Beyond just invasive/annoying, ad networks explicitly spread malware and scams/fraud. There's not much incentive for them to clamp down on it, though, as that would cost them money both in lost revenue and in paying for more thorough review.

Figure this: You could plaster a page with the most obtrusive ads imaginable without ever showing a cookie banner, when they collect no private info.

Most people, including folks on here, think cookie banners are a problem, but they are just an annoying attempt to phish your agreement. As long as these privacy loopholes exist, we will keep hearing such stories even from large corporations with much to loose, which means the current privacy regulations do not go far enough.

> The social contract was "your ads aren't annoying or invasive

Even back in the 1990s the internet was awash with popups, popunders and animated punch-the-monkey banner ads. And with the speed of dial up, hefty images slows down page loads too.

You must be a true Internet veteran if you remember a time ads weren’t annoying!

I remember how I felt the first time I saw an ad come across my browser, it seems so long ago - I guess it was more than a quarter century ago now. I knew it was going to be downhill from there, and it has been.

Ya, back when 'we' were fucking around on BBS's there was the equivalent of 10 people online at the time.

Quantity is a quality in itself. Your BBS was never going to support a million users. Once people figured out the network effect it was over for the masses. They went where the people are, and we've all suffered since.

> a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs

"we" is doing a lot of work here. No clubhouse got optical switching working and all that fiber in the ground for example. Beyond POC, the Internet was all commercial interests.

This is ignoring things like newspapers that were made obsolete by the internet. At some point someone does need to actually pay for the content we see online. That is if we want that content to actually be good.

not sure why you're talking about "commercial business" being the one inserting ads everywhere when even niche community run forums from the 2000s also had ads to help pay for their server costs. At the end of the day all this costs money. Whether its paid by ads or direct subscriptions. IMO the problem is more about concentration and centralization of the internet into a handful of sites than advertising.

I mean yeah, you pay for the internet. But many sites are free to use only due to ads.

Such as news and magazine sites, many of which are actively dying due to a lack of revenue.

I personally wish these sites could all switch to paid models, because I also don’t like ads.

But absent that, I’d like to support the sites I use so that they don’t go out of business.

Isn't Brave backed by Peter Thiel? That alone would make me not trust it but they also have baked in crypto and other weird stuff.

Firefox on Android has approximately 0.5% market share on mobile, less than Opera. I really doubt it's enough to spark any sort of industry-wide change.

Lite doesn't actually protect you.

Which do you use? I was unaware that Apple even let such apps on the App Store. I always assumed that their ToS would strictly prohibit it.

But there's no method or structure in place to pay a website a fraction of a cent. Ads are the only way we've found that actually implements a form of microtransactions... paying a tenth of a penny for a sliver of attention.

I don't want to defend ads, but whatever replaces them is going to be very disruptive. Maybe better, but very different.

YouTube had an estimated $40 billion in ad revenue in 2025: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/youtube-surpasses-disney-p...

And has roughly 2.7 billion monthly active users. This means the average YouTube user brings in around $1.23 per month. When you consider that CPM's can easily swing by 20X based on how wealthy the user demographic is, and willingness to pay a subscription is a strong signal for purchasing power, I would not be at all subscribed if a YouTube premium subscription was revenue-neutral for Google.

I believe this and it makes a web 3.0 solution seem viable if only we could escape the collective action trap

This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks.

There would need to be a way for ISPs to know which websites are getting my traffic in order to know who to distribute the money to, which I'm not a fan of. But I think something along those lines, with anonymized traffic data, would work a treat.

That'd be ideal because it would mean I could browse the internet without ads and just never use AI chatbots. Unfortunately I think ads are only going to spread and what we'll actually end up with is "more ads everywhere".

Yes, but the Awful registration fee is more like a speedbump to make banned behavior at least a little expensive to the offending users. Most of the revenue comes from completely optional aesthetic purchases: avatars, avatars _for others_, smilies, etc. I suspect it's a whale based economy.

I would love to get something more akin to a monthly print issue of BYTE, Omni, Starlog, Reality Hackers, WIRED and Dr Dobbs Journal without blinky, shouty ads that cause the content to re-render every 10 seconds.

I would pay money for that.

> If there is any way to make cash from news, shouldn't Bezos have been able to do it??

