this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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Companies wonder why people use adblockers; this is my experience trying to read this article on mobile without an adblocker:
Picture of the outside of the building.
Three paragraphs, each composed of a single sentence.
Ad.
Two paragraphs, each composed of a single sentence.
Ad.
A teaser block trying to get me read another article on their site.
Ad.
A stock photo of a public bathroom with mirrors.
A teaser trying to get me to follow them on Google News.
A single sentence with eight words.
Ad.
Another sentence, which is a quote from a school admin.
Ad.
Two paragraphs, each consisting of one sentence each.
Teaser block trying to get me to read more articles on their site.
A stock photo of some social media platform logos.
A trending block with links to more articles on their garbage site.
Two more paragraphs, each consisting of one sentence each.
A distracting carrousel of images that are links to more articles on their site.
Two more paragraphs, one of which actually has two sentences!
Links to their social media.
Is that the end of the article? I think so, but I've missed things before, so better keep scrolling a bit just in case.
Related articles section.
Ad.
Ad that looks like a link to another article.
Ad that looks like a link to another article.
Ad that looks like a link to another article.
Link to another article.
Ad.
Comments section.
Editors pick section of articles.
Ad.
Ad.
Okay, pretty sure I've read the entire article now, but let's keep scrolling to see how far this bullshit goes.
Ad that looks like a link to another article.
Ad that looks like a link to another article.
Link to another article.
And then the following pattern SIX times:
Ad.
Link to another article.
Link to another article.
Link to another article.
Ad that looks like a link to another article.
FINALLY a whole bunch of links to other articles, some of which are promoted by Taboola, whatever the fuck that is.
And the entire time there was a red popup for "breaking news" taking up 1/5 of the screen.
For those keeping track at home, the article was a total of fourteen sentences, one