3 ms·

I tend to agree with you, but for me personally I think the difference comes down to intent. When I open a magazine, even if I have a specific article in mind

I tend to agree with you, but for me personally I think the difference comes down to intent. When I open a magazine, even if I have a specific article in mind I want to read, I will slowly turn through the pages happy to browse through other random content. It is a very leisurely, less focused interaction. When I go to a website it is almost always for a very specific purpose. My mindset is goal oriented - I want exactly the content I came here for, nothing more (with rare exception, like HN). And probably years of navigating through horrible websites has helped shape that mindset in me, but I have to wonder, if websites delivered curated content and ads at the level of a magazine, would I even care?

yason 7y ago
I thought of the same but realised that I have contradicting examples from myself alone. I sometimes go to a magazine to read about something specific yet I might eyeball the ads while I'm around the target content. If it's a long multi-page article that I'm interested in specifically, or a single page thing, I still might pop out of the text into an advertisement occasionally. Conversely I do browsing (in the traditional sense) on the web as well: I often find myself looking around some website, reading this and that around here and there, trying to figure out how much of the stuff is interesting vs boring, and generally not diving deep on anything and thus I'm theoretically quite open to subject myself to advertising but I still don't look at ads, and I'm still not interested. I sometimes wonder how would it be if web had started with good ads and I had conditioned myself from the start to expect interesting stuff in the ads. It's just that the web went the opposite way, innocently starting with a <blink>, and going to JavaScript, Flash, and cookie-infested ad networks and whatnot to deliver involuntary injections of striking advertisements, and now I'm practically allergic to anything that moves or stands out.

yason 7y ago

I thought of the same but realised that I have contradicting examples from myself alone. I sometimes go to a magazine to read about something specific yet I might eyeball the ads while I'm around the target content. If it's a long multi-page article that I'm interested in specifically, or a single page thing, I still might pop out of the text into an advertisement occasionally. Conversely I do browsing (in the traditional sense) on the web as well: I often find myself looking around some website, reading this and that around here and there, trying to figure out how much of the stuff is interesting vs boring, and generally not diving deep on anything and thus I'm theoretically quite open to subject myself to advertising but I still don't look at ads, and I'm still not interested. I sometimes wonder how would it be if web had started with good ads and I had conditioned myself from the start to expect interesting stuff in the ads. It's just that the web went the opposite way, innocently starting with a <blink>, and going to JavaScript, Flash, and cookie-infested ad networks and whatnot to deliver involuntary injections of striking advertisements, and now I'm practically allergic to anything that moves or stands out.