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.
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.
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.