15 ms·

The web used to have ads, not be ads. Now it's permeated everything to the extent that almost every click is paid for. Whether it's Facebook, Google or someon

The web used to have ads, not be ads. Now it's permeated everything to the extent that almost every click is paid for. Whether it's Facebook, Google or someone else entirely, the web's a broken pay-to-win mess and I don't see a way back to it being any reasonable definition of open while the status quo remains.

amatecha 6y ago
I miss the late-90's web pretty much every day :(
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  It was awful then too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8
  - tim333 6y ago
    Worse really. These days there's >10x more content and thanks to uBlock origin I see about 10x less ads.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    There was however a brief moment when there were no ads. I remember it. There were also no search engines so you only found other sites by word of mouth.
    - amatecha 6y ago
      Fun memories of finding stuff to download via Archie :)
- tpetry 6y ago
  I dont miss popups or popunders. Popup blockers had not been able to block every one, it was so annoying.
  - hr2016 6y ago
    I was just venting to a friend about the massive comeback of popups/banners. "We value your privacy" is a huge part, another one is after the first few pixels of scrolling, "Please support/subscribe to xxx today". So the popups may have a bit more of justified content, but there are plenty of them. And this is while using adblock, pi-hole and other stuff. Related, currently on HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25457440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25457440
    - tpetry 6y ago
      You‘re right, i didn‘t see it like this. The current state of the web (past years) feels really like in the old times: many nagging „popups“ and despite using blocking solutions you cant get rid of all of them. Wikipedia is a good example: Their yearly call to you to spend for money is using about 1/3 of your vertical screen and you cant remove it. Sadly it seems to be very effective.
      - pheres 6y ago
        I would say that wikipedia is a good example of an honest way of using ads.
      - jooize 6y ago
        Why is Wikipedia a good example? It's a freely available encyclopedia without tracking nor ads.
        headmelted 6y ago
        Yeah Wikipedia is about the last thing I would accuse of egregious spamming given it’s incredible (and ridiculously under-appreciated) value.
        naravara 6y ago
        The user seems to be posting about UX and navigability rather than ad tracking. Wikipedia's banner ads that take up an entire browser window before you can scroll down to the content is definitely a good example of that.
- Reason077 6y ago
  I don’t miss how slow it loaded on a late-90s 56 kbps modem!
- GuB-42 6y ago
  I don't because it was: - Slow (remember 56k modems) - Expensive (remember when you had to pay by the minute) - It was the early days of the browser war, which IE was winning. Remember the "best viewed" banners. It was one of the worst times for compatibility, you had plugins too: Java, Flash/Shockwave, ... - Search engines were terrible. Now we can write whatever is on our mind in the search box, even with typos, and 95% of the time, we get exactly what we are looking for. We like to complain about the remaining 5%, but in the late 90s it was the norm. - The web was simply smaller, there was less information. Wikipedia didn't exist for instance. - Ads, terrible design and annoyances have always been a thing. The 90s had popups and blink, the 2000s had flash, and we now have JS. - Tracking, privacy and security. The 90s web was insecure as hell. Remember there used to be a popup warning you that SSL was used, plain http was the norm. It was less of a concern simply because we used to do less on the web. It was a time when people were calling you crazy for buying something online. So no, I don't miss it. It is a piece of history that would look nice in the digital equivalent of a museum, but for day to day use... no.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    >>- Search engines were terrible. Now we can write whatever is on our mind in the search box, even with typos, and 95% of the time, we get exactly what we are looking for. I feel like this part has actually gotten worse in the last few years. No matter what I search for it's very rarely the thing I'm actually looking for, at least on google. Most of the time it's SEO'ed to hell in order to sell me stuff, and google will happily cut out half of my query just in order to show me promoted results. Like, when I search for "C# programming <name of class>" why is the <name of class> cut out and the entire first page of results is just paid programming courses???? That's a lot worse than it was just 5 years ago. We're going back on usability just to extract more money.
    - donmcronald 6y ago
      Yep. Search for literally anything and you’ll land on an affiliate marketing page disguised as a blog or a review site. When’s the last time you saw a bad review for anything? According to Google there are no bad products, but Amazon is predominantly filled with garbage. It’s pretty depressing.
- 8fingerlouie 6y ago
  This comment was brought to you by Altavista : http://web.archive.org/web/19970605012414/http://altavista.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19970605012414/http://altavista.c...
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  I don't, ad-blockers have become a lot more effective since the late 90's. Arguably, browsing today's web filtered through a modern ad-blocker (such as uBlock Origin) is safer and more enjoyable then browsing the web without an adblocker in the late 90's.
  - rurp 6y ago
    It scares me to think that there's a good chance we'll look back a decade from now and remember this as the golden age of ad blocking. Google getting steadily more powerful doesn't bode well for user freedoms on issues like this. Without a major course correction things like AMP and Manifest V3 are just the start of where things are headed.
