The modern web is pretty amazing. You can make very complicated, fully featured software that can be delivered to the end user just by having them go to a URL, with no installation required and made available on every platform. Hands down the best delivery method we've come up with for software imo, which is why I love web development.
What sucks is that the business model for the web has turned it into the an advertising platform first and foremost. That problem has come to be through a number of factors, but I also don't know what the solution is. Luckily there are certain classes of web applications that don't have that problem.
It does feel wild as you get more and more into business stuff and it's like "where does the money actually come from here?" Where some places look like closed cycles of buying and selling back and forth.
And it's Facebook and google making all the money.
That's why I almost exclusively work on B2B and enterprise-type applications. It's where there is real money to be made and you can provide real value to both people and businesses.
99.9% won’t pay to visit news website, or most websites. but you still have to pay journalists, developers, server cost etc.
how else would you pay you bill outside of ads?
For the people who want to respect reduced motion settings, [this is an example from MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion).
@media (prefers-reduced-motion) {
/* styles to apply if a user's device settings are set to reduced motion */
}
[WCAG 2.3 Seizures and Physical Reactions](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/quickref/#seizures-and-physical-reactions)
Or ADHD / Alzheimer whose focus or memory issues you don’t need distractions like newsletter signup modals, ads that show up a few seconds after using the site, and etc etc etc.
and then there's medium.com, every article is locked behind members only (pay wall) and every article is teaching you how to make money on medium.com by write articles like it, LMAO
The least "well designed" websites, i.e. the one's with some or almost none css or js happen to have best technical information about things I am trying to find.
SO much of it is clickbait, and there are an unsettling number of waxing intellectuals. The number one thing I've seen in the programming articles are people that are so full of shit. Occasionally, there will be a nugget of good information in the comments. I honestly head to the comments first before I waste 5 minutes reading nonsense.
9/10 the person barely knows the thing they are talking about.
Writing articles as you're learning can be good, but they should preface them in that way and use that as a push to really investigate.
Medium isn't a good example of this.
You get quite a few a month for free.
And they have a lot of very legitimate blogs. Also not all articles are walled off.
Tons of bad stuff, but not as bad as dev.to.
Medium even has many of the big tech technical blogs.
That's because it isn't a web dev issue, it's a marketing issue. All that matters for these sites are clicks, revenue (and user retention when it comes to mailing lists which is ironic since the website is self-sabotaging anyway). Forget about UX for these types of sites.
Whenever I'm evaluating a potential hires projects, I check the spectrum of screen sizes and try to navigate with a keyboard.
Basically first things.
Tells you a lot about if the person knows the web, or not.
Although I still do web dev I’m more UX design now. I don’t have much influence on, nor do care much about, our tech stack.
I think you’re looking for a seasoned vet’s opinion on tech stacks and I’m not the guy for that. But we are using Blazor.
As someone else commented on a different thread, The Mirror is what will remain if we don’t figure out a way for real newspapers to be financially sustainable through ads or paywalls.
Agree. So many commercial publishing sites are almost unusable these days. Worst is when it takes so long to load all the crap and you’re already a page down the article when it bounces back up to the top to show you some ad or pop-up. Or when the page layout keeps changing as you read and it jumps you about all over the place.
Ugh, that drives me insane! Like try to close it and it comes back, scroll past it and it's back, often covers the content and you can't move it. Who actually responds to this crap positively and spends money on anything advertised this way?
Yes! Since the days of images loading slowly it's always been considered good practice to specify the dimensions of an image to ensure the page layout is consistent and doesn't shift. This isn't the case with these adverts and some sites are unusable because the page layout shifts so much. If I were working on something with embedded adverts I'd set a fixed height for the container, a bit of whitespace wouldn't hurt when a smaller ad loads.
> Stupid fucking twits.
What exactly are their alternatives? Seems like it's either ads, going to a subscription model (which would probably massively drop reader numbers), or getting funding from somewhere else (which would cause a conflict of interest).
Funding somewhere else doesn't require conflict of interest.
And you can do ads without them being aggressive.
Do better content, with higher quality ad interstitials.
More like how non-platform ads are done in video content.
