Comment by hilbert42
1 day ago
These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort.
Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access.
I no longer think about it as by now my actions are automatic. Rarely do I find an important story that's just limited to only one website, generally dozens have the story and because of syndication the alternative site one selects even has identical text and images.
My default browsing is with JavaScript defaulted to "off" and it's rare that I have to enable it (which I can do with just one click).
I never see Ads on my Android phone or PC and that includes YouTube. Disabling JavaScript on webpages nukes just about all ads, they just vanish, any that escape through are then trapped by other means. In ahort, ads are optional. (YouTube doesn't work sans JS, so just use NewPipe or PipePipe to bypass ads.)
Disabling JavaScript also makes pages blindingly fast as all that unnecessary crap isn't loaded. Also, sans JS it's much harder for websites to violate one's privacy and sell one's data.
Do I feel guilty about skimming off info in this manner? No, not the slightest bit. If these sites played fair then it'd be a different matter but they don't. As they act like sleazebags they deserve to be treated as such.
It’s hard to beat https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org (I imagine their own employees likely use these as well) or https://newsminimalist.com
Love both of them. CNN has become a bit "left-leaning Fox News" for my taste, though.
If Al Jazeera or BBC had a similar text only site, that would be best. I really love the different perspectives.
I mostly use brutalist.report to find the articles, then deal with them on a case by case basis.
> CNN has become a bit "left-leaning Fox News" for my taste, though.
Don't worry, it'll be just like the real Fox news after the Paramount merger.
At least the BBC has RSS feeds for its stories, which avoids having to go through the dire news front page.
I also love https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news
They also compress the hell out of the images, so it all loads shockingly well on poor connections.
Ahh, I love them. The fact that they are fast, give you the exact thing you are looking for without any other noise is just amazing!
https://lite.cnn.com seems to load 200KB of CSS
27KB of CSS for me, but only if I switch off uBO. Otherwise, there's no CSS. I think the CSS is just for the cookie popup styling.
Comes to about 2MB for me, which seems to be because they've added the EU cookie policy compliance bloat (probably from a third-party). Once that's agreed to via cookies the page is 47KB.
Cannot reproduce on my machine
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I’m honestly dumbfounded that these exist
In the past some site had light versions, but I haven’t come across one in over 10 years
Makes me wonder if this isn’t just some rogue employee maintaining this without anyone else realizing it
It’s the light version, but ironically I would happily pay these ad networks a monthly $20 to just serve these lite pages and not track me. They don’t make anywhere close to that from me in a year
Sadly, here’s how it would go: they’d do it, it be successful, they’d ipo, after a few years they’d need growth, they’d introduce a new tier with ads, and eventually you’d somehow wind up watching ads again
a lot of these are internal tools that they just haven't disabled access to for whatever reason. old.reddit still exists for whatever reason.
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> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription and you have an ad blocker running to deny any revenue generation opportunities.
Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going to contribute revenue anyway. You’re doing them a very tiny favor by staying away instead of incrementally increasing their hosting bills.
> They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription
I subscribe, and yet they still bombard me with ads. Fuck that. One reason I don’t use apps is that I can’t block ads.
>Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going to contribute revenue anyway.
It's closer to 30% that block ads. For subscription conversion, it's under 1%.
It's a large reason why the situation is so bad. But the internet is full of children, even grown children now in their 40's, who desperately still cling to this teenage idea that ad blocking will save the internet.
> They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription ..
That's not true I had a subscription for multiple years. I canceled it because they
A. Kept trying to show me bullshit ads, B. The overall deterioration of the quality of the content especially the opinion section.
I'm about to go full cycle.
For a while it looked like companies were going to offer a good product at a fair price. I started getting a few subscriptions to various services.
Then all of those services got enshitefied. I got ads in paid accounts, slow loads, obvious data mining, etc.
Paying for services now often offers a degraded experience relative to less legitimate methods of acces.
