I Miss the Old Internet

Today I was online, and I saw a reference to an article about a better way to use old unused binders (notebooks). OK, that made sense, as I have a few of those. So I clicked on the link, and I was sent to a page, not with information about binders, but with an entire slideshow about “life hacks.” Not only did I not care about a slideshow of “life hacks,” if I had gone through with it, I would have had to click through probably 20 pages of things I didn’t care about, each page taking forever to load, just to get to the one thing I wanted. But I didn’t go through with it, because it loaded so slowly, I got tired of waiting for it to load, so I gave up and closed the tab. And why? Because of the ads… hundreds of them. Which of course is why almost nothing on the internet is given in a list; instead, information is given one page at a time, each one loading agonizingly slowly, so I can be bombarded with ads.

Or how about this one? I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You see a news article you want to read. So you click on it. The article shows up for about 1 second, then the screen is covered with some ad for the news source, and if you’re patient, you can click on through in 5...4...3...2...1. Finally you get to the page, and you start reading. But as you’re reading, all of a sudden the text moves down, out of view, while an ad loads, usually a video. And then the ad starts playing. You search for your text, and when you find it and try to start reading again, the video is still playing. Sometimes you can mute the video, sometimes you can’t. When the video is done, it disappears, and your text jumps back up, and you lose your place all over again. Or sometimes two videos start playing at the same time, fighting each other. So, many times, if you’re like me, you give up and just close the page.

You know, it wasn’t always like this. “Back in the day” it was possible to actually use the internet. Directly. Without being bombarded with ads. Now don’t get me wrong. I understand the need for ads. It costs money for an organization to sponsor a web page, and that money has to come from somewhere. And I know that America, being the land of the free, allows and encourages capitalism and all that goes with it, such as incredible numbers of ads. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. But I get it. Still, sometimes I really think it has just run amok. Yes, I can use adblockers, but those don’t always work particularly well either.

When I took my first internet design course, back in the mid 90’s, one of the cardinal rules was to never, never, never embed video or audio that would start playing by itself. It was considered too rude. Well, today’s internet doesn’t care about rude. And while I’m talking about the 90’s, “back in the day,” my internet speed was less than 10% as fast as it is today, but since 90% of the stuff that comes across is advertisements, it doesn’t really seem any faster. I just pay Time Warner more.

I don’t know the answer. But I do think that if the companies cared, they could make the ads just as effective but less intrusive. My facebook feed has ads, and while I don’t like them, they don’t normally ruin the experience. Google’s products all have ads ( which I why they’re free) but somehow the ads don’t get in the way. Amazon’s site is nothing but ads, yet it still works well. But companies, for the most part, don’t care. As long as they make their bucks.

Unfortunately, I know it’s not ever going to get any better. So this is probably just a “grayshift” old-guy rant about “the good old days.” Maybe it is. Still, I’m not normally one for nostalgia. I’m not one of those who think everything was better way back when.

But some things were.