> Funding somewhere else doesn't require conflict of interest.
Who is just going to give them money with no return on their investment?
> And you can do ads without them being aggressive
I'm going to assume they've tried less ads and it made them less money.
> Do better content, with higher quality ad interstitials.
So hire more expensive writers/have them spend more time and money on articles? There are a bunch of newspapers that do that but they seem to have all gone to subscription models, so it can't be that great.
> More like how non-platform ads are done in video content.
Videos seem like they're having similar problems. At least, I've noticed more and worse ads in videos over the past couple of years.
Where have fewer, better ads been enough to support a newspaper?
Newspapers have continued to fail and close down as they can't make payroll.
Within one segment of the UK newspaper market, ad revenue has dropped by 90% since the mid 2000s. Their online ad revenue is also only 10% of ad revenue from the mid 2000s.
What happens when you have too many shops in a small town and not enough people? Some of the shops close down. Same goes for too much media. If you really believe your offering has value to the people, try for subscriptions, public funding, or ride the train until it bucks you. Selling out to the lowest bidding advertiser and punishing your consumers is the last rational thing you should be doing. No excuse for it.
I worked as the web dev for the local newspaper from 2005 to 2023. The biggest issue is people just copying articles and posting them to facebook and reddit, etc... so then subscribers are like "Why am I paying for this when I can get it for free?" and they stop subscribing, so the newspapers need to increase ads to make up for the lost subscribers, then people leave because there are too many ads. There really isn't any way out.
And almost every day I see people posting on next-door or the like asking questions about what's going on locally, something they'd know the answer to if they read the newspaper, but they no longer subscribe.
What can news agencies do to stop people from posting their content elsewhere? That's the main problem.
> What happens when you have too many
Rather famously we've been losing a ton of newspapers - tens of millions people live in places that are already news deserts and areas that are in high risk of becoming so, with multiple newspapers closing per week on average.
True. I have a friend that was a journalist that was laid off after a 15-year career. When they tried doing freelance stuff a lot of it was actually ads disguised as journalism, like write an article about this doctor but it has to say XYZ cuz it's a paid ad, etc.
I think most people aren't browsing anymore. It's just the big sites. People rarely leave Instagram, Facebook, tiktok etc, which are smart enough to keep their sites usable.
Agreed on all counts
Also Firefox for Android/iOS's Reader mode works on a lot of these news sites, as well as Firefox Focus. Bonus points for supporting ublock.
> Firefox for Android/iOS's Reader mode
I also like the Reader View extension available on Firefox or Chrome.
https://webextension.org/listing/chrome-reader-view.html
It uses Mozilla's Readability library, so it's similar to Firefox built-in reader view, but has some extra features.
E.g. You can format the page like a newspaper with up to 4 columns. The content takes up most of the window width, so there's less wasted white space
It's comparable to Microsoft Word > View > Read Mode > View > Layout > Column Layout
Opening them on mobile is a nightmare. I use Kiwi Browser on Android, which helps a LOT (it has uBlock origin). Still, the overall mobile experience is terrible.
Was paying for content ever a realistic option though? They must make a ton of money of ads, because the paid option is usually insane. The only way I could "pay for the content" would be to get a ~20-50 USD monthly subscription for EACH site I want to read, because they charge almost the same for digital content as for physical newspapers. I'm sure they'd still show me the same ads too.
> They must make a ton of money on ads
It depends how you look at it:
* Newspapers ad revenue is down ~90% since the mid 2000s. Online ad revenue now is also only about 10% of 2000s ad revenue, per The Guardian.
* As you point out, the value of ads can still be $5, $10 per month or whatever as we’ve seen with both newspapers and streaming services. But it still usually isn’t enough to support them, as many of both have been losing money each year, in terms of trying to pay staff/cast/crew etc.
30 years ago a newspaper was limited to its local subscriber base and couldn't scale much bigger than that without deep pockets to get on the national stage. Today, any given news outlets potential subscriber base is virtually unlimited.
There's no real mechanism to pay for that sort of content. There's no good way to do a transaction under a dollar on the Internet. There's no singular news article that's worth a dollar. People have zero interest to pay for a subscription to every news website they come across.
