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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 annoyan
by hilbert42 7mo 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.
- CalRobert 7mo agoDo 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?
- curtisblaine 7mo agoBig 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.
- hilbert42 7mo agoIt 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.
- curtisblaine 7mo agoTo be frank, I don't think the general public cares enough. And the other side is always ready to use children safety, foreign hackers and scam prevention as an argument. Nobody will riot over tech people losing the ability to run their own machines with their own software. It already happened to printers and, most importantly, phones. When 95% of normal activities happen on mobile devices anyway, they will come for computers. They'll run a campaign, they'll lobby politics, cartel chip vendors and start introducing small changes in hardware and OS that will make it always a bit more inconvenient running your own software. Until there's nothing left to defend, and the industry will move on.
- int_19h 7mo agoPeople riot when they can't make ends meet, not when they can't install an app on their phone. Rioting is very costly.
- hilbert42 7mo agoThe rioting in Washington a while back had little to do with people not being able to make ends meet. Many civil wars (including the US Civil War) came about for other reasons.
- int_19h 7mo agoUS Civil War was a civil war in name only. For all practical purposes, it was an interstate conflict. And yes, riots can be caused by other things too - e.g. religious riots. But whatever it is, people have to care a lot about it, enough so to be willing to put their own life and limb on the line. This is not one of those cases.
- hilbert42 7mo agoIf 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.
- int_19h 7mo agoYouTube 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 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-youtube-windows-phone-store https://www.windowscentral.com/google-microsoft-remove-youtu...
- alpinisme 7mo agoWhat 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.
- hilbert42 7mo agoI'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.
- curtisblaine 7mo agoYou'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.
- Aurornis 7mo agoIt 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.
- appreciatorBus 7mo ago> 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.
- hilbert42 7mo ago"…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.
- zbentley 7mo agoSure, 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.
- reaperducer 7mo agoLikely not, but they are over their lost revenues. NYT's revenue and subscription base are both increasing quite well. Ad revenue was up 20%, and profit was up 26% in Q4. Revenue was over $700,000,000. 12,300,000 people pay for the New York Times.
- hilbert42 7mo agoNYT is perhaps an exception for well understood reasons. However, my local newsagent sells only a fraction of the magazine titles (conservatively 25%) of what it sold two to three decades ago. Many of those absent publications haven't transitioned to online but have ceased publication altogether. Moreover, daily newspapers (the ones that have survived) are only about a third (or even less) as thick as they used to be in the 1990s, their classified ads are now almost nonexistent. And broadsheet format newspapers were kill off at the same time for the same reasons. The internet has been devastating for the industry, ipso facto, the loss of revenues - both for physical print and online - has resulted lower journalistic standards hence the shithouse mess the publications industry is in today.
- keane 7mo agoIt’s hard to beat https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org (I imagine their own employees likely use these as well) or https://newsminimalist.com https://newsminimalist.com
- TheMode 7mo agohttps://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com seems to load 200KB of CSS
- tomcatfish 7mo agoCannot reproduce on my machine
- goodmythical 7mo agosimilar for me. homepage: 47.25 kB transferred with articles averaging ~70kB with ublock origin having refreshingly zero impact.
- TheMode 7mo ago200KB uncompressed* You can download the homepage html see the style block.
- benbristow 7mo agoComes 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.
- aembleton 7mo ago27KB 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.
- gxs 7mo agoI’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
- Aurornis 7mo ago> 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.
- jkestner 7mo ago> 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.
- reaperducer 7mo agoI subscribe, and yet they still bombard me with ads. Fuck that. Dead trees FTW. I'm lucky enough to live somewhere that gets dead trees for NYT, WSJ, local rag, and more. I value news, so I pay for it, and it's still less than I spend on coffee each month. The best part: The newspaper ends. No everscroll zombie addiction.
- aprentic 7mo agoI'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.
- gzread 7mo agoWhat is your most hated service? There must be people here looking for a new product to create.
- emodendroket 7mo ago> 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.
- hahajk 7mo ago> 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.
- zbentley 7mo agoThe 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.
- ajxs 7mo agoSomething 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.
- userbinator 7mo agoDepending on the site, unfortunately that might be interpreted as a feature and not a bug.
- username223 7mo agoThe 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.
- doe88 7mo agoI 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.