• IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Basically how I browse the internet these days … if I have to click on a bunch of stuff, sign up, register, accept a bunch of notifications, cookies, blah, blah, blah … all because I want to read 200 words on your dumb site … I’m not even going to bother with your site, skip and find a different source that is easier.

    • saltesc@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I go a step further and block them in DDG. This includes any “article” I have to scroll through to find the answer.

    • archonet@lemy.lol
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      2 months ago

      Get PopUpOFF and AdNauseam. Don’t just back down without a fight. If I need to read an article to find some information I am going to read it, dumb bullshit be damned, even if I have to break half your site to do so. I’ve even been spiteful enough to hack away at the page with inspect element if it still manages to get past those add-ons.

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        Generally for news websites … especially highly rated ones that are supposed to be the best professional outfits … if I can’t use ‘reader view’ and just read your copy … I’m skipping your site and never going back to you.

        All I want to do is read the news … you don’t need to sell me on a great refrigerator or a cigarette lighter that has a flame that can melt steel because I’m never going to buy it.

        • archonet@lemy.lol
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          2 months ago

          NoScript tends to break more things on the page than is desired, in my experience, I used to use it but eventually I got rid of it because of the hassle of “is this the one I should add an exception for to make it work? No. How about this one?” repeat until you figure it out, and then repeat the whole process for every website you ever use

          Using AdNauseam’s built-in uBlock, I can use its element picker if something is particularly stubborn

          Don’t get me wrong, I like NoScript as a concept and think it should exist for the subset of users who want that functionality, but it’s not for me.

          • LunchMoneyThief@links.hackliberty.org
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            2 months ago

            and then repeat the whole process for every website you ever use

            The thing is that you soon reach a point in which most of your frequently visited sites are already properly permissioned. After that, only newly visited domains need any special attention, and that’s assuming you’re there to do anything other than read some text or view an image.

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      2 months ago

      Occasionally my phone recommends an article to read that I find interesting, I click it and it opens in the built in chrome based browser and is a sea of ads. Fortunately there’s an “open in Firefox” button so I actually can read the article

    • NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      My less tech savy younger family members have learned to completely ignore ads, wait for the skip button and effectively avoid all the false skip buttons on account of playing mobile games with ads since they were babies. Advertisers have perfected the human brain of people who rawdog the internet to be incapable of retaining any information from any ad they see and finding skip buttons wherever they may be.

      From my personal observational account, i think I’ve only seen boomers and some older millennials ever interacting with ads. A gen alpha’s brain wouldn’t even remember an ad they just saw. They have perfected filtering them.

      • helloworld55@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        Ads work differently than that. At least good ones do.

        A good ad is almost imperceptible in presenting an idea to you. I have no doubt that people that are bombarded with ads that they say they “ignore” are still influenced over not having seen the ad at all

  • NutWrench@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    Advertisers abused the hell out of us back in the early days of the Internet and we haven’t forgotten. Multiple Pop-ups, pop-unders and seizure-inducing banner ads.

    If they simply stuck with small, basic, non-flashing banners, I could have handled it. But greed knows no limits with advertisers.

    • yamanii@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yep, they brought it upon themselves, I still remember as a kid falling for a “you are the visitor number 1 million” and getting a virus; and now we have porn and cults advertising on youtube, nothing changed.

    • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I certainly do lot miss the days when I’d go onto a website covered in ads for cheap, garbage MMOs… And then suddenly hear random music really fucking loudly. Scrambling to figure out where it’s coming from I’d find 4 or 5 smaller windows has opened up behind my main browser window.

    • Holyginz@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Honestly I wouldn’t even mind some basic banner flashing, i.e. not neon fucking strobe and plastered over everything. I can understand them wanting to get a little bit of an eye catch. But not all of the ads can be like that and not with pop-ups and shit.

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    Someday soon my “adblocker” might be a personal AI that reads the spam-ridden website on a virtual display in memory, identifies the actual content while pretending to look at whatever ads the site demands, and then passes the information I’m actually looking for along to me. Good luck captchaing that.

    • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      An AI feature actually useful for consumers? Corporate overloards say no thx, let’s instead fill the net with more AI-generated SEO bullshit

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      І ԁоո’t раrtісulаrly thіոk thаt summаrіzеrs аrе а gооԁ gоаl, sіոсе аі summаrіеs саո оftеո bе wrоոg, mіsіոtеrрrеt іոfоrmаtіоո, оr оmіt іmроrtаոt іոfоrmаtіո thеy fаіl tо іԁеոtіfy аs іmроrtаոt.

      I think if that starts to become common people should start using tools like this as well as the use of pre-baked PDF or image rendered text to thwart it on their content.

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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        2 months ago

        I’m not talking about a summarizer, I’m talking about a classifier. It just needs to identify which parts of the page are advertising and which are not.

        The point of such a tool is that it would read the web page in exactly the same way that a human would, so using trickery like pre-rendered images of text or funky unicode wouldn’t really change anything. If a human can read it then so can the AI.

        • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          That could be useful, if ads get to the point where removing their elements manually is no longer possible. I don’t think that’ll happen for a while though, as long as were still using HTML and Javascript which downloads and runs pages locally inside of our browsers.

      • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        This is a really interesting little project, but there’s no background info available. Making this be a plugin for that ‘other’ site that most of us left would be great. I still surf there once in a while but no longer comment due to their policy changes.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    It turns out the popular alternative is “force you to sign up (with a phone number) from critical mass/FOMO, track the snot out of you then slide ads in later.” Oh, and the stuff you want is siloed away until you join, and buried in a mountain of rambling and engagement optimization junk.

    Note that I’m largely talking about Discord, which is unfortunately where many of my interests have been shunted off to. People talk about Facebook, Google and OpenAI eating the internet, but I feel like Discord is the quiet trojan horse.

      • BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        Discord is 1000x worse because entire communities have taken to moving onto there. It’s like the one thing that’s worse than moving everything to Reddit: people using a fancy chat service like a forum. Everything from hardware to games seems to have most of the community on Discord; incredibly unhelpful if I’m trying to troubleshoot something.

        • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          It’s unbelievavly time inefficient for… anything.

          And its incredibly engaging. I burnt through so much time shooting the breeze in hopes of actually finding something interesting, notification spam, checking channels… It’s why I deleted it from everywhere. And it left a gaping hole in my life, because its the only place some niche communities exist now.

  • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I will try to unblock ads on a new site one time. I want to see the whole article on one page, No click-through gallery of 27 different takes. There can be ads in the borders and margins. And maybe if I’m feeling generous one in the middle of the content. I don’t want to see an unrelated pop-up video I don’t want to see every paragraph separated by another ad.

    If they can’t play nice I block the ads, If I can’t, by default, see the content without the ads, I’ll find the article on another service. Everyone’s literally just copying the same content back and forth with different wording.

    If I can’t see the content, and I can’t find it on another service, I’ll generally use bypass paywalls clean. If I can’t see it through that I don’t see it.

    I’m not giving in for this b******* ads all over the place scenario. You can’t even read a recipe page nowadays without an ad blocker.

    • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      You can say “bullshit” here, lemmy isn’t so concerned with making everything child friendly to appease advertisers like tiktok or youtube.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yeah I have open requests for speech to text to give me an easy way to turn on/off censoring. Unfortunately, until somebody does that it’s better to censor in places that I don’t need to censor then to not censor in places that need it.

  • pathief@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I often wonder how news websites are supposed to survive. People (myself included) want unbiased news websites without paywalls and ads.

    How are they supposed to pay their staff?

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I’m fine with ads when they don’t take up half my screen or try and shift the page to to trick me into clicking on them, should a stuck with sidebar adds.

    • Fiona@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      The honest answer are general fees like they are used for public broadcasters. It’s not a perfect system either and it requires significant effort to keep things neutral, but overall it seems to have the best results if you compare the quality of the outcome.

      • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Who gets to collect revenue from the fees though? Where do you draw the line, are you cutting off independent journalism?

