I just don’t look at it if I have to make an account.
Same. Those sites simply don’t exist to me. If it’s so important that I see it, then copy/paste the content.
It’s like they’re trying to show you a party that’s going on in some private location, but you don’t get in, because you don’t have an account. Well then, they say, if the account is free and you still don’t make it, it’s not our fault. So they close you out.
You telling them to “just copy and paste the content” is like telling them to send you a photo/video of the party. It’s not the same as being there.
Which is 100% fine by them.
They’ve created a situation where we HAVE to use ad-blockers for security, so they instead have to sell our data.
If they can’t make money off ads OR selling our data AND we won’t pay to view the content, all we’re really doing is using up their bandwidth.
Haha, so true. I really really miss the “old” interwebz. Imagine the content of back-then with the hardware of today. The dream of yesteryear would come true. A blazingly fast net. Just html with a bit of JS (when really needed). Not 10 frameworks (each used for one function), dozens of mb of graphics, a gazillion of cookies and tracker-scripts and… Jeez.
Today i need so much stuff to fight the other stuff, it’s stuffmageddon.
Oh and if you’re also European you can also fight (for free!) the silly cookie-war.
4chan back before the Nazi takeover was like the wild west. My favorite part was “Lithursday,” when we would share images with embedded PDFs of copyrighted content, including rare books, anarchist materials, and military manuals. I often wonder if those unusually large .jpgs are still floating around the internet waiting to be unlocked. I also saw legitimate acts of activism and terrorism unfolding live, without the interpretation and propaganda of the state.
Not 10 frameworks (each used for one function), dozens of mb of graphics,
Have you seen the old internet?! It would have been even more gifs, music players, and oh the flash websites! Haha I know that’s really not your point but this jumped out at me and made me chuckle.
some of our clients are on what the telco calls ‘extended’ dsl. they’re waaaay tf out at the ‘end of the line’ where speeds can be as shitty as 250-500kbps; there’s even a couple still on dialup. so we definitely consider the weight of a page and how many connections are made for each when we do our own sites.
Ha! Recently went to breakfast with a couple of new neighbors (partners).
They were asking me what apps I enjoyed and I told them that I WAS enjoying Apollo. Told them I left Reddit. They sort looked at me. They later said they both worked at home. Their job was creating ad space for the web. One of them gave me the enshitification face. Sigh.
The browser in my computer at work doesn’t have an ad blocker. I haven’t installed one because I most of the time I’m using it to access our intranet. But when I do happen to use the internet, damn are there so many ads! They literally block the content I’m trying to read, and come back even when I try to close it.
All that to say, due to enshittification I will forever keep my ad blocker on my personal computer.
I’m baffled when companies that self-host DNS don’t have DNS-level adblocking.
It’s because there’s websites out there that will entirely break, and for really dumb fucking reasons. I’ve seen some sites not even load due to google tag manager being blocked. Most of the time it’s a signal to me that I don’t want to have anything to do with that domain.
However, if this was at work, that would be a call to IT. Multiply that by potentially hundreds of calls on the regular, and that could get really expensive.
The better solution here I think, is to default the browser install with uBlock Origin already there. Then allow the user the power to toggle the addon to their own liking. Then last, train your employees to know what the addon is, and how to use it.
Then it’s the best of both worlds: websites aren’t necessarily breaking for all users, ads are absent as a default state, and users are empowered to control their own experience. (And yes there’s still going to be Jims and Karens calling for support, but they’re going to regardless, those types will always find a reason.)
It’s wild using a browser without a blocker. I’ve had one since they first started appearing so the internet I know is very different to reality. On the rare occassion I use a browser that allows ads, it feels like shit’s broken. It’s so hard to get anything done and a chore to read or view content.
It’s gotten real bad for me just in the last week.
Videos load really slowly, constantly stops when I play a playlist of videos.
I have had ad blockers for over a decade now, it’s never been this bad.
I’ve been using NewPipe since I found out about it. Ad free YouTube with no slow down that I can see.
Really? My main reason for still trying to use adblockers instead of NewPipe or another frontend is that every one I’ve tried is slooooow. Is there a setting I should change or something???
Alternative interfaces like NewPipe, FreeTube, etc. work fine for what they are, but I prefer using a web browser because I actually like Youtube keeping track of my watch history and its recommendation algorithm works (reasonably) well for me.
All the alternative interfaces have privacy from Google as a primary design goal, so they want you to import your subscriptions and let them keep track of what you watched locally, but the consequence and downside of that is that it doesn’t synchronize across devices (e.g. FreeTube on my Linux desktop and NewPipe on my phone). At least not without a bunch of extra effort on my part manually importing and exporting, anyway.
