The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it. Kind of sad really, but I guess you could be happy as it’s so big now and there’s so much to do. Just makes you wonder what stuff would thrive if ads didn’t exist. As of now every niche thing that gets successful will be invariably pulled into the ad ecosystem as it’s very hard to say no to money.
RSS wasn’t in the interest of the big platforms as it’s decentralized and there’s no good way to deliver ads through it, simple as that.
> everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind.
I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux, and haven't seen an ad in years. It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad. Javascript, in particular, has been constantly abused against the user ever since it was created.
Same setup and same experience. I've recently joined another company which only provided chrome with no extensions by default. I know the web is filled with ads but I'm shocked again and again when I get a glimpse into what it's like without an adblocker.
It's not just a better user experience. It also addresses the security issues.
Blocking ads will also prevent malware scripts, unscrupulous information collection, and deceptive virus infection messages. I've got friends who've been infected because they believed the popup that told them their computer had a virus, and they needed to click the link to remove it.
Firefox could be doing a great deal better if it had less imaginative corporate leadership. Just pay salaries for Servo developers and watch the browser get better.
There's more to ads than banners and unskippable videos.
I bet if you open YouTube, even with Adblock and sponsorblock, you'll see ads. "Tech" channels are nothing but ads because all they do is present products for people to buy.
Even channels that do legos are ad channels.
YouTube itself has become a platform for serving videos that are advertisement at their core. These videos are popular, get good engagement, pay the content creators and come in cheap for brands. This style of "journalism" extends to many other platforms.
Sponsorblock (FF extension) is neccessary for YouTube, as well as Seal (GUI for yt-dlp) + BravePipe (fork of NewPipe, integrated Sponsorblock) for Android.
Also, adding `Before: YEAR` in search takes you back to a more wholesome time.
Watching Youtube through Brave browser and I can't remember the last time I saw ads (ads by youtube, not by the content creator within the video). Twitch is different story, platform ads certainly play there.
Prior to Brave, ublock origin on Firefox provided a similar ad-free Youtube experience.
I don't consider ad content like the tech channels you mention to be a negative. Informing people about new products is a useful service. The ads that are negative are those that impose themselves over other content or mess with normal internet browsing experience.
Personally I do consider them a negative because they are not really realistic and grounded when giving reviews.
It's a different story if it's a person that's used a device that they bought for a year. But these tech youtubers, they are extremely dependent on a good relationship with the brands because what brings them money is doing the "reviews" on day 1 (if not before) and they can only do that if they have a good standing with the brands. Meaning they will can only talk the product in a way that they know the brand is going to be okay with, mentioning obvious flaws that are easy to disregard ("it's not the best value for the money" is a classic).
This is bad because this type of journalism is constantly moving the window of what's acceptable. Channels that are truly critical (for example gamersnexus) don't get any support from brands. Channels like that are rare, of course, they do exist.
So, to reiterate my point, these channels are not informing: they're selling. There's a really good documentary with Noam Chomsky called "manufacturing consent" that really gives a good overview of this topic. Well, it's about politics, but the same applies for marketing.
I switched to a Firefox fork, but recently opened Firefox itself and was horrified to see the browser itself shoving ads in my face. Buy our VPN! Sign up to a Mozilla profile! Did you know about the extension store?
Firefox (the product) and Mozilla (the for-profit company) are lost causes. Firefox (the technology) is still there, for now.
There's a difference. It was a matter of principle for a Web site (not) to use pop-up ads or ads in general. It would be highly inappropriate for a large and successful business to have (especially pop-up) ads in their product (unless ads was their business).
Another aspect of ads from the early 2000: they were individually made for particular places, rarely generating any controversy. For example, I used to be a moderator on a forum dedicated to ActionScript, and we had a sponsor, who, basically paid our hosting expenses, and that sponsor had a banner in the header of the forum advertising lessons in Web design / programming. The banner was designed to match the overall forum appearance, it didn't track anyone's browsing history, didn't collect cookies... it was simply a big and fancy button linking to the sponsor's Web site.
The problems really started with the "media buying" waterfalls, i.e. the automated ad delivery. Ad agencies automated their job by providing customers with (semi-, but increasingly fully-automatic) ways to design their ad campaigns. In order to make these campaigns at least somewhat effective, they needed to somehow automatically reproduce the situation similar to the one I described having in the ActionScript forum: they needed to find a good match between the audience and the ad, but they had to cut corners because of the automation and resort to the unsavory mechanisms of tracking users' behavior. The decrease in quality had to be compensated for by increase in quantity. And that's how we got here...