What is your most hated service? There must be people here looking for a new product to create.
That's why we need to spread the word and get more people using adblockers. It's not even a hard sell - the difference is so striking, once it has been seen, it sells itself, even for the most casual users.
"Why would you feel guilty for not visiting a site you’re not paying for and where you’re blocking ads?"
This isn't a simple as it sounds, in fact it's rather complicated (far too involved to cover in depth here).
In short, ethics are involved (and believe it or not I actually possess some)!
In the hayday of newsprint people actually bought newspapers at a cheap affordable price and the bulk of their production was paid for by advertisements. We readers mostly paid for what we read, newspapers were profitable and much journalism was of fair to good quality. Back then, I had no qualms about forking out a few cents for a copy of the NYT.
Come the internet the paradigm changed and we all know what happened next. In fact, I feel sorry about the demise of newsprint because what's replaced it is of significantly lesser value.
In principle I've no objection to paying for news but I will not do so for junk and ads that I cannot avoid (with magazines and newspapers ads are far less intrusive).
So what's the solution? It's difficult but I reckon there are a few worth considering. For example, I mentioned some while ago on HN that making micro payments to websites ought to be MUCH easier than it is now (this would apply to all websites and would also be a huge boon for open source developers).
What I had in mind was an anonymous "credit" card system with no strings attached. Go to your local supermarket, kiosk or whatever and purchase a scratchy card with a unique number to say the value of $50 for cash and use that card to make very small payments to websites. Just enter the card's number and the transaction is done (only enter one's details if purchasing something that has to be delivered).
That way both the card and user remain anonymous if the user wishes, also one's privacy is preserved, etc. It could be implemented by blockchain or such.
The technical issues are simple but problems are obvious—and they're all political. Governments would go berserk and cry money laundering, tax evasion, criminal activity, etc., and the middlemen such as Master and Visa cards would scream to high heaven that their monopolies were being undercut.
In short, my proposal is essentially parallels what now exits with cash—I go to a supermarket and pay cash for groceries, the store doesn't need to know who I am. It ought to be no big deal but it isn't.
It seems to me a very simple micro payments system without name, rank and serial number attached would solve many of the internet payment problems.
Sure, there'll always be hardline scavengers and scrapers but many people would be only too happy to pay a little amount for a service they wanted, especially so when they knew the money was going into producing better products.
For example, I'd dearly love to be able to say purchase a copy of LibreOffice for $10 - $20 and know there was enough money in the organisation to develop the product to be fully on par with MSO.
Trouble is when buying stuff on the internet there's a minimum barrier to overcome and it's too high for most people when it comes to making micro payments (especially when the numbers could run into the hundreds per week).
I cannot understand why those who'd benefit from such a scheme haven't at least attempted to push the matter.
Oh, and that's just one aspect of the problem.
Something about these JS-heavy sites I haven't seen discussed: They don't archive well.
Websites that load a big JS bundle, then use that to fetch the actual page content don't get archived properly by The Wayback Machine. That might not be a problem for corporate content, but lots of interesting content has already been lost to time because of this.
Depending on the site, unfortunately that might be interpreted as a feature and not a bug.
> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
Seems like a gross overestimation of how much facility people have with computers but they don't want random article readers anyway; they want subscribers who use the app or whatever.
> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
No.
"savvy" web surfers are a rounding error in global audience terms. Vast majorities of web users, whether paying subscribers to a site like NYT or not, have no idea what a megabyte is, nor what javascript is, nor why they might want to care about either. The only consideration is whether the site has content they want to consume and whether or not it loads. It's true that a double digit % are using ad blockers, but they aren't doing this out of deep concerns about Javascript complexity.
Do what you have to do, but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us.
"…but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us."
Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues. The profitability of newspapers and magazines has been slashed to ribbons over the past couple of decades and internet revenues hardly nudge the graphs.
Internet beneficiaries are all new players, Google et al.
