I'm just confused about how the average person is supposed to navigate the internet. Is the assumption now that everybody knows about ad blocking plugins?
I think they're just used to it, or genuinely don't care that much. To them, reading an article through the four-line letterbox between the autoplaying video ad and the "you might also like..." box is just what the internet is.
The average person is locked into multiple walled gardens where ad blocking doesn't work, and the "feed" is curated specifically for maximum advertising exposure and lowered attention span.
I would expect that basic computer literacy is taught in schools, but I have no idea how these classes operate today. Seeing articles like "Gen Z Kids Apparently Don't Understand How File Systems Work" [1] make me wonder whether these courses even exist at all anymore
Belive it or not, but the Internet is usable even with Ads. I'd even say that Ad quality has gone up without adblock users noticing, I don't see fullscreen or 1/2 screen Ads anymore.
I'm not so sure about that. I don't use an adblock on my phone, and the internet is close to unusable when I venture to top google result websites on my phone.
The vast majority of search results surfaced for me by Google, Bing, or DDG are blogspam structured to alternate between one paragraph of text and then a square ad of about the same size, which is essentially a half screen of advertising saturated into the content and the meat of the content has moved from the top of the article (as in traditional journalism) to the bottom (to maximize ad exposure).
Depending on how the ads are being served, it's either a bunch of blank squares in those space because my ad block strategies successfully stopped them from loading or its a wash of color noise and bold graphic design demanding my attention.
Then, there's almost always either a GDPR compliance popup over the bottom 50%-75% of the page or a "subcribe now" call to action popup over the whole thing, or (most often) both.
I would so much prefer to have access to whatever Internet you do. Please tell us where to find it.
In the meantime, I just avoid exploring the internet through search engines as much as I can.
