this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Old guy checking in. When ad blockers first became a thing, my then-teenaged boys started using one and were trying to talk me into it. I was pretty dubious. I said my concern was that the model most of the web was built on was ad-supported. That is, people created content on the web to try and get visitors, and made money by selling ads on their site, or used monetized links. If everyone started using ad blockers, I said, that model would break down and either people would stop creating content or they'd go to a new model, like subscriptions. I figured few people would take time equivalent to a full time job to create content for free.
I think that largely came to pass. A lot of great online publications have closed their doors, and the are lots of paywalls now. The things is, the sites are just as much to blame. Most people wouldn't have been driven to use ad blockers if the ads hadn't gotten so untenable. A banner or a box here or there is one thing, but when there are a giant number of pop-up windows, autoplay videos, windows you can't back out of, and all the other hellish stuff, people are going to be highly motivated to find a way to stop it.
That whole arms race was one of the things that ruined the internet, in my opinion.
I also think a lot of people who grew up on the internet have completely and totally forgotten about how bad it really was. They had ads that would take over your computer, ads that would download viruses, ads that would use your modem to dial 1-900 numbers, ads that would open 800 uncloseable web pages full of porn and start playing loud screaming music and moaning sounds to gather the interest of every other person in the house just a shame you for using the internet.
And dear Jesus don't forget about the fucking toolbars. Dozens upon dozens of toolbars installed in every browser, everything from bonzi buddy to AOL email, detecting that a picture would be loaded on your screen and replacing it with one of theirs as an ad link.
Ad blockers have been necessary to use the internet for the last 20 freaking years.
If you're not the kind of person who would go to the STD clinic and fuck every person there without a condom, you should never use the internet without an ad block.
Going to my parents house to help fix why their computer was "running slow" and like 6 inches of their browser was all toolbars that they had no idea how they got there nor knew what they did.
This is a thing of sheer beauty ❤️
Oooh a free lobster dinner!
Triggered!! 🤣
Yeah, and that's what I mean when I say that the sites brought it on themselves. If the ads started reasonable, like what you'd see on the old Sunday newspaper, three wouldn't have been much reason to block them.
You also have to add on the privacy issues with all the tracking, that also drove people to use them.
There was a sort of nice period.
In the wake of a bunch of BS, Google came along with rather nice and unobtrusive ads, and it seemed to catch on. Then over the last decade, it's really gone way downhill again.
Yeah, I didn't mind an ad on the side of the screen when all of the content was front and center. But the problem is is that when you make it so that a company's livelihood depends on forcing users to do things they don't want to do, and there's no regulation on that whatsoever, it's just going to go downhill very quickly and if you think this is bad it can get much much worse.
I'm kind of surprised that isps are not injecting ads into your browsing and forcing you to watch ads just to use the internet that you paid for.
They could even charge you like a $10 a month up charge fee for ad-free internet and say that we're not going to block the ads on the rest of the internet you just won't get additional ads from us.
If I recall correctly, during one of the more recent public debates around Net Neutrality in the US, it came out that certain ISPs were doing just that. Some people were showing screenshots of ads showing up inside their steam client (which runs the storefront and community sections as webpages).