        • Fiona@discuss.tchncs.de
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          2 months ago

          I’m not saying it’s an easy line to draw because you obviously don’t want to create incentives for bad journalism, but don’t want to make it too high of a bar to get into in the first place. I think you’d need to take things like the number of readers, the factuality of headings and content, the originality and the investigative value into account and be able to at least temporarily cut of bad outlets that spread fake/hate/… while at the same time ensuring that inconvenient truths make it out.

          It’s not an easy task, but I feel there is more room to get somewhere useful than with the current model of billionaire-owned media that outdo each other with rage-bait and inaccurate/misleading/falsly balanced/biased reporting…

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      If your website is a business, you need to have a business model. If your business model isn’t sustainable, because it relies on not annoying visitors too much, maybe look for a better one.

      Btw, most newspages have adapted some 10 years ago already, showing the important news for free and additional details with paid account. A lot have the balance off tho.

    • stoy@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      News sites are in need of a paradigm shift.

      I think we might get to a system where summaries of news are free, but indepth articles and videos are paid.

      Oh and I believe that news sites should scrap subscription only models, I should be able to pay 1-2EUR for a single article that I want to read, with no risk of the payment being a subscription.

      Obviously subscriptions models should still be an alternative if the users want it.

      • tehmics@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I’d happily pay a nominal fee for news that was unbiased reporting of facts rather than opinion, and didn’t bombard me with ads or sell my data. It just doesn’t exist so I use aggregators to get a general vibe across sources.

        • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          That’s easy to say, but when it comes to finding my credit card to type in my info for yet another news website, I can guarantee that I just don’t give enough fucks about any individual news story.

          • tehmics@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            I have mine saved in my password manager, but I’d rather they use a different payment processor (where it’s also saved) anyway. I try to avoid giving card info directly to smaller sites.

            If a news website that I could trust met my criteria, it wouldn’t be ‘just another’ news site, it’d be my source of truth. So like I said, I would happily pay for that. And I’d pay a lot more than an average subscription.

      • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        It’s nigh impossible to get many users to read past the headline. A summary is what 98% of people would actually want (and a good news story really is just a summary anyway) so the pay-through-rate would be so close to zero that I can’t see this model working.

        • stoy@lemmy.zip
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          2 months ago

          That is a fair point, which just makes me wonder what else new services can offer that people will pay for…

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Subscription models. Some sites even combine some free articles with it, so that anyone can look into their works, but not necessarily everything. If it fits you, you get a subscription. Sort of the same way people would pay for their daily newspaper.

      It can be argued that “news” should be free, and there are some news site that are basically picking up AP/AFP/whatever and repost these, but actual journalism do requires work.

    • Donkter@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The best business model is one that allows users to pay what they want. Unfortunately that means most of these sites would go out of business, which is not what they want so they’ll keep forcing more and more invasive ads on people until the dam truly breaks.

    • LunchMoneyThief@links.hackliberty.org
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      2 months ago

      The news sites that we have today are an inversion of what they should be. As a journalist, you wield tremendous power that is entrusted to you. Being able to set the narrative for millions of others is a privilege and, in fact, something that journalists should be paying to enjoy (e.g. footing the bill for web hosting).

      • pathief@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I don’t agree with this take that people should pay to work. Journalist have family to feed as well.

  • Aneb@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Umm I was reading the comments, does nobody else go into the page’s HTML and delete the “pay now” popup. Usually deleting the code works for me. Let me know if you have a way that works for you!

    • Mr. Satan@monyet.cc
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      2 months ago

      Depends, some pages don’t actually load the full content. Removing the paywall pop-up doesn’t really work then.

      • Lord Wiggle@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        There are some websites you can use to avoid a paywall for a newspaper sites, sometimes even loading the otherwise hidden content when removing the paywall code or manually removing the paywall overlay using an ad blocker. I forgot the one I used to use, but I found a Reddit post about it.

    • Fleppensteyn@feddit.nl
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      2 months ago

      Sometimes the reading mode bypasses paywalls and popups.

      Also make sure to block “annoyances” in uBlock.

      For the rest, I’m using the Nuke Anything extension.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      That sounds like a lot of work. On sites where that work (which is not all of them, some are made by competent people), firefox “reading mode” just do the job.

