41–50 of 326 posts
How did we get here? Does any and everything ultimately get absorbed by the marketing department?
Lol a few years ago I did a full-page capture of a web article. 60% of space is just ads, with actual content sprinkled among the minefield. The rate has only worsened since then.
In the past few years, the (very much suffering) principle local daily began falling far below this level. During the first wave of COVID-19, there were days with virtually no advertising at all.
On the one hand, that made for less distraction. But knowing that ad revenue is the mainstay of newspaper revenues, it was terrifying. The bleeding has continued, and the household eventually cancelled its subscription (something I'd long advocated for).
How did we get here? Does any and everything ultimately get absorbed by the marketing department?
Money. The web was great until someone said "I love this, but how do we make money with it?"
Idea: What if we had a search engine that would search only web sites without ads... It could have some type of "readability / usability / user friendliness rating" (score 0-10) ...
http://kakapo.susa.net:8080/cfs/
A similar (and in my opinion more viable) approach is Marginalia Search. This down-scores pages with a large number of scripts, among other heuristics.
Very bitter and to the point. I regularly wonder, do the people who want features like these installed — feedback form, "support chat" windows of various degrees of fakeness, subscription offer popups jumping in your face, and other absolutely baffling obstacles — really use their own web sites? Have they ever had to?
The marketing and sales departments never targeted the editorial/dev team of a website/company but directly the sales department or an upper management department of the potential new customer.
Chances are that the developers of those websites have to suffer those bullshit integrations as much as you do. And they also are asked to integrate them.
Honestly the site is way too performant to be realistic. All those buttons worked nearly instantly. I'm assuming you're missing the awaited tracking networking calls.