- aerosmile 6y ago
  The "good old days" were never as good as we have them in memory. The medical advances alone make it worthwhile living in the future. Not to mention racism, gender inequality and all other sins of the past. The human race is in a terrible shape today, but it's never been better. I would argue the analogy extends to the internet. People talk about pageload payloads of today vs 20 years ago, and somehow infer that the web fast faster back in the day. It wasn't - with the gigabit internet connections, we're easily making up for the bloat in payloads. Also, it's never been easier to quit your 9-5 job and leverage the combination of the internet and globalism to be your own boss. Just because it's still relatively hard, it doesn't mean it's ever been easier.
  - amatecha 6y ago
    I mean, I had ADSL in 1998, so yeah it was insanely fast, and web pages were much more lightweight. I've been developing for the web since 1995, which is why I miss those days of the web so much. Even a total newbie to web dev could use pretty much everything available in the HTML spec without much difficulty. Now the learning curve for just a basic web project is colossal by comparison. Further, web pages were more "honest" and straightforward. It wasn't very easy for sneaky or "dark UX patterns" to be implemented, partly because they weren't well-developed by marketing teams, but also because the web specs didn't really provide much to work with. Computer hardware has advanced to an amazing degree, and software has become more abstract and complex to nicely use up all that processing power -- but the core user interaction with software remains largely the same, without much actual speed increase and with a LOT more cognitive overhead (ads, animations, popovers etc.) I'm not denying the extremely powerful nature of the services we have available to us now, but more-powerful hardware wasn't really necessary to have that. It's like the thing about technology making it so we don't have to do any work but instead we just work on different things, still for 40+ hours a week. Today, our CPUs are still saturated with work, it's just not the same things as it was back then.. for example, interpreting 5mb of JavaScript to show a chat window or a product page :)
fossuser 6y ago
I've been playing around with Urbit and it's pretty cool. - https://tlon.io https://tlon.io - https://urbit.org https://urbit.org It tends to get a lot of knee-jerk hate in HN comments, but I think it's a from first principles approach that could actually work. At a minimum it's a pretty cool/ambitious project and it's been fun to play with.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  First time I've ever come across this project, so bear with me. Is it really necessary to use the word "breach" in a big yellow banner at the top? The word "breach" is usually associated with some kind of security penetration, and might be scary to first-time users (like me). On further reading, it seems something more akin to a "desynchronization event requiring your attention", which is far more reassuring.
  - icebergonfire 6y ago
    FWIW this is my first time coming across this project, and I had the same initial reaction.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Urbit is often about confusing naming and reinventing/redesigning meaning. I guess you have to accept it to really get into it?
    - moomin 6y ago
      Which is a brilliant way to exploit people’s sunk-cost bias.
      - zepto 6y ago
        Brilliant in the same way that cults are brilliant when they redefine a lot of meanings.
  - reitanuki 6y ago
DNtBlVtHhYp 6y ago
> Now it's permeated everything to the extent that almost every click is paid for. This comment brought to you by news.ycombinator.com | Apply to YC |
- headmelted 6y ago
  Not sure if this was in jest, but a single not-targeted-against-my-personal-data link in a footer is not what I had in mind.
  - 93po 6y ago
    I think the comment was more about the YC ecosystem and less about the HN website specifically. The HN website exists because of YC, and YC has a lot of companies that rely on advertising.
mola 6y ago
I find the entire media expo system, web or not, to be like this. TV is 100% paid content, be it actual commercials, product placements, bought editorials or just a media mogul manipulating public perception for his business interests. Best thing to do, is just minimize media consumption.
kevindong 6y ago
> Now it's permeated everything to the extent that almost every click is paid for. Content creators deserve to be compensated somehow and relying on users to voluntarily contribute a la Patreon is unrealistic given that most pieces of contents are rarely used by most users. I don't value seeing most content at more than penny per view in general and fixed transactional costs make it impractical to send that to each creator.
- wcarron 6y ago
  > I don't value seeing most content at more than penny per view in general and fixed transactional costs make it impractical to send that to each creator. I find this interesting. What about books? A quick search yields average paperback novels are 300-400 pages long and between $14-18. That's between 2.1-2.9c/page, roughly. Many articles from quality content creators are > 1 page long. So applying the book pricing, between 5-25c per worthwhile article, give or take. Seems like a penny is pretty heavily undervaluing the product you're getting, then. As for the impractability of actually distributing those monies to each creator, well, no argument there.
- Rumudiez 6y ago
  Wait, so if I go and make a YT channel I suddenly _deserve_ to be paid for it? When did that become a thing? Perhaps those earning mere pennies per view don't make enough to support themselves. In that sense, it feels similar to any of the gig companies that pay below minimum wage -- it's not good for anyone, but at the same time no one is forcing you to work with them. If making content doesn't pay the bills, maybe you should leave it to the luckier/more apt creators.

