#could've kept giffing them for so many more hours tbh

[appropriatelystupid]

[theprismaticvoid]

I'm in a rambling mood tonight and I just kinda wanna talk about something meaningless. A friend put these tags on a post she retweeted tonight and it just kinda got me thinking (not in a bad way, not mad at you or throwing shade Jade <3)

I feel like this isn't an uncommon sentiment tbh. I don't think anyone would have an issue with advertisements on the internet if they were small, unintrusive banner ads. If a website had a little banner for coca-cola or the latest blockbuster movie, it wouldn't really matter to me or many other people; we basically have the same thing going on with billboards along roads and nobody really complains about those.

And it got me thinking about the reason why we're in this advertising-hell we are now, the constant war between sites trying to either guilt-trip you or lock you out entirely if you use adblock, adblockers trying to get around their detection methods, and users spreading methods to get around the guilt-tripping/lockouts of sites

I think it's easy to just say that companies got greedy and kept demanding more intrusive ads, stepping it up from simple banner images to flashing animated banners to entire videos that they want autoplayed with volume on whenever you open a page, to the point where adblock became necessary to have a good viewing experience, meaning the less extreme ads weren't profitable anymore because less people were seeing them.

I think that's definitely a big part of it, but I don't think it's the whole explanation

And then I suddenly remembered, flash player. Back in the late 2000s/early 2010s, it was everywhere. Nowadays I think most people just remember it for games and video players, but it really was for EVERYTHING at the time - including ads.

That was before HTML5, before it was as easy to make a site dynamic with just stock Javascript - if you wanted to do anything more complicated than images and links, you needed something like Flash Player to do it (that's a bit of an exaggeration, but still, you get my point).

So, advertisements wanted to make things more dynamic than just a banner GIF - more complex animations, reacting when you put your mouse over them, multiple buttons for different sites, etc., and so they were flash applets.

And the important thing about Flash Player is that it was horrible for performance. Flash was a resource hog even with well-programmed stuff, and a LOT of ads at the time were poorly programmed, super inefficient for how simple they were.

I had an absolutely terrible laptop back in 2014/2015, just a very slow clunker that could barely handle browsing the web most of the time, and I remember opening Task Manager and killing Flash Player around every half-hour or so because the advertisements on sites like TVTropes or Wikia were both so abundant and so poorly-programmed that Flash would be taking up like 75% of what little RAM my PC had at the time. A lot of the reasons people recommended installing adblockers was because of the massive performance increase you'd get from not having all of those resource-hogging applets active at once.

So it makes me wonder, would we still be in this ad hellscape we are now if Flash Player hadn't existed, or at least been better programmed? If every flashing banner at the time hadn't been its own independent program running on a slow virtual machine for very little benefit?

I mean, the answer is probably yes, we still would've gotten companies who got too greedy and tried to force more and more intrusive ads on us constantly - but I can't help but wonder how different things could've been if it weren't for all those years of your tabs instantly coming to a screeching halt just because an advertisement wanted to have two links at once and the developers decided the best way to do that would be to make the entire thing a Flash applet.

TL;DR: I'm holding Adobe responsible for every single time I see one of those "Hey, please disable your adblock. We neeeeeeeeeed to show you the most obnoxious advertisements on planet Earth or else our multi-billion dollar company won't be able to keep the lights on :(" messages from a megacorp that could definitely stand to cut corners in other ways instead of trying to guilt-trip people into having a worse experience for their own benefit.