I don’t know if it’s just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It’s getting to the point where adblocking isn’t an optional luxury - it’s a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.
Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?
I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.
“We hate ads, too!” — some window asking me to turn off my adblocker
No, you don’t. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be showing me this notice asking me to turn off my adblocker. Either that or I hate ads way more than you do.
Becoming? I think we are past that stage. What grinds my gears is how hostile the net is to adblockers where users are either barred from the site entirely or guilted into turning it off.
Worse yet is if you try to take back your privacy thru a VPN you are instantly deemed a bad actor or a downright threat!
I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate
They don’t, though! Pages of static HTML are tiny and cost almost nothing to serve; they bring the cost upon themselves by ballooning the page with multiple megabytes of ad-injection and tracking scripts. That claim is like 99% self-serving lie.
I like how angry they is about this, because I relate to this.
I think I am in love with whoever wrote this site.
online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate
A 40kb HTML page packaged with 450MB of JavaScript, AJAX, and streaming video costs a shitton for some reason.
Discounting temporary tech issues, I haven’t browsed internet without an adblocker for a single day in my entire life. Nobody is entitled to abuse my attention; no guilt, no exceptions.
I have but only because in the late 90s and 2000s they didn’t really exist, partially because the problem wasn’t present that they were designed for. Been using once consistently since probably around ‘08 tho
Did you not use popup and redirect blockers and AV/AM programs, though? Sort of the same problem, just evolved to be embedded.
All those toolbars and “helpers”, man.
What really pisses me off is when sites tell me to disable it. It’s my computer, I’ll choose what extensions I run. Fuck you.
Fuck fandom
https://getindie.wiki and the Indie Wiki Buddy browser extension
I tried that, and for some reason it redirects me to an outdated version of the wiki I’m trying to browse.
Logopedia especially is one of my favorites, I just wish it moves out of Fandom. Using Indie Wiki Buddy, it pretends the current date is a few months back, which is kinda odd.
That is odd. Something must be broken for the wiki you tried. It’s most useful when there is a real alternative like for the various minecraft wikis. Here is a full list of alternatives: https://getindie.wiki/listings/
Sometimes you just have to check
wikiafandom because they are the only ones with an up to date page. But I’d rather avoid it.It really sucks that I have to continue relying on Fandom for one of my most visited wikis.
I feel some guilt for using content blockers
Please don’t. The advertisers “defected” decades ago with popup windows (and probably before that, but popups in the late 90s/early 2000s stand out in my mind). It’s only gotten worse since then.
i am at the point where i’m just letting this encourage me to use the internet less. my house is quieter, my mind is quieter.
I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate,
This is verifiably just false.
How much does food cost you a day? Maybe $25, depending on what you buy.
How much does operating a 1000-user lemmy-instance cost for a day? Around $0.0003 per person per day.
Trust me I did the math on this one. Internet services are not expensive. Internet corporations just try to extract a lot of money out of you.
$25 a day for food? USD???
Yeah, seems high tbh.
Depends on where you are and what you’re eating, tbh.
If my wife and I eat out once that’s 20something right there for just that one meal that one day, for example
Fuck Fandom, find alternative wikis whenever possible.
Me and my homies HATE fandom
It’s kind of a selfish feeling but I’m always so bummed to find the only wiki for an indie game on fandom. Yeah, I could put the work in to make a different one elsewhere…but I’ll probably beat the game before I’m done copying the info over.
Pretty sure they C&D or whatever, so you have to modify the content before using it on another website.
I’m not sure if they do, but that’s some hypocritical shit since they blatantly rip off content from independent wiki’s (you can see this whenever the Terraria wiki is updated).
They’ll claim “we didn’t do it, one of our users did it, and we aren’t responsible for them”.
Fuck Fandom
But they ads to pay for seo engineers to get more traffic to show more ads.
This is the current metagame of the web, only people profiting are SEO engineers and ad services.
You’re just now coming to this realization?
Ever since download speeds have been able to support the bandwidth required for ads, ad-blockers have been a part of my daily life. I’m gonna guess that started in 2006?
On top of that, ads pay to load first; so even if you’ve got a poor connection, guess what the first thing you’ll see is?
“Our studies have shown we can fill up to 80% of a user’s visual field with ads before it induces seizures.”
What a movie!
What movie?
Isn’t that from Ready Player One?
Yep
