Very much Lies of P.

I’ve been on the web since my college installed Mosaic on their HP-UX machines. I wanna say summer of '94. Thus, I can honestly say that I’ve seen it before the first commercial banner ad was sold later that year. I actually thought ad were worse in the early 2000’s than they are now. Flash should never have been used for that, for example. My main problem with ads these days is that there are sites where the signal/noise ratio is just ridiculously bad. In those cases, I vote with my feet and stay away.

You keep using that word phrase, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Well, now you have. I also tailgate or pass annoyingly slowly to be able to read bumper stickers.

You use a service but deny it the remuneration it expects. If that does not meet your definition of theft, do you also think turnstile jumping is fair play?

It would be boot licking if Big Advertising or Big Content actually cared about my opinion. I have no illusion that they do.

Ever hear of "Can’t read half a sentence without

I have (no kidding) taken u-turns to see an interesting billboard. Anyway, the analogy is flawed: You still see the billboard, even if you don’t read all of it - just like I see the ad, but may not really read it.

I produce no content, ad supported or otherwise. I’ve been on the WWW pretty much since day 1, so I know that ads have gotten worse. Still, if I decide to use a site, I use it according to how the owners want it to be used, or not at all. To me, that’s respect, I fully understand that I am in the minority - which is why I didn’t post this in the PopularOpinions sublemmy.

Someone gets it :) You may downvote me.

Definitely up :)

I was working with a different definition of ‘look at’. When reading a magazine (according to my definition), you will look at the ad, because you never know whether a given page will contain an ad or editorial content. Your eyes will fall upon the ad, and then you move on, likely not really taking it in unless it manages to catch your eye. Same with me and web ads. Most will barely register, as the majority is really not that interesting - but sometimes, I will take a closer look, and very occasionally even click on one.

Little bit of column A, little bit of column B. There are sites I appreciate which don’t allow you to pay to disable ads - so I sometimes take a look at one or two.There are others where the ads get annoying, so I stay away, or leave when I’ve had enough of 35 animations slowing down my web browser.

I have yet to see an ad that managed compromise the safety of my computer (knocks on wood). I am aware that this has happened, but I would be really cross with BitDefender if it happened to me.

I have been using it for a few months, and it is working well. By default, you get daily snapshots, with a retention of 7 days; I believe you can buy more.

rsync.net is no-frills remote storage that gets out of the way of whatever you want to do. In my case, this is rsync over ssh, but they also support borg.

I am clearly not hip to popular culture.

Breezewood, PA, I believe.

Yep. Pessimistic about anything still being useful at this point, but hoping I am wrong.