[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.