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Comment by toper-centage | Hacker News Reader

This is the main reason why I always advocate for using ad blockers. It's not just about annoying adds, not even just about trackers. Ad-supported content is always, to some extent, ad-controlled content. Advertisers have successfully taken control of YouTube by demonising anything that could be controversial.

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I spent years browsing the web before it had any advertising on it at all. I remember the first ads, they were called "banners" and everyone raged out about how awful they were.

But we had no idea just how truly awful they could become, and that in fact the entire infrastructure of the internet would bend so that tracking and advertising became omniscient and pervasive. What a nightmare.

For a few years there though it kind of looked like the web was going to remain free and open forever. Back when we were all so young.

When did it not have ads? I remember seeing ads as early as 1993. AOL's browser was full of them. Sometimes they were just links at the bottom of a page thanking a sponsor, though.

I feel like if you have to actively look for it at the bottom of the page, it doesn't really qualify as an "ad" in the sense we're talking about here.

AOL's garden (and Prodigy's before that) was always packed with ads from the first version, it was one of the reasons I hated AOL and was always just trying to get a simple TCP connection so I could just browse the web instead.

I don't think AOL shipped a normal browser until later than '93, they hated the web for obvious reasons and were actively fighting against it in those early years. They had something resembling a browser you could just type AOL keywords into, but that was only for their content. I remember I had to make a phone call to get a config change for a normal TCP connection to browse the web in some versions, that's how locked down AOL was.

Hit the monkey to win!

Congratulations! You've been chosen to win a free iPod!

Everyone fell for those at least once

Install Bonza Buddy!!

Advertising drove me away from watching television and listening to the radio. And those aren't even the nasty, spying sort of ads that we have on the web.

I really see the day coming when I can no longer defend myself against advertisers enough to make it worth continuing to use the web at all.

From my point of view, cable has the easiest kind of advertising to fully skip. It's distinct from programming and can be fast forwarded.

I find that preferable to the web and streaming. Being manipulated by unskippable previews and algorithms using personal data about me to show me an Amazon or Netflix controlled browse interface that tries to funnel me into watching what they consider optimal.

The first banner ad was in 1994.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-f...

The first web browser was introduced in 1990.

https://starry.com/blog/inside-the-internet/what-was-the-fir...

Advertising has been a part of the web for almost its entire history.

Therefore it would seem that the years the parent poster spent browsing an adless world were in the range 1990-1994.

And the web was basically useless to find any information back then.

Not at all. It was a magical wonderland of directories, forums, and secret links you'd pass around between friends. For the first time ever you could type in an address at the top of a window and just go there. We had never seen anything like that before, everything previously was a walled off program or service that hid everything under the hood.

Pretending advertising was built in from the beginning is just dishonest. It was a shift in the contract, we all got swept up in the early ad free web and it was amazing at first.

In these early years I learned so much, there was a pirated encyclopedia which was the first thing I downloaded, followed by learning how to shave, how to speak spanish, how to do my homework, how to tie a tie. The first time I got paid as a web developer was in 1993, still more than a year before the first ads, and like five years before ads actually started appearing in significant numbers.

None of this advertising is necessary, it was all just tacked on by corporations. This is to say nothing of tracking and profiling and targeting, which is simply evil.

I was in college then. My first internet connected app that I wrote was gopher based in 1994. You couldn’t find any useful information from most publications, it was basically useless for research, you definitely couldn’t do too much shopping. Shopping for computer equipment was still done by browsing the huge Computer Shopper magazines.

There wasn’t an easy way an easy way to search Usenet until 1995 when DejaNews became available. You would have never had the investment in internet infrastructure that allows everyone to get internet speeds at home that were unheard of even for businesses that were usually connected via a T1 if they had any internet at all.

I don't really understand this.

Before advertisers had a stranglehold on the remaining American cable networks and newspapers, did cable networks and newspapers consistently get "de-platformed" into non-existence if they violated an advertiser's social stance?

Like, are the populist calls for deplatforming that we see on social media today against other organizations (which advertisers sometimes agree with) new? Or is this just history repeating itself until we get tightly corporate governed internet media that never runs afoul of social norms, slightly "pushing the envelope" on occassion for shock value and entertainment.

No, but I suspect that’s only because before the Internet there was no easy way to organize a critical mass of people to name-and-shame platforms which aired objectionable content, not because back then we had objections to the concept of deplatforming.

I remember in the 80s and 90s there were campaigns to deplatform musicians from Walmart. At the time Walmart was where most music was sold so getting taken out meant lots of lost sales.

Some artists changed their work. Some released sanitized versions. Some skipped Walmart.

I remember when you were considered left wing when you defended those artists.

It’s so weird how people have flipped. Nowadays Walmart would be lauded for “choosing who to do business with” or whatever the appropriate phrasing is for companies not doing business with people we don’t like.

whereas only right wing people are being deplatformed now and only right wing people are defending them?

I get the feeling that this country requires an external enemy solely to maintain cohesion

Respectable publications still have a firewall between their business and editorial sides. I know some cynics will scoff at this, but there are lots of ethical journalists who would blow the whistle if they felt they were losing editorial independence.

Some publications have suffered a breakdown of the firewall as their business declined, but the top-tier outlets (the ones who still have a lot of money and even print circulation) are still more trustworthy than your average blog.

I still have a lot of cynicism at the "trustworthy" top-tier outlets, mainly because of their so-called editorial independence. [1]

1. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/new-yo...

Even Ars Technica the content writers and editors only control the article bodies - the headings are made by other people who do AB testing.

Yep.

Advertising tends to ruin everything it touches. This is a case in point.

Well ya, but also TV.

demonising -> demonetizing

Same thing these days innit?

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