    • newcockroach@lemmy.world
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      I used to do that but it turns out ublock has a option for that!! When u click on the ublock plugin there is a thunder symbol option which u can use to delete any element on the page. 🙃

      Edit: grammer mistake

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I guess a lot of people have a strange aversion towards messing with the code of websites. Which is weird and dumb, it’s downloaded to your browser, it’s not running on their system, you’re free to mess with it as much as you want. Best to familiarize yourself with the Web developer tools, they can be an effective weapon against scammy sites which use deceptive methods like this.

      • InputZero@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Plus the worst thing that can happen is the webpage crashes, just hit reload and you’re back baby! It’s the safest environment to fuck around with code. A person would have to go out of their way to actually make a problem, maybe some random kid too. They get into everything.

    • tehmics@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I’d rather just leave if I hit a pay wall, I want to hit their metrics. but I have a huge amount of blocked elements via ublock and a handful of my own tampermonkey scripts for frequently used sites

    • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Generally the first thing I try is to hit ESC to stop a paywall script from running.

      If that doesn’t work I try pressing ctrl-A ctrl-C to copy the whole page as soon as I see something. This works on pages that load and are then hidden by a script, but you have to be quick. Then I open Notepad and paste. If this doesn’t work I’ll either try it once more and see if I can be faster or just say screw it, if they want to hide their content that bad I don’t need it. If it’s important to me google will usually find the same news or info somewhere else.

    • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      I’ve found this rarely works myself, due to them disabling other parts of the page, it’s less hassle to just find the article elsewhere

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    It’s legitimately embarrassing how many people can’t seem to grasp that this isn’t the “fuck you” they think it is.

    They aren’t shocked or upset, they’re not panicking because you left, because it’s all the same to them either way. You either access the site while blocking the ads and they get no income from your views, or you go away and they don’t get income from your views. Exactly nothing has changed for them except now they don’t have you pulling bandwidth.

    The point is not to get YOU to turn your ad blocker off, the point is it will get SOME people to turn it off who aren’t you. If you’re not willing to turn it off, then what you do matters very little because they appreciate there’s no way they’re getting income from you ever.

    It’s got the same energy as “You expect me to pay admission to enter this theme park? Well now I’m not going in, don’t you feel stupid?”

    • Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works
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      Well first it’s not “fuck you”, its “goodbye”. And second it’s not about “you”, it’s about “me” not visiting your site if I need to turn off adblock. End of the story, our path will not cross again. Ciao, aurevoir, hasta not luego.

      • ADTJ@feddit.uk
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        2 months ago

        I think the comment is about the last panel being a shocked pikachu type face.

        The companies are not shocked that you no longer visit their page, that’s their intention. “Generate revenue for us or leave”

        P.S. genuine lol at hasta not luego, shouldn’t it also be “aurevoir pas” or “aurevoir never” since that also essentially means see you again.

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          Lol, I’m french canadian and you’re actually not wrong. Aurevoir litteraly means “see you again” but we dont really use it that way. “Adieu” would have been a better choice. It kind of mean “to God”, meaning you dont intent to see someone ever again, or until you die at least.

          • ADTJ@feddit.uk
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            2 months ago

            That’s not what I was saying, I meant instead of the French they did say

            • Agrivar@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              You should have used a period then, or at least a semicolon, in between the unrelated phrases.

    • ArchRecord@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      I completely get your point, and to an extent I agree, but I do think there’s still an argument to be made.

      For instance, if a theme park was charging an ungodly amount for admission, or maybe, say, charged you on a per-ride basis after you paid admission, slowly adding more and more charges to every activity until half your time was spent just handing over the money to do things, if everyone were to stop going in, the theme park would close down, because they did something that turned users away.

      Websites have continually added more and more ads, to the point that reading a news article feels like reading 50% ads, and 50% content. If they never see any pushback, then they’ll just keep heaping on more and more ads until it’s physically impossible to cram any more in.

      I feel like this is less of a dunk on the site by not using it in that moment, and more a justifiable way to show that you won’t tolerate the rapidly enshittified landscape of digital advertising, and so these sites will never even have a chance of getting your business in the future.