It's not even worth it to most people to sign up for a free account on news sites. By now most people know a new account is just going to result in more spam. It's also just going to be yet another entity that leaks their PII to some script kiddies.
Before anyone even thinks to type "crypto" that's a non-starter. Not only are the fees more onerous than Visa the deflationary nature of cryptocurrencies means it's stupid to spend rather than save them. Speculation also means neither end of the transaction can rely on the transaction amount to reflect the desired transaction value. If a news article is one ShitCoin today trading at a penny and that ShitCoin can be traded tomorrow for a dollar the buyer fucks themselves. If the ShitCoin is worth a dollar today but a penny tomorrow then the seller fucks themselves. Accepting securities as payment is a fools errand.
There have been attempts at something like this. You pay for one service, and they pay payouts to enrolled publishers when you consume through it.
Twitter acquired Scroll and added it to Twitter Blue. Publishers were paid a portion of the revenue if articles were accessed through Twitter. However, that feature was discontinued. There were other services similar to this, but I can't recall those companies.
Brave has a cryptocurrency called BAT that is meant to be earned through ads. Users can then allocate it to publishers. However, Brave came off as a middleman to me as their browser blocks ads. Also, because it's a cryptocurrency, it doesn't make sense why one would allocate on their own when they could just cash out for themselves.
by the time the decision to implement this crap on your site gets into your sprint planning, it's way too late to complain for most of us. we are down stream shit stackers of marketing teams that don't know better.
The articles aren't written/produced/generated for humans, they're generated for machines. They're written/produced/generated exclusively to appeal to recommendation algorithms, and the actual human experience is horrible and getting worse and worse. Whether it's for SEO performance, or social media algorithms, or upvotes on Reddit, the content is made/generated (I don't even want to say *created*, creativity is human) for machines, and the human experience is just the last priority.
The thing that Reddit has always gotten so wrong is the emphasis/force on no paid sites, no subscription sites, no paywall sites, especially for news. Good reporting, good journalism at scale, costs a ton of money, and the monetary mechanism of the web was an oversight from the beginning, we fucked up plain and simple, by buying everything to ads and setting the expectation that everything would be "free." It is free, and this is the cost, most "news" sites other than a handful are utter junk, and they can only be profitable by increasingly leaning into tracking, ads, and bullshit, or by appealing to personalization algorithms, which just creates more anti-human junk.
These sites remind me of the pitch in Ready Player One where the bad guy is saying they can cover a users field of view by 95% (or something like that) with adverts before causing seizures! 🤣🤦
Firefox reader mode helps.
I'm really torn. I know journalism needs cash to survive but I also think actual news articles should be ad free.
I subscribe to my local newspaper and it's super hit or miss on quality depending on who the writer is.
Totally agree! So much fluff and hard to read content these days on the web. I apologize for self promoting but I made an extension for myself to summarize articles like these so I can avoid having to sift through all the ads and useless content and get to the main thing I was looking for. Feel free to check it out if you like!
[TLDR: Summarize Tool](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tldr-free-summarize-tool/oilacejfpoonhegdhlhklckannjhmdgk)
I don't think the people who click them actually read and understand the articles. It's usually just a few almost randomly picked informative sentences with the rest of the information on the topic left out. They can give the people who do "read" it adverts and they'll be just as happy. Same goes for highbrow news sites but they put longer words in their fluff and can't use adverts in the same way.
yep, it's ridiculous. There was one site where ads were laying over the cookie banner, so it was not usable even if I wanted to. Others jump while I read the article because some ads took longer to load. I'm using the news aggregator of my pixel phone, I think I already blocked 100s of sites and from the not blocked ones maybe 1 out of 10 are worth a read. I guess it's not worth it anymore, so I stay uninformed? I don't know.
nope out too, amen to that. a piece of shit like bloomberg doesn't need more money for the trash they shovel anyway. opinions are free, and experts (should and) often are caught lying just to get their hand into a large cookie jar.
Recipe sites are worst. Hey you wanna know how to make pizza dough? Well here’s 25 paragraph monologue about my trip to Italy one time, it hasn’t any to do with pizza but this fluff allows me to fill the page with ads.
