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I am just quite old enough to remember the late 90's/early aughts dotcom craze. The vibe in software feels very similar to me - back then I remember ad-riddled

I am just quite old enough to remember the late 90's/early aughts dotcom craze. The vibe in software feels very similar to me - back then I remember ad-riddled pages that'd spam you with popups and sometimes malware, all in the same fever pitch to eek out every possible penny so they could show revenue for their overpriced valuations. The web was seen as a gold mine that if you weren't pillaging, you were actively losing - until it all imploded. The look and feel of a lot of web pages today (invasive ads taking up disproportionate amount of the page) reminds me a lot of that time, even without going to the dotcom parallels we have with the current hype cycle.

api 1y ago
It did not take long after the Internet went mainstream for a borderline (or not borderline) malware industry to evolve around getting predatory crap onto peoples' computers. I remember uninstalling shit like "Bonzai buddy" and the various toolbars and other trash that would come with dodgy installers or sometimes on new installs if you bought a cheap machine. Still, those computers were still PCs. They were still holdovers from the era when computers were mostly designed for their users, who were the customer. The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy, owing in part to the old cyberpunk/hacker ethos of the 1980s and 1990s. The political zeitgeist would best be described as "left-leaning libertarian" with a smattering of more radical ideas like anarchism. It was the mobile revolution that fully mainstreamed a computer as a device to spy on you and manipulate your dopamine system and only incidentally to help you. It didn't start this way, but that's where it went pretty fast. Social media also rapidly went this way. It started as a way to stay in touch with your friends, and has evolved into a chum feed with a UI/UX modeled after a slot machine. It's interesting to me how this shift has coincided with a shift away from liberal, libertarian, and small government conservative type ideas and toward every kind of authoritarianism. It's as if our politics echoes the permission and control structure of our computing devices, or vice versa. I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation goes-- maybe both ways.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  > The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy Let’s not romanticize the old PC culture - most running Windows with some combination of viruses, bundled software when you were trying to install something else, many people had 10 tool bars on IE that were all tracking your browser history
  - api 1y ago
    I'm not talking about the maturity or quality of the software but the zeitgeist of the ecosystem. Vendors mostly made software for the user, who was the customer, not for themselves or advertisers to sell the user as a product.
  - nartho 1y ago
    I forgot about that. I feel like everybody had an uncle or parent that would have so many toolbars that there was barely any space left for the page. That was mainly the results of using software that had those installers where you had to actively refuse the toolbars (and of course they just accepted everything)
scarface_74 1y ago
Why are you even seeing ads on web pages? Don’t you use an ad blocker?
- caulkboots 1y ago
  Not GP, but some of us have family members who refuse to even consider using uBlock Origin, for reasons they're never quite able to articulate.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    It might help them to know that both my employer and my kids' schools install it by default.
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  I usually avoid meta-commentary like this, but this comment has been re-iterated 500,000 times on this site any time this topic comes up. The reason I'm replying is that it's become offensive at this point the idea that anyone needs to install 3rd party software to (sometimes) avoid being barraged by advertisements and data miners. It also doesn't work as well or at all for mobile applications with ads built into them, like facebook, or even sometimes my OS these days. This type of comment is often used to dismiss complaints about ads in general, and is a really weak soft-defense of it in my opinion. Ad blockers existed in the 90's/00's too. This is a critique of the entire ecosystem, not one person being like "aw i hate seeing all these ads and don't know how to fix it." That's an overly simplistic view of my comment. Regardless, this is a commentary on the state of the web, not my personal usage of it. The vast majority of people do not block ads, otherwise they would not make money. If everyone did this, these sites wouldn't even work in the first place at least in the way the web is currently designed, which is part of the entire problem.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    It’s not useless. It’s like complaining about why am I having trouble breathing while I’m holding my head underwater. The commercial web has always been a cesspool of ads since the “punch the monkey” banner ads and the X11 pop under ads.
lproven 1y ago
> just quite old enough What does this mean? "Quite" does not fit in there for me.
- vimax 1y ago
  It's pretty obvious that it narrows the statement of "old enough" to be a fine-grained distinctions fitting, in this case, to a short timespan, possibly a few years, that some readers may consider to be old and others not old at all. Is there some other meaning you had in mind when asking this, or was this a pedantic question?
- lioeters 1y ago
  Maybe an usual and non-native wording, but I take it to mean "not that old but a little more than the sufficient level of oldness to qualify".

