51–60 of 352 posts
I also built an extension to redirect the article to this website, so that before these actions annoy me, I could read the article in peace.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.
People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data." Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not…
The 49MB web page
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing. If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did…
Right before the web became a thing, Usenet was starting to become inundated with spam
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>If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. ? Where is this true? I pay for the NY Times. Logged in to my subscriber account, the front page is 68MB and has a giant Hume band ad filling 1/3 of the screen. Loading an article that contains about 9 paragraphs of text and I have a huge BestBuy banner ad filling the top, and then smaller banner ads interspersed between every pa…
It is true in a historical sense. People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue. This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here). On top of t…
The NYT makes about $2B per year from subscriber revenue. They make about $450M from digital ads over all properties. Obviously not all news orgs are the same, but the lead example of a shitty experience is the NYT, so weird that all of the rationalizations work so hard to diverge.
>tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it
"Tailoring" a digital page to not include ads for subscribers is so laughably trivial that this is a farcical claim. They aren't hand-laying out the content and removing ad upsets it or something. But they don't remove the ads because, gollum style, why shouldn't they force ads on me?
What we're talking about is classic enshittification, and every justification people make up is just cope. Indeed, the fact that I'm a subscriber makes me even more lucrative to advertisers, in a classic catch-22 that completely undoes all of the "just pay and you don't get ads in my invented scenario".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. ? Where is this true? I pay for the NY Times. Logged in to my subscriber account, the front page is 68MB and has a giant Hume band ad filling 1/3 of the screen. Loading an article that contains about 9 paragraphs of text and I have a huge BestBuy banner ad filling the top, and then smaller banner ads interspersed between every pa…
It is true in a historical sense. People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue. This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here). On top of t…
"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data." Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not…