I’ve a friend who uses chrome on Windows and absolutely refuses to switch to Firefox for ublock. His kid is three and already knows what ads are.
I don’t get it.
It’s because most people do their browsing on their phone and so when they use a computer browser the internet just looks “normal”
Yeah those people are absolutely frying their children’s brains. I can’t imagine not protecting kids against constant notifications or ads.
I think the worst is when parents give their children a phone, but do a really shitty job vetting what apps they install. Like, why did you let your small child install 150 “free” “games” which show two ads every 75 seconds? Are you insane, stupid, evil or all three equally???
My god I am so triggered.
I guess Firefox is some sort of outcast in their eyes, or something like that.
That’s the thing: that’s still true, it’s just that Windows, Chrome and Facebook/IG are all malware, and people (of all generations) seem to fail to process that undeniable fact.
If you see that many ads you still have malware, we just call them apps now.
“This website has loads of apps”
I miss AIM :(
Just looks like Facebook to me.
Where’s WeatherBug?
BonziBuddy seems almost wholesome now.
Ya know, that Alexa was probably more helpful than today’s too. 😅
Before Alexa we had Jeeves
I miss Jeeves
How did you get a screenshot of my ex wife’s old Samsung netbook?
She called me up once, asked if I could have a look at it because it was slow as hell. Opened IE and I’m not kidding when I say that literally 1/3 of the tiny screen was toolbars.
I was looking into making a toolbar extension for fun, they look really whimsical. But all major browser removed the possibility :(
Fake and gay, we had and trusted chrome by then
Windows XP predates Chrome by 7 years.
Now the virus is the operating system.
I screamed when I saw a ad in the fucking Windows 10 start menu. Literally suggesting you download Minecraft. Like wtf Microsoft – this is a work computer.
Not sure what win11 has but I bet its Cortana or bing or whatever AI slop they use.
Hate to be pedantic but *MicroSlop
Erm, it’s actually MacroSlop
Macrohard Pilot
Facts.
I mean, I haven’t seen that shit on my system in years because I run redundant adblockers but… when viewing someone elses computer… it’s crazy.
I gave my grandma ublock origin
Going to my parents’ house is mildly maddening. They watch network and cable TV… The sheer number of ads is unbelievable to me.
Imagine paying money to watch ads.
Listen, I’ll admit I’ve never experienced a virus download automatically and rarely experienced a virus from a sketchy file.
But nearly all of gen Z remembers the free internet. Even up to 2016 it was still possible to view every major website without an account.
Every time I disable my ad block, or I see Internet Archive fail to save a webpage, or I’m forced to download the app for the privilege of scrolling down a thread; I get mad at what was taken.
We didn’t realize how brief the era of mostly reliable and always verifiable universal information access would be. Now we can’t trust any video because Sam Alton threw gasoline on the AI fire to make a failed Tiktok clone.
“Back in my day” if a platform or service would look at all your messages and sell the data it would be called active spyware and we treated that like the antichrist.
Software peaked around 2008. And that’s a looong time ago now.
Yes there has been a few improvements since then, but nothing that can really be said to compensate for the massive enshittification of performance, basic quality control, UI, UX, pricing as well as the anti-user practices that have become commonplace.
Sad I never got to experience it.
The 2008 financial crises rendered me homeless through my teenage years and my early adult years. I went from experiencing Windows XP/Mac OSX 10.4 straight to Windows 8.1 (I just missed Vista and was quickly introduced to Windows 10).
You missed Windows 7 because you were homeless? Bruh.
Hope you’re doing better. At least it’s the golden age of Linux right now!
Yeah, ditched Windows 10 as soon as I could. Most of the tools I use have Linux native versions.
Conversely, ads are now one of the primary vectors how malware is distributed, so you still have at least 3 viruses on your computer. 👍
Ads have always been a primary vector for malware and viruses.
adblocking is basically a condom for the modern internet.
Watching TV, ads ran every 15 minutes and lasted 3 minutes when I was a kid but then jumped up to 4-5 minutes. So, 4 minutes of ads and 11 minutes of show, then another 4 minutes of ads. Unskippable, awful ads for deodorant and slap chop
Oh discussion is only about computers. I remember the first popup ads and pop under ads and they put a fake x so when you click it instead of closing it takes you to install malware
Some countries have ads right before the end credits of a TV show.
how young do people think gen z are? older gen z people will turn 30 next year which is in roughly 3 months
i’m on the older end of gen z and can absolutely remember this.
windows xp was used for a very long time and this is a windows xp and before era thing
Just like how boomers always used to assume millennials are children, everyone keeps assuming gen z are children.
The absolute youngest gen z are 14, only 4 more years and there won’t be any child gen z left.
Though with how fucked gen alpha is appearing due to the systematic destruction of teaching basic reading skills plus brainrot plus AI; I have a feeling us gen z will go the way of gen x, being silently overshadowed by our neighboring gens over time. Also the nihilism, gen x and gen z share a lot of nihilism.
Eh, it might not be legally true but a lot of 22 year olds still seem like children to me.
I remmeber early years of Facebook and other similar era stuff. It was pretty alright as far as ads go.
I also find this weird. I feel like millennials have more in common with gen z than any other two of the “gens”.
The main problem is, that the “generational concept” is sociologically useless.
Advertising is the most prolific form of environmental pollution wrought by commerce.
It needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking, and every instance of it must be exhaustively scrutinised and required to be justified.
Thank you. People use power usage against cryptocurrency but their eyes glaze over when I ask how much of our resources are wasted serving constant ads to every screen in existence.
Completely agree. The worst are maybe the nonstop ads for various prescription medications. Those used to be illegal.
You mean the people who consume ads get extra work breaks throughout the day?
That could be a perverse incentive to have businesses curtail their excretions.
I don’t think you lot know how old gen Z are, older gen Z are turning 30 next year
I just want you to ask yourself, does putting that information out in the world make anyone’s day better. Cmon friend, no one wants to see that.
It’s roughly the right ballpark. Yes some of the oldest gen Zs dealt with that era in their childhoods, but by the time they were not depending on their parents to curate their computer, most of them weren’t dealing with that reality anymore.
You’re off by 3 yearsmillenials are described as people who remember the turn of the millennium, so anyone born after 1996 doesn’t count
I need to stop doing math before coffee
It’s hard for me to say this but I actually miss older (NT based) Windows versions. They kind of worked, had a mostly consistent UI / UX and could even be customized a little bit.
Yesterday I had the Editor (the thing that used to me notepad) show me an account login notification, next to some weird copilot buttons that were not there the last time I used it. Best of all, the notification couldn’t be confirmed due to a bug and stayed open the whole time and covered about 1/8 of the screen…
On my super locked down work laptop windows does weird screen size stuff with windows shrinking or getting larger, especially when they’re moved between screens that have different scaling, sometimes task bar icons disappear or begin to flicker.
WTF?!
We used to have a Windows NT pc. It had 64MB of RAM iirc. I think we had it in a dual boot with windows 98 at one point? It was always crashing. There was a weird issue where if the pc crashed when it was shutting down, your profile got wiped. So every time we shut the pc down, we’d be like, “Please don’t crash, please don’t crash.”
At first they all blamed me for the wiped profiles, because I was the only one it didn’t happen to. Then they realised it was the shut down crash.
Still the case. Except now the malware is from the OS/hardware vendor.
