this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Old guy checking in. When ad blockers first became a thing, my then-teenaged boys started using one and were trying to talk me into it. I was pretty dubious. I said my concern was that the model most of the web was built on was ad-supported. That is, people created content on the web to try and get visitors, and made money by selling ads on their site, or used monetized links. If everyone started using ad blockers, I said, that model would break down and either people would stop creating content or they'd go to a new model, like subscriptions. I figured few people would take time equivalent to a full time job to create content for free.
I think that largely came to pass. A lot of great online publications have closed their doors, and the are lots of paywalls now. The things is, the sites are just as much to blame. Most people wouldn't have been driven to use ad blockers if the ads hadn't gotten so untenable. A banner or a box here or there is one thing, but when there are a giant number of pop-up windows, autoplay videos, windows you can't back out of, and all the other hellish stuff, people are going to be highly motivated to find a way to stop it.
That whole arms race was one of the things that ruined the internet, in my opinion.
I also think a lot of people who grew up on the internet have completely and totally forgotten about how bad it really was. They had ads that would take over your computer, ads that would download viruses, ads that would use your modem to dial 1-900 numbers, ads that would open 800 uncloseable web pages full of porn and start playing loud screaming music and moaning sounds to gather the interest of every other person in the house just a shame you for using the internet.
And dear Jesus don't forget about the fucking toolbars. Dozens upon dozens of toolbars installed in every browser, everything from bonzi buddy to AOL email, detecting that a picture would be loaded on your screen and replacing it with one of theirs as an ad link.
Ad blockers have been necessary to use the internet for the last 20 freaking years.
If you're not the kind of person who would go to the STD clinic and fuck every person there without a condom, you should never use the internet without an ad block.
Going to my parents house to help fix why their computer was "running slow" and like 6 inches of their browser was all toolbars that they had no idea how they got there nor knew what they did.
Oooh a free lobster dinner!
This is a thing of sheer beauty ❤️
Triggered!! 🤣
Yeah, and that's what I mean when I say that the sites brought it on themselves. If the ads started reasonable, like what you'd see on the old Sunday newspaper, three wouldn't have been much reason to block them.
You also have to add on the privacy issues with all the tracking, that also drove people to use them.
There was a sort of nice period.
In the wake of a bunch of BS, Google came along with rather nice and unobtrusive ads, and it seemed to catch on. Then over the last decade, it's really gone way downhill again.
Yeah, I didn't mind an ad on the side of the screen when all of the content was front and center. But the problem is is that when you make it so that a company's livelihood depends on forcing users to do things they don't want to do, and there's no regulation on that whatsoever, it's just going to go downhill very quickly and if you think this is bad it can get much much worse.
I'm kind of surprised that isps are not injecting ads into your browsing and forcing you to watch ads just to use the internet that you paid for.
They could even charge you like a $10 a month up charge fee for ad-free internet and say that we're not going to block the ads on the rest of the internet you just won't get additional ads from us.
If I recall correctly, during one of the more recent public debates around Net Neutrality in the US, it came out that certain ISPs were doing just that. Some people were showing screenshots of ads showing up inside their steam client (which runs the storefront and community sections as webpages).
I think it is worth mentioning that patreon also surfaced as a means to provide income for creators. Whether this was a direct result of ad blockers may be debatable. However, patreon certainly provides creators with an avenue to generate income that is not dependent on ads services.
Then there are also creator focused platforms like nebula and curiosity stream, which aim to provide creators with a fair share of generated revenue.
All in all, my take on the developments over the past ten years or so is that ad revenue sharing (with creators) provided an important impulse to establish the field of online content creation, and that shortcomings of this model are now being addressed. Mainly to funnel more money to the content creators rather than platform owners.
I think the last really big hurdle to an actually democratized internet is that we need to make it easier to host at home.
Asymmetrical download upload is such a fucking pain. I would rather have 100 down and 100 up then 400 down and 5 up like I currently do.
On top of that, there aren't a lot of good systems in place to enable me to host a website from home. If IPv6 were common it would be easy for me to secure a static IP address and to point that to my DNS resolver and attach my domain, but since I've got to be on an ipv4 system since no provider in my area provides an on-ramp to IPv6 and even if they did the Grand majority of Internet users cannot resolve IPv6 addresses, it's dead in the water.
If every person in America had symmetrical upload download and a static IPv6 address for their home, we could get rid of the grand majority of the content provider and hosts and instead use democratized systems like bluesky and Kbin and Mastodon and free tube without having to worry about these multi trillion dollar companies' bottom lines.