      If something like this happens enough, advertisers might start finding alternative ways to fund their content, (i.e. donation model, subscription, limited free articles then paywall) or ad networks might actually engage with user demands and make their systems less intrusive, or more private. (which can be seen to some degree with, for instance, Mozilla’s acquisition of Anonym)

      Even citing Google’s own research, 63% of users use ad blockers because of too many ads, and 48% use it because of annoying ads. The majority of these sites that instantly hit you with a block are often using highly intrusive ads that keep popping up, getting in the way, and taking up way too much space. The exact thing we know makes users not want to come back. It’s their fault users don’t want to see their deliberately maliciously placed ads.

      A lot of users (myself most definitely included) use ad blockers primarily for privacy reasons. Ad networks bundle massive amounts of surveillance technology with their ads, which isn’t just intrusive, but it also slows down every single site you go to, across the entire internet. Refusing that practice increases the chance that sites more broadly could shift to more privacy-focused advertising methods.

      Google recommends to “Treat your visitors with respect,” but these sites that just instantly slap up an ad blocker removal request before you’ve even seen the content don’t actually respect you, they just hope you’re willing to sacrifice your privacy, and overwhelm yourself with ads, to see content you don’t even know anything about yet. Why should I watch your ads and give up my privacy if you haven’t given me good reason to even care about your content yet?

      This is why sites with soft paywalls, those that say you have “x number of free articles remaining,” or those that say “you’ve read x articles this month, would you consider supporting us?” get a higher rate of users disabling adblockers or paying than those that just slap these popups in your face the moment you open the site.

    • Karjalan@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yes and no. Similar with apps, you can say “well if you’re not paying/seeing adds then we lose nothing by you not visiting”, but, depending on their growth stage, it’s very hard to grow and get investors without a sizable audience.

      Say you’re a startup. If you have 10k people and you ignore ad blockers and people who don’t play subscriptions. Then you start preventing people with ad blockers and no subscriptions from your platform and it drops to 1k… You lose investment pulling power.

      The effect is amplified, or much worse, if you actually require user generated content as well

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        2 months ago

        Traffic could also help other types of advertising that doesn’t include the ads that ublock stops (e.g. sponsorships on yt)

    • don@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Ignore the last panel and it makes way more sense. When the site demands I see their ads, I leave that site and look for that same content elsewhere. There’s never a time when I think “HA! Gotteem!” I just don’t engage with the site, and don’t care about it or who else does.

    • x00z@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      You can’t seem to grasp that we’re not just single people. We’re a force that also influences the non-tech people around us.

      When I use, repair or configure the computer of a friend or family member, it’ll definitely get an adblocker.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      This is Lemmy, though. We’re not the normal crowd, not even the normal tech crowd. We’re the “Hacker News in '07 that laughed at Dropbox because you could just use curlftpfs and source control” crowd. As a general rule, if it’s not about Linux or Star Trek lore this place knows nothing.

      • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months ago

        You’d be surprised, there’s plenty of people with niche interests here, it’s just that if I made an AR builder’s comm, or a reloading comm, or a vape juice mixing comm, there’ll be 5 whole users if I’m lucky because lemmy is still small.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    ublocks’ annoyance lists blocks most of these warnings and more.

    i suggest you enable them as its sadly not on by default.

    • w3dd1e@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      AdGuard does on iOS as well, as long as you’re using Safari. Doesn’t work on other browsers.

      I think AdGuard subscribes to the same annoyances list.

  • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Many moons ago I worked briefly on an ad prototype that aimed to replace banner ads, particularly those that sit in content with a single bottom overlay that would “smartly” unobstruct the viewing experience of the page. I was able to reduce a full page of horrible ads into a single box at the bottom of the page that could be closed whenever.

    The idea fell completely flat for various reasons, but some off the top of my head:

    • We have x advertisers that NEED to be on this page - how can we possibly get x on the page with just one box?
    • I don’t care if people use ad blockers, let them do their thing and we’ll target those that are happy to see ads
    • If people can easily close them, the reflex to close will mean no ad is glanced.

