Ah yes. Before the dark times. When dragons lay sleeping.
I would add that if isa News website, the 1000 words article is just a verbatim copy from Reuters.
I want more info about [something happening], not to read the same article with minimal information again and again.
Eh…This is a little rose coloured glasses. Anyone else remember the pre-adblock era of umpteen pop-up ads?
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.
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)
pop-up ads? Ha… try pop-UNDER ads.
also can’t have ads when there is no javascript to begin with. Just static content.
hah, forgot img tags?
still static content.
they’re advertisements!
also you think content is static just because it has no js? hyperlinks! forms! the server!!!
Hyperlinks and Forms are static, yet they allow for interactivity (communication with the server and or url handler like mailto:, tel:, fax: etc.)
iframes, frames (and framesets) were a fricking mistake. And that malicious practice with meta refresh yeah, that certainly was a thing back then. I loved when internet explorer just clicked on every navigation…
img tags, are not advertisements, or what do you mean? since you probably don’t mean
<img/>also, you can edit your commit so that you don’t have to spam comments.
different point -> different comment?
also ads technically are anything that promotes a product? i’m not using the definition of “visible malware added to a website”
consider this. an iframe containing a page with meta refresh, and on each load, the server adds a different hyperlinked image. and some cookies.
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.
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.
Imagine my surprise when Spider-Man.com lead to marvels website but Xmen.com lead to porn
It was such a time saver…
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.
I remember using internet in mid to late 90s and there were no ads, maybe OP means that period?
Who made this?
Since they’re talking about JQuery, I think that knowledge is lost to time.
There used to be a link at the bottom for who made it, but it appears to be missing now.
Also:
Endless redirects that attempt to keep you on the site when you want to nope right out and click the back button
It is always the Microsoft Help Center/Community answers
the biggest mistake of humanity was (and still is) javascript
One ring to bind them all…
And politically biased content… fuck you Reddit
Missed the half-dozen boilerplate SEO sites that scraped the most generic and unhelpful information possible that feature links to whatever barely tangential software or product they might be selling.
Are Temu the ones who say “pretend you’re a billionaire” or something but their ads always have the most bizarre, undesirable-looking, nasty, cheap, plastic things in them?
“Shop like a billionaire”
“Uh, ok”
closes Temu app, calls Sotheby’s
I think the best way to make the Internet less sh*tty is to get away from Google search.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
I switched to DuckDuckGo a while back and even that was beneficial. I can always tell when I’m on a different machine and I forget to switch the default search… It’s wild how fast they’ve fallen.
These days I setup ollama with open webui to host my own ai. Then you can connect Searxng to that and have the AI search the web for you and return no nonsense results.
Algorithms
Algorithms? On my website? It’s more likely than you think!
But not needed.
Ad-blocker dedectors
buy crap you don’t needed
Inrelevant information
SO MANY ADS, INRELEVANT INFORMATION, TRACKERS
It’s getting so hard to find outrelevant results these days.
I think they forgot to mention ads
For what is worth, I have yet to see a temu ad
Apart from usual ubo, reader mode and friends trained eyes are very effective content filter. We all can glance on a search result page or an article and immediately know if it’s content or low effort craps.
Stay out of mainstream social media, stop consuming ‘feeds’. Stay in the realms of personal sites, blogs and sane link aggregators/rss to keep mental peace of not having to filter garbage with eyes everyday.
