15 May 2026 Search

Then:

“I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.” — Eugene V. Debs

Now:

“[site name redacted] is unusable without an ad blocker.” — employee of a web advertising company, overheard at [tech event redacted]

The World Wide Web of today is almost two platforms. Back when “Wintel” (that was Microsoft Windows on Intel x86, kids) dominated the market, a Microsoft Excel developer who brought home a copy of Microsoft Excel was getting the same experience as an ordinary MicroWarehouse shopper. People certainly had better and worse PCs, but there was no productive release of Excel for the elite and shitty Excel for the regular customers.

The web, though, is a two-class environment: a tolerable business class version for those with the right tools, and a mess for everyone else. The upper class is harder to define, and to get into, than it looks. About half the people say they have some kind of ad blocker, but in practice the fraction of web traffic that’s affected at all is below that, and the fraction that has full protection including search and YouTube advertising is a lot less. Many of the “ad blockers” that are easiest to find using search engines and browser extension directories provide only partial protection, or are outright adware or worse. Reasonable people disagree on how to measure ad blocking, and it has only gotten harder to measure as the proportion of “AI” scraper bots goes up. A lot of those look realistic, and bots differ in their ad blocking behavior. Some want to load the ads for adfraud, while others just grab the content they need.

But I do have some better numbers that I think are starting to show how we are now on a two-class web. Hope to be able to share when FIXME [add site info and link] puts up a page about some user research. The privileged class here doesn’t necessarily match up with the 10% of the people who buy 50% of the stuff in the US economy as a whole, but there’s some overlap.

The inconvenient situation here is that some kind of element hiding and/or other page finagling has gotten to be a necessity. About as much as an email spam filter. Obviously you need to block certain ads, especially Google Search (checks RSS reader for a fresh search ad scam story…here: Search Ads as a Vector for Travel Scams) and you need to block the script that trains Meta’s AI to scam you, but browsers have other reasons to modify the page, too. Den Odell points out that Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently—when a site only tests on Google Chrome, the other browsers have to work around it.

Of course, not all the stuff that’s bad about the web is fixable with tools alone. Pulitzer-winning newsrooms are quietly publishing mountains of gambling slop, and in order to keep a productive experience with search you need to fix it which includes some habit changes as well. If we’re lucky we can get the web to the level of protection that email has—most email users are reasonably well protected, for historical reasons. Email spam filters fortunately squeaked through back before the big enshittification trend. If spam filtering were newly invented today, the same companies that form the web’s attribution cartel would be standardizing on an approach that lets their own spam through.

Some good news. It has been about a week since I put up next steps on tinyMyTerms, in which I added a hella annoying Accept Terms of Service dialog to this site—but made it invisible to anyone with a decent element-hiding ad blocker configuration. And zero complaints so far. Element-hiding ad blockers working, I’m (sniff) so proud of all of you.

We still need an answer to the problem of the two-class web. And making the web more fair by ending the maltreatment of the “underclass” is going to work better than the alternative. I think it’s going to take some humility, recognizing folk privacy practices and bottom-up applied behavioral economics, and working with them. Sometimes just hide the annoying thing is the productive starting point, then you can do the necessary paperwork on top of that. This doesn’t mean abandoning personalized advertising for those who want it—Rewarded Interest is a thing, and works. Eugene Debs again: I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out.