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Why It's OK to Block Ads (2015)
(blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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no ads in web 1.0 and the internet was perfectly fine
That's before it got colonized by megacorporations.
there were so many fucking ads online in the late 90s
and you couldn't block them because they were either served from the same domain or used the same plugin as the content and it was an all-or-nothing thing
all those goddamn blinking gifs with "click here" and "you're our millionth visitor", and the pop-ups, and the flash bars with "shoot the ducks"...
that was 3.0
considering that "web 2.0" is widely accepted to be "the social web", where the focus was on user contribution and interoperability... no.
maybe i'm getting my html versions mixed up with my buzzwords
a lot of those came up in the late 90s early 2000s though. the early 90s were mostly just text based pages.
yeah, but as soon as the web actually had enough traffic to take off the ads were everywhere. before 1996 it was basically just a prototype.
There were ads! But these were simple banner graphics of 468x60 pixels. In the worst case it was an animated GIF. But hosted on the same server as the page and without any tracking shenanigans.
I remember the add that made me install my first add blocker. It stated playing the sound of knocking on glass and a voice going "Hey You!". With a looped videoof some guy waving at me.
Every so often one gets through my blocker and they have only gotten more annoying.
I have a similar story. People were fine with ads until they got too obnoxious and intrusive, and now the people making the obnoxious intrusive ads are crying that people are blocking them.
Yeah, people seem to have mostly forgotten about the forced audio playback that was really prevalent for a while. It was crazy effective because you would have to hint down the actual ad causing the issue on the page to stop it.
LoL, that wasn't the original internet. That was years after the internet had been around.