It really is dead, isn’t it?

My less tech savy younger family members have learned to completely ignore ads, wait for the skip button and effectively avoid all the false skip buttons on account of playing mobile games with ads since they were babies. Advertisers have perfected the human brain of people who rawdog the internet to be incapable of retaining any information from any ad they see and finding skip buttons wherever they may be.

From my personal observational account, i think I’ve only seen boomers and some older millennials ever interacting with ads. A gen alpha’s brain wouldn’t even remember an ad they just saw. They have perfected filtering them.

I still have an itch from last time

Discord is the new snapchat

That’s an issue with people using Discord as something it shouldn’t be used for. Not the other way around though lol.

I’m fine with ads when they don’t take up half my screen or try and shift the page to to trick me into clicking on them, should a stuck with sidebar adds.

If your website is a business, you need to have a business model. If your business model isn’t sustainable, because it relies on not annoying visitors too much, maybe look for a better one.

Btw, most newspages have adapted some 10 years ago already, showing the important news for free and additional details with paid account. A lot have the balance off tho.

Subscription models. Some sites even combine some free articles with it, so that anyone can look into their works, but not necessarily everything. If it fits you, you get a subscription. Sort of the same way people would pay for their daily newspaper.

It can be argued that “news” should be free, and there are some news site that are basically picking up AP/AFP/whatever and repost these, but actual journalism do requires work.

The best business model is one that allows users to pay what they want. Unfortunately that means most of these sites would go out of business, which is not what they want so they’ll keep forcing more and more invasive ads on people until the dam truly breaks.

You got any blacklists that catch YouTube and twitch ads? Afaik those are provided from their own cdn now, so dns won’t work unless I’m mistaken

That sounds like a lot of work. On sites where that work (which is not all of them, some are made by competent people), firefox “reading mode” just do the job.

I used to do that but it turns out ublock has a option for that!! When u click on the ublock plugin there is a thunder symbol option which u can use to delete any element on the page. 🙃

Edit: grammer mistake

I just put Firefox into reader mode before that can load.

Generally the first thing I try is to hit ESC to stop a paywall script from running.

If that doesn’t work I try pressing ctrl-A ctrl-C to copy the whole page as soon as I see something. This works on pages that load and are then hidden by a script, but you have to be quick. Then I open Notepad and paste. If this doesn’t work I’ll either try it once more and see if I can be faster or just say screw it, if they want to hide their content that bad I don’t need it. If it’s important to me google will usually find the same news or info somewhere else.

People know how to do that, but why not just leave instead?

Right Click->Block Element

I’d rather just leave if I hit a pay wall, I want to hit their metrics. but I have a huge amount of blocked elements via ublock and a handful of my own tampermonkey scripts for frequently used sites

I guess a lot of people have a strange aversion towards messing with the code of websites. Which is weird and dumb, it’s downloaded to your browser, it’s not running on their system, you’re free to mess with it as much as you want. Best to familiarize yourself with the Web developer tools, they can be an effective weapon against scammy sites which use deceptive methods like this.

I’ve found this rarely works myself, due to them disabling other parts of the page, it’s less hassle to just find the article elsewhere

It’s ironic, they depend on perpetual growth, which means the more efficient they get at growing, the faster they outgrow their effective markets and then end up in a position where they need to further optimize optimal positions.

Sure, there’s probably smaller optimizations they could make, but they don’t just depend on growth but a certain % of growth.

Cornering markets is the beginning of the end for businesses in our growth obsessed system.

We want them gone. The market goes where the users use it. The Internet did not have the advertising presence it does now when it was conceived. Saying they want us gone means they are the only game in town. They aren’t. They are too big for their britches and need to realize the users dictate the usage.

But everyone wants everything for free…

Fantastic point, I completely agree.