Not really sure if this is the right place to post this but I just need it written somewhere for reference when people inevitably give me shit for “not reading the article”. Here’s the thing:

  1. The only thing you’ve provided is a clickbaity title and a link that tells me almost nothing about the content of the article. This actively makes me not want to click. Include some context in your post, or add it to the title. I know you’re not supposed to “editorialize” the title, but I think it’s fair to make an exception in the case of clickbait.
  2. Site is broken/paywalled/blocking my connection or otherwise inaccessible. If you link to an Archive site, those are inaccessible 100% of the time. If you send me to Nitter, it will almost certainly be either broken or block my access. Invidious is almost always broken. Even if you pay to share a NYT link with me, they will still refuse me access until I give them an email address. Sorry, not doing it, don’t care that much.
  3. The post/article you’ve shared is just a long drawn out post with gobs of unnecessary context about a 1 or 2 sentence Xeet or Reddit post. Just share the source content.
  4. The post/article you’ve shared does not contain a source of the information at all. It’s so patently absurd that we allow publications to get away with this. They often have a couple dozen links that go nowhere except back to their own page.
  5. Advertising. I do not consent to sharing my cookie information with your 1056 advertising partners. Nor do I want to click your pop-up banner to allow “strictly necessary” (whatever the fuck that means) cookies. If I use my adblocker to remove the cookie banner without actually giving them any permissions at all so I can see the God damn page, it often breaks the page . If my ad blocker misses it, I’m just leaving .
  6. I’m not spending 1 hour watching your clickbait video. YouTube incentivizes creators to make longer videos, and so the creators will fill them with a ton of bloat to lengthen them. YouTube also very often blocks me as well, prompting me to “sign in to confirm you’re not a bot”. I’m not doing it.

In short, the modern internet just fucking blows too much for me to even bother trying to work around all this bullshit. If you link to some obscure blog from a URL I don’t recognize, I’ll probably click and read it, because those are the only selfless unmonetized publications left.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

  • DougPiranha42English
    10·
    10 days ago

    I relate to this very much. Most media sites are unusable, and I don’t care, I am not lowering my standards. However, I kind of have a workaround when browsing lemmy on my phone:

    • click link
    • click share button in the app
    • select GoodLinks and save it
    • immediately close the page.
    • open GoodLinks. If the content loads and I can read it, I give it a go.
    • Otherwise, fuck them, I won’t read the article.

    There are headline styles and domains that I learned to avoid, because no real information can be expected to be found.