I’ve always hated that. I feel like I’m seeing it less and less on newer vehicles, though, so maybe manufacturers are also realizing that it’s stupid as hell.

Or maybe it’s just not worth the cost to have two different but mostly identical versions of a very expensive and highly integrated modern taillight housing for different markets.

It wasn’t just the norm for websites, it was the norm for every single kind of established platform that offered “free” content; see TV, radio, and even our goddamn public roadways.

Apple did not create an ad platform for the iPhone when it was introduced. The iAd platform was introduced in 2010 with the iPhone 4 as “mobile ads done right” (well after Google’s acquisition of AdMob in 2009, and certainly after the iPhone launch in 2007). It was subsequently shut down in 2016.

Developers never needed to “hack” ways to put ads in mobile apps. Mobile ad platforms already existed at the time, and developers were happy to use them extensively once they realized that smartphones were becoming a truly mass-market product (just like TV advertising, imagine that).

“I blame RCA for television ads. If they hadn’t made the first mass-market television set, we wouldn’t have TV ads interrupting my morning cartoons!”

that’s how you sound rn

Well, it was the norm for websites, why would anyone expect it to not transfer over to every other conceivable platform like it has today? The fact that Apple made the first device that allowed people to put adware on a device in your pocket is pure happenstance, and I’m not even sure how true that is given the existence of Blackberry and early Windows Mobile devices.

That said, have you ever heard of WildTangent? Because they’ve been around for a loooong time, and were really attractive to poor and stupid kids like me that really started using the internet circa 2005 and wanted to play computer games.

Again, what are you basing that on? Many websites, games, etc. that had traditionally only been accessible on a desktop/laptop were already primarily using ads for monetization at that point (I should know, I was using a lot of them). Blaming Apple for simply making the first handheld devices capable of running similar software makes absolutely zero sense.

How so? I went from Android to iPhone and one of the biggest reasons I kept it was the lack of consumer-hostile intrusive bullshit that seems to be everywhere on Google and Samsung products.

I do worry about how the community will handle when that eventually becomes a problem, or how the community might keep it from becoming a problem in the first place. Low-quality posts are inevitable with a sufficiently large user base.