I've got symmetrical gigabit and an IP address I can remember
Just because you are 1/8th immortal does not mean that you get to rub it in our faces.
puts on tinfoil hat
The asymmetrical internet speeds are intended to keep hobbyists and small businesses from self-hosting, thereby driving traffic to larger companies. I wonder if ISPs get any kind of kickback from large companies like AWS, cloudflare, or digital ocean. Like, reduced hosting costs for their websites and internal cloud services.
Takes tinfoil hat off
The reality is that it's probably a lot cheaper for ISPs to make connections asymmetrical because it effectively lets them pump up their download speed numbers for free. However, ISPs really should give customers the option to custom allocate bandwidth. Instead of saying X upload, Y download, you get X Mbps maximum and can choose the upload/download split.
That would definitely be fair. Like even limit the ratio between tears just give me the option to have the internet that I want at my house without paying for business internet prices.
I'm not asking for symmetrical gigabit with a static ipv4 address on a fiber line with unlimited bandwidth. I just want a decent amount of bandwidth, 50-100mb up, a static IP address that is IPv6, and I'm okay with a ipv4 address that changes.
They've had a really long time to simply flip the switch in the routers that they use to also transmit IPv6 addresses and they are not doing it.
Their hardware is not old enough in most cases to not have IPv6 available by default in the hardware and firmware, they are just intentionally choosing not to activate it.
Are there any benefits to having a static IP, aside from self-hosting purposes? Is it somehow faster or more responsive? I'd think dynamic IPs would be better (ignoring self-hosting) because at the very least, they'd allow you to dodge (d)dos attacks (which can happen with games, people sometimes get salty enough to attack other players IPs if their IP is exposed).
The only use or reason for having a static IP is to have a domain name that resolves to that IP and knowing that the domain register can set the IP address and it's good until everything falls apart for lack of payment.
The other use of having a static IP is for a VPN, to remote back into your home network. Technically you can use both of these services with non-static vpns because most people's home internet does not change their IP addresses that often and there are services called dynamic DNS resolvers that you can get to constantly update your rotating IP address to a specific domain name.
You will not see any speed increases or throughput increases from having a set ip, it just simplifies running a home domain or home network because then you don't have to worry about ddns.
Dynamic IPs were primarily a way to get around a limited pool of IP addresses. That's all. Local IP addresses (think 192.168.x.x) were created for the same reason.
The NAT your home internet modem uses in providing your local network IP does provide a hard firewall between your computer and the internet, but that is more a side effect of the technology than anything else.
My dream for the past 3-4 years is something like a raspberry pi that you could just plug into power+internet+a chunky hard drive at home to have your own kbin/masto/lemmy/peertube instance.
I don't know how one can bring this about, though, in a more meaningful way than yet another hackaday.io post.
I feel like I have seen something like this. Just an all-in-one home server box.
I know you can make one but I get what you're saying is that you want it to be an appliance.
I don't know if "appliance" is how I would describe it but, yeah, something that's as plug-and-play as possible. I guess in the sense that off the shelf, it would be as easy to use as a dishwasher or toaster.
Until I became aware of the fediverse and activitypub, I thought that any such project would be doomed to fail - like most of the smart home market, you're tied to the manufacturer not only for compatible hardware but more crucially to talk with their servers.
Now I'm starting to think it is feasible, but still too many unknowns to bet a business on it.
Eh, I'm not sure it's much improved. In the ad model, the content creator owned the site and got money from selling ads. The more traffic they got, the more they could charge. In the new model, a corporation owns the site and takes a cut of whatever the creator generates.
Not necessarily. For instance, YouTube uses the old ad model and is of course not creator owned.
Additionally, you can use patreon while also using (and capitalising on) your own content distribution systems.
This is all to say, I do think the ad model may stay somewhat relevant, however, I also think that other income avenues are helpful and enable content creators more flexibility in terms of the manner in which they think they can best reach their audiences while generating income
Worth pointing out that ad blockers don't work for ads that are inserted into a video stream, so there was no need to change that model there. Also, YouTube is an example of a site that's not owned by the content creator. YouTube makes the money from the ads, then gives the significant creators a cut.
I wonder how stable the situation for in-stream ads really is. Paid sponsorships are nothing new, yet with browser extensions like sponsorblock becoming more and more popular I doubt the arms race will stop any time soon.
Not sure if arms race is the right way to put it when 1 side is deploying nukes and the other is only deploying shields. Money ruined the internet, ads is just one way how it did that.
