• brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    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.

      • BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca
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        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.

        • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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          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.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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    ublocks’ annoyance lists blocks most of these warnings and more.

    i suggest you enable them as its sadly not on by default.

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      AdGuard does on iOS as well, as long as you’re using Safari. Doesn’t work on other browsers.

      I think AdGuard subscribes to the same annoyances list.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    The companies that keep these are ones that people in certain professions (like journalism and politics) have to use, so their corporate paymasters just pony up the subscription costs.

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    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.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        This is a really interesting little project, but there’s no background info available. Making this be a plugin for that ‘other’ site that most of us left would be great. I still surf there once in a while but no longer comment due to their policy changes.

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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        I’m not talking about a summarizer, I’m talking about a classifier. It just needs to identify which parts of the page are advertising and which are not.

        The point of such a tool is that it would read the web page in exactly the same way that a human would, so using trickery like pre-rendered images of text or funky unicode wouldn’t really change anything. If a human can read it then so can the AI.

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          That could be useful, if ads get to the point where removing their elements manually is no longer possible. I don’t think that’ll happen for a while though, as long as were still using HTML and Javascript which downloads and runs pages locally inside of our browsers.

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      An AI feature actually useful for consumers? Corporate overloards say no thx, let’s instead fill the net with more AI-generated SEO bullshit

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    I often wonder how news websites are supposed to survive. People (myself included) want unbiased news websites without paywalls and ads.

    How are they supposed to pay their staff?

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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      I’m fine with ads when they don’t take up half my screen or try and shift the page to to trick me into clicking on them, should a stuck with sidebar adds.

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      The best business model is one that allows users to pay what they want. Unfortunately that means most of these sites would go out of business, which is not what they want so they’ll keep forcing more and more invasive ads on people until the dam truly breaks.

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      The news sites that we have today are an inversion of what they should be. As a journalist, you wield tremendous power that is entrusted to you. Being able to set the narrative for millions of others is a privilege and, in fact, something that journalists should be paying to enjoy (e.g. footing the bill for web hosting).

      • pathief@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        I don’t agree with this take that people should pay to work. Journalist have family to feed as well.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      Subscription models. Some sites even combine some free articles with it, so that anyone can look into their works, but not necessarily everything. If it fits you, you get a subscription. Sort of the same way people would pay for their daily newspaper.

      It can be argued that “news” should be free, and there are some news site that are basically picking up AP/AFP/whatever and repost these, but actual journalism do requires work.

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      The honest answer are general fees like they are used for public broadcasters. It’s not a perfect system either and it requires significant effort to keep things neutral, but overall it seems to have the best results if you compare the quality of the outcome.

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        Who gets to collect revenue from the fees though? Where do you draw the line, are you cutting off independent journalism?

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          I’m not saying it’s an easy line to draw because you obviously don’t want to create incentives for bad journalism, but don’t want to make it too high of a bar to get into in the first place. I think you’d need to take things like the number of readers, the factuality of headings and content, the originality and the investigative value into account and be able to at least temporarily cut of bad outlets that spread fake/hate/… while at the same time ensuring that inconvenient truths make it out.

          It’s not an easy task, but I feel there is more room to get somewhere useful than with the current model of billionaire-owned media that outdo each other with rage-bait and inaccurate/misleading/falsly balanced/biased reporting…

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      News sites are in need of a paradigm shift.

      I think we might get to a system where summaries of news are free, but indepth articles and videos are paid.

      Oh and I believe that news sites should scrap subscription only models, I should be able to pay 1-2EUR for a single article that I want to read, with no risk of the payment being a subscription.

      Obviously subscriptions models should still be an alternative if the users want it.

      • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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        It’s nigh impossible to get many users to read past the headline. A summary is what 98% of people would actually want (and a good news story really is just a summary anyway) so the pay-through-rate would be so close to zero that I can’t see this model working.

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          That is a fair point, which just makes me wonder what else new services can offer that people will pay for…

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        I’d happily pay a nominal fee for news that was unbiased reporting of facts rather than opinion, and didn’t bombard me with ads or sell my data. It just doesn’t exist so I use aggregators to get a general vibe across sources.

        • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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          That’s easy to say, but when it comes to finding my credit card to type in my info for yet another news website, I can guarantee that I just don’t give enough fucks about any individual news story.

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      If your website is a business, you need to have a business model. If your business model isn’t sustainable, because it relies on not annoying visitors too much, maybe look for a better one.

      Btw, most newspages have adapted some 10 years ago already, showing the important news for free and additional details with paid account. A lot have the balance off tho.

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    Imagine if Newspapers were originally run like web site news

    If you wanted to read A paper, you would have had to buy a year’s subscription

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        I was trying to do a meme but it didn’t format :( I was going to say “do you want to continue without supporting us?” and put in a “you’re god damn right” breaking bad meme but I goofed it.

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    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.

    • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      You can say “bullshit” here, lemmy isn’t so concerned with making everything child friendly to appease advertisers like tiktok or youtube.

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      My less tech savy younger family members have learned to completely ignore ads, wait for the skip button and effectively avoid all the false skip buttons on account of playing mobile games with ads since they were babies. Advertisers have perfected the human brain of people who rawdog the internet to be incapable of retaining any information from any ad they see and finding skip buttons wherever they may be.

      From my personal observational account, i think I’ve only seen boomers and some older millennials ever interacting with ads. A gen alpha’s brain wouldn’t even remember an ad they just saw. They have perfected filtering them.

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        Ads work differently than that. At least good ones do.

