[integralid]

>the average person's response is "nah, that would take at least a couple of minutes of my time,

As a data point I, a technical person who tweaks his computer a lot, was against adblocking for moral reasons (as a part of perceived social contract, where internet is free because of ads). Only later I changed mi mind on this because I became more privacy aware.

[ronsor]

The social contract was "your ads aren't annoying or invasive, and don't waste my time, so I earn you some money"

But ads are all of those things now, so I feel no obligation. I only got an ad blocker around the time ads were becoming excessively irritating.

[throwawayqqq11]

Figure this: You could plaster a page with the most obtrusive ads imaginable without ever showing a cookie banner, when they collect no private info.

Most people, including folks on here, think cookie banners are a problem, but they are just an annoying attempt to phish your agreement. As long as these privacy loopholes exist, we will keep hearing such stories even from large corporations with much to loose, which means the current privacy regulations do not go far enough.

[macNchz]

Beyond just invasive/annoying, ad networks explicitly spread malware and scams/fraud. There's not much incentive for them to clamp down on it, though, as that would cost them money both in lost revenue and in paying for more thorough review.

[cogman10]

It'd not even be hard for them to stop it, but they just had to be annoying instead.

When I first started out on the internet, ads were banners. Literally just images and a link that you could click on to go see some product. That was just fine.

However, that wasn't good enough for advertisers. They needed animations, they needed sounds, they needed popups, they needed some way to stop the user from just skimming past and ignoring the ad. They wanted an assurance that the user was staring at their ad for a minimum amount of time.

And, to get all those awful annoying capabilities, they needed the ability to run code in the browser. And that is what has opened the floodgate of malware in advertisement.

Take away the ability for ads to be bundled with some executable and they become fine again. Turn them back into just images, even gifs, and all the sudden I'd be much more amenable to leaving my ad blocker off.

[michaelt]

> The social contract was "your ads aren't annoying or invasive

Even back in the 1990s the internet was awash with popups, popunders and animated punch-the-monkey banner ads. And with the speed of dial up, hefty images slows down page loads too.

You must be a true Internet veteran if you remember a time ads weren’t annoying!

[hn_acc1]

I remember a time before ads. I remember the first time I got "spam" email - email not directly addressed to me that ended up in my inbox. I was very confused for some time about why this email was sent to me.

[leptons]

I remember how I felt the first time I saw an ad come across my browser, it seems so long ago - I guess it was more than a quarter century ago now. I knew it was going to be downhill from there, and it has been.

[jasonfarnon]

Well by 2000 the guy at Tripod had already developed pop-up ads. I honestly don't remember ads before the pop-ups, but it must have already been maturing.

[ACow_Adonis]

You mean the internet you pay to access and which was around before the ads were even on it? That internet?

I'm not trying to be mean I'm just trying to historically parse your sentence/belief.

Because for me this is a simplified analogy of what happened on the internet:

a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs

b) a few years later a new guy called commercial business turned up and started using our club house and fucking around with our stuff

c) commercial business started going around our club house rearranging the furniture and putting graffiti everywhere saying the internet is here and free because of it. We're pretty sure it might have even pissed in the hallway rather than use the toilet and the whole place is smelling awful.

d) the rest of us started breaking out the scrubbing brushes and mops (ad blockers, extensions, VPNs, etc) trying to clean up after it

e) some of its friends turned up and started repeating something about social contracts and how business and ads built this internet place

f) the rest of us keep crying into our hands just trying to meet up, break out the slop buckets to clean up the vomit in the kitchen and some of us now have to wear gloves and condoms just to share things with our friends and stop the whole place collapsing

[pixl97]

Ya, back when 'we' were fucking around on BBS's there was the equivalent of 10 people online at the time.

Quantity is a quality in itself. Your BBS was never going to support a million users. Once people figured out the network effect it was over for the masses. They went where the people are, and we've all suffered since.

[hn_acc1]

Honestly, I still prefer webboards, the closest thing to a BBS, for specific topics like specific car brands/models. WAY better signal-to-noise ratio. Alas, for my car model, all the recent stuff has moved to Fbook. FML.

[chasd00]

> a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs

"we" is doing a lot of work here. No clubhouse got optical switching working and all that fiber in the ground for example. Beyond POC, the Internet was all commercial interests.

[mech422]

"we" paid ISP's ... which in turn, paid for infrastructure. Some of "we" pay cable providers for internet service, which in turn paid for (in my case) fiber-to-the-curb. Advertising basically supported social media, search engines, etc.

[kibwen]

No. The internet was not a commercial enterprise, it was first and foremost a military enterprise, just like GPS.

[JumpCrisscross]

> it was first and foremost a military enterprise, just like GPS

This is sort of like arguing cutlery is a military enterprise. Like yes, that’s where knives came from. But that’s disconnected enough from modern design, governance and other fundamental concerns as to be irrelevant. The internet—and less ambiguously, the World Wide Web—are more commercial than military.

[kibwen]

This is moving the goalposts. The commenter above is talking about the enthusiast-populated internet of the late 80s/early 90s, at which point it still wasn't even clear if it was legal to use the internet for commercial purposes. If all you mean to say is that the internet is currently commercialized, yes, that is obviously true, in much the same way that a disgusting ball of decomposing fungus may have once been an apple.

[JumpCrisscross]

> commenter above is talking about the enthusiast-populated internet of the late 80s/early 90s, at which point it still wasn't even clear if it was legal to use the internet for commercial purposes

Source? Not doubting. But I have a friend who was buying airline tickets through CompuServe in the late 80s/early 90s.

[jmuguy]

This is ignoring things like newspapers that were made obsolete by the internet. At some point someone does need to actually pay for the content we see online. That is if we want that content to actually be good.

[account42]

Paying doesn't inherently make things more valuable and can even provide incentives for the opposite. And most of the people creating "content" for the web today aren't even being paid at all - it's third parties plastering the ads on it and profiting.

[fl4regun]

not sure why you're talking about "commercial business" being the one inserting ads everywhere when even niche community run forums from the 2000s also had ads to help pay for their server costs. At the end of the day all this costs money. Whether its paid by ads or direct subscriptions. IMO the problem is more about concentration and centralization of the internet into a handful of sites than advertising.

[brokencode]

I mean yeah, you pay for the internet. But many sites are free to use only due to ads.

Such as news and magazine sites, many of which are actively dying due to a lack of revenue.

I personally wish these sites could all switch to paid models, because I also don’t like ads.

But absent that, I’d like to support the sites I use so that they don’t go out of business.

[account42]

If their business depends on psychologically manipulating me into acting against my own best interests then I hope they go out of business.

[bookofjoe]

I have expensive online subscriptions to New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Nevertheless they are FILLED with ads/popups/videos that run automatically/dark patterns. Just saying: there's no refuge.

[brokencode]

True, but that doesn’t invalidate what I said about the vast majority of sites that aren’t globally known, prestigious news companies that people are willing to pay an expensive subscription for.

Most publishers of content online are ad supported and struggling, and I want to make sure I’m contributing to their revenue somehow.

I don’t feel bad about blocking ads on sites I pay for though.

[fl4regun]

here's an idea: don't use those sites.

[acdha]

I strongly believe in paying journalists but I started blocking ads after nytimes.com served me a Windows malware download from a Doubleclick domain. It couldn’t have harmed my Mac but it was clear that the adtech industry had no interest in cleaning shop if it cost them a dime in revenue.

[bookofjoe]

The average person — that would be me — thinks "nah, I have no idea how to install an ad blocker or how one works, and I'm afraid I'll screw up my computer."

[whynotmaybe]

Duckduckgo is free and with ads.