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Comment by WhyNotHugo | Hacker News Reader

Link redirects me to `guce.advertising.com`, which my adblock blocks. If I unblock it, it redirects to yahoo, where I have to agree with YAHOO's terms of use, and only after agreeing I'm taken to techcrunch's home page.

When did the web become such an unusable place?

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You’ve got a point here about the complexity of the web or maybe advertising models, but it’s hard to criticize usability when you have installed a browser plugin that breaks it. Use the thing or don’t, but don’t complain when your own reassembly of the product doesn’t work.

The web is a lot more unusable WITHOUT adblockers.

In any case, even disabling the adblocker resulted in multiple redirects and having to accept multiple privacy policies before seeing the article.

The web became an unusable place when people who wrote for print media and had mortgages to pay started putting their content online. People wanted to read their stuff, and they wanted money, but people wouldn't pay them directly to read their stuff. So they got sponsors who pay them to write the articles, and those sponsors want you to look at ads.

> people wouldn't pay them directly to read their stuff

Has this actually been tested? How many blogs have a "drop $0.10" button at the end of the article or anything alike?

I wouldn't mind paying for good content, but it seems that companies would rather try to track users than aspire to just get money.

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