News only made money when the newspapers could leverage their circulation numbers to run their own ads network. The classifieds section was a money machine. I remember full-page ads in the Washington Post from local car dealerships showing every model they were selling. They likely ran different ads for distribution in other regions, probably 10Xing their money. Google and Facebook killed that.

What Bezos bought was a corpse of a business, but one with strong journalistic credibility known for historic investigative analyses such as the Watergate cover-up that earned public goodwill. He was buying that goodwill and slowly asphyxiating it to align with his own interests.

> Free does not scale

No disagreement there, except the early web was not about scale. The sites you visited may have been created by someone as a hobby, a university professor outlining their courses or research, a government funded organization opening up their resources to the public, a non-profit organization providing information to the public or other professionals, or companies providing information and support for their products (in the way they rarely do today).

> people need to eat, pay for rent

Those people were either creating small sites in their spare time, or were paid to work on larger sites by their employer.

There were undoubtedly gaps in the non-commercial web. On the other hand, I'm not sure that commercializing the web filled those gaps. If anything, it is so "loud" that the web of today feels smaller and less diverse than the web of the 1990's.

Newspapers continue to run ads even after the paywalls went up everywhere a decade or so ago. Once "premium" offerings like HBO, which were ad-free on cable TV, now has ads on its paid streaming version. Even with the "premium" subscription tier, there's sponsored/co-branded content. And for some reason, it now has live sports, where they have no control over the ads shown.

The problem was less the scale of supply and more the scale of demand.

In the 19th century, economist William Stanley Jevons found that, as coal became more readily and easily available, demand for it went up. This was counter to the theories of others, and the principle became known as Jevons Paradox.

Jevons Paradox (a concept that is widely misunderstood, especially when it comes to tech and finance bros talking about AI) demonstrates that, a resource becomes more abundant and easily accessible, demand for that resource rises. As the web took off, people hungered more and more for digital content -- especially as internet accessibility became faster and cheaper.

To keep up -- and to pay for being able to keep up -- increasingly sophisticated monetization models were introduced.

In any case, ad models are one thing. But it's the data brokering that's even more insidious.

The irony is that if internet content were harder to access, the population on the whole wouldn't want it as much.

Now, the culmination of Jevons Paradox has spun itself around a bit in this case. We now live in a world where those profiting off of ad models and data brokering actively try to get people to demand internet content more. (Look no further than the recent social-media-addiction lawsuits.)

> I would rather pay people and websites for content.

I do not think that this is a workable model. Firstly, because it leads inevitably to monopolization, because you don't want to pay 50,000 people for content, you want to pay 10 people for content. Secondly, because most content is bad and a waste of time and you don't find out until after you've bought it. Thirdly, and most importantly, is that there's no actual, clear separation between "news" and "advertising."

Content is generated because people who want that content generated sponsor it beforehand, and dictate the conditions under which the delivery of that content will be accepted as a fulfillment of that sponsorship. The people sponsoring that content can have any number of reasons for doing it; it can make them money directly (i.e. I have articles about cats, people who like cats subscribe to my cat website), which if you're a linear thinker you think is the only way, or it can make them money indirectly, maybe by leading consumers to particular products or political stances that they have a stake in.

This is simply the truth. Your preferences don't matter, and it's not a moral question. If you pay for content, you're more valuable to advertise to, not less. A lot of work is put into producing trash that you regret having read or watched, and was really intended to make you support Uganda's intervention in a Zambian election (or whatever.) If you "value" reading it, you've failed an intelligence test. Its value is elsewhere for the people to paid for it to be written.

What's recently shown itself to scale is small groups of people sponsoring journalists and outlets who put out tons of content for free. The motivation of those sponsors is usually to spread the points of view of the journalists they sponsor widely, because they believe them to be good.

There was never a pay model that supported things that people didn't feel passionate about or entertained by. Newspapers cost less than the paper they were written on. Television news was always a huge money loser that was invested in to raise the social status and respectability of the network. If you feel passionately about anything, you're far better off paying people to listen, to give you a chance, than to lock away content. Journalism as a luxury good can work, but only for Bloomberg terminals and Stratfor, when it is used to make other lucrative decisions by its buyers.

> orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them

This is simply sponsorships by governments and billionaires. Never ever been any significant shortage of that (the patron saint of this is King Alfonso X.*) All of those people have wide interests that can often be served by paying for media to be produced or distributed. It's where we got our first public libraries from.

