Im old. I know this.  I’ve been on the internet a long time.  I used to access usenet and irc II and email with PINE via a unix shell account.  I owned a 1200 baud modem.  My first “real” computer was an XT.   I pre-date the World Wide Web.  I suffered through AOL hometown and geocities (I did not have sites there; I was a snob ;)) and an epidemic of Comic Sans. Then came frontpage and even more heinous crimes against our eyes and ears.  When the first real blogging sites came along, they were mostly about people sharing opinions, providing information, connecting with others out there.  Open up a site and there it was.  The worst thing you’d get loading a page was some stupid music player. (I hate hate hated those sites.  No matter how much I enjoyed the content, if they put on a music player, off my visit list it went.)

I long for the days where the only annoyance and interference to page loading was a damn music player.  People just pile their pages with ads now.  Everyone apparently wants to generate income with thier sites.  This is not subtle.  Every Tom, dick, and harry seems to think thier opinions, recipes, advice, and what not is worth ads on both sides, in the middle of their content, covering the page and making you scroll, pop ups, multiple widgets directing you to all thier social media sites.  Links to Amazon stores, affiliate links, sales of digital content, pop ups to subscribe to thier email lists, banner ads that cover bits of the site, no matter how I resize the screen.  Selling site memberships.  Asking for by the video donations.  And the more we ignore them and because blind to them, when these digital billboards aren’t enough to get our attention, they ramp it up again.

This (I blurred, im not trying to shame anyone specific) isn’t even near a worst offender, I mean gosh, why isn’t there a cpc banner down both sides?!? —

I’d already dismissed a hovering redundant social media link bar and a pop up to subscribe.  As you scroll down, there are ads every 3-4 lines.  It takes for freaking ever to load these pages.  It used to be we were grateful to have an audience, and you could make connections, actually have conversations via comments and develop friendships.

Now it’s all about duping us and selling to us and at the very least, making us pay with our time just to pull up a damn site.