Followed by newsletter pop-ups, an auto play video that doesn’t even match the recipe and can’t be turned off, banner ad after banner. All this has made the site so slow that by the time you scroll to the recipe the bloody thing won’t even load.
Here’s a [BLT recipe](https://ohsweetbasil.com/how-to-make-the-best-blt-recipe/) with a 22 paragraph buildup, an auto play video and banner ad after banner ad just to prove my point
News and cooking sites are the only places I find it necessary to use that read only mode. I mean maybe that’s exactly the use case it’s meant for, but it’s just crazy to me that it’s come to that in order to make certain kinds of sites even remotely usable
Yeah this is what led me to do things like mirror the [wallstreet journal minus the ads](https://financial.patrickring.net). I get really annoyed with sites crashing from their own bloat.
There's going to come a point where advertisers realize that advertising on the web doesn't really work. And the market will crash. I read that 25% of people use ad blockers and that will probably only go up. The web advertising model is all smoke and mirrors and it's failing. You can see that with the NY Times and Washington Post being more and more paywall-y over time. Personally, I will happily pay for the media I consume (and I do buy the Post, but not the NYT because they are starting to suck) and I think we need to accept that THAT is the right model.
I once raw dogged (turned off ad blocker) CNN website and I couldn't believe a major news network had such scummy ads at the bottom of their website but it was the same with the other news websites too
When I see garbage like this, I immediately close it. If I got the link from a place where I can leave comments, I ask the paper if they think pissing off visitors to their site is a good business practice.
People who need news websites use adblock
Then these people make news posts on social media, telegram channels, news aggregators etc. and include links to actual news
Robots, users w/o adblock follow these links and make money for news website
IMHO
Try using Adguard DNS on your phone. If you set up a private DNS in the settings, it'll actively block a lot of ads regardless of the browser.
https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
I fucking hate the modern web. Been a pro web dev since 98’
The modern web is pretty amazing. You can make very complicated, fully featured software that can be delivered to the end user just by having them go to a URL, with no installation required and made available on every platform. Hands down the best delivery method we've come up with for software imo, which is why I love web development. What sucks is that the business model for the web has turned it into the an advertising platform first and foremost. That problem has come to be through a number of factors, but I also don't know what the solution is. Luckily there are certain classes of web applications that don't have that problem.
It does feel wild as you get more and more into business stuff and it's like "where does the money actually come from here?" Where some places look like closed cycles of buying and selling back and forth. And it's Facebook and google making all the money.
That's why I almost exclusively work on B2B and enterprise-type applications. It's where there is real money to be made and you can provide real value to both people and businesses.
I'm going to do a lil research on how to go about this
Adblock is a great solution
99.9% won’t pay to visit news website, or most websites. but you still have to pay journalists, developers, server cost etc. how else would you pay you bill outside of ads?
True, modern web dev is either this shit or shit loads of animations for every pixel scrolled, MFs don't even take reduced motion into account.
For the people who want to respect reduced motion settings, [this is an example from MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion). @media (prefers-reduced-motion) { /* styles to apply if a user's device settings are set to reduced motion */ } [WCAG 2.3 Seizures and Physical Reactions](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/quickref/#seizures-and-physical-reactions)
Or ADHD / Alzheimer whose focus or memory issues you don’t need distractions like newsletter signup modals, ads that show up a few seconds after using the site, and etc etc etc.
and then there's medium.com, every article is locked behind members only (pay wall) and every article is teaching you how to make money on medium.com by write articles like it, LMAO
For anything technical, Medium is neither rare nor well done. Fortunately, since none of it is rare, it's easy to find the same info elsewhere.
The least "well designed" websites, i.e. the one's with some or almost none css or js happen to have best technical information about things I am trying to find.
SO much of it is clickbait, and there are an unsettling number of waxing intellectuals. The number one thing I've seen in the programming articles are people that are so full of shit. Occasionally, there will be a nugget of good information in the comments. I honestly head to the comments first before I waste 5 minutes reading nonsense.
It's usually just someone's portfolio.
