Ah yes. Before the dark times. When dragons lay sleeping.
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.
Or when the search results say “learn about [thing], [insert adjectives here]” or other bullshit instead of just giving you the answer.
Eh…This is a little rose coloured glasses. Anyone else remember the pre-adblock era of umpteen pop-up ads?
I remember hunting for the actual “Download” button. Got pretty good at it I would say.
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.
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.
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!
That’s an excellent point. Hundreds of years ago, if you wanted to recomment the product of a particularly skilled soapmaker or farmer, you’d say “Jo made that”, and maybe you could point to Jo’s logo on the product so your friends knew how to recognize it. So the signifier of quality (the brand) pointed to the signified of a quality product. But now the signifier has become disentangled from the signified: the advertisements and marketing campaigns promote brand loyalty even if the product becomes worse through inferior ingredients or shrinkflation. Because of this, the signifier is presented to us when we do not want to see it.
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.
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)
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.
also you think content is static just because it has no js? hyperlinks! forms! the server!!!
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.
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”
consider this. an iframe containing a page with meta refresh, and on each load, the server adds a different hyperlinked image. and some cookies.
they’re advertisements!
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.
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
It was such a time saver…
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.
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
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.
I remember using internet in mid to late 90s and there were no ads, maybe OP means that period?
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.
Sure, but we had Bonzi Buddy too. These days the best we can hope for is some AI that tells us to eat rocks.
Who made this?
Since they’re talking about JQuery, I think that knowledge is lost to time.
There used to be a link at the bottom for who made it, but it appears to be missing now.
noice
Also:
Endless redirects that attempt to keep you on the site when you want to nope right out and click the back button
It is always the Microsoft Help Center/Community answers
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!
Idk about chrome but ok Firefox you can right click to go backer
Reeeeeaalllllllyyyy putting on the rose tinted goggles, here…
Yeah that’s not how I remember the early Internet.
More like gifs everywhere, wild colours, you have to have that fancy html marquee! And terrible layouts, because aligning divs is difficult.
Good timesdon’t forget autoplay video and music
Landing pages, too. Often with a corny Shockwave animation.
Those mouse cursor tracers lol
Why deal with float when you can use a table?
divs were added in the late 90’s… that is not what I’d call early internet
I mean, it may be subjective, but Internet was open to public in '93, and divs were specced in '97.
It was more of a joke anyway. The layouts were often tables long after divs if I’m not mistakenYeah, definitely subjective, but to me the early days of the web were before HTML 2 - so up to 1995.
And yeah, so many tables for a long time… Mostly because it was a bit messy to work with and had limitations, not to mention browser support requirements and a pretty fast moving sets of specs…
It was fun though.
I remember clicking on a website and getting ABSOLUTELY BOMBSRDED WITH NEVERENDING POPUPS OF HARDCORE PORN PICS AND SOUND and my parents were behind me, and you just panic reboot the computer.
It’s funny because I definitely remember this happening while using Netscape Navigator to access our Prodigy-peovided internet.
the biggest mistake of humanity was (and still is) javascript
One ring to bind them all…
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?
“Shop like a billionaire”
“Uh, ok”
closes Temu app, calls Sotheby’s
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.
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.
Why aren’t you using ublock origin like a rational adult?
l use it
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.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
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.
And politically biased content… fuck you Reddit
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