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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.
grte@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Eh…This is a little rose coloured glasses. Anyone else remember the pre-adblock era of umpteen pop-up ads?
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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.
LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world 5 weeks 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)
simple@lemm.ee 5 weeks 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.
riskable@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
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‽
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
It was such a time saver…
ieatpwns@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Imagine my surprise when Spider-Man.com lead to marvels website but Xmen.com lead to porn
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 5 weeks 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@szmer.info 4 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks ago
I remember using internet in late 90s and there were no ads, maybe OP means that period?
brb@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I remember hunting for the actual “Download” button. Got pretty good at it I would say.