[chillacy]

> unobtrusive banner ads

Oh boy I don’t miss the flash animated pop up ads, but that has less to do with forums vs social media and more to do with how the tech has evolved.

That said fb and google ads are pretty unobtrusive because they exert so many restrictions on businesses. If you’ve ever tried to run ads you’d find user friendly restrictions like “no all caps text” or “limit to text in an image”.

[JohnFen]

> That said fb and google ads are pretty unobtrusive

That depends on how you count. "Unobtrusive", maybe, but those ads are intolerably intrusive, because of the tracking.

Between the two, I'd rather have those old "spank the monkey" banners any day of the week. But I also fondly remember a time before even those existed.

In many ways, advertising has really ruined vast swaths of the internet.