Comment on Websites: Then vs Now
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 1 day agoA 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.
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)
Sergio@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
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.
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 1 day 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 1 day 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.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 1 day ago
People just eat up ‘personalized’ things so whoever coined ‘personalized ads’ was an evil genius.
riskable@programming.dev 1 day ago
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!
Sergio@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
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.
zea_64@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
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.