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.
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]
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.
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.