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 an escalating game. 95% of the shit is dealt with by a native browser feature or extension. But that last 5% can get very ugly very quickly.
And the longer the escalation game goes on, the more likely you are to make a casual mistake - clicking on the wrong part of a screen or getting fooled by a deceptive link or being sucked by an ad or just feeling curious/horny enough to finally see whether there’s really pussy in that bio.
For folks who pirate, it can be even more dangerous, depending on how malicious some counter-piracy agency wants to get.