| "In an ideal world, personalized ads wouldn't be called ads, and would be like having an assistant." Right, I'm truly stretched to the limit to think of any ad that I've seen on the web that's actually been truly informative to me. For that I have to go back to ads in specialized technical magazines that used to list detailed specifications for the products they were selling, today web advertisers simply don't do that - all we get is hyped-up uninformative and often misleading crap that interferes with our access to the site's web pages. Similarly, many, many websites that are selling stuff are cluttered, disorganized and otherwise hard to navigate (as well as being very, very slow). Of course, this is a deliberate marketing ploy but the effect on me is that I'm straight out of there as fast as possible. Internet advertising has always been an unmitigated mess and unlike those old magazine ads, almost without exception, it's gotten in the way of the main presentation to the utter annoyance of website visitors. It's little wonder so many use ad blockers. For years, my solution has been to block ads as well as all the accompanying JavaScript of which much is devoted to spying on the user. Eliminating both ads and JS not only speeds up websites enormously but also it eliminates all those hesitant pauses and other jerky/delay-like responses that make browsing such a damn pain. I'm now so used to 'clean' browsing that I cannot ever imagine myself returning to the standard defaults - ads and JS. For those who ask 'how do you do this or that without JS?' I'd just say this, there are millions of sites on the web, if one blocks me then I instantly move on (one good point about the web is that most of the information on it is paralleled across multiple sites and there are many sites that are more user friendly than others). That said, there are rare situations where I still have to use JS. When necessary I just toggle it on and off, the default being off. As far as I'm concerned the web has been ruined by invasive advertising and we need a new paradigm to fix it. There are many options for that but it's too big a subject to discuss here. |