> It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad.
Google pretty much declared war on those back then, providing reasonable-looking ad formats that could be integrated discreetly on the page (and as far as I remember, they had a limit of how many banners you could show). I really wish we could back to that. Now they serve animated/video ads.
So we have ad blockers, ad blocker detectors....
But apparently no ad blocker blocker. Should I continue?
Block the blockers by blocking the blockage... ouch.
There are adblock blockers... some sites detect the ad blocker and prevent you from visiting the site without ads... so yeah, you then don't visit the site.
Funnily enough most of those only work if the Javascript from an external resource is allowed to load. NoScript, no problem. Of course then you have to deal with NoScript, but it has so many other uses you'll be sorting your whitelist anyways.
There was also .001% of the content there is now. The Internet of 2000 was microscopic.
Now everyone can create content, without any of the friction of hosting it. The vast majority of it is crap, but that was always the case.
The main difference between now and 30 years ago is that the Internet is vastly more diverse. It isn't just other CS majors any more. Now everyone gets to wade in the vast crap pool looking for the smidge of things that appeal to them. Meanwhile the CS majors still host their own stuff, because they can, and you find out about it via the same word of mouth.
The .001% was the top .001% of today's content. The other 99.999% we gained was spam aimed at getting money while providing minimal value and taking minimal effort.
can’t wait to hear about how some 9/11 truther blog was the cream of the crop. I’m surprised you can see anything through those rose coloured glasses.
the most charitable interpretation is that the internet used to more exclusively cater to your interests specifically, which i’m sure is true.
try asking most women about the internet then vs now. there are still scumbags, and one could reasonably argue that they’ve gotten worse, but at least theres more to do now.
i don't think it's fair to say it was just CS majors, I'm a 90s baby and i was on the web in the 2000s when i was in middle school, I still remember reading web comics and forums, messaging people on MSN and playing MMOs with online friends, looking up gameFAQs to get past sticking points. This could just be me, but it felt more social and personal.
Yeah it feels like people aren't making friends online as much nowadays. Everyone is chasing clout, and if you get a rando who sends you a friendly message, it's quite likely a pig butchering scam.
In the early aughts the web was largely anonymous (MySpace and Friendster were just starting out and Facebook was still a Ivy league only thing). We thought we wanted to be able to find and be found by specific people, but in retrospect I definitely regret that change. It was better when I was just a randomish string of characters.
It sounds like you agreed with them from the other direction. “The internet of yesteryear felt more special.” - “Nah, there wasn’t as much slop back then and now it’s a crap pool that anyone can wade into and look for scraps.”
I'm saying the amount of crap is the same, but it used to be all our crap and not crap targeted at 12 year old Korean girls or 77 year old Uruguayan grandmas.
It was more special, to us specifically. But I'm claiming that the amount of crap just for us is still there. It's just easy to be distracted by the billions of content producers that are easier to find.
Note that I wasn't talking about slop, which does indeed risk a true Dead Internet. But people were pining for Geocities long before AI.
I would argue that a lot of our crap can't be produced anymore because of automated moderation and the DMCA. Remixes of old videogame songs, animutations, fan lore websites, these all get targeted constantly, and it's disenfranchising and disincentivizing people. They're scared whatever thing they made is going to get a takedown request, or the website they upload it to will not accept it because it's legally toxic. And before anything is said, no, not everyone uploaded to their own site even back in the late '90s. We had web portals like Newgrounds and Fark where they'd put stuff. It's when we abandoned web portals and moved to social media platforms that the suffocation began to happen, because the point wasn't to show other people in your community something you made, the point became grabbing as many generic views as possible. First that was for virality, then it was for AdSense money.
What's funny is that back in the day if you mistyped a URL it'd go nowhere. Then for a while domain squatters took over, and they'd lead you to dead end traps slinging porn or pyramid schemes. Those dead end traps were on the fringes however, where nobody really ventured. Nowadays everywhere is designed like that, except instead of porn it's corporate ads, and the pyramid schemes are run by people making videos those corporate ads play over.
I didn’t take the OP to mean the raw amount of data was more catered to their interests, but rather that the personality of the internet was different. I said it sounded like you agreed because you listed the symptoms of that difference.