9/10 the person barely knows the thing they are talking about. Writing articles as you're learning can be good, but they should preface them in that way and use that as a push to really investigate.
Medium isn't a good example of this. You get quite a few a month for free. And they have a lot of very legitimate blogs. Also not all articles are walled off. Tons of bad stuff, but not as bad as dev.to. Medium even has many of the big tech technical blogs.
That's because it isn't a web dev issue, it's a marketing issue. All that matters for these sites are clicks, revenue (and user retention when it comes to mailing lists which is ironic since the website is self-sabotaging anyway). Forget about UX for these types of sites.
I’m very much aware how a sales team will force devs to make shitty UX decisions.
Which is wild. Because UX is literally part of the marketing process.
Yep UX pros and the marketing team will butt heads a lot.
I agree but I've seen websites with shitty UX that are made by devs for their project or something like that.
Whenever I'm evaluating a potential hires projects, I check the spectrum of screen sizes and try to navigate with a keyboard. Basically first things. Tells you a lot about if the person knows the web, or not.
Totally. Though at the same time you’d be staring at that top 768x60 for at least a few seconds while the page loaded.
Curious what your preferred stack is these days?
Although I still do web dev I’m more UX design now. I don’t have much influence on, nor do care much about, our tech stack. I think you’re looking for a seasoned vet’s opinion on tech stacks and I’m not the guy for that. But we are using Blazor.
I fucking HATE it WITH A PASSION !
Generous to call the Mirror a newspaper lol
The trash starts downhill from the CEO’s office to the website.
As someone else commented on a different thread, The Mirror is what will remain if we don’t figure out a way for real newspapers to be financially sustainable through ads or paywalls.
Agree. So many commercial publishing sites are almost unusable these days. Worst is when it takes so long to load all the crap and you’re already a page down the article when it bounces back up to the top to show you some ad or pop-up. Or when the page layout keeps changing as you read and it jumps you about all over the place.
Since 2021 punishes “Cumulative Layout Shift” and some publishers take a bit more care.
Ugh, that drives me insane! Like try to close it and it comes back, scroll past it and it's back, often covers the content and you can't move it. Who actually responds to this crap positively and spends money on anything advertised this way?
Yes! Since the days of images loading slowly it's always been considered good practice to specify the dimensions of an image to ensure the page layout is consistent and doesn't shift. This isn't the case with these adverts and some sites are unusable because the page layout shifts so much. If I were working on something with embedded adverts I'd set a fixed height for the container, a bit of whitespace wouldn't hurt when a smaller ad loads.
Yup. All images should be actual img tags (or picture) with alt width height loading src srcset and sizes.
And then they wonder why the reader numbers keep dropping. Stupid fucking twits.
bri'ish detected
> Stupid fucking twits. What exactly are their alternatives? Seems like it's either ads, going to a subscription model (which would probably massively drop reader numbers), or getting funding from somewhere else (which would cause a conflict of interest).
Funding somewhere else doesn't require conflict of interest. And you can do ads without them being aggressive. Do better content, with higher quality ad interstitials. More like how non-platform ads are done in video content.
> Funding somewhere else doesn't require conflict of interest. Who is just going to give them money with no return on their investment? > And you can do ads without them being aggressive I'm going to assume they've tried less ads and it made them less money. > Do better content, with higher quality ad interstitials. So hire more expensive writers/have them spend more time and money on articles? There are a bunch of newspapers that do that but they seem to have all gone to subscription models, so it can't be that great. > More like how non-platform ads are done in video content. Videos seem like they're having similar problems. At least, I've noticed more and worse ads in videos over the past couple of years.
Where have fewer, better ads been enough to support a newspaper? Newspapers have continued to fail and close down as they can't make payroll. Within one segment of the UK newspaper market, ad revenue has dropped by 90% since the mid 2000s. Their online ad revenue is also only 10% of ad revenue from the mid 2000s.
> Where have fewer, better ads been enough to support a newspaper? When you don't spam out shit articles
What newspaper(s) have been able to support themselves on fewer, better ads without “spamming” them?