amatecha 6y ago

I miss the late-90's web pretty much every day :(

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
It was awful then too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8
- tim333 6y ago
  Worse really. These days there's >10x more content and thanks to uBlock origin I see about 10x less ads.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  There was however a brief moment when there were no ads. I remember it. There were also no search engines so you only found other sites by word of mouth.
  - amatecha 6y ago
    Fun memories of finding stuff to download via Archie :)
tpetry 6y ago
I dont miss popups or popunders. Popup blockers had not been able to block every one, it was so annoying.
- hr2016 6y ago
  I was just venting to a friend about the massive comeback of popups/banners. "We value your privacy" is a huge part, another one is after the first few pixels of scrolling, "Please support/subscribe to xxx today". So the popups may have a bit more of justified content, but there are plenty of them. And this is while using adblock, pi-hole and other stuff. Related, currently on HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25457440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25457440
  - tpetry 6y ago
    You‘re right, i didn‘t see it like this. The current state of the web (past years) feels really like in the old times: many nagging „popups“ and despite using blocking solutions you cant get rid of all of them. Wikipedia is a good example: Their yearly call to you to spend for money is using about 1/3 of your vertical screen and you cant remove it. Sadly it seems to be very effective.
    - pheres 6y ago
      I would say that wikipedia is a good example of an honest way of using ads.
    - jooize 6y ago
      Why is Wikipedia a good example? It's a freely available encyclopedia without tracking nor ads.
      - headmelted 6y ago
        Yeah Wikipedia is about the last thing I would accuse of egregious spamming given it’s incredible (and ridiculously under-appreciated) value.
      - naravara 6y ago
        The user seems to be posting about UX and navigability rather than ad tracking. Wikipedia's banner ads that take up an entire browser window before you can scroll down to the content is definitely a good example of that.
Reason077 6y ago
I don’t miss how slow it loaded on a late-90s 56 kbps modem!
GuB-42 6y ago
I don't because it was: - Slow (remember 56k modems) - Expensive (remember when you had to pay by the minute) - It was the early days of the browser war, which IE was winning. Remember the "best viewed" banners. It was one of the worst times for compatibility, you had plugins too: Java, Flash/Shockwave, ... - Search engines were terrible. Now we can write whatever is on our mind in the search box, even with typos, and 95% of the time, we get exactly what we are looking for. We like to complain about the remaining 5%, but in the late 90s it was the norm. - The web was simply smaller, there was less information. Wikipedia didn't exist for instance. - Ads, terrible design and annoyances have always been a thing. The 90s had popups and blink, the 2000s had flash, and we now have JS. - Tracking, privacy and security. The 90s web was insecure as hell. Remember there used to be a popup warning you that SSL was used, plain http was the norm. It was less of a concern simply because we used to do less on the web. It was a time when people were calling you crazy for buying something online. So no, I don't miss it. It is a piece of history that would look nice in the digital equivalent of a museum, but for day to day use... no.
- gambiting 6y ago
  >>- Search engines were terrible. Now we can write whatever is on our mind in the search box, even with typos, and 95% of the time, we get exactly what we are looking for. I feel like this part has actually gotten worse in the last few years. No matter what I search for it's very rarely the thing I'm actually looking for, at least on google. Most of the time it's SEO'ed to hell in order to sell me stuff, and google will happily cut out half of my query just in order to show me promoted results. Like, when I search for "C# programming <name of class>" why is the <name of class> cut out and the entire first page of results is just paid programming courses???? That's a lot worse than it was just 5 years ago. We're going back on usability just to extract more money.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    Yep. Search for literally anything and you’ll land on an affiliate marketing page disguised as a blog or a review site. When’s the last time you saw a bad review for anything? According to Google there are no bad products, but Amazon is predominantly filled with garbage. It’s pretty depressing.
8fingerlouie 6y ago
This comment was brought to you by Altavista : http://web.archive.org/web/19970605012414/http://altavista.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19970605012414/http://altavista.c...
flohofwoe 6y ago
I don't, ad-blockers have become a lot more effective since the late 90's. Arguably, browsing today's web filtered through a modern ad-blocker (such as uBlock Origin) is safer and more enjoyable then browsing the web without an adblocker in the late 90's.
- rurp 6y ago
  It scares me to think that there's a good chance we'll look back a decade from now and remember this as the golden age of ad blocking. Google getting steadily more powerful doesn't bode well for user freedoms on issues like this. Without a major course correction things like AMP and Manifest V3 are just the start of where things are headed.
aerosmile 6y ago
The "good old days" were never as good as we have them in memory. The medical advances alone make it worthwhile living in the future. Not to mention racism, gender inequality and all other sins of the past. The human race is in a terrible shape today, but it's never been better. I would argue the analogy extends to the internet. People talk about pageload payloads of today vs 20 years ago, and somehow infer that the web fast faster back in the day. It wasn't - with the gigabit internet connections, we're easily making up for the bloat in payloads. Also, it's never been easier to quit your 9-5 job and leverage the combination of the internet and globalism to be your own boss. Just because it's still relatively hard, it doesn't mean it's ever been easier.
- amatecha 6y ago
  I mean, I had ADSL in 1998, so yeah it was insanely fast, and web pages were much more lightweight. I've been developing for the web since 1995, which is why I miss those days of the web so much. Even a total newbie to web dev could use pretty much everything available in the HTML spec without much difficulty. Now the learning curve for just a basic web project is colossal by comparison. Further, web pages were more "honest" and straightforward. It wasn't very easy for sneaky or "dark UX patterns" to be implemented, partly because they weren't well-developed by marketing teams, but also because the web specs didn't really provide much to work with. Computer hardware has advanced to an amazing degree, and software has become more abstract and complex to nicely use up all that processing power -- but the core user interaction with software remains largely the same, without much actual speed increase and with a LOT more cognitive overhead (ads, animations, popovers etc.) I'm not denying the extremely powerful nature of the services we have available to us now, but more-powerful hardware wasn't really necessary to have that. It's like the thing about technology making it so we don't have to do any work but instead we just work on different things, still for 40+ hours a week. Today, our CPUs are still saturated with work, it's just not the same things as it was back then.. for example, interpreting 5mb of JavaScript to show a chat window or a product page :)

