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Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

old.sage.moe

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Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#31

Post by margalabargala »

blackhaz wrote: post #18
sigg3 wrote: post #4

> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…

Just recently my wife came back home telling me about some tablet computer she has never ever seen before. I think she has googled for it on her phone. What do you know - my Facebook showed a few ads of that device - on that day. I've never heard about it before. I never searched for it and I never searched for a tablet even - I don't use them. Is this now the new normality - palantiring through databases? Is it OK f…

There is a much less malicious explanation here.

If that tablet company had very recently begun an internet marketing campaign, across multiple ad networks, target approximately your demographic, then it's wholly reasonable that you and your wife would independently see ads for it.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#32

Post by drdaeman »

plagiarist wrote: post #26
nmilo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always read comments like this and just assume it's confirmation bias on two levels: 1. Out of the 1000s of ads you see every day, at least one of them might coincidentally relate to something you talked about. You don't notice all the ads that are wildly irrelevant. 2. Even if you personally didn't have a hyper-relevant ad experience, out of the 1000s of HN readers that might comment a reply, one of them surely…

IDK, I think it is plausible they might be joining by IP or deeper connections. I've seen some ads that aren't relevant to me but are for something my partner was looking at on a different device.

It's probably simpler than this - advertiser just runs a campaign with some broad criteria (like income estimate based on IP-geolocated ZIP code) that both people in the same household fit. No surprise the same ad that one person had seen (and remembered) will be eventually shown to the other.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#33

Post by AlbertCory »

Kind of like radio (hello, ClearChannel) or TV.

There are still a few holdouts from corporatism. On radio, there's KKUP (online at https://kkup.org/) which has no ads and does all kinds of weird shit.

We need the equivalent of the 88 MHz - 92 MHz band on FM that's reserved for non-profit stations, and you know that in a strange city you can dial around and find something there. Equivalent things do exist on the Web, but it needs to be easier to find them.

Yes, you do get religious stations and NPR, but there are also college radio stations and oddballs like KKUP.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#34

Post by jknoepfler »

As someone who came of age in the era the OC waxes nostalgic about, I can't find a lot to recommend about this post, nor do I think it's accurate. From where I sit, the internet today is richer, more diverse, and more accessible than it was in the 90's, the 00's, or the 10's.

Consider that one of the top links on HN is the OpenMW project. What a great project. If I want to go deep on that, there's a forum with a wiki, a discord and an IRC and a public gitlab.

I don't want to go deep on that. But there are literally hundreds of thousands of communities into which I could dive deep, some of which I do. I've been involved in home hydroponics groups, poker forums, online chess study groups, an Everquest emulation community, community-run RTS and fighting game tournaments.

I've dug into sites hosting side-by-side translations of the Tao Te Ching, Soto Zen communities, forums for recovering from addiction.

I've found music and books and events that I never otherwise would have found.

I've learned to read rudimentary Japanese using web apps. I've vastly improved my classical guitar form using YouTube channels.

... and on and on and on. I'm on this wonderful internet every day for much of my day, co-creating communities with other people.

There are deep, rich, giving communities everywhere on the internet today, not gated behind walled gardens. I wouldn't describe these as "shit" (or the homophobic slur the author seems think constitutes peak internet diction).

I'm glad these communities also existed in the 90's. Personally I grew up into things like the Quake 2 modding community and MUDs. Great stuff. I'm glad the internet has continued to grow and thrive and has evolved into what it is today.

edit: correction, by "more accessible" I meant "discoverable." I genuinely don't know whether or not the internet is more or less supportive of visually impaired users, for example (I can imagine it being far worse).

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#35

Post by TeMPOraL »

rumey wrote: post #13
sigg3 wrote: post #4

> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…

> Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. What? Do you remember webrings? How absolutely riddled with shit-tier spam they were? Geocities drove those.

IIRC, webrings tended to be stuck at the bottom of the page. They didn't pop up or over the content.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#36

Post by adamrezich »

nmilo wrote: post #22
blackhaz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just recently my wife came back home telling me about some tablet computer she has never ever seen before. I think she has googled for it on her phone. What do you know - my Facebook showed a few ads of that device - on that day. I've never heard about it before. I never searched for it and I never searched for a tablet even - I don't use them. Is this now the new normality - palantiring through databases? Is it OK f…

I've always read comments like this and just assume it's confirmation bias on two levels: 1. Out of the 1000s of ads you see every day, at least one of them might coincidentally relate to something you talked about. You don't notice all the ads that are wildly irrelevant. 2. Even if you personally didn't have a hyper-relevant ad experience, out of the 1000s of HN readers that might comment a reply, one of them surely…

years ago I moved back to my hometown in South Dakota after a few years in Washington. my mom asked me to pick up some groceries for her and gave me her credit card to pay for it. I bought the groceries and, additionally, the first Red Bull I'd had in at least a year, using her credit card. within an hour, I got a notification from that one Google app thing where you answer survey questions for Play Store credit (not sure if it still exists), asking what my opinion of Red Bull was.

