alt Hacker NewsA lot of sites are essentially unreadable. There are things flashing at you, videos that autoplay, and the page will reload every 30 seconds and you lose your place.
And even if ads are respectful of user experience, there is a cognitive load to having the content you want to consume bombarded with unrelated content, especially when it’s trying to manipulate your emotions in some way.
Site owners don’t have a right to complain about people using ad blockers because their insistence on money over user experience is the reason everyone is installing them.
A lot of the time I just read sites in Reader Mode. There are no ads or distractions and it seems that site owners haven’t figured out how to block or detect it yet.
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its funny, I was trying to read something the other day, and I kept scrolling around and dismissing things, bobbing and weaving as the layout kept rearranging itself, doggedly trying to keep my place in the text.
and I realized its like a video game. we've actually been trained to try to keep your eyes on the actual content and go through a series of skilled motions just to be able to read it.
Some website exists where ads are entirely self-hosted (at worst they are affiliate links), and if you self-host your ads, ublock default filters don't catch them. Which is my response: host the ads you run yourself, then we'll talk.