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Comment by newAccount2025 | Hacker News Reader

newAccount2025

I would feel more sad about this if the web wasn’t so rotten to begin with. On average, any random site is just trying to throw ads at you and harass you to subscribe and such.

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I have a particular disdain for “subscribe to our newsletter” modals. Especially when I’ve spent a sum total of less than 3 seconds looking at the webpage.

How such modals aren’t considered pop-ups is beyond me.

So you want websites to rely on traffic from Google instead of building their own newsletter? Interesting.

I want web pages to stand alone, not be part of a newsletter I'm meant to subscribe to. Maybe we could, shock horror, share links to individual good pages.

I don't mind newsletters but I'd prefer a public RSS feed and I absolutely detest unsolicited or otherwise unnecessary modals.

Adding a subscription form at the end of the article when the user is ready for the next task always made more sense to ne

The rot goes deeper, it is not just the ads. There is a some sort of search engine incentive where recent content is favored over good content so all web sites just dump what feels like generated garbage all the time. It has gotten to the point where if I search and there is a timestamp within the last two years on the result. I know it's garbage and will not click on it.

The answer is probably going over to kagi where you are the customer not the product.

Honestly, not all web sites, there are still good ones out there but the search engines never direct me to them. It is always just slop all day long.

That rot was the direct result of the ad economy that made Google all of its money. Now maybe if they hadn't done it then somebody else would have, but they did do it, and poisoned the well we all drink from.

A state that of course Google had absolutely nothing to do with at all.

Do you trust Google to do a better job?

I was trying to read some I/O news on some feckless Google news fan-blog.

By the time I got to the middle of the article: three massive banner ads (top, right, and bottom) were taking up more content than the text, there was an auto-playing video ad floating in the bottom right corner (overlapping most of one of the banner ads), and a "dynamic" ad in the middle of the text randomly started expanding/shrinking and glitching out making it impossible to actually read anything.

And this is one of the better experiences reading modern blog-alikes. Things are almost at sketchy porn-site levels.

Sad and pathetic...

to be blunt actual porn sites are hyper optimized and mostly have a polished user experience, even frontier level tech stuff going on at times. you know how onlie credit card payment came really alive? not judging, but I'd not throw corn into the edge of shitty tech by default

I would categorize most porn sites as sketchier on average than non-porn sites, but the gap is closing and that's an indictment of bloggers and the companies running them.

Early tech finds footing in porn (VHS, internet video, etc.) but that's a separate topic/conversation.

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