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.

  • elephantium@lemmy.world
    1·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
    1·
    18 days ago

    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!

  • Audalin@lemmy.world
    1·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • Raffster@lemmy.world
    0·
    19 days ago

    It’s been shitty for a long time now. I’ve been using adblockers since they exist. And I can not fathom how people don’t realise how pathologically sick its become. The internet used to be a great place, everyone forgot.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      18 days ago

      You could write “click here” and people would just do it because that link would reliably go to something cool.

      The ads were text on the top of the page, and ironically unblockable. But you could block the autoplay MIDIs.

      UNDER CONSTRUCTION

      “Web search found no results” instead of just showing you a bunch of wrong results.

      • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 days ago

        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.

        • Joe Cool@lemmy.ml
          1·
          10 days ago

          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 wikia fandom because they are the only ones with an up to date page. But I’d rather avoid it.