[blackflame7000]

Shot in the dark here, but perhaps you could try leaving the functionality the same and just try taking out all that code that tracks every pixel the user looks at, for how long, and how they can better market porn to that user...seems like that stuff could be taken out...

[larzang]

What programmer wants to add those things? Ads have been the bane of the internet for 20 years, how many times has a developer excitedly clamored to ruin their performance metrics, layout, security, etc with more ads? How often are programmers arguing for incredibly complex UI elements over the native (and trivial to implement) alternatives?

Programmers don't choose these things, because programmers aren't the real decision makers, it's management and business that makes the web awful.

[manicdee]

> What programmer wants to add those things?

The one that wants to keep their job.

> How often are programmers arguing for incredibly complex UI elements over the native (and trivial to implement) alternatives?

The existence of Bootstrap and Semantic UI suggest that programmers are in fact often arguing for incredibly complex UI elements over the native alternatives.

[reportgunner]

Are you saying that the executioner is not a murderer because he doesn't make decisions about who to execute and who to leave alive ?

[blackflame7000]

"how many times has a developer excitedly clamored to ruin their performance metrics, layout, security, etc with more ads?"

Depends how much traffic they have I suppose. I'd be pretty excited if ads bought me a Lamborghini for every color of the week because Tuesdays right now are pretty boring.

[zaro]

Of course, I tottally agree. I am not talkng at all about tracking, and 3rd party services at all.

I was talking mostly about the actual application logic and presentation.

BTW tracking is hapening even w/o javascript.

[C1sc0cat]

Its not adds its shovelling massive amounts of bloated JavaScript frame works in and hoping for the best and in a lot of cases just not understanding how to structure a website.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

I wonder what the economic impact of doing that would be.

[TeMPOraL]

If everyone did that? Probably very positive in terms of energy and resource use, positive in terms of less things to worry about for the businesses - and very negative for all the bullshit adtech jobs that wouldn't be needed anymore.

So strongly positive, in other words.

One has to remember that marketing and advertising have a big negative-sum-game component going on, where most or all of your marginal effort to promote your product serves only to cancel out the marginal effort of your competitors to promote their products.

[nobody9999]

>If everyone did that? Probably very positive in terms of energy and resource use, positive in terms of less things to worry about for the businesses - and very negative for all the bullshit adtech jobs that wouldn't be needed anymore.

It's not just the annoyance factor, it's the bloat from ads. In fact, something like 48% of retrieved data[0], on average is ad related.

Getting rid of those ads could cut client (and server and network) energy draws significantly. And we could further reduce energy usage by not needing add-ons like ad/tracking blockers and stuff like NoScript[1].

I browse with js disabled and, unless I need to visit a particular site, I'll just close the tab if js is required -- as the bloat, the security risks and the hubris of js overuse is just too much.

[0] https://www.nextpit.com/ads-consume-half-of-your-mobile-data

[1] https://noscript.net/

Edit: fixed spacing of referenced links.