this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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The web, "as intended," worked for several years with utterly no ad content. And when ads did start coming along, they were largely innocuous; little things in side bars, not obnoxious full-page videos that are rarely dismissible.
Anyone who tries to sell you on the idea that the web was designed for commerce or as a way to distribute anything other than information is a lying fucker.
Don't know if that's true. People invested in it as a bubble - knowing that someday the companies running sites within them would be worth trillions. And they were right (though not about which ones would be worth that)
I remember seeing a lot of dinky banner ads back in the day.
But it is true. Luckily, Tim Berners Lee, the guy who invented the WWW, is still alive, and has posted his opinions about the state of the web.
His intention, the purpose for which he created the web, was not commerce and ads.
I knew about ad blockers before I started using one. Small sidebar or header ads weren't really enough to convince me I needed one.
Now the Internet has so many popups, ads, aggressive video players, requests to accept cookies, all because some people figured out how to make websites more profitable by making them worse. It's sad, really. The Internet of old was great.
Is your point that technology should never be used for anything other than what it was originally designed for? If that's the case then please stop using TCP/IP for anything other than advancing US military weapons research.
My point was that the comment I was replying to implied that the web was created so that people could monetize content. That was not the reason why the web was created.
If I create a whingdoodle that provides people with free electricity, and you find a way to murder cities with it, then you can't claim it's "functioning as intended." I didn't intend for it to do that; you found a way to pervert it. Now, Billy found a way to prevent you from murdering him with your weaponized wingdoodle, and you argue that he shouldn't, because the wingdoodle is "functioning as intended." I'm calling bullshit on that. That was my point.
There's http response code 402 (payment required) which comes before even 404 (page not found). Indicates to me that people were thinking about using the web for commerce even before they thought about people putting in a wrong URL.
Like I said, the best resource for this is Tim Berners-Lee, the man who literally invented the WWW.
Although, I was in college when he did it, and I have a pretty clear memory of those early years. Before JavaScript; before Java; before https. You know, https, the thing that enables secure data transfer like credit card information? Which was introduced 11 years after http was released and being used?
No. I can't say what all Tim foresaw, but ecommerce and monetization of the web was not at the forefront of his intentions. Just look at what he's written about it himself. Or, email him; he's still alive.
When he said "the system", he probably meant the system of ad funded services, not the system of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP as envisioned by Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955),[1].
Oh. So advertising is working as it was designed? I won't argue with that, except that I block all that so it doesn't, really. I suppose it still affects people who neither care to block it, or don't know how.
Advertising is a pox on capitalism, which has enough problems without the parasites.
And I hope you never used dial-up internet! That is NOT what phone lines are for.
I did in the past. But now my internet connection involves co-ax cable. So please send all replies in an analog video form, since that's what that cable was designed for.