api 1y ago

It did not take long after the Internet went mainstream for a borderline (or not borderline) malware industry to evolve around getting predatory crap onto peoples' computers. I remember uninstalling shit like "Bonzai buddy" and the various toolbars and other trash that would come with dodgy installers or sometimes on new installs if you bought a cheap machine. Still, those computers were still PCs. They were still holdovers from the era when computers were mostly designed for their users, who were the customer. The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy, owing in part to the old cyberpunk/hacker ethos of the 1980s and 1990s. The political zeitgeist would best be described as "left-leaning libertarian" with a smattering of more radical ideas like anarchism. It was the mobile revolution that fully mainstreamed a computer as a device to spy on you and manipulate your dopamine system and only incidentally to help you. It didn't start this way, but that's where it went pretty fast. Social media also rapidly went this way. It started as a way to stay in touch with your friends, and has evolved into a chum feed with a UI/UX modeled after a slot machine. It's interesting to me how this shift has coincided with a shift away from liberal, libertarian, and small government conservative type ideas and toward every kind of authoritarianism. It's as if our politics echoes the permission and control structure of our computing devices, or vice versa. I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation goes-- maybe both ways.

scarface_74 1y ago
> The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy Let’s not romanticize the old PC culture - most running Windows with some combination of viruses, bundled software when you were trying to install something else, many people had 10 tool bars on IE that were all tracking your browser history
- api 1y ago
  I'm not talking about the maturity or quality of the software but the zeitgeist of the ecosystem. Vendors mostly made software for the user, who was the customer, not for themselves or advertisers to sell the user as a product.
- nartho 1y ago
  I forgot about that. I feel like everybody had an uncle or parent that would have so many toolbars that there was barely any space left for the page. That was mainly the results of using software that had those installers where you had to actively refuse the toolbars (and of course they just accepted everything)

scarface_74 1y ago

Why are you even seeing ads on web pages? Don’t you use an ad blocker?

caulkboots 1y ago
Not GP, but some of us have family members who refuse to even consider using uBlock Origin, for reasons they're never quite able to articulate.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  It might help them to know that both my employer and my kids' schools install it by default.
JohnMakin 1y ago
I usually avoid meta-commentary like this, but this comment has been re-iterated 500,000 times on this site any time this topic comes up. The reason I'm replying is that it's become offensive at this point the idea that anyone needs to install 3rd party software to (sometimes) avoid being barraged by advertisements and data miners. It also doesn't work as well or at all for mobile applications with ads built into them, like facebook, or even sometimes my OS these days. This type of comment is often used to dismiss complaints about ads in general, and is a really weak soft-defense of it in my opinion. Ad blockers existed in the 90's/00's too. This is a critique of the entire ecosystem, not one person being like "aw i hate seeing all these ads and don't know how to fix it." That's an overly simplistic view of my comment. Regardless, this is a commentary on the state of the web, not my personal usage of it. The vast majority of people do not block ads, otherwise they would not make money. If everyone did this, these sites wouldn't even work in the first place at least in the way the web is currently designed, which is part of the entire problem.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  It’s not useless. It’s like complaining about why am I having trouble breathing while I’m holding my head underwater. The commercial web has always been a cesspool of ads since the “punch the monkey” banner ads and the X11 pop under ads.

lproven 1y ago

> just quite old enough What does this mean? "Quite" does not fit in there for me.

vimax 1y ago
It's pretty obvious that it narrows the statement of "old enough" to be a fine-grained distinctions fitting, in this case, to a short timespan, possibly a few years, that some readers may consider to be old and others not old at all. Is there some other meaning you had in mind when asking this, or was this a pedantic question?
lioeters 1y ago
Maybe an usual and non-native wording, but I take it to mean "not that old but a little more than the sufficient level of oldness to qualify".