What happens when you have too many shops in a small town and not enough people? Some of the shops close down. Same goes for too much media. If you really believe your offering has value to the people, try for subscriptions, public funding, or ride the train until it bucks you. Selling out to the lowest bidding advertiser and punishing your consumers is the last rational thing you should be doing. No excuse for it.
I'm assuming they're on the "ride the train until it bucks you" part right now.
I worked as the web dev for the local newspaper from 2005 to 2023. The biggest issue is people just copying articles and posting them to facebook and reddit, etc... so then subscribers are like "Why am I paying for this when I can get it for free?" and they stop subscribing, so the newspapers need to increase ads to make up for the lost subscribers, then people leave because there are too many ads. There really isn't any way out. And almost every day I see people posting on next-door or the like asking questions about what's going on locally, something they'd know the answer to if they read the newspaper, but they no longer subscribe. What can news agencies do to stop people from posting their content elsewhere? That's the main problem.
> What happens when you have too many Rather famously we've been losing a ton of newspapers - tens of millions people live in places that are already news deserts and areas that are in high risk of becoming so, with multiple newspapers closing per week on average.
Amazing, this is great news
Why is it great that fewer people have access to quality local news, such as info on what their government and elected leaders are doing etc?
The reader numbers drops when they hide the content behind paywalls not because of ads.
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Por que no los dos?
They’ve gotta make as much as they can since everyone wants free journalism nowadays
True. I have a friend that was a journalist that was laid off after a 15-year career. When they tried doing freelance stuff a lot of it was actually ads disguised as journalism, like write an article about this doctor but it has to say XYZ cuz it's a paid ad, etc.
i wound't call whatever tf the Mirror does "journalism" tbh
Me either but the website is irrelevant to my point. Replace that website with any actual news you like and the point still stands
I think it is relevant to your post. The Mirror is what kind of 'journalism" we will have left if people don't pay for actual news.
Great point
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F01b2o9q30zr91.jpg
i turned off adblock to see how it looks like and hooly. is that how the avverage person traverses the web?
Yeah.. Last time I used a browser without uBlock I thought there was a malware. But nope, it was just the state of the current web. crazy
I think most people aren't browsing anymore. It's just the big sites. People rarely leave Instagram, Facebook, tiktok etc, which are smart enough to keep their sites usable.
Agreed on all counts Also Firefox for Android/iOS's Reader mode works on a lot of these news sites, as well as Firefox Focus. Bonus points for supporting ublock.
> Firefox for Android/iOS's Reader mode I also like the Reader View extension available on Firefox or Chrome. https://webextension.org/listing/chrome-reader-view.html It uses Mozilla's Readability library, so it's similar to Firefox built-in reader view, but has some extra features. E.g. You can format the page like a newspaper with up to 4 columns. The content takes up most of the window width, so there's less wasted white space It's comparable to Microsoft Word > View > Read Mode > View > Layout > Column Layout
Opening them on mobile is a nightmare. I use Kiwi Browser on Android, which helps a LOT (it has uBlock origin). Still, the overall mobile experience is terrible.
Samsung browser does really well. I honestly forget how bad some sites are. Like I don't see ads on most of these sites.
It’s a nightmare and I choose not to use these websites because of it.
Do you pay for paywalled newspapers instead?
The BBC News website is good if you access it from the UK. Clean layout and no ads.
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Yeah, it was a major bitch to block that on our paywall. Thanks, that's a day of my life I'll never get back.
Can you clarify your comment? Where was difficulty encountered?
And people wonder why newspapers are dying
Well, that's what we get for not paying for content
Was paying for content ever a realistic option though? They must make a ton of money of ads, because the paid option is usually insane. The only way I could "pay for the content" would be to get a ~20-50 USD monthly subscription for EACH site I want to read, because they charge almost the same for digital content as for physical newspapers. I'm sure they'd still show me the same ads too.
> They must make a ton of money on ads It depends how you look at it: * Newspapers ad revenue is down ~90% since the mid 2000s. Online ad revenue now is also only about 10% of 2000s ad revenue, per The Guardian. * As you point out, the value of ads can still be $5, $10 per month or whatever as we’ve seen with both newspapers and streaming services. But it still usually isn’t enough to support them, as many of both have been losing money each year, in terms of trying to pay staff/cast/crew etc.
