[throwaway63467]

The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it. Kind of sad really, but I guess you could be happy as it’s so big now and there’s so much to do. Just makes you wonder what stuff would thrive if ads didn’t exist. As of now every niche thing that gets successful will be invariably pulled into the ad ecosystem as it’s very hard to say no to money.

RSS wasn’t in the interest of the big platforms as it’s decentralized and there’s no good way to deliver ads through it, simple as that.

[drnick1]

> everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind.

I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux, and haven't seen an ad in years. It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad. Javascript, in particular, has been constantly abused against the user ever since it was created.

[mschild]

> Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux

Same setup and same experience. I've recently joined another company which only provided chrome with no extensions by default. I know the web is filled with ads but I'm shocked again and again when I get a glimpse into what it's like without an adblocker.

[cwnyth]

There are dozens of us. Maybe one day people will realize how much better Firefox is now and how nicer the web can be with no ads.

[anonymousiam]

It's not just a better user experience. It also addresses the security issues.

Blocking ads will also prevent malware scripts, unscrupulous information collection, and deceptive virus infection messages. I've got friends who've been infected because they believed the popup that told them their computer had a virus, and they needed to click the link to remove it.

[paradox460]

Funny, I literally just saw an ad for Firefox

[jfengel]

There was also .001% of the content there is now. The Internet of 2000 was microscopic.

Now everyone can create content, without any of the friction of hosting it. The vast majority of it is crap, but that was always the case.

The main difference between now and 30 years ago is that the Internet is vastly more diverse. It isn't just other CS majors any more. Now everyone gets to wade in the vast crap pool looking for the smidge of things that appeal to them. Meanwhile the CS majors still host their own stuff, because they can, and you find out about it via the same word of mouth.

[inigyou]

The .001% was the top .001% of today's content. The other 99.999% we gained was spam aimed at getting money while providing minimal value and taking minimal effort.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

can’t wait to hear about how some 9/11 truther blog was the cream of the crop. I’m surprised you can see anything through those rose coloured glasses.

the most charitable interpretation is that the internet used to more exclusively cater to your interests specifically, which i’m sure is true.

try asking most women about the internet then vs now. there are still scumbags, and one could reasonably argue that they’ve gotten worse, but at least theres more to do now.

[pwdisswordfishq]

> can’t wait to hear about how some 9/11 truther blog was the cream of the crop

Compared to the torrent of AI slop today, it was.

[tombert]

> It isn't just other CS majors any more.

Hey, that's not fair! It also had nine year olds who bought a book about HTML and made shitty sites on Geocities!

[modriano]

Those were just CS majors before they majored in CS.

[KPGv2]

Jokes on you, I majored in pure mathematics.

[fl4regun]

i don't think it's fair to say it was just CS majors, I'm a 90s baby and i was on the web in the 2000s when i was in middle school, I still remember reading web comics and forums, messaging people on MSN and playing MMOs with online friends, looking up gameFAQs to get past sticking points. This could just be me, but it felt more social and personal.

[gmadsen]

The 90s were very different from the 2000s

[fl4regun]

the commenter was talking about the internet in the 2000s, as am I. I was only born in the 90s.

[JKCalhoun]

Yeah, that was fine. It meant I got out riding my bike more often.

[docjay]

It sounds like you agreed with them from the other direction. “The internet of yesteryear felt more special.” - “Nah, there wasn’t as much slop back then and now it’s a crap pool that anyone can wade into and look for scraps.”

[siren2026]

That's exactly why I used to love tech (and working in tech) 20 years ago and why I lost faith in tech completely.

We went from a bunch of open protocols and decentralized web to a full closed garden gatekeeped by a couple mega companies. It is a sad state of the world, but the MBAs and BigTech won.

[antod]

yeah, when I first stumbled on to the internet it was all about the protocols and specific implementations didn't matter.

Then later IE dominated the web and hurt interoperability, but we fought back through the Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox era anxiously following IE6 slowly losing market share.

Only to find that the war had shifted beyond clients and standards support to the sites and the power of their business models.

And parallel battles for the old standards based DIY freedom lost to hyperscaler clouds and now AI.

All in all compared to that, losing Google Reader seems small, but it was kinda the nexus point at the centre of it all.

[ethagnawl]

> ... when I first stumbled on to the internet ...

StumbleUpon used to be an endlessly entertaining way to find new content on the internet.

[mathieudombrock]

What I don't understand about the "RSS can't support ads" argument is that most of my RSS feeds don't actually let me read the article. Just a headline and a snippet at most. So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.

[dhosek]

I’ve encountered feeds that do this and I tend to not keep those subscriptions long. That said, some feeds often have content that doesn’t present well in my feed reader and I’ll end up clicking to view the web presentation

What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recover, being able to just get a set of tabs that represent new posts at sites that I want to follow. Maybe I’ll vibe code this for myself now that I’ve given in and turned to the dark side with Claude.

[inigyou]

Doesn't Firefox still have this? It's a special kind of bookmark folder populated by RSS.

[defrost]

Moz Support says "Firefox's built-in support for web feeds and Live Bookmarks ended in December 2018 with version 64."

I checked as I use the Feedbro extension in Firefox and Chrome family browsers for holding and updating a tree of RSS feeds and thought I'd missed a built in FF feature :/

[singpolyma3]

Also you can literally insert ads into the feed content

[SanjayMehta]

There are some RSS feeds which let you read even their paywalled content completely, without ads. I'm guessing by accident, not design.

[emzo]

Google felt a little more special. "Don't be evil" and all that. Those were the days.

[user3939382]

> the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it

Not LibreWolf. I’m also a fan of ungoogled-chromium, those are my two daily browsers.