I set up a pi-hole on my home network. At least at home I see a lot less ads.
I had this yesterday on my phone. The video was like half an inch wide and silent.
What’s the purpose of this? It also had some banner at the bottom, so I’m only have to use 30% of the screen to actually read the article.
The web has become such garbage.
I’m getting to the point where I just want to read … once I get onto a site, I skip the ads and just read (most of the time I get limited ads because I have ad blocker) … but if the ads, images, display is making it hard to read, I turn on read mode and get rid of all the clutter … if the site was purposefully designed to not allow me to use read mode … turn off the tab and move along to the next link.
If the site has somehow bypassed ad block and now shows ads, floating images, floating videos, banners or other elements … if I can’t get to the content I came to see, I turn off the tab and move on to the next site. I’m no wasting my time on these dumb sites.
absolutely. Since the advent of the YouTube gameplay guide, I have done my best to not touch multimedia guides and forcibly put it into text. You can even extract YouTube closed captions for accessibility reasons via hidden APIs. Give me plaintext.
Until search engines punish shit like this it will continue to get worse. Unfortunately search engines typically also own the ad networks.
add to that that google turned to crap nowadays and just pushes meaningless bot generated content in the top pages… it’s getting almost impossible to use it to find stuff. not sure about other engines because I only started recently being search-engine-curious, so no idea how they were like before
Been using duck duck go for the last year or two. It’s maybe a little better on the bot & blog spam, but not much
Google beats DDG by a mile when you’re searching something super vague like “movie where Statue of Liberty gets slime sprayed inside”
Ghost busters 2?
Yeah that’s what I was thinking of. Is there another? lol
I’ve also noticed some sites displaying totally unrelated videos above their news articles. Extremely weird
Google got in trouble recently for running ads on these videos. Advertisers would pay for a YouTube ad and it would only run on these random videos in the corner of the screen on click bait websites.
And “news” sites that intentionally delay the relevant images/videos to load after their ads and related stories, so users scrolling around for the only relevant content in the entire “article” see all the ads first.
Yahoo news is notorious for this. It’s like an ad after every paragraph and every paragraph is just one sentence.
