Garbage ads have been a thing almost since the dawn of the Internet and we found a solution to them years ago. They're called ad blockers. If you are online and not using an ad blocker: Why? That's like finding a $2/night hooker and not using a condom.
The article did mention ad-blockers:
Some users take back control from online ads by installing ad-blocker software. These can be free versions in the form of a browser extension, or more advanced versions with a subscription fee.
I think you underestimate how technologically illiterate the average person is. Many people do not even understand the difference between a web browser and a search engine - they use Chrome because they think that's the only way to perform a Google search.
Ew. Speaking of technological illiteracy, the author is irresponsibly contributing to it by insinuating that subscription fee ad blockers are somehow inherently better than free ones, which is not only absolute bullshit but also pretty much anti-Free Software propaganda.
I was promised that surveillance capitalism would mean high quality ads that improved my quality of living. :blessed:
When I can’t block the ads, I always opt for the “non-personalized ads” option, since I know they are getting paid less. Also easier to ignore an ad when it is random.
$2/a night? Okay Mr Moneybags, must be nice to be so rich!
Eloquently/elegantly put
Garbage ads predate the internet.
For example, Google Chrome has stopped the use of auto-play video.
Even setting aside ads, that was virtually always something that I did not want.
If websites like CNN want someone to watch video, put the video up with autoplay off. If someone wants to watch it, they can start it playing.
But then they can't force you to watch claim that you watched the ad at the start of the video for that sweet advertiser revenue.
Firefox plus uBlock Origin is what you can do about it. I hardly ever see any ads. SponsorBlock is great if you watch youtube too.
What ads?
Because it's "too hard" for websites to have proper relationships with advertisers vs just signing onto an ad network.
Remember the purpose of ads is to advertise a product that might potentially sell. Quality control isn't always a priority it's capitalism after all. At the end of the day, if you just want to block ads, just block ads.
The AI generated car ads are just awful, I made a post about it:
What can we do about it? Is this some grandpa's first time on the internet?
Ads = revenue that keep sites and services running. What can you do about it? Pay.
Or let all the commercial sites go out of business and fucking die, so that the labor-of-love websites that dominated the net in the '90s can return to prominence. And nothing of value would be lost.
Anyone who wasn't around then can't really know what they missed.
That sounds wonderful. But I've been using the web a long time. I remember the time you're talking about when we first got web browsers etc. And let me tell you, the windows 95/98 time frame before Google and ask Jeeves etc was not a golden age. Ads were still on web pages, and while people with the right technical knowledge and access to a computer could create a server and a website and so on, they still had to get that website in front of people's eyes.
We had visitor counters and web rings and a rush to buy up domain names before everyone else, and so on. That still costs money though. The electric to run a server. The time to upkeep a website (even in html), and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.
Google and even Jeeves and Alta Vista came at a time when we badly needed to connect the internet together in a way that the average new user would be able to find usable and.intuitive enough to get away from books and papers.
Search engines that ran on ads became one of the few good ways to do this. And a lot of the way the business of ad aggregation and web search have developed to make it easier to find what you're looking for for on the web makes sense when you give it any thought. But people spent a good couple of decades completing ignoring that to the point that now it's gotten out of hand and Google basically has a monopoly on search, and half the internet doesn't seem to even know they're not a search company but an ad aggregation company doing what makes them money.
I don't honestly care if you agree with what Google is doing or not. But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.
In general, you're not wrong in your summary of how the Web developed. The problem is, though, that you seem to be assuming that since the Web did develop that way, that it had to develop that way. I disagree with that: I think other possibilities existed and might have been viable or even dominant if the dice of fate/random chance had happened to land differently. (And I think that they would've been much more likely to be viable or even dominant if some of the regulatory environment had been different, e.g. if residential ISPs hadn't been allowed to get away with things like drastically asymmetric connections and prohibiting users from running servers. More enforcement of accessibility and standards compliance, instead of tolerating companies deliberately abusing things like Flash and Javascript to unduly restrict users, would've also gone a long way.)
and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.
That was not only totally optional, but also arguably considered harmful. HTML was intended to leave presentation up to the client to a certain extent, by design. Megalomaniacal marketers and graphic designers demanding to have pixel-perfect control and doing a bunch of dirty hacks (e.g. abusing `` for page layout instead of tabular data) to achieve it were fundamentally Doing It Wrong.
But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.
Or they implement a distributed architecture that offloads the bandwidth and storage costs to users directly, a la Bittorrent, IPFS, Freenet, etc.<table></table>
How about becoming literally disabled and pushed away from the one area i was deemed proficient in?
autists with visual sensory overload complications.
Seriously, if the internet is going to be like this, might as well pull the plug.
