This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
what is with p.i.p video everywhere. hate it. can't figure out how to block it. firefox
I run uBlock Origin for the browsers, and Pi-Hole for the network. Plus a wireguard VPN server that my phone connects to when I’m not on the home wifi for ad-blocking on the go.
I confess that I don't have the money to frequently donate and fund the services that I use (if they allow to donate) and recognize long time ago ads would be an okay alternative. but like everyone said, ads just became a lot more cancerous and have to block it. despite the shortcomings of the FBI, even they advise to use adblockers.
though I guess I just have to suck it up and donate once in a while as well.
We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)
Get the hell out with AI slop and constant dark marketing
Let the idiots live on Instagram and don't depend on their 'content'
We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)
You are probably not wrong, and we should be paying for a lot more things, but the genie is out of the bottle for many things here and it's difficult to roll that back.
For example, newspaper reading habits have changed a lot. Before the internet, you'd usually stick with one newspaper and that's it. Maybe two if you have too much money. You buy your newspaper and you read it front to back, probably even the topics you don't particularly care about.
Now it's often the other way round. Most people read news from quite a few sources (or often just follow links on social media and don't really even care for the publisher), but they don't read their news from virtual cover to virtual cover. Instead, they stick to the topics they care for, or maybe even read about the same thing in multiple publications, comparing what they have to say about it.
For this kind of newspaper reading, current forms of monetarisation don't really work. Most newspapers only offer subscriptions to the whole newspaper, often in the range of €5-15 per month. So if I were to pay for the ~20 newspapers that I read news from at least semi-frequently, that's €200-600 per month. No way I can or want to afford that.
Some allow you to pay per article, but that is usually pretty expensive too (€1-3 per article) and also I need to register to every single newspaper. That's not great either.
What I'd really like to see would be a industry-wide subscription. For example, I pay €10 per month and that allows me to read 100 articles per month across all newspapers. That would be really nice.
If we could figure out how to block ads on TV we might actually still bother posting for cable again. I'm the mean time, fuck 'em, they're too rich as it is.
“And Scott Messer, founder of publishing adtech consultancy Messer Media, added: “Dark traffic is unlike anything we have seen before. It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent.
“Publishers already face an existential-level threat in the face of AI reducing referral traffic. This is another slice that publishers cannot afford to lose.””
Good, I hope they go the way of the telegraph and whale oil salesman.
And the good old guilt tripping at the end, with the usual "quality content".
Well now, here's one that comes up under "other".
I started using an adblocker because I was using an elderly netbook for my studies. Ads junked up resource usage so much they used to freeze my laptop, and render most sites unusable.
Thanks to my adblock, I was able to finish my studies.
These days I use adblock because I object to virus-like code execution on my hardware. I tell others about adblock and get them set up to get free tea/coffee (and to watch their faces as sites become usable again).
The quiet mention of the 12ft.io being taken down is disturbing, it was a good tool for students to read article sources. This kind of change forces them to rely on AI (Gemini respects paywalks, Copilot just ignores them), which risks misinformation being spread!
Well no one ever had to sell me on how nice a fire smells.
Oh no. 🎻
Largest boycott in human history.
