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8organicbits12/08/20240 repliesview on HN

I can't tolerate the web without an ad blocker, and it's not just ads. Pressure from ad networks to build sites that match advertising friendly structure makes every site overly verbose. Social media sites encourage cover images, so every blog post has an image (often unrelated, creepy, uncanny valley gen-AI). So cut-the-crap is valuable tool.

A different solution is to avoid content discovery mechanisms that funnel you to AI slop and other disfunction. I'd really like a search engine that could filter out sites with ads and affiliate links, because those sites have competing interests that lead to low quality or even harmful content.

Thankfully there's a sea of independent bloggers who don't care about revenue and just want to write. They build websites that are reader friendly and aren't painful to interact with.