I have been investing in running my own services and programming my own life essential tools anyway. I will always be computer nerd but one of these years i am just going offline, trow my phone away and glue my mailbox shut.
And yeah this is anger talking but i am so fed up with this “someone must make profits to justify our existence” excuse. That is not how passion works.
I'm not talking about "someone must make profits" that's disingenuous. What I'm saying is that services that you consume for free cost money to run. Someone somewhere has to provide if nothing else the computer/server, and electricity to run it the fediverse runs on donations and ads literally the sync app I'm using runs on ads, paid tier, etc. because it costs time and money to upkeep.
Your personal problems with tech in general and your disability don't have anything to do with that. People are talking on the tech community about how Google is taking out competing front ends for YouTube and what this means for an ad free experience, and while I agree that Google is obviously the bad guy for being the mutli-trillion dollar company it is, I also recognize that they have always been an ad company and the thing about Google is that before it existed as a free to use service we relied really heavily on an open web that was pretty empty by comparison and very disjoined. Finding things was a problem. Web rings may give people nostalgia for a "better time", but they weren't efficient ways to find information.
I can understand being angry but paying for the things you use is the one way to create alternatives to these services that are literally taking advantage of their users for profit as you put it. Lots of web services that are big "gotta make money" companies started out offering us free or inexpensive alternatives to the companies that were overcharging us and gouging us.
The fact that they've got too big is an issue with capitalism not the concept that people shouldn't have to pay for the things they use.
The Internet is full of ads because ads pay bills and keep the lights on.
I run some of those services that people use. 24/7
I have been doing so for years.
That does costs a lot of time and energy, i ask nothing
In return.
Well except they they wont be upset with me
In person when i end up going dark. ( I’ll make sure to opensource provide it all naturally. )
Right now on lemmy, you are using a free service running on someones computer, there are no ads nor subscriptions to support it. If it would then i would be spinning up my own instance quicker then bender can imagine his own themapark.
The alternative isn't just possible, but the default way people have gotten things done since prehistoric times. Do things because we want to, share resources, providing for others. Lift everyone else up and you too will rise.
What i see when i observe services that complain about not being able to sustain without some form of financing is a lack of motivation and passion. To me they are a red flag that they are disfunctioneel by nature. I lose completely faith in there ability to provide competence or quality.
Of course i do understand that being unwilling to compromise morality under treat of poverty is an exception rather then rule.
But honestly how people do this shit and
Not want to kill themselves in shame is actually weird to me.
Garbage ads have been a thing almost since the dawn of the Internet and we found a solution to them years ago. They're called ad blockers. If you are online and not using an ad blocker: Why? That's like finding a $2/night hooker and not using a condom.
The article did mention ad-blockers:
I think you underestimate how technologically illiterate the average person is. Many people do not even understand the difference between a web browser and a search engine - they use Chrome because they think that's the only way to perform a Google search.
Ew. Speaking of technological illiteracy, the author is irresponsibly contributing to it by insinuating that subscription fee ad blockers are somehow inherently better than free ones, which is not only absolute bullshit but also pretty much anti-Free Software propaganda.
I was promised that surveillance capitalism would mean high quality ads that improved my quality of living. :blessed:
When I can’t block the ads, I always opt for the “non-personalized ads” option, since I know they are getting paid less. Also easier to ignore an ad when it is random.
$2/a night? Okay Mr Moneybags, must be nice to be so rich!
Eloquently/elegantly put
Garbage ads predate the internet.
Even setting aside ads, that was virtually always something that I did not want.
If websites like CNN want someone to watch video, put the video up with autoplay off. If someone wants to watch it, they can start it playing.
But then they can't
force you to watchclaim that you watched the ad at the start of the video for that sweet advertiser revenue.Firefox plus uBlock Origin is what you can do about it. I hardly ever see any ads. SponsorBlock is great if you watch youtube too.
What ads?
Because it's "too hard" for websites to have proper relationships with advertisers vs just signing onto an ad network.
Remember the purpose of ads is to advertise a product that might potentially sell. Quality control isn't always a priority it's capitalism after all. At the end of the day, if you just want to block ads, just block ads.
The AI generated car ads are just awful, I made a post about it:
https://lemmy.world/post/14053496
What can we do about it? Is this some grandpa's first time on the internet?
Ads = revenue that keep sites and services running. What can you do about it? Pay.
Or let all the commercial sites go out of business and fucking die, so that the labor-of-love websites that dominated the net in the '90s can return to prominence. And nothing of value would be lost.
Anyone who wasn't around then can't really know what they missed.
