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I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?
I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.
Just like the bad old days, when entire sites were made in Flash and Linux users were shafted. Ridiculous.
Ironically somehow AI is making disabling JS better nowadays, because text/markdown is becoming normalized, so receiving a pure text version of a page is a thing again.
Meanwhile people out here hosting websites on disposable vapes.
If you miss how the web was before everything became Plattform, this might be a good place to drop kagis small web initiative: https://kagi.com/smallweb
On the topic of load time, it didn’t even mention the compulsory “prove you are human” Cloudflare gate on practically every website these days. Add 10 seconds to every visit.
Pretty ironic this blog runs multiple scripts that get blocked by ublock origin
“Why do people not read articles anymore and just go by what the headline says?”
The articles people are supposed to read:
That was a great read. I have worked at companies that lived on display ads and it’s a terrible, desperate business to be in. Personally I think branded display ads have always had zero value (or even negative value) and the better the net has gotten at tracking their value, the more this has come to light, the less advertisers are willing to pay, and therefore the more fuckery publishers engage in to try to survive. It’s extremely hard or impossible to deliver a good user experience under this set of incentives.
Thinking back to the print news era, a lot of the ads were local, which made them much more valuable. But now the net has snuffed out local retail too, so that model isn’t even there to fall back on if we tried.
I’m grateful now to be working somewhere that doesn’t survive on display ads, and that may be one of the big reasons I’ve stuck with this employer for almost a decade now.
I purchased Ad Guard for my Android phone seven or eight years ago and it’s a game changer. I despise ads and it’s jarring to use someone else’s phone.
