The internet is unusable

[usonian]

Medium, archived at: https://archive.is/2025.01.31-151534/https://uxdesign.cc/the-internet-is-unusable-2666a31f96d1

Summary of a righteous rant.
In pursuit of marketing dollars, increasing stock prices and filling shareholder wallets, it’s been broken beyond repair. ... These days, it’s just a funnel to get us, the online herd, plugged into the machine so we can be blasted with an advertising assault on the eyes.

We’ve reached the point where the Internet — once a tool that offered us the entire world of information at our fingertips — is now completely unusable.

The root cause is adverting, and it’s gotten so bad that it’s being called the ‘adpocalypse.’



Almost every website I go on now is bursting at the digital seams with adverts. It’s bad enough on desktop; on mobile it’s a nightmare. There are banners along the top, bottom, and down each side of the page, often animated to maximize distraction. Websites use parallax scrolling so they can add an entire layer of adverts that sits below what you’re reading, popping in and out as you scroll.


We get the random pop-up one’s that interrupt you and then make you wait a designated amount of seconds before you can click away or try to prompt you to add your email address for a shitty PDF download of some bullshit productivity hacks. We get blasted with ads begging us to click, telling us we’re “missing out” or that we “won’t see this deal ever again,” a practice known as Confirmshaming. There are the infuriating ones that open the App Store in a separate window. The other day, I reched a whole new level of ad rage — I encountered a full-screen video ad that started playing automatically and offered me no way of escaping. There was literally no option to exit it or go back to what I was reading. It seemed like the tipping point. All I could do was lose my temper, consider destroying my laptop, and close the website

Something new? No. But adverspammers now have AI in their arsenic arsenal.

Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it.
George Monbiot
2011
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advertising-poison-hooked

[rog]

1. There may be other ways around this, but I use ...

... 'uBlock Origin' with Firefox. I have some issues with Firefox, and I know some folks are dead set against it, but it's my default browser, both on Linux and Windows, and also on my Android phone. Chrome, the default browser on Android, will not let you install any extensions or add-ons.

Using 'uBlock Origin', I rarely see ads, even on youtube. On the rare occasion when it temporarily fails (usually closing and restarting Firefox fixes it), I am stunned by the landscape I see ... exactly what you describe -- ad on top of ad. There's literally just about no room for any content at all.

Sometimes I wish I didn't remember what the internet was like when I first got on in the late 1980s. This was pre-World Wide Web, when all the sites were academic sites and you had multiple (more or less) reliable resources available through Gopher, Veronica, Jughead, etc, etc. You got on by using telnet to access university computers. In the early days of the WWW, the browser (LYNX) was entirely text-based. Everything started going downhill fast when they figured out how to embed images and video ... javascript sealed the deal, and here we are.

Anyhow, uBlock Origin is working now, and it's maintained 24/7. We'll see how long that lasts.

[usonian]

2. Yes, I use ublock origin on Firefox.

Giving away your age. I put up one of the first WWW sites, at Berkeley, with CERN httpd.

The “dot com” did in the fun internet.

So, I later went to work for Sun, “The dot in dot com”.

Never a dull moment.

[hunter]

3. I block internet advertising that flashes, moves, pops up, or make noise. I don't see any ads on our television.

If I can't make the ads go away from a place I simply don't go there.

On DU I buy a star to make the ads go away.

I have an ad free subscription the The Guardian.

I use uBlock Origin for all sites I don't regularly visit

My wife and I usually subscribe to two or three no-ad streaming services, Lately we're only watching the no-ad version of Netflix and DVDs. We quit all traditional television -- broadcast, cable, satellite -- in 2012.

[Hokie]

4. I use Brave browser on YouTube

It blocks all the ads except the in video ones that you have to manually skip. It used to be YouTube would try to block you if you were using Brave. In a few days Brave would always have a patch. Of late YouTube seems to have given up blocking or maybe their answer is the in video ads.

[LeftInTX]

6. Ad Block etc usually works on YouTube, but it goes in phases.

Sometimes it doesn't. Then a few weeks later it works again. YouTube ads have gotten really bad. However, last night I was listening to my playlist on my phone (there's no ad blocker on my phone) and the ads weren't too bad. (15 sec skip at the beginning)


A year or so ago, I decided to listen to my playlist while I was out walking. (MPR player had died) OMG, it was torture.