this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Ads have evolved into a cancer that is just growing and growing, making everything around them worse.
Ads have always been a cancer.
Not exactly. When the webmaster you knew put a banner in the corner of their site with ads from one and the same source, in one and the same place, not popping up and not bothering you, it really felt fine. I even felt the urge to click that and see where it leads.
Remember also Opera free version with that ad banner.
Yeah. I used to run a website back in the very early 2000s that a local bicycle seller/repair shop used to pay me to have a little static banner for. It was just an image, that's it. No tracking, no malware, no silly animations or covering content, etc. It was unobtrusive.
Did I get a huge amount of money? No. But it paid for maintenance, and a bit to spare. It made me feel like the effort I was putting into the site wasn't wasted. It was relevant to the site content (cycling club in my town) and so was probably an effective advertisement.
Ads aren't automatically evil, but the way they exist now definitely is. I wouldn't dream of browsing the web without Firefox+Ublock origin.
The unbridled greed of companies has made me go out of the way to remove them all from my life. If they had been more restrained, I'd have happily accepted some ads as being the price I pay for using the web.
The way they exist now is similar to taxi drivers in airports. You simply know that if something is being advertised this way, it's likely not what you need and probably a scam. So anything you don't find intentionally and not via ads becomes useless, so ads become useless.
I used adblockers back then too. Else some sites would cause infinite pop-up windows to open (I assume to get pay-per-click revenue). Even plain banners would significantly increase loading times on 56k connections.
🤮
The best part is when spammers and ad generators realized how easy it is to use GPT to automate and increased the number of spam bots and ads.