Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007) (opens in new tab)

IIRC, webrings tended to be stuck at the bottom of the page. They didn't pop up or over the content.

Weird. I remember them being groups of sites sharing similar subject matter that would all link to each other, so when you found one, you found them all. You may have experienced that differently.

You and your wife's phones are almost certainly tied together in multiple databases that adtech companies (especially the quieter tiers below Google/FB themselves) maintain and sell. And then you get re-targeted for ads you or her see, or ads based on things you or her see (retargeting was a really big thing back when I was in the industry, since behavioral prediction wasn't quite living up to the hype - so just re-show stuff you already think is relevant! I'm sure you've seen stuff like "here's thirty other lightbulbs" after you buy one lightbulb on Amazon in the past decade.)

Here's how it worked ~12 years ago: At some point you almost certainly have used the same home internet connection. A cookie associated with some account(s) of hers gets associated with that IP. Same for some account(s) of yours. Find IPs that over small time frames only have a handful of distinct users to filter out coffeeshops and such. Bam, likely family or roommate connection. Some sticky "supercookie" stuff or similar gets set so this can be both resurrected even when cookies expire (through like Etag cache headers or whatever) and then there's a lot of behind-the-scenes ad network offline-cookie-syncing.

One of the companies in that web partners offers ads on FB, another runs ads on Google, she searches and click something on your wife's phone (at this point regardless of network), it gets tied to you too.

It could be more innocuous but tracking same-household, cross-device for retargeting... all that is really old hat at this point.

I intentionally moved my career pretty far from ad-tech in the past decade, but from what I've heard in adjacent convos and such is that the newer developments include some of the newer platforms like smart TVs into all that old cross-device fun, too. Both as data source and ad display destination. A lot of TVs phone home about what you watch, even - like https://clinch.co/clinch-partners-with-samsung-ads/ There's a million ad-tech companies out there, they aren't all just writing real-time-bidding algorithms for traditional display ads.

There is a much less malicious explanation here.

If that tablet company had very recently begun an internet marketing campaign, across multiple ad networks, target approximately your demographic, then it's wholly reasonable that you and your wife would independently see ads for it.

I've always read comments like this and just assume it's confirmation bias on two levels:

1. Out of the 1000s of ads you see every day, at least one of them might coincidentally relate to something you talked about. You don't notice all the ads that are wildly irrelevant.

2. Even if you personally didn't have a hyper-relevant ad experience, out of the 1000s of HN readers that might comment a reply, one of them surely did. You just might be the one lucky guy that got your hyper-relevant ad of the day.

How about the pop-under ads that sat back there behind your browser just waiting to shock you with something stupid when you closed your browser window. Good times.

Yes, and I miss them every day.

The ads were sleazy and brazen and right in your face trying to dragnet as many people as possible into buying something 99.999% had no interest in. Not like now, where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies regardless of the steps you take as an individual to convince yourself you have privacy (like VPN/Private Relay/Incognito/Tor).

But people didn't rely on search, as much, back then. I belonged to a few forums, and I'd visit one or two portals, almost every day as my starting point on the Web, and from there people would be recommending things, and I'd follow that. All through the 90s and into the early 00s, it was sites such as Everything and Digg and Slashdot that drove all traffic. Search-as-in-Altavista was ineffective, so people didn't rely on it. We all relied on certain forums, and those drove traffic in a more organic way. Of stuff we have nowadays, Reddit almost recreates that old world, but Reddit now operates in a context where online traffic has concentrated into 2 sites: Google and Facebook. There is no way to escape the current context, that traffic is now massively concentrated. There was a certain freedom to the 90s, in that no site could reliably capture even 1% of the Web traffic, a situation that we idealistically thought would last forever.

If you paid for that it would be less than a decade before that company was also doing the same bullshit and also collecting a subscription. Look at what is happening to streaming. "Oh, $10/mo for basically all the content, that's a no-brainer." Now it's returning to the cable television experience with ads every 10 minutes.

Considering that the old quote is Cicero criticizing pre-dictator Julius Caesar for the way he wore his toga (and not, you know, all the things that Sulla might've put him on the Proscription Lists for), I'd argue its more that old people consistently criticize the wrong thing about young people, focusing on the superficial, rather than the substantive.

EDIT because I forgot to add:

This missing the mark is rarely because there's something intrinsic about old people and other people's haircuts. Its more that we are generally raised to respect (as authorities) our elders, and sort of subconsciously expect that people younger than us will in turn grant us the same respect. So the criticism basically comes down "they're not giving me what's due to me".

Meanwhile, if the criticism leveled against Caesar came down to "he's waaaaay too ambitious, and has already shown a propensity for ignoring social mores to get what he wants", then Cicero's criticism might feel more prescient, and less like an old man shouting at a cloud.

All of that said, its actually really hard in the moment to identify what will be dangerous to society before it comes up. So maybe Cicero had a feeling in his gut, but all he could come up with is "he's kind of sloppy with his toga"

worth noting that the Roman and Greek empires did, in fact, fall

> Still no browser extension that finds the original and replaces all rehosts with it.

You'd think that'd be a job for search engines, but they don't seem to care about the product.

Also IIRC right around the same time they totally abandoned "don't be evil" and started doing ads inline with search results, basing much of their future revenue on tricking unwary users.

[EDIT] They might also have switched from their text-only ads to being a more ordinary, crappy web advertiser not long after, which started to partially align their interests with webspammers, which may explain why they didn't mind yielding the whole middle (if that makes sense) of the search-result space to them.

/pol/ ????????

oh honey no

But to my knowledge, no one has ever been able to triforce on HN. It's like a perpetual summer.