fossuser 6y ago

I've been playing around with Urbit and it's pretty cool. - https://tlon.io https://tlon.io - https://urbit.org https://urbit.org It tends to get a lot of knee-jerk hate in HN comments, but I think it's a from first principles approach that could actually work. At a minimum it's a pretty cool/ambitious project and it's been fun to play with.

nmfisher 6y ago
First time I've ever come across this project, so bear with me. Is it really necessary to use the word "breach" in a big yellow banner at the top? The word "breach" is usually associated with some kind of security penetration, and might be scary to first-time users (like me). On further reading, it seems something more akin to a "desynchronization event requiring your attention", which is far more reassuring.
- icebergonfire 6y ago
  FWIW this is my first time coming across this project, and I had the same initial reaction.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Urbit is often about confusing naming and reinventing/redesigning meaning. I guess you have to accept it to really get into it?
  - moomin 6y ago
    Which is a brilliant way to exploit people’s sunk-cost bias.
    - zepto 6y ago
      Brilliant in the same way that cults are brilliant when they redefine a lot of meanings.
- reitanuki 6y ago

DNtBlVtHhYp 6y ago

> Now it's permeated everything to the extent that almost every click is paid for. This comment brought to you by news.ycombinator.com | Apply to YC |

headmelted 6y ago
Not sure if this was in jest, but a single not-targeted-against-my-personal-data link in a footer is not what I had in mind.
- 93po 6y ago
  I think the comment was more about the YC ecosystem and less about the HN website specifically. The HN website exists because of YC, and YC has a lot of companies that rely on advertising.

mola 6y ago

I find the entire media expo system, web or not, to be like this. TV is 100% paid content, be it actual commercials, product placements, bought editorials or just a media mogul manipulating public perception for his business interests. Best thing to do, is just minimize media consumption.

kevindong 6y ago

> Now it's permeated everything to the extent that almost every click is paid for. Content creators deserve to be compensated somehow and relying on users to voluntarily contribute a la Patreon is unrealistic given that most pieces of contents are rarely used by most users. I don't value seeing most content at more than penny per view in general and fixed transactional costs make it impractical to send that to each creator.

wcarron 6y ago
> I don't value seeing most content at more than penny per view in general and fixed transactional costs make it impractical to send that to each creator. I find this interesting. What about books? A quick search yields average paperback novels are 300-400 pages long and between $14-18. That's between 2.1-2.9c/page, roughly. Many articles from quality content creators are > 1 page long. So applying the book pricing, between 5-25c per worthwhile article, give or take. Seems like a penny is pretty heavily undervaluing the product you're getting, then. As for the impractability of actually distributing those monies to each creator, well, no argument there.
Rumudiez 6y ago
Wait, so if I go and make a YT channel I suddenly _deserve_ to be paid for it? When did that become a thing? Perhaps those earning mere pennies per view don't make enough to support themselves. In that sense, it feels similar to any of the gig companies that pay below minimum wage -- it's not good for anyone, but at the same time no one is forcing you to work with them. If making content doesn't pay the bills, maybe you should leave it to the luckier/more apt creators.