to reiterate:

- I had just moved halfway across the country

- this was the first Red Bull I had purchased in at least a year

- I made the purchase using a credit card other than my own, which was in no way connected to any bank account that was connected to me

- there should have been nothing connecting me to my purchase

I uninstalled the app immediately after that. sure, maybe it was some strange coincidence, but there's been far too many strange coincidences like that to make me anywhere near comfortable with this shit.

another time, years ago, I was talking to someone about how I needed to get a new pair of cheap earbuds, and within a couple hours an Amazon ad for this specific thing appeared in my Twitter timeline.

additionally, I just got married a couple weeks ago, and my wife and I immediately started seeing ads for sexual stamina tablets in our social media feeds—thanks, evil advertising apparatus, I thought I was doing okay :/

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#37

Post by tenebrisalietum »

bamfly wrote: post #30

'07 was the height of Google's cat-and-mouse game with webspammers. It'd degrade to near-uselessness for a month or two, suddenly get a ton better, repeat. This went on though the whole of the middle years of the '00s. '08 or '09 is when they seemed to surrender that fight, and just give up on indexing the entire Web. Major sites got a huge boost, and a great deal of the Web seemed to just drop off the index entirely…

Coincides with the iPhone, then the beginning of Android, and the rise of mobile overtaking desktop.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#38

Post by bamfly »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #37
bamfly wrote: post #30

'07 was the height of Google's cat-and-mouse game with webspammers. It'd degrade to near-uselessness for a month or two, suddenly get a ton better, repeat. This went on though the whole of the middle years of the '00s. '08 or '09 is when they seemed to surrender that fight, and just give up on indexing the entire Web. Major sites got a huge boost, and a great deal of the Web seemed to just drop off the index entirely…

Coincides with the iPhone, then the beginning of Android, and the rise of mobile overtaking desktop.

Also IIRC right around the same time they totally abandoned "don't be evil" and started doing ads inline with search results, basing much of their future revenue on tricking unwary users.

[EDIT] They might also have switched from their text-only ads to being a more ordinary, crappy web advertiser not long after, which started to partially align their interests with webspammers, which may explain why they didn't mind yielding the whole middle (if that makes sense) of the search-result space to them.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#39

Post by majormajor »

blackhaz wrote: post #18
sigg3 wrote: post #4

> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…

Just recently my wife came back home telling me about some tablet computer she has never ever seen before. I think she has googled for it on her phone. What do you know - my Facebook showed a few ads of that device - on that day. I've never heard about it before. I never searched for it and I never searched for a tablet even - I don't use them. Is this now the new normality - palantiring through databases? Is it OK f…

You and your wife's phones are almost certainly tied together in multiple databases that adtech companies (especially the quieter tiers below Google/FB themselves) maintain and sell. And then you get re-targeted for ads you or her see, or ads based on things you or her see (retargeting was a really big thing back when I was in the industry, since behavioral prediction wasn't quite living up to the hype - so just re-show stuff you already think is relevant! I'm sure you've seen stuff like "here's thirty other lightbulbs" after you buy one lightbulb on Amazon in the past decade.)

Here's how it worked ~12 years ago: At some point you almost certainly have used the same home internet connection. A cookie associated with some account(s) of hers gets associated with that IP. Same for some account(s) of yours. Find IPs that over small time frames only have a handful of distinct users to filter out coffeeshops and such. Bam, likely family or roommate connection. Some sticky "supercookie" stuff or similar gets set so this can be both resurrected even when cookies expire (through like Etag cache headers or whatever) and then there's a lot of behind-the-scenes ad network offline-cookie-syncing.

One of the companies in that web partners offers ads on FB, another runs ads on Google, she searches and click something on your wife's phone (at this point regardless of network), it gets tied to you too.

It could be more innocuous but tracking same-household, cross-device for retargeting... all that is really old hat at this point.

I intentionally moved my career pretty far from ad-tech in the past decade, but from what I've heard in adjacent convos and such is that the newer developments include some of the newer platforms like smart TVs into all that old cross-device fun, too. Both as data source and ad display destination. A lot of TVs phone home about what you watch, even - like https://clinch.co/clinch-partners-with-samsung-ads/ There's a million ad-tech companies out there, they aren't all just writing real-time-bidding algorithms for traditional display ads.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#40

Post by gumballindie »

plagiarist wrote: post #23
gumballindie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results No but altavista and metacrawler did. Then there came google, heavily subsidised by vc money. Deep pockets. Then that turned out to be unsustainable and so they began controlling search results and showing excessive ads. If we want an ad free internet we need to pay for services or have government provided alternatives. There’s no in between i am a…

If you paid for that it would be less than a decade before that company was also doing the same bullshit and also collecting a subscription. Look at what is happening to streaming. "Oh, $10/mo for basically all the content, that's a no-brainer." Now it's returning to the cable television experience with ads every 10 minutes.

Very true. And when that happens i will gladly switch.
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