Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2THFairy | Hacker News Reader

So, obviously, ads were the norm back in the day. The author had to be wearing several rose tinted glasses when writing that.

But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game".

This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or legacy forums were and are.

View on HN

I may be wearing the same glasses here, but it felt like ads were more like "real ads" back then.

Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles.

On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the modern internet, ads and content feels entangled.

It's a bit like visiting a touristic area. It can feel like everything is trying to grab your attention to sell something and merchants become untrustworthy.

I don't know, I rarely see ads these days. I surf the internet with adblock exclusive and just try to skip over things like sponsored links or youtubers advertising in their video.

I've been using adblockers for as long as I can remember, and now also sponsorblock for youtube, so I don't see them in that form either.

My point is that there seem to be more things to "skip over" these days. Search results being the worst place.

Ads back then were pretty unobjectionable because they were like, a GIF or JPG on a page. It wasn't even until like 1998-1999 or something where they really started being JavaScript-driven from ad delivery shit like DoubleClick and so on. Suddenly I'm reminded of one of the early perpetrators of pop-up ads, X10 Technology[0] which was egregious enough to result in an early internet music artist, Kompressor, releasing a song about it, "We Must Destroy X-10"[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_Wireless_Technology

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8NK6eruUs

I still refuse to even consider an X10 product to this day because of those ads.

I miss being able to hit the Esc key and all the animations on the page stopped.

They all wish they had the viewership for ads. They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers. Banners, side banners, buttons, applets, most web advertising size standards are derivative of these initial placements.

What you’re talking about was geocities or aol’s members sites that anyone could build a site with. Anyone running CGI wishes for that sweet ad revenue to pay for the Sun servers…

Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and the like all had banner ads. I think you could pay not to have them but for free accounts they were mandatory.

That wasn't the case in the beginning, on Geocities at least. It was a pretty big deal when they started introducing popups and mandatory banner ads.

Yes, I had some pages on geocities around 1996/97 and to the best of my memory they had no ads. I must have stopped using the site entirely by the point they got added.

edit: Wikipedia claims that happened in May 1997.

That's exactly right. They were REALLY chill in the early days: "The only code that we require to be on all of your html pages is a reference back to GeoCities. This can be a reference to the main Neighborhood page that you reside in, or to the GeoCities Home Page. Please see the FTP Procedures Page for the preferred source code." from https://web.archive.org/web/19961220170537/http://www.geocit...

The other rules are actually pretty cool, too. Zero commercial use allowed. This probably singlehandedly ensured the most diverse and interesting content.

And in order to find those neighbors in my neighborhood, we started web rings... Sites I liked were added to mine. My friends added me to theirs. Next thing you know we have curated journeys through web design - graphics - music - literature - art - trade skills - DIY - and well... let's just say they like four channels.

> They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers.

I am not disputing that ads were a thing. I am not disputing that ads were common.

I said that there were a lot of sites that chose not to run them.

> They all wish they had the viewership for ads.

This is just not true. Like, c'mon man, the very site you're on right now takes this approach.

I had ads on one of my sites in the later 90's that drew a fair amount of traffic... it technically was enough to pay for the hosting, but in the end it wasn't making enough money for it to be real income. I removed it just because I wanted to give a better experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com