That sounds wonderful. But I've been using the web a long time. I remember the time you're talking about when we first got web browsers etc. And let me tell you, the windows 95/98 time frame before Google and ask Jeeves etc was not a golden age. Ads were still on web pages, and while people with the right technical knowledge and access to a computer could create a server and a website and so on, they still had to get that website in front of people's eyes.
We had visitor counters and web rings and a rush to buy up domain names before everyone else, and so on. That still costs money though. The electric to run a server. The time to upkeep a website (even in html), and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.
Google and even Jeeves and Alta Vista came at a time when we badly needed to connect the internet together in a way that the average new user would be able to find usable and.intuitive enough to get away from books and papers.
Search engines that ran on ads became one of the few good ways to do this. And a lot of the way the business of ad aggregation and web search have developed to make it easier to find what you're looking for for on the web makes sense when you give it any thought. But people spent a good couple of decades completing ignoring that to the point that now it's gotten out of hand and Google basically has a monopoly on search, and half the internet doesn't seem to even know they're not a search company but an ad aggregation company doing what makes them money.
I don't honestly care if you agree with what Google is doing or not. But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.
In general, you're not wrong in your summary of how the Web developed. The problem is, though, that you seem to be assuming that since the Web did develop that way, that it had to develop that way. I disagree with that: I think other possibilities existed and might have been viable or even dominant if the dice of fate/random chance had happened to land differently. (And I think that they would've been much more likely to be viable or even dominant if some of the regulatory environment had been different, e.g. if residential ISPs hadn't been allowed to get away with things like drastically asymmetric connections and prohibiting users from running servers. More enforcement of accessibility and standards compliance, instead of tolerating companies deliberately abusing things like Flash and Javascript to unduly restrict users, would've also gone a long way.)
That was not only totally optional, but also arguably considered harmful. HTML was intended to leave presentation up to the client to a certain extent, by design. Megalomaniacal marketers and graphic designers demanding to have pixel-perfect control and doing a bunch of dirty hacks (e.g. abusing `` for page layout instead of tabular data) to achieve it were fundamentally Doing It Wrong.
Or they implement a distributed architecture that offloads the bandwidth and storage costs to users directly, a la Bittorrent, IPFS, Freenet, etc.<table></table>
How about becoming literally disabled and pushed away from the one area i was deemed proficient in?
autists with visual sensory overload complications.
Seriously, if the internet is going to be like this, might as well pull the plug.
I have been investing in running my own services and programming my own life essential tools anyway. I will always be computer nerd but one of these years i am just going offline, trow my phone away and glue my mailbox shut.
And yeah this is anger talking but i am so fed up with this “someone must make profits to justify our existence” excuse. That is not how passion works.
I'm not talking about "someone must make profits" that's disingenuous. What I'm saying is that services that you consume for free cost money to run. Someone somewhere has to provide if nothing else the computer/server, and electricity to run it the fediverse runs on donations and ads literally the sync app I'm using runs on ads, paid tier, etc. because it costs time and money to upkeep.
Your personal problems with tech in general and your disability don't have anything to do with that. People are talking on the tech community about how Google is taking out competing front ends for YouTube and what this means for an ad free experience, and while I agree that Google is obviously the bad guy for being the mutli-trillion dollar company it is, I also recognize that they have always been an ad company and the thing about Google is that before it existed as a free to use service we relied really heavily on an open web that was pretty empty by comparison and very disjoined. Finding things was a problem. Web rings may give people nostalgia for a "better time", but they weren't efficient ways to find information.
I can understand being angry but paying for the things you use is the one way to create alternatives to these services that are literally taking advantage of their users for profit as you put it. Lots of web services that are big "gotta make money" companies started out offering us free or inexpensive alternatives to the companies that were overcharging us and gouging us.
The fact that they've got too big is an issue with capitalism not the concept that people shouldn't have to pay for the things they use.
The Internet is full of ads because ads pay bills and keep the lights on.
I run some of those services that people use. 24/7 I have been doing so for years.
That does costs a lot of time and energy, i ask nothing In return. Well except they they wont be upset with me In person when i end up going dark. ( I’ll make sure to opensource provide it all naturally. )
Right now on lemmy, you are using a free service running on someones computer, there are no ads nor subscriptions to support it. If it would then i would be spinning up my own instance quicker then bender can imagine his own themapark.
The alternative isn't just possible, but the default way people have gotten things done since prehistoric times. Do things because we want to, share resources, providing for others. Lift everyone else up and you too will rise.
What i see when i observe services that complain about not being able to sustain without some form of financing is a lack of motivation and passion. To me they are a red flag that they are disfunctioneel by nature. I lose completely faith in there ability to provide competence or quality.
Of course i do understand that being unwilling to compromise morality under treat of poverty is an exception rather then rule.
But honestly how people do this shit and Not want to kill themselves in shame is actually weird to me.