[CapsAdmin]

I may be wearing the same glasses here, but it felt like ads were more like "real ads" back then.

Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles.

On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the modern internet, ads and content feels entangled.

It's a bit like visiting a touristic area. It can feel like everything is trying to grab your attention to sell something and merchants become untrustworthy.

[amatecha]

Ads back then were pretty unobjectionable because they were like, a GIF or JPG on a page. It wasn't even until like 1998-1999 or something where they really started being JavaScript-driven from ad delivery shit like DoubleClick and so on. Suddenly I'm reminded of one of the early perpetrators of pop-up ads, X10 Technology[0] which was egregious enough to result in an early internet music artist, Kompressor, releasing a song about it, "We Must Destroy X-10"[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_Wireless_Technology

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8NK6eruUs

[tracker1]

I still refuse to even consider an X10 product to this day because of those ads.

[randomNumber7]

I don't know, I rarely see ads these days. I surf the internet with adblock exclusive and just try to skip over things like sponsored links or youtubers advertising in their video.

[CapsAdmin]

I've been using adblockers for as long as I can remember, and now also sponsorblock for youtube, so I don't see them in that form either.

My point is that there seem to be more things to "skip over" these days. Search results being the worst place.

[joquarky]

I miss being able to hit the Esc key and all the animations on the page stopped.