        A good ad is almost imperceptible in presenting an idea to you. I have no doubt that people that are bombarded with ads that they say they “ignore” are still influenced over not having seen the ad at all

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    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.

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      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.

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        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.

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            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.

            • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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              Almost like I saw the issue and resolved it with knowledge rather than being a victim. If you want to continue to be an asshole about it, you can fuck off with being too stupid to see that shit is different when you can see through the BS ahead of time.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        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.

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          Yeah it really is choosing beggars. If you don’t want to look at ads to view content you should pay for it.

    • save_the_humans@leminal.space
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      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.

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      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.

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    Many moons ago I worked briefly on an ad prototype that aimed to replace banner ads, particularly those that sit in content with a single bottom overlay that would “smartly” unobstruct the viewing experience of the page. I was able to reduce a full page of horrible ads into a single box at the bottom of the page that could be closed whenever.

    The idea fell completely flat for various reasons, but some off the top of my head:

    • We have x advertisers that NEED to be on this page - how can we possibly get x on the page with just one box?
    • I don’t care if people use ad blockers, let them do their thing and we’ll target those that are happy to see ads
    • If people can easily close them, the reflex to close will mean no ad is glanced.

    The sad stat that came out was that obtrusive ads, the kind that used popups or automatically opened apps to download were VERY effective. I could prove that my ads were several times more effective than “normal” banner ads and popups, but when you could sell 10x the ads it didn’t matter if they were 10x more effective.

    My brief stint in advertising made me feel that for many years people didn’t care about those that blocked ads because there was always more shit to optimise or grow into. That has stagnated, so now the likes of Google are targeting “market share” by getting those that block ads to look at ads again. It won’t work, at all, but it feels like they’ve now optimised themselves into a hole.

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      It’s ironic, they depend on perpetual growth, which means the more efficient they get at growing, the faster they outgrow their effective markets and then end up in a position where they need to further optimize optimal positions.

      Sure, there’s probably smaller optimizations they could make, but they don’t just depend on growth but a certain % of growth.

      Cornering markets is the beginning of the end for businesses in our growth obsessed system.

    • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      What they’re “forgetting” is that those who block ads are more likely to say “fuck product X I’ll never buy it because of this ad” if forced to see an ad. (Well, they don’t care, they know, but they can still sell the “spot” so to speak because the advertisers themselves are dumb enough not know that it is just shooting themselves in the foot.)

      • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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        those who block ads are more likely to say “fuck product X I’ll never buy it because of this ad” if forced to see an ad.

        This demographic is much, much smaller than you probably assume it is–I mean ‘statistically insignificant’ small.

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          It very well may be bigger than you think, there’s a reason all the adblock users use adblock, and I know multiple people who do the same thing, and even more that while they may not say “fuck your ad I’ll buy your competitor,” they will only buy the product if they were already going to buy it through their own independent research or word of mouth from trusted friends.

          Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone that bought something from a popup or ad in the middle of a news article, maybe the first few “sponsored links” on google when they google the product anyway and were already looking for that amazon link, but that’s about it.

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    2 days ago

    Umm I was reading the comments, does nobody else go into the page’s HTML and delete the “pay now” popup. Usually deleting the code works for me. Let me know if you have a way that works for you!

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      I’d rather just leave if I hit a pay wall, I want to hit their metrics. but I have a huge amount of blocked elements via ublock and a handful of my own tampermonkey scripts for frequently used sites

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      I guess a lot of people have a strange aversion towards messing with the code of websites. Which is weird and dumb, it’s downloaded to your browser, it’s not running on their system, you’re free to mess with it as much as you want. Best to familiarize yourself with the Web developer tools, they can be an effective weapon against scammy sites which use deceptive methods like this.

      • InputZero@lemmy.world
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        Plus the worst thing that can happen is the webpage crashes, just hit reload and you’re back baby! It’s the safest environment to fuck around with code. A person would have to go out of their way to actually make a problem, maybe some random kid too. They get into everything.

    • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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      Generally the first thing I try is to hit ESC to stop a paywall script from running.

      If that doesn’t work I try pressing ctrl-A ctrl-C to copy the whole page as soon as I see something. This works on pages that load and are then hidden by a script, but you have to be quick. Then I open Notepad and paste. If this doesn’t work I’ll either try it once more and see if I can be faster or just say screw it, if they want to hide their content that bad I don’t need it. If it’s important to me google will usually find the same news or info somewhere else.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      That sounds like a lot of work. On sites where that work (which is not all of them, some are made by competent people), firefox “reading mode” just do the job.

    • Mr. Satan@monyet.cc
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      Depends, some pages don’t actually load the full content. Removing the paywall pop-up doesn’t really work then.

      • Lord Wiggle@lemmy.world
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        There are some websites you can use to avoid a paywall for a newspaper sites, sometimes even loading the otherwise hidden content when removing the paywall code or manually removing the paywall overlay using an ad blocker. I forgot the one I used to use, but I found a Reddit post about it.

    • Fleppensteyn@feddit.nl
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      Sometimes the reading mode bypasses paywalls and popups.

      Also make sure to block “annoyances” in uBlock.

      For the rest, I’m using the Nuke Anything extension.

    • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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      I’ve found this rarely works myself, due to them disabling other parts of the page, it’s less hassle to just find the article elsewhere

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      I used to do that but it turns out ublock has a option for that!! When u click on the ublock plugin there is a thunder symbol option which u can use to delete any element on the page. 🙃

      Edit: grammer mistake