Current Events > Did ads ruin the internet IYO?

(+) Yeah! (+)

And popups. They seem worse now than they were back in the early 2000s.

I can't even look at a Youtube video anymore without being forced to sit through a 15 second unskippable ad. And then some of these ads are 5 minutes, though you can skip after a few seconds. Why the **** would anyone voluntarily watch a random 5 minute commercial?
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I don't get ads at all.
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they are absolutely not worse than they used to be
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ads were way worse back before adblockers. and i definitely remember popups being way worse, i remember having to hard reset my pc a couple times because of the damn things.
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Not saying its a good reason for them to exist, but five minute commercials exist because toddlers and young children will watch YouTube for hours on end and are too dumb to press the skip button for ads.
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Try ublock origin works p well even with youtube.

I use an adblocker on my phone as well.

But yeah it was not a great economic model, the internet kind of decided that everyone should have everything for free so the platform was advertising by default. We've shown we're willing to subscribe to a lot of things though given the rising popularity of subscription models online. It could be that maybe in the future less services and sites will be ad based, but who knows. It's always been pretty annoying.
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metralo posted...

they are absolutely not worse than they used to be

I mean that now, every Youtube video has ads (didn't years ago), news websites force you to disable adblocker, popups on most websites you visit. And this is all with AdblockPlus installed.
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Not really. Then again I use this so called ad blockers, pop up blockers, over lay blockers, modded apps, and in extreme cases, comb through list of scripts in a webpage to block redirects. Sometimes, just gotta have to suck it up.
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Yes but uBlock Origin saved it.
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No, adblocks saved us from that fate

the true villain is the new prevalence of paywalled content
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Still fewer ads than before the internet though.

Ads have gotten worse for sure (uBlock Origin has fixed that for me) but pop ups are definitely lighter these days then they used to be. I remember the days of having an infected (I assume) computer with 20+ popups daily.
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FL81 posted...

No, adblocks saved us from that fate

the true villain is the new prevalence of paywalled content

Sometimes it's worth the price of admission. I'm almost positive social media like Facebook would be so much better if they stopped relying on behavior modification, spying and advertising revenue and instead offered a paywalled version of their service without all that garbage instead.

Netflix is probably the best example of a paywall being worth it.
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PeerBlock, uBlock Origin, Free Firewalls have made the internet bareable.
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No. They were much worse when popup blockers weren't really a thing. Now they are built into some browsers.

What I do know is that the sites I used to go to as a kid, had unintrusive banners on the sides or tops while the real content was left untouched. Nowadays, content is interrupted by animated windows designed to distract you as hard as possible, ads come right in the middle of videos, etc. I didn't need an adblock as a kid but it's necessary now.
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