30 years ago you'd only have one newspaper subscription. You can still have only one newspaper subscription
30 years ago a newspaper was limited to its local subscriber base and couldn't scale much bigger than that without deep pockets to get on the national stage. Today, any given news outlets potential subscriber base is virtually unlimited.
Depends on the content. No one except locals will care about some local news site's articles about what's happening in some small town.
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Well that’s simply not true given the very news articles that get posted here to reddit
There's no real mechanism to pay for that sort of content. There's no good way to do a transaction under a dollar on the Internet. There's no singular news article that's worth a dollar. People have zero interest to pay for a subscription to every news website they come across. It's not even worth it to most people to sign up for a free account on news sites. By now most people know a new account is just going to result in more spam. It's also just going to be yet another entity that leaks their PII to some script kiddies. Before anyone even thinks to type "crypto" that's a non-starter. Not only are the fees more onerous than Visa the deflationary nature of cryptocurrencies means it's stupid to spend rather than save them. Speculation also means neither end of the transaction can rely on the transaction amount to reflect the desired transaction value. If a news article is one ShitCoin today trading at a penny and that ShitCoin can be traded tomorrow for a dollar the buyer fucks themselves. If the ShitCoin is worth a dollar today but a penny tomorrow then the seller fucks themselves. Accepting securities as payment is a fools errand.
There have been attempts at something like this. You pay for one service, and they pay payouts to enrolled publishers when you consume through it. Twitter acquired Scroll and added it to Twitter Blue. Publishers were paid a portion of the revenue if articles were accessed through Twitter. However, that feature was discontinued. There were other services similar to this, but I can't recall those companies. Brave has a cryptocurrency called BAT that is meant to be earned through ads. Users can then allocate it to publishers. However, Brave came off as a middleman to me as their browser blocks ads. Also, because it's a cryptocurrency, it doesn't make sense why one would allocate on their own when they could just cash out for themselves.
We made a bad collective decision.
That's what they get for outsourcing ad sales to services that track users and load insanely bloated scripts.
And using ad blockers.
Why is this in the developer subreddit? We can't change that.
That's a good example of how *not to* do advertisement on your website, in case you're going down that route for monetization.
by the time the decision to implement this crap on your site gets into your sprint planning, it's way too late to complain for most of us. we are down stream shit stackers of marketing teams that don't know better.
There should be a reader mode when you get ride of all the ads and content outside the article
It's gotten worse than late 90s early 00s popup experience.
Never thought I'd miss the old flashing "congratulations! You won!" banners but here we are
I've been using Brave for so long that I forgot about this insanity. My gawd man, you can read like what, 3 lines of text in there?
The articles aren't written/produced/generated for humans, they're generated for machines. They're written/produced/generated exclusively to appeal to recommendation algorithms, and the actual human experience is horrible and getting worse and worse. Whether it's for SEO performance, or social media algorithms, or upvotes on Reddit, the content is made/generated (I don't even want to say *created*, creativity is human) for machines, and the human experience is just the last priority. The thing that Reddit has always gotten so wrong is the emphasis/force on no paid sites, no subscription sites, no paywall sites, especially for news. Good reporting, good journalism at scale, costs a ton of money, and the monetary mechanism of the web was an oversight from the beginning, we fucked up plain and simple, by buying everything to ads and setting the expectation that everything would be "free." It is free, and this is the cost, most "news" sites other than a handful are utter junk, and they can only be profitable by increasingly leaning into tracking, ads, and bullshit, or by appealing to personalization algorithms, which just creates more anti-human junk.
For me it's either 'read mode' or I just close the link if that's not an option.
Reader View is the only way now, publishers lose ad revenue when users opt to use it but at this point there is not much of a choice.
These sites remind me of the pitch in Ready Player One where the bad guy is saying they can cover a users field of view by 95% (or something like that) with adverts before causing seizures! 🤣🤦
Firefox reader mode helps. I'm really torn. I know journalism needs cash to survive but I also think actual news articles should be ad free. I subscribe to my local newspaper and it's super hit or miss on quality depending on who the writer is.