That actually is a major facet of the military arms race. Side A develops a missile. Side B develops an anti-missile missile. So side A develops a missile with multiple warheads or builds more missiles so they won't all be shot down, etc. The defensive systems spawn the development of more or more-devastating offensive systems.
I still see one party racing with arms and one party trying to survive.
I used to not care about ads in Google because they were minimal. I was OK with ABP "acceptable ads".
But I've since gone full scorched earth. Fuck them all, their trackers, their fake news, the terrible products. I'm still OK with ads in my search results (no longer using Google) because they are often relevant to something I'm looking for. But for the rest, the Web stopped deserving my respect. I don't consume that much content online, and I pay for most of the few things I do consume.
As a software and data guy, having my search results tainted by paid content is pretty infuriating. I wouldn't care if there were ads to the side or something, but I find things like Amazon's search results almost completely unusable. And early on I used to point out to people how amazing Amazon's search engine really was. It was a marvel at getting you to exactly what you were looking to buy. Now it's optimized for showing you what they want to sell.
It really doesn't matter what the users did in response, because the MBAs' greed is such that they would have eventually ruined everything anyway no matter how compliant or patient the users were. It doesn't matter how much they get, it's never enough.
I’m also old (well, middle-aged is the right word I guess), but having lived through the adpocalypse that was the early 2000s, when the majority of sites were rushing to demonstrate their lofty stock valuations and satisfy their debtors by bringing in as much revenue as possible no matter the cost to the user base, I never really had that much patience for this business model, especially not once they discovered the concept of pop-ups (or worse, pop-unders).
I’ve also personally worked for a site whose business model was entirely based on SEO and click funneling and that has further eroded my patience to pretty zero. Pretty much none of our developer meetings were ever about “how can we make the product more useful to our users so they’ll actually WANT to come back”, it was always “our numbers are declining, how can we jam in more ads in order to meet the quarterly revenue goals?”
Yes, there are some sites that DO work hard to make actual, original content in order to earn those clicks, but for the most part, it’s an amoral, downright parasitical industry that doesn’t deserve any sympathy or goodwill.
It was already being enshittified, adblockers had fuck all to do with it since even today they represent a fraction of all users.
The jack wagons who decided to push web 2.0 as a money making gig are to blame, not the users.
I doubt very much adblockers are to blame for that. They're a convenient excuse for those trying to squeeze as much money as possible from their users... but they would have gone that route no matter what. It's just the nature of the economic system we live in.
I'm perfectly happy to pay for things I value, especially if the alternative is being forced to pay with my time and attention. The evidence also doesn't entirely support your argument, since plenty of places that you pay for still try to show ads.
Where was it ever said that a site could only use one model? The same is/was true of newspapers that cost you a subscription but also sold ads. Without the ads, the subscription would be much more expensive.
I personally am unlikely to pay for a huge variety of news sites and other publications, but I really appreciated having access to all that content for free. Sure, I might pay for one or two especially valuable sites, but my personal opinion is that it was better when the sites were making enough money to make it worthwhile for them by selling a reasonable amount of advertising, and the content was free to the users.
If your claim were accurate, they wouldn't have to resort to putting ads on websites that are subscription based.
Unless you want to make the argument they're just greedy bastards, which then means your first argument is bull, because they were already greedy bastards enshittifying it all well before adblockers were even close to commonplace.
And again, adblockers even today account for a fraction of users.
42% is a fraction, but it's a huge fraction. Higher in some demographics, lower in others.
How do you figure? Most business ventures will ask themselves how much a customer would pay for their product. If the answer is lower than enough to make product, they either won't enter the market or they'll figure out a way to lower the price. Selling ads is a way to lower the price. Also worth noting that ads used to generate a lot more revenue than they do now.
"Without the ads, the subscription would be much more expensive."
That's not at all how it works. How is it that adults think prices are based on costs? They teach supply and demand in high school.
As I said elsewhere, for most products, the makers ask how much they think people would be willing to pay for it. If that price is lower than an amount that would generate reasonable profit, they'll either no go to market or they'll look for ways to reduce or offset costs. Ads are a common way of keeping the price within what people are willing to pay.
No, that assumes that prices are based on cost, which is not true. Ads are a way to make money on top of what people will pay.
He didn't write a multi page thesis covering every single use case, quick tell him he's wrong!
No, that's what ruined the web.
You're right that ads supported the model, but the model was also generally anarcho-communist in nature. That people wanted to experience it without ads was expected, and considered fine. It is fine.