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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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The lack of ads. Were there ads? Of course there were. A reasonable amount with reasonable placement. Websites still functioned as intended without content being progressively more blocked on your screen, and they rarely required interaction to deal with them. Nowadays, if you can get a site that's not paywalled, the text field is so small you can only see a sentence or two between the bullshit.
I... don't think we used the same internet. There were pop-up ads, pop-under ads, flashing ads, "you're the millionth visitor" ads, "hit the monkey" ads, ads with sound, ads with drive-by ActiveX malware that'd silently install onto your PC and use your modem to call premium phone numbers (to make money for the scammers) while you were asleep, ads that popped up "Windows messenger" alerts, ads with malware that phished bank details (when nothing used SSL and before 2FA was a thing), etc. You may have just forgotten about this since it's been a loooooong time :)
Ad networks like Google AdSense/AdWords were a huge improvement over the garbage we used to have to deal with. At the time, they were just basic text ads or 468x60 banners (which is a long-deprecated ad size now)
Yeah, I remember all of that. It usually went hand in hand with sites I shouldn't have been on lol. But who knows, you're probably right. It's been a lot of years.
Larger sites were sometimes OK, but a lot of sites (both small and large) eventually wanted to make money quickly (especially during the dot com bubble), and started showing ads, unaware of the fact that the sketchy ad networks of the time would show malicious ads.
Pop-up ads were ridiculously effective (high clickthrough rate) since they literally popped up above whatever you were doing and you had to do something (close it) to continue browsing. This was before adblockers and even popup blockers.
Interesting. I remember there being fewer ads but the ones that did exist were worse. Bright colours, flashing, blink tags, 3-frame epilepsy inducing animated gifs... "You are the 10000th visitor!" Some in the mid to late 90s would pop-up new windows or even start autoplaying sound...