How I experience that site... The first page loads... there's nothing to do except click the one link. I click the one link and get a blank-ish page, ublock Origin and privacy badger have blocked essentially all of the content... For the win!
@cory I had to turn off my adblock to experience this site as it was meant to be experienced. (It had blocked the cookie banner so I was able to just read the "article")
@cory
The one thing I can think of that it's missing, is asking you to sign in with Google. I don't want to experience that. But I do every day on the web and I can't get rid of it.
@cory
Possibly! I haven't looked terribly hard. There's supposed to be a setting in Google that turns it off. But mine has been off for at least 6 months and I still see it.
I'll see if I can get it blocked somehow. It's just a modal that slides up and takes half your phone screen.
@cory The worst part is how the initial Google search results are horrible too. Seeing it so clean and simple makes me feel like I'm warped back in time.
@codefolio haha yeah, it used to be about getting to the first page and, in some ways it still is, but the results are pushed down by junk AI answers and the results are pretty worthless even when you get to them.
@cory hopefully with the re-emergence of the blogsphere we will see a rebound from the days of old. I'm waiting for the Java Applet rebirth... NO I am not but it was that moment of wow for me back in the late 90's. HotDog Editor and all at my fingertips figuring out if I had all the attributes in check for each tag surrounding my content. It's becoming all filler and no killer sites. I am hopeful for a change.
@midknight I really think we're seeing a regrowth of blogging and a bit of the weird web. It's pretty clear that the corporate web is openly hostile to users and relentlessly extractive.
It's not even reasonable free services in exchange for data — it's that plus all that data being used to train AI models of dubious utility.
@midknight it's all the more reason to be wary of commercial web products — if the business model and value isn't immediately clear to users it should be avoided.
I’m much more heartened by personal sites, volunteer efforts and small web-based businesses that don't aspire to scale to some imagined infinite growth.
It's stunning how fast we went from opposing web scraping to centering the entire industry around it.
@cory Even the clarity isn't all out there on the table. You and I know full well that the metrics and sub-data being analyzed is used for other things. Data currency is broken down to the cents and micro-cents with companies creating penny markets for absurd points.
The understanding is do we benefit from it in anyway. Are we just all in the lab and going through the paces and will all get the cheese in the end?
@midknight we're not even getting cheese anymore. It's all a hellish attention trap that everyone feels compelled to participate in. You can't leave the platform because everyone is there, they've been there for years. It ends up being a sunk cost where you can't bear to leave a platform that's become utterly unusable and hostile.
@cory True friends and acquaintances keep in touch or find you. Or at least I hope so. I try my best to keep up that practice for birthdays and special events in their lives to know I am thinking of them wherever we are in the world. That was the only value at this moment outside Mastodon that I feel those other sites helped me. The rest is just a blur.
@midknight I like to think of my address book as the most important social network. I love Mastodon, but I do my best to shoot off notes for birthdays and check in over chat (whichever one folks use — I wish that weren't all so unbearably fragmented).
You're right — IMHO — that that's the best and healthiest approach.
@cory i don't know which plugin it is that does it, but in my browser this looks perfectly normal without any popups and "ads", just the plain "article".
Looked at it without any plugins and it reminded me of their importance for anyone's mental health.
@cory cookie modals are the worst, i hate them from the bottom of my heart, but if i just hide them instead of spending half an hour to search the "no" button that probably doesn't do anything anyway i have so much more time for that thing called "life".
admittedly, sometimes it breaks websites, but in those cases that's probably for the better anyway...
@fabi yeah, I often find that sites that are that hostile or that poorly built are best closed and not revisited. If they're not interested in providing a decent experience they're not worth anyone's time.
@jake4480@cory I like to think a tipping point is coming.
The original, clean, simple, performant Google came about because of the bloat and ads and faff that was involved in using altavista, Lycos, yahoo etc... Something will upend it.
@sarajw@jake4480 I sure hope so. It feels like we passed what I could tolerate a long time ago. Now everything has a chatbot too, but I'm hoping the energy and data costs pop that bubble sooner than later.
@sarajw@cory one thing I think will upend it is just, people not going to mainstream sites as much. Eventually. It'll all revert back to things like this, interconnected communities this or that way, and stuff people put into archive.is to save and kill the ads. Firefox already kills so much, the pages take SO long to load because of it though, I've noticed.
@jake4480@sarajw yeah — my brother sends me NBA related videos from Instagram all the time and it's amazing how slow it is to load and how frequently the page just breaks and fails to load altogether.
@cory@sarajw ha! Amazing you can even see those. For MY begrudging daily use of Instagram, I have to use sideloaded APK Instander on my S21. The ads on Insta.. it's like, between every post now. It's bonkers. hahaha. Instander kills all the ads and at least makes it usable.
@jake4480@sarajw@cory The weird thing is that people are willing to put up with a lot of abuse if it means getting content they want. I think the real tipping point comes when Stop the Madness-type blockers start becoming OS-level features that are on by default.
Like—my parents don't know how to install adblocking plugins, but they absolutely appreciate having them.
When sites that rely on this trash have to either find ethical sources of income or fail, that's when we'll see change.
@csilverman@jake4480@sarajw it's awful and I wonder how much of it is simply not knowing adblockers and such are an option. My parents have them installed and I've got nextDNS running on their home network but, to your point, it’ll have the greatest impact if and when it becomes a default.
@mathi_gwithyas@jake4480 I would install that in a heartbeat. I've already got 1Blocker, Stop the Madness, Banish (for open in app prompts) and Consent-o-Matic layered on.
Add comment