Sure, but GP’s still right: savvy internet users are a rounding error in volume … and thus revenue as well. So whatever forces are enshittifying news websites, they’ll not reconsider because power users complain.
> We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access.
Where do you trust to read the news? Any newsrooms well staffed enough to verify stories (and not just reprint hearsay) seem to have the same issues.
The AP and Reuters are well-staffed and have functional websites. The sites aren’t great (they’ve been afflicted with bloat and advertising along with most outlets, just at a marginally lower rate), but they are at least usable.
I don't understand all these sites with moving parts even with muted soon, like if everything was a collection of GIFs. NYT followed this path and started to insert muted clips preheminently on their page one, very very annoying.
Do you think youtube will continue to make it possible to use alternate clients, or eventually go the way of e.g. Netflix with DRM so you're forced to use their client and watch ads?
YouTube is already actively blocking alternative clients. that's why yt-dlp needs a JavaScript runtime these days: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
They are also not averse to using legal means to block them. For example, back when Microsoft shipped Windows Phone, Google refused to make an official YouTube client for it, so Microsoft hacked together its own. Google forced them to remove it from the store: https://www.windowscentral.com/google-microsoft-remove-youtu...
If Google were just starting YouTube today then DRM would likely be enforced through a dedicated app. The trouble for Google is that millions watch YouTube through web browsers many of whom aren't even using a Google account let alone even being subscribers to a particular YouTube page. Viewership would drop dramatically.
Only several days ago I watched the presenter of RobWords whinging about wanting more subscribers and stating that many more people just watch his presentations than watch and also subscribe.
The other problem YouTube has is that unlike Netflix et al with high ranking commercial content are the millions of small presenters who do not use advertising and or just want to tell the world at large their particular stories. Enforced DRM would altogether ruin that ecosystem.
Big tech will slowly enforce "secure browsing" and "secure OS" in a way that will make it impossible to browse the web without a signed executable approved by them. DRM is just a temporary stopgap.
It doesn't have to be that way, you can only push people so far before they riot. History has thousands of instances and many have been very ugly, 1789 and 1917 for instance.
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What does playing fair mean in this context? It would be one thing if you were a paid subscriber complaining that even paying sucks so you left, but it sounds like you’re not.
It is strange to hear these threats about avoiding websites from people who are not subscribers and also definitely using an ad blocker.
News sites aren’t publishing their content for the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing their visitor count go up. They’re running businesses. If you’re dead set on not paying and not seeing ads, it’s actually better for them that you don’t visit the site at all.
'Running a business' is not carte blanche to do whatever you like to get money, and it does not silence valid criticism. Businesses still exist in society and have to act accordingly. A primary mechanism that society has to enforce rules is criticism and shame.
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I am a paid subscriber to NYT and have been reading it paper / internet for 30+ years. It is an Enshittification winner in terms tracking and click bait. It doesn't feel like a serious news outlet anymore, feels like Huff Post or similar.
Yes this, I was a subscriber for about a decade even back then an adblocker was required for sane reading even with a subscription. I cant imagine what it looks like without an adblocker these days.
I'd like to answer that in detail but it's impractical to do so here as it'd take pages. As a starter though begin with them not violating users' privacy.
Another quick point: my observation is that the worse the ad problem the lower quality the content is. Cory Doctorow's "enshitification" encapsulates the problems in a nutshell.
If you have enough detail for a blog post I'd heartily encourage you to submit it.
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You're right, it means nothing. But it cuts two ways. These sites are sending me bytes and I choose which bytes I visualize (via an ad blocker). Any expectation the website has about how I consume the content has no meaning and it's entirely their problem.
The NYT is comically bad. Most of their (paywalled) articles include the full text in a JSON blob, and that text is typically 2-4% of the HTML. Most of the other 96-98% is ads and tracking. If you allow those to do their thing, you're looking at probably two orders of magnitude more overhead.