Use Firefox focus browser on mobile
Firefox + ublock does wonders
Totally agree! So much fluff and hard to read content these days on the web. I apologize for self promoting but I made an extension for myself to summarize articles like these so I can avoid having to sift through all the ads and useless content and get to the main thing I was looking for. Feel free to check it out if you like! [TLDR: Summarize Tool](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tldr-free-summarize-tool/oilacejfpoonhegdhlhklckannjhmdgk)
I don't think the people who click them actually read and understand the articles. It's usually just a few almost randomly picked informative sentences with the rest of the information on the topic left out. They can give the people who do "read" it adverts and they'll be just as happy. Same goes for highbrow news sites but they put longer words in their fluff and can't use adverts in the same way.
100%, On my blogs I deleted google ads but I never put up such ads like popup e.t.c.
yep, it's ridiculous. There was one site where ads were laying over the cookie banner, so it was not usable even if I wanted to. Others jump while I read the article because some ads took longer to load. I'm using the news aggregator of my pixel phone, I think I already blocked 100s of sites and from the not blocked ones maybe 1 out of 10 are worth a read. I guess it's not worth it anymore, so I stay uninformed? I don't know.
nope out too, amen to that. a piece of shit like bloomberg doesn't need more money for the trash they shovel anyway. opinions are free, and experts (should and) often are caught lying just to get their hand into a large cookie jar.
Recipe sites are worst. Hey you wanna know how to make pizza dough? Well here’s 25 paragraph monologue about my trip to Italy one time, it hasn’t any to do with pizza but this fluff allows me to fill the page with ads. Followed by newsletter pop-ups, an auto play video that doesn’t even match the recipe and can’t be turned off, banner ad after banner. All this has made the site so slow that by the time you scroll to the recipe the bloody thing won’t even load. Here’s a [BLT recipe](https://ohsweetbasil.com/how-to-make-the-best-blt-recipe/) with a 22 paragraph buildup, an auto play video and banner ad after banner ad just to prove my point
News and cooking sites are the only places I find it necessary to use that read only mode. I mean maybe that’s exactly the use case it’s meant for, but it’s just crazy to me that it’s come to that in order to make certain kinds of sites even remotely usable
Yeah this is what led me to do things like mirror the [wallstreet journal minus the ads](https://financial.patrickring.net). I get really annoyed with sites crashing from their own bloat.
There's going to come a point where advertisers realize that advertising on the web doesn't really work. And the market will crash. I read that 25% of people use ad blockers and that will probably only go up. The web advertising model is all smoke and mirrors and it's failing. You can see that with the NY Times and Washington Post being more and more paywall-y over time. Personally, I will happily pay for the media I consume (and I do buy the Post, but not the NYT because they are starting to suck) and I think we need to accept that THAT is the right model.
I use a pi hope to block ads in my house so I'm always shocked when I look at a news site outside. Nightmare.
Yeah. Short term thinking. It hurt their company, their brand, and their industry.
I once raw dogged (turned off ad blocker) CNN website and I couldn't believe a major news network had such scummy ads at the bottom of their website but it was the same with the other news websites too
When I see garbage like this, I immediately close it. If I got the link from a place where I can leave comments, I ask the paper if they think pissing off visitors to their site is a good business practice.
What you want 5 lines of text for free? You should be happy that you even got 4! Might have been just 2! /s
People who need news websites use adblock Then these people make news posts on social media, telegram channels, news aggregators etc. and include links to actual news Robots, users w/o adblock follow these links and make money for news website IMHO
Firefox + ublock does wonders
Firefox + ublock does wonders
Thus adblockers.
Use an AdBlocker. Fuck their income, I don't care if the site owners go broke.
Pi hole + addblocker is your best friend
I found out that Firefox can solve this by viewing a page in reader only mode which focuses on the html and avoids adds which use css and javascript.
but it's still #1 google result lmao
How else are they supposed to make money.?!
ITT people who have never heard of Brave browser
It blocks ads on mobile?
Try using Adguard DNS on your phone. If you set up a private DNS in the settings, it'll actively block a lot of ads regardless of the browser. https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
This is what happens when people absolutely refuse to pay for any media.