The OP is talking about the “Web 1.5” era, and it seems like you have the requisite patina to remember it too. It really was an entirely different world. Server side technologies just became common, allowing for dynamic websites and user submitted content, which was the birth of forums and aggregators of user content. They tended to cater to special interests and had their own culture, inside jokes, and standards (if any). It was common to be a member of a half dozen or more forums or interest sites, and it was more rare to already know a friend that was part of them. Instead you interacted and became friends with strangers, rather than upload your contacts list and send out friend requests.
There was Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Fark, Something Awful, Albino Blacksheep, eBaum’s World, Slashdot, Homestar Runner, YTMND, DeviantArt, Worth 1000, Maddox, Stile Project, Consumption Junction, Snopes, The Smoking Gun, Stick Death, The Perry Bible Fellowship, Penny Arcade, Threadless, Newgrounds, Zombo.com, Weebl's Stuff, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, Badger Badger Badger, Fenslerfilm, Break.com, Stupid.com, Ogrish, Hot or Not, RateMyProfessors, Rate My Face, Stupidvideos, Questionable Content, How Stuff Works, Something Positive, IGN, Daily Kos, DeadJournal, LiveJournal, IRC, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Trillian… even of those that still “exist”, they don’t still exist.
I’m not saying those sites were necessarily better, but the personality and environment that created them no longer exists. Websites were created just because of an inside joke on a forum somewhere, which then became cultural memes that were talked about at work and school. It was the era of “Have you seen this website?!” and “Joined: 2002” bragging, and that personality is gone.
That's exactly why I used to love tech (and working in tech) 20 years ago and why I lost faith in tech completely.
We went from a bunch of open protocols and decentralized web to a full closed garden gatekeeped by a couple mega companies. It is a sad state of the world, but the MBAs and BigTech won.
yeah, when I first stumbled on to the internet it was all about the protocols and specific implementations didn't matter.
Then later IE dominated the web and hurt interoperability, but we fought back through the Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox era anxiously following IE6 slowly losing market share.
Only to find that the war had shifted beyond clients and standards support to the sites and the power of their business models.
And parallel battles for the old standards based DIY freedom lost to hyperscaler clouds and now AI.
All in all compared to that, losing Google Reader seems small, but it was kinda the nexus point at the centre of it all.
What I don't understand about the "RSS can't support ads" argument is that most of my RSS feeds don't actually let me read the article. Just a headline and a snippet at most. So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.
I’ve encountered feeds that do this and I tend to not keep those subscriptions long. That said, some feeds often have content that doesn’t present well in my feed reader and I’ll end up clicking to view the web presentation
What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recover, being able to just get a set of tabs that represent new posts at sites that I want to follow. Maybe I’ll vibe code this for myself now that I’ve given in and turned to the dark side with Claude.
Moz Support says "Firefox's built-in support for web feeds and Live Bookmarks ended in December 2018 with version 64."
I checked as I use the Feedbro extension in Firefox and Chrome family browsers for holding and updating a tree of RSS feeds and thought I'd missed a built in FF feature :/
Feed aggregators (inoreader, feedly) make this difficult, though. One request may end up serving any number of end users, so you can't personalize ads the same way.
Good, you might say, and I wouldn't disagree, but Google et al sure would.
The main reason for that is because most of the interactions back then were based on Open standards: rss, email, etc.
If we want to get back to that. We need to start using Open standards for all things: chat - signal, social media - activity pub / at proto, news/blogs - rss, long messages - email
A public open standard solves most of the problems of walled gardens
Ads have destroyed our culture. Just look at the fundamental change YouTube underwent in 2012 when they made all users eligible for monetization. It turned it into junk/infomercial TV.
I don’t disagree with you at all, but it’s not like we didn’t have alternatives. We could’ve just paid for the content, directly subsidising the creators we like.
>We could’ve just paid for the content, directly subsidising the creators we like.
That wasn't an option. And if it had been, they would've rolled out monetization through ads anyway. If you believe otherwise, there's too much we disagree on to sum it up here.
It wasn't an option because people weren't willing to pay. A bit tautological, I know, but it simply wasn't a viable way to fund content. Think how many people use google versus paying for kagi.
There was literally no mechanism, there were no YouTube memberships, there was no Patreon. You could maybe donate to a PayPal link as a one time transaction.
IDK, I ran an RSS feed that had ads 20 years ago (it was a niche hobby blog and every fifth post was an ad for supplies for that hobby). It made enough to pay for the hosting.
RSS wasn’t in the interest of the big platforms as it’s decentralized and there’s no good way to deliver ads through it, simple as that.