediately know if it’s content or low effort craps.
Stay out of mainstream social media, stop consuming ‘feeds’. Stay in the realms of personal sites, blogs and sane link aggregators/rss to keep mental peace of not having to filter garbage with eyes everyday.
I think they forgot to mention ads
“Inrelevant Information”? That’s unpossible english!
inrilevant
