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The site guilted me into turning off my adblocker. I’m sympathetic to local media outlets. My god. That site is comically unusable. There is just no way to rea
by Hnrobert42 3y ago
The site guilted me into turning off my adblocker. I’m sympathetic to local media outlets.
My god. That site is comically unusable. There is just no way to read an their article in peace.
So when they, too, inevitably have to fold, let it be known, I tried.
- raverbashing 3y agoFunnily enough, I get the GDPR pop-up, agree to nothing and the site is readable
- Waterluvian 3y agoOh good gravy I just tried. It’s over 50% ads.
- spacemadness 3y agoEveryone involved should feel bad and really if this is the only way for them to figure out how to survive, they should just go out of business.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoMedia used to exist based off of classified ad sales, then tech companies absorbed all that cash flow. After that, most local media died.
- ant6n 3y ago> It’s over 50% ads. Like 1999…
- ce4 3y agoFirefox mobile's reader mode was usable
- samstave 3y agoUh, I have ublock origin and such... Site is clean as a whistle for me: (zoomed all the way out so you can see the whole page: https://i.imgur.com/I4EaG3A.png https://i.imgur.com/I4EaG3A.png - Edit: I appear to have “wooshed” the point… Sorry fam.
- thfuran 3y agoSo you didn't try at all.
- rajbot 3y agoIf you have an Apple News/One subscription you can read it as this link. Much more readable, and the publisher still gets ad revenue: https://apple.news/AlNrxUYEHQPGfrBna1YfVqQ https://apple.news/AlNrxUYEHQPGfrBna1YfVqQ
- annexrichmond 3y agoI had to delete Apple News because Apple was forcibly inserting its own channels that I could not remove or say “Not Interested”, which you can normally do for all other channels. I recall they were BLM and COVID19; sorry that I don’t want politics shoved in my face every day. Why can’t I choose what I want to see?
- juunpp 3y agoBecause Apple, not you, owns your phone.
- 0_____0 3y agoGoogle news is the same. At some point it decided that I must follow every sniff and fart coming from a certain electric car tycoon, and there was no negotiating.
- rajbot 3y agoYou can. First you can just use it like Reader Mode. Safari -> share menu -> open in News for any HN link you click on that has too many popups. Or, in the News following tab, click Edit, remove all “suggested by Siri” topics, and block low-quality channels. I blocked the National Review, WSJ, USA Today, and People Magazine and my feed got a lot better.
- annexrichmond 3y agoNo, you can’t remove the “Special Coverage” section, which you can’t unsee in the macOS app. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251600920 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251600920
- diebeforei485 3y agoI believe Firefox/Mozilla use sfgate as a stress test.
- ElfinTrousers 3y agoIt was sure a good stress test for my eyes.
- paulirish 3y agoSFGate has been a notorious test site for Chrome web performance folk too. Here's a perf audit from 8 years ago: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1viSX0vNYPeDB9iWLaOyAg6Fa6u0gufVB4lmbcrWhYSM/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1viSX0vNYPeDB9iWLaOyAg6Fa...
- pietro72ohboy 3y agoNLtimes.NL can serve as a European contemporary for this stress test. Absolutely unusable without an adblocker.
- ElfinTrousers 3y agoI tried too. Awful. And the biggest chumbox I've ever seen in my damn life at the bottom.
- juunpp 3y agoThat's because you haven't tried Mercury News.
- r00fus 3y agoReader mode every time.
- Sebb767 3y agoThis is functionally no different to using an adblocker for the site.
- faangsticle 3y agoIts better because it gets rid of crap layout
- r00fus 3y agoI use it in conjunction with an adblocker. For sites that I repeatedly visit, I pay for them. Substacks and local newspapers for example. As a one-off if I can’t adblock or reader-mode, it ain’t worth my time.
- mucle6 3y agoI tried turning off Adblock and wow.... I didn't even mind the ads, but the loading just never stopped. Some of the article images wouldn't load because they were trying to load so many ads.
- digitalengineer 3y agoEuropean here. I clicked the privacy pop-up and did not accept the ad and tracking cookies. No ads..
- benzible 3y agoSFGate was originally the online version of the SF Chronicle, starting in the 90's. For whatever reason, they wanted a distinct online brand. Now the online version of the Chronicle is hosted at sfchronicle.com and SFGate continues on under the same ownership (Hearst) as its own clickbaity thing. Not much in the way of original reporting.
- efdee 3y agoInteresting. I turned off my adblocker out of curiosity but I'm not seeing anything special. Coming from the EU though, maybe that has something to do with it.
- thebigwinning 3y agoYou owe them nothing and the guilt you feel is an exploitation of your courtesy.
- Melting_Harps 3y ago> My god. That site is comically unusable. There is just no way to read an their article in peace. Lurk more f..... https://archive.is/JngjW https://archive.is/JngjW
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Animats 3y agoTry the EFF's Privacy Badger. I didn't see any ads there. Just click "Continue without Disabling".
- scarface_74 3y agoI had no problems using 1Blocker for iOS in Safari and no guilt trip or ads.
- getcrunk 3y agoMan if y’all think this is bad try tom’s hardware. It usually crashes chrome on iOS for me after reloading on its own
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hnarn 3y ago”Show Reader” in iOS does a great job of showing you the actual content without having to interact with all that garbage — I presume the “reader” functionality in most other browsers does too.