Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
Web of links
Basically how I browse the internet these days .... if I have to click on a bunch of stuff, sign up, register, accept a bunch of notifications, cookies, blah, blah, blah ... all because I want to read 200 words on your dumb site ... I'm not even going to bother with your site, skip and find a different source that is easier.
I go a step further and block them in DDG. This includes any "article" I have to scroll through to find the answer.
Wait what? We can do that!?
I am also intrigued
I love cookies!
.......not the browser kind. I'm partial to chocolate chip!
if I’m curious, I’m going through https://archive.today – not only are your ads not getting seen, you’re not getting my page views either
Get PopUpOFF and AdNauseam. Don't just back down without a fight. If I need to read an article to find some information I am going to read it, dumb bullshit be damned, even if I have to break half your site to do so. I've even been spiteful enough to hack away at the page with inspect element if it still manages to get past those add-ons.
Generally for news websites ... especially highly rated ones that are supposed to be the best professional outfits ... if I can't use 'reader view' and just read your copy ... I'm skipping your site and never going back to you.
All I want to do is read the news ... you don't need to sell me on a great refrigerator or a cigarette lighter that has a flame that can melt steel because I'm never going to buy it.
Have you tried rawdoggin the WWW anytime in the last decade? Unusable.
I still have an itch from last time
I will try to unblock ads on a new site one time. I want to see the whole article on one page, No click-through gallery of 27 different takes. There can be ads in the borders and margins. And maybe if I'm feeling generous one in the middle of the content. I don't want to see an unrelated pop-up video I don't want to see every paragraph separated by another ad.
If they can't play nice I block the ads, If I can't, by default, see the content without the ads, I'll find the article on another service. Everyone's literally just copying the same content back and forth with different wording.
If I can't see the content, and I can't find it on another service, I'll generally use bypass paywalls clean. If I can't see it through that I don't see it.
I'm not giving in for this b******* ads all over the place scenario. You can't even read a recipe page nowadays without an ad blocker.
Someday soon my "adblocker" might be a personal AI that reads the spam-ridden website on a virtual display in memory, identifies the actual content while pretending to look at whatever ads the site demands, and then passes the information I'm actually looking for along to me. Good luck captchaing that.
An AI feature actually useful for consumers? Corporate overloards say no thx, let’s instead fill the net with more AI-generated SEO bullshit
Adblockers aren't made by "corporate overlords." This wouldn't be either.
But right up the alley of local LLMs which are coming along gangbusters. For your consideration perplexica search engine.
І ԁоո't раrtісulаrly thіոk thаt summаrіzеrs аrе а gооԁ gоаl, sіոсе аі summаrіеs саո оftеո bе wrоոg, mіsіոtеrрrеt іոfоrmаtіоո, оr оmіt іmроrtаոt іոfоrmаtіո thеy fаіl tо іԁеոtіfy аs іmроrtаոt.
I think if that starts to become common people should start using tools like this as well as the use of pre-baked PDF or image rendered text to thwart it on their content.
It turns out the popular alternative is "force you to sign up (with a phone number) from critical mass/FOMO, track the snot out of you then slide ads in later." Oh, and the stuff you want is siloed away until you join, and buried in a mountain of rambling and engagement optimization junk.
Note that I'm largely talking about Discord, which is unfortunately where many of my interests have been shunted off to. People talk about Facebook, Google and OpenAI eating the internet, but I feel like Discord is the quiet trojan horse.
Discord is the new snapchat
Discord is 1000x worse because entire communities have taken to moving onto there. It's like the one thing that's worse than moving everything to Reddit: people using a fancy chat service like a forum. Everything from hardware to games seems to have most of the community on Discord; incredibly unhelpful if I'm trying to troubleshoot something.
It's unbelievavly time inefficient for... anything.
And its incredibly engaging. I burnt through so much time shooting the breeze in hopes of actually finding something interesting, notification spam, checking channels... It's why I deleted it from everywhere. And it left a gaping hole in my life, because its the only place some niche communities exist now.
That's an issue with people using Discord as something it shouldn't be used for. Not the other way around though lol.
Reader mode on
That's just fine as far as the site is concerned.
They provide content that is paid for by ads. When you block the ads, you're using up bandwidth and not contributing to the site's revenue. They want you gone.
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.
Rose-colored glasses, dude.
The internet was full of never-ending pop-ups that opened 2 more windows every time you closed one 25-30 years ago, and the viruses they carried fucked your computer to the point you had to do a clean Windows install. Spam.filters didn't work and you'd get 500 unfiltered spam messages a day, and since you were on 28-56k using a POP3 system it took an hour to download them before you could sort through them.
Shit's bad now, but it was way, way worse back then.
I use Linux. That's YOUR choice.
I talk about the prevalence of online ads 30 years ago when Linux was first getting a GUI and wasn't supported by any major hardware companies, and you respond with this bullshit?
Fuck right off with that argument.
You didn't just move the goalpost you changed fields, leagues, and sports.
The Internet did not have the advertising presence it does now when it was conceived.
Do you mean back when it was only the government and universities connected to it, before the web existed? Those times were very different. Practically user was contributing to the internet some way, either through time (like actually creating the software to use it, and once the web existed, creating sites) or money.
These days, there's a significantly larger number of freeloaders that want everything for free, without contributing anything back. So far, advertising has been the only effective model to support such users that don't want to pay.
Yeah it really is choosing beggars. If you don't want to look at ads to view content you should pay for it.
Peak monetisation. Don't let them even see the article [copied from another website and run through ChatGPT] until they fork over the entrance fee.
At least you won't use up that bandwidth routing traffic through pihole. You also get a nice cache for faster loading on frequented sites.
But everyone wants everything for free...
Nobody wants to work anymore
You wouldn’t download a job