For me, the fact that Substack and Patreon almost work is more important, and is something that wouldn't have been as easy without the benefits that the internet brings for the collaboration of distant strangers.

-----

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_X_of_Castile#Court_cul...

I run into occasional articles, often linked from here, for say economist or ft.com or new york times

I'm not signing up for a subscription for that journal, but paying a small amount for access to that one article is a no brainer. I don't subscribe to a newspaper either, but I'll happily buy one.

The New European did this a decade ago using "agate" (named after the smallest font you'd get in a newspaper), top up with a few quid, then pay for each article.

Sadly didn't catch on. TNE dropped it in 2019[0]. Agate still exists, having been renamed to "axate", but consumers aren't willing to pay with anything other than their time.

[0] https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/new-european-drops-micro-pay...

Sadly you are atypical and the vast majority are freeloaders, who even without ads or tracking will try and find another way not to pay.

Yeah, the fact that the only way that these products can survive in the competition of how I spend my time is a testament to how shitty they are.

I think the damage is there even if you don't see the ads. News outlets and organizations that used to be magazine publishers focus on lowest common denominator stories they know will get the highest engagement. That usually means sexy anger-bait.

Sure we had that in the print times, but we had a lot more "slow" content that you could sit with and contemplate over a day, week or month.

Even those of us who don't see ads see the structure that the ad-driven internet economy creates. Listicles, clickbait and AI-generated slop web pages, just trying to get more ad impressions. Sure, with an ad blocker I can see the low-quality content without an ad, but without the ad economy hopefully there'd be less incentive to create low-quality content to begin with.

Nary a month goes by that I don't bemoan the loss of BYTE and Dr Dobbs Journal. WIRED is still hanging on, but it's more of a site where tech warehouses in Shenzhen hawk there latest wares.

There was a time when Boing Boing was a decent little print magazine. And the web site went a decade before turning into... whatever the heck it is now.

And Reality Hackers and Mondo 2000 were "guaranteed unreadable," but they were on the bleeding edge of desktop publishing style and technology.

I'm old enough to remember typing BASIC games from COMPUTE! into my C64 and reading about the latest Star Trek film in Starlog.

I sing the praises of Omni, even though it was clear they were probably snorting a lot of cocaine in their offices.

I can't be the only one who remembers Computer Shopper, but I have to admit it was years before I realized they had a bit of content and were more than just an ad sheet for Micro Center.

PC World wasn't my jam, but I respected the role it played. UnixWorld and Info World were more my thing.

And I even read the stories and articles in Playboy in the 70s. Believe it or not, they had some amazing authors publish stories there.

Apple is worth nearly $4T. I think they can afford to take a principled stand here, especially considering the current mood about big tech.

And I don't think Google would lightly give up being the default search engine on the dominant mobile platform in the USA, and significantly more dominant among upper-income users.

The best browser is either Waterfox or Librewolf since they're Firefox-based but don't steal your data or claim copyright on it.

[dead]

I'd like to install uBlock Origin, when I try, Chrome warns it needs the permission to, "Read and change all your data on all websites". That seems excessive, to give that much power to one extension. I currently use no extensions to keep my security posture high.

Appreciate the clarification, I would clarify to say the origin story of Ad blockers are ads, and the underlying behaviours may not capture everything that fingerprinting may do where people don't advertise.

Ublock is great, but I am finding fingerprinting that gets past it and that's what I'm referring to.

alternatively, css can script quite a bit... :)

I use uBlock Origin with basically every filter list enabled on Brave with their default blocker enabled. I just confirmed that this does not prevent the script from loading and scanning extensions. The browser tools network tab on LinkedIn is absolutely frightening.

According to the EFF fingerprinting website, Firefox + uBlock Origin didn't really make my browser particularly unique.

But turning on privacy.resistfingerprinting in about:config (or was it fingerprintingProtection?) would break things randomly (like 3D maps on google for me. maybe it's related to canvas API stuff?) and made it hard to remember why things weren't working.

Not really sure how to strike a balance of broad convenience vs effectiveness these days. Every additional hoop is more attrition.

> Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser

I thought uBlock Origin was now dead in Chrome?

I remember a few hacks to keep it going but have now migrated to Firefox (or sometimes Edge…) to keep using it.

Go try it with fingerprint.com. Even post-sanitization, pi-hole, you name it, it will be surprising.