1999
Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible
(stackdiary.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Gonna have to pick one
Absolutely untrue. People run websites and pay for their servers themselves. People inherently want to post stuff on the internet and many websites don't have ads at all. Think of pretty much every old blog that used to exist, or every portfolio page for an artist. I will simply stop using Google's internet and that will be that. I pretty much already have to be honest, Google results are absolute dog shit.
Cool man, do you. Totally respect that.
I do remember old school GeoShitties and blogs tho. Livejournal most assuredly had ads: http://bradfitz.com/misc/bct/#valueclick
I loved Geocities. I personally had like five different pages on it, including one that acted like a virtual tour of a video game world I used to play where you would navigate through map screens and could "talk" to characters. My friends and I would also have a communal page, which worked like our own mini-reddit where we would post cool shit, and then webring to our individual sites. I also currently have an ad-free website, which I operate and create all the content for myself.
Geocities was dope AF man!
TikTok is the closest thing we have to a mainstream recreation of those days, if you curate your feed properly. It was truly the Silver Age of the internet