Regardless of what you think of a particular news organization, I think this is a sign of things to come. (See YouTube’s experiment with warning users using ad blockers).
This will probably just make me use various sites a lot less.
Which, in all honesty, is probably good for my overall mental health.
I sort of suspect this is where we are headed. I'm also not sure it's a bad thing; people derive benefit from playing in a sandbox, and as long as the sandbox isn't the only option, there's value in providing it for those who don't, won't, or can't play the old 'net game of being a full peer online (with all the benefits of "publish whatever" and all the ills of "your machine was compromised? Sounds like a you problem").
No, I want to live on a sanitized network SKIP AD IN 15 SECS that only allows happiness and suppresses hate.
I also want folks to be able to say anything on the internet, and to have agency in filtering content served to me. I’ll also pay sites that don’t abuse my humanity, to support them. Best of all worlds.
I don't think payment helps. They'll take your money and abuse you anyway. One phenomenon I've recently clued into is that of the "market-hostile business". Now that I understand that it is a thing which can exist, I see it everywhere.
There are businesses out there which have changed hands many times, and not just new owners purchasing them from the last. New boards of directors, new vice presidents hired, new managers. Just constant churn. And at some point in the (not necessarily recent) past, the people in charge were those that truly hated their customers. Hate of the "burning, eternal rage" variety. But they couldn't kill the golden goose either.
They still sell the stuff their customers want to buy. But they poison it. They fill it up with garbage. They make it worse in every way possible, right up to the point where this is still a deniable phenomenon. See it alot in media... there's some show or franchise or genre that you like. But the people producing the show hate it. They think it's low-brow. They give the laziest effort possible. They fight with the few on the production crew who enjoy it. In many cases, getting them fired.
Many other brands and products are like this though. And if you pay them for it, they don't love you for being a loyal customer. They resent you for being a chump. And there's nothing to be done about this.
Not only old businesses, watch Peter Thiel's "competition is for losers":
I hate the phrase "facts don't care about your feelings." It's default-offensive and trite. It's also a little untrue; human beings filter their comprehension of facts through emotion all the time, and a huge category of "facts" are arbitrary social norms where the only reason they are what they are is feelings.
... that having been said, I feel like if people were going to want that, we wouldn't have seen Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok (even Blogger, MySpace, and LiveJournal, ultimately) take off the way they did. It is easier than ever before to host your own content, run your own blog from a static (or dynamic) site generator, and set up your own database of comments that you will moderate.
Almost nobody wants any of that. They want someone else hosting. They want the amount of time they spend doing sysadmin shit to be zero. They definitely don't want to be the front line of comment moderation, where everything from the most well-crafted put-down that will sit with them for days to actual child pornography will be their responsibility to filter.
I don't have an answer. In fact, I think the answer is "stop trying to force it." Let there be a less-free Internet for those without the time and jealously guard the more-free Internet for those willing to do the pain and toil of being independent. The only other alternatives I see are put up a bunch of law around this space (which just cedes the power from unaccountable corporations to governments that become increasingly unaccountable as their jurisdiction grows, and the jurisdiction scope needed to police the Internet is "global")... Or solve the problem from the other end, roll the clock back to the "good old days" when the 'net fit in a bathtub and could be moderated by gentlemen's agreements and peers... And start handing out licenses to use that 'net, while everyone else just gets to live in the late-20th century forever.
But, yes, it's good your mental health to not visit those sites.
That's because everyone does tracking in the front end these days and it just gets blocked by Firefox users.
Safari/WebKit has more users than Firefox, AFAIK
A popular search engine like Google, or a less popular and freer, user privacy respecting search engine like DuckDuckGo, if you prefer not to use Google might help you get to stats other people have reported their websites getting, which is a rough approximation of plausible numbers. Those numbers will show you, without you having to use "snoop-phones" how many, approximately, people use Firefox. Which is about 2%.
Capitalism is like nature. It doesnt decide who is best, it decides who is left.
Try to find a browser you can actually pay for. At least you will know that incentives will be aligned.
My motivation was I was trying to make a crappy dual-core low-clock Celeron rooted Chromebox with 2GB of memory usable as a light-duty workstation, a couple years back. I didn't find anything not webkit-based that I tried light enough to even be in the running. Firefox wasn't remotely close (nor were close Chrome-derivatives). Even light webkit browsers were practically limited to 1-3 windows/tabs depending on the weight of the pages, before they got unusable.