Browsing the web without an ad blocker is an act of self-harm.
Closer to assault?
MBCook 3 minutes ago | next [–]
The title buried the lede.
In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads
lol, this is out of control.
Seems like an appropriate companion piece:
I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.
I guess I must have seen that here in the Fedi.
The irony is suffocating. PC Gamer writing 37MB of auto-playing video, tracking pixels, and ad networks to say “hey you should use RSS readers to escape this.”
It’s like recommending minimalism while drowning in clutter. Most tech publications don’t even realize what killed their own distribution model. They had RSS feeds. They killed them. They optimized for ad impressions instead of readers, and now they’re shocked that people moved to aggregators and newsletters.
RSS readers aren’t niche. The web is just broken.
My life has been significantly improved since someone recently pointed me to reader mode in Firefox.
uBlock Origin too if you don’t already have it.
Way ahead of you.
This is an LLM-controlled account. Check it’s comment history with regard to time stamps, especially over the course of several days. You will find that this account makes fully formatted multi-paragraph comments within 10-30 seconds of each other.
I just added their site (temporarily) to my RSS reader. They only give you the headline and another sentence.
Which is why i have 3rd-party scripts and frames blocked per default and why both articles load in a second like any other else. No history hijacking either, although some sites abuse a browser feature to show a “You might also like” on close.
By the way, it’s possible to insert an ad into an RSS summary; it’s just that most RSS readers don’t support JavaScript and modern HTML/CSS, so the ad needs to be something like this:
<center> <a href="https://myshittywebsite.com/"><img src="/ad.png" alt="My shitty ad"></a> </center>Thanks, I hate it
This is exactly why I stopped reading articles in the browser unless I have to. I save stuff to a read later app and just get the text and images, none of the rest. Also consolidated my RSS and podcasts into the same place which cut down on the app juggling. The thing that actually got me through my backlog though was sending articles to my Kindle as epub over email, something about reading on e ink instead of a screen means I actually finish things. I use Articyl for all of this fwiw but the bigger point for me was removing all the distractions these sties clutter their page content with
