this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Microblog Memes
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The internet was not a mistake! The modern internet was...
Twitter and Facebook were the mistakes.
It was ads. All the social media algorithms do what they do to maximize ad engagement because that’s their primary source of income.
Ads were there from the beginning of the... broad public internet.
I remember having to load them up over a 56k modem, and then shortly thereafter learning how to block javascript... in the mid/late 90s.
But yes, roughly by about 2010 - 12, the entire internet had just become... SEO, AdServing engines, everything is an ad platform on the surface, but actually highly, highly specific and refined ways of data profiling people for all kinds of purposes, selling that data to anyone.
I don't know exactly where you could or should draw the line on ... at what point it tipped from reasonable to horrific.
I feel like the original Google AdWords, where they were only text based ads in their own boxes separate from the page content and clearly labeled as ads, weren't too egregious.
But there were already obnoxious ads around by then.