    The sad stat that came out was that obtrusive ads, the kind that used popups or automatically opened apps to download were VERY effective. I could prove that my ads were several times more effective than “normal” banner ads and popups, but when you could sell 10x the ads it didn’t matter if they were 10x more effective.

    My brief stint in advertising made me feel that for many years people didn’t care about those that blocked ads because there was always more shit to optimise or grow into. That has stagnated, so now the likes of Google are targeting “market share” by getting those that block ads to look at ads again. It won’t work, at all, but it feels like they’ve now optimised themselves into a hole.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It’s ironic, they depend on perpetual growth, which means the more efficient they get at growing, the faster they outgrow their effective markets and then end up in a position where they need to further optimize optimal positions.

      Sure, there’s probably smaller optimizations they could make, but they don’t just depend on growth but a certain % of growth.

      Cornering markets is the beginning of the end for businesses in our growth obsessed system.

    • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      What they’re “forgetting” is that those who block ads are more likely to say “fuck product X I’ll never buy it because of this ad” if forced to see an ad. (Well, they don’t care, they know, but they can still sell the “spot” so to speak because the advertisers themselves are dumb enough not know that it is just shooting themselves in the foot.)

      • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        those who block ads are more likely to say “fuck product X I’ll never buy it because of this ad” if forced to see an ad.

        This demographic is much, much smaller than you probably assume it is–I mean ‘statistically insignificant’ small.

        • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          It very well may be bigger than you think, there’s a reason all the adblock users use adblock, and I know multiple people who do the same thing, and even more that while they may not say “fuck your ad I’ll buy your competitor,” they will only buy the product if they were already going to buy it through their own independent research or word of mouth from trusted friends.

          Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone that bought something from a popup or ad in the middle of a news article, maybe the first few “sponsored links” on google when they google the product anyway and were already looking for that amazon link, but that’s about it.

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    2 months ago

    That’s just fine as far as the site is concerned.

    They provide content that is paid for by ads. When you block the ads, you’re using up bandwidth and not contributing to the site’s revenue. They want you gone.

    • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      We want them gone. The market goes where the users use it. The Internet did not have the advertising presence it does now when it was conceived. Saying they want us gone means they are the only game in town. They aren’t. They are too big for their britches and need to realize the users dictate the usage.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Rose-colored glasses, dude.

        The internet was full of never-ending pop-ups that opened 2 more windows every time you closed one 25-30 years ago, and the viruses they carried fucked your computer to the point you had to do a clean Windows install. Spam.filters didn’t work and you’d get 500 unfiltered spam messages a day, and since you were on 28-56k using a POP3 system it took an hour to download them before you could sort through them.

        Shit’s bad now, but it was way, way worse back then.

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            2 months ago

            I talk about the prevalence of online ads 30 years ago when Linux was first getting a GUI and wasn’t supported by any major hardware companies, and you respond with this bullshit?

            Fuck right off with that argument.

            You didn’t just move the goalpost you changed fields, leagues, and sports.

            • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Almost like I saw the issue and resolved it with knowledge rather than being a victim. If you want to continue to be an asshole about it, you can fuck off with being too stupid to see that shit is different when you can see through the BS ahead of time.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        The Internet did not have the advertising presence it does now when it was conceived.

        Do you mean back when it was only the government and universities connected to it, before the web existed? Those times were very different. Practically user was contributing to the internet some way, either through time (like actually creating the software to use it, and once the web existed, creating sites) or money.

        These days, there’s a significantly larger number of freeloaders that want everything for free, without contributing anything back. So far, advertising has been the only effective model to support such users that don’t want to pay.

        • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Yeah it really is choosing beggars. If you don’t want to look at ads to view content you should pay for it.

    • NoForwardslashS@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      Peak monetisation. Don’t let them even see the article [copied from another website and run through ChatGPT] until they fork over the entrance fee.

    • save_the_humans@leminal.space
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      2 months ago

      At least you won’t use up that bandwidth routing traffic through pihole. You also get a nice cache for faster loading on frequented sites.