...are literally the worst people in the world. You can't go anywhere anymore without unsolicited crap being heaped upon you, and it's gone from being a minor annoyance, to a serious inconvenience, to downright malicious.

I remember the early days of the internet when the worst things you had to deal with were banner ads and blink tags. Then came the onset of popover windows, which were resolved with popup blockers (although these generated uncountable calls to tech support from users who couldn't figure out why legitimate content wasn't working). These days, there is so much embedded crap on every page that you can't hardly get anything to load, and when you do, you have to visually sift through all the garbage to find what you're lookoing for. To make matters worse, a lot of that embedded content contains malware. This can be readily combatted by browser extension like adblock plus (greatest web tool ever, IMO), but these days many content providers are coding to detect this, and restricting acess to their pages unlesss you whitelist them, or turn adblock off.

Even worse than these are the telemarketers. I get 2-3 calls a day on my cell. I normally don't answer if I don't recognize the number, but that's not always possible when you're expecting a call. It annoys the crap out of me at the best times, but I work nights, so I sleep until about noon or 1:00pm. There's nothing like forgetting to turn your ringer off and getting woken up in the middle of your limited sleep time by some a-hole peddling garbage that you don't want, and then not being able to get back to sleep. To make matters worse, almost all of them are robocalls these days, so you don't even get the pleasure of telling them to go self-fornicate.

If I want what you're selling, I'll contact you, not the other way around. When I do contact you, I expect you to be knowledgeable about what you are selling, and I appreciate well-informed recommendations when solicited. But waste my time (or worse, interrupt my life) with unsolicited, uninformed bullcrap, and I will add you to my list of folks I hope die of septic herpes infections.

Para, I can't begin to say how much I appreciate you keeping all that crap off of this page. I know you put in significant personal time and money to maintain things the way you do, and it has got to be tempting to recoup some of that through advertising revenue. The fact that you don't is one of the reasons this is a great place to spend time on the internet, so thanks for all that you do.

Don't get me started on advertising. It's very high a my Cut The Crap list.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Eponym,

That is a very well crafted rant, and I agree completely. My phone number starts with 585, and I swear the spoofers have called me from every other 585 number available. This means my number is being used to call every other number as well, which leads to weird "what do you want" text messages from people I've never interacted with.

Advertisers, for the most part, are the reason why you don't have as much money as you could have. They are adept at getting you to give up money for something you would have never known you couldn't live without except for them.