this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 55 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I'm getting to the point where I just want to read ... once I get onto a site, I skip the ads and just read (most of the time I get limited ads because I have ad blocker) ... but if the ads, images, display is making it hard to read, I turn on read mode and get rid of all the clutter ... if the site was purposefully designed to not allow me to use read mode ... turn off the tab and move along to the next link.

If the site has somehow bypassed ad block and now shows ads, floating images, floating videos, banners or other elements ... if I can't get to the content I came to see, I turn off the tab and move on to the next site. I'm no wasting my time on these dumb sites.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Until search engines punish shit like this it will continue to get worse. Unfortunately search engines typically also own the ad networks.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Unfortunately search engines typically also own the ad networks.

You know, now that I think about it, that sounds like a really good reason to file an anti-trust suit. Search engines have a clear conflict of interest to prefer content that uses their ad network. Search engines should not have a preference for a particular ad network, but they almost certainly do and that harms the consumer.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

add to that that google turned to crap nowadays and just pushes meaningless bot generated content in the top pages... it's getting almost impossible to use it to find stuff. not sure about other engines because I only started recently being search-engine-curious, so no idea how they were like before

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Been using duck duck go for the last year or two. It’s maybe a little better on the bot & blog spam, but not much

Google beats DDG by a mile when you’re searching something super vague like “movie where Statue of Liberty gets slime sprayed inside”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah that’s what I was thinking of. Is there another? lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

absolutely. Since the advent of the YouTube gameplay guide, I have done my best to not touch multimedia guides and forcibly put it into text. You can even extract YouTube closed captions for accessibility reasons via hidden APIs. Give me plaintext.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago

IF I WANTED TO KEEP WATCHING THE FUCKING VIDEO I WOULDN'T BE FUCKING SCROLLING

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago

Reminds me of this one I saw during the gme craze 🤣

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

I had this yesterday on my phone. The video was like half an inch wide and silent.

What’s the purpose of this? It also had some banner at the bottom, so I’m only have to use 30% of the screen to actually read the article.

The web has become such garbage.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And "news" sites that intentionally delay the relevant images/videos to load after their ads and related stories, so users scrolling around for the only relevant content in the entire "article" see all the ads first.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Yahoo news is notorious for this. It's like an ad after every paragraph and every paragraph is just one sentence.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've also noticed some sites displaying totally unrelated videos above their news articles. Extremely weird

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Google got in trouble recently for running ads on these videos. Advertisers would pay for a YouTube ad and it would only run on these random videos in the corner of the screen on click bait websites.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Yeah I hate that with all my soul.

That reminded me a bit about some odd behavior that have some form of vertical videos like shorts/reels (don't remember where I saw it) like you are watching a video and then it moves up a bit like to show you (like if you didn't know) that you can doom scroll forcing you to tap the video to bring it at its original place, this has happened to me several times like, bruh, what the heck is this asshole design.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

I set up a pi-hole on my home network. At least at home I see a lot less ads.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Recently, I saw some news page where there was a video, but it was just stringing together the sentences from the article on top of a random stock image.

I was extremely confused why this exists, but then realized, I hadn't unmuted the video. Surely, it reads it out for sight impaired folks.

...nope, there was no audio. They just figured, they should have a worse way of reading. And of course, it would float on top of the article, too, to make reading that worse as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Damn, they were this close to caring about disabled people...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Probably some SEO bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Simple mode in chrome, reading mode (not sure if that's an extension actually) in firefox. Whatever addon you need to just show the text without the ads. Works on most sites

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Does uBlock Origin have a filter list for that kinda stuff

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yes, I think most of those will be filtered by default too, if they are ads.

You can disable autoplay globally on Firefox which is a great solution for everything else.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I like it on certain sites like YouTube where I can read the comments while watching the video if I want to, but for the majority of sites and especially if the video's an ad/not the main focus of the page the website can fuck right off.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Fandom covers half the mobile page with a video sometimes. Fuck Fandom.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Fucking the independent dose that shite thank the gods for reader mode

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Much more polite than I am on the matter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

That is for people like my uncle that had 3 TVs and a computer in his lounge.

I agree with you, that shit needs to stop.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

In Safari, the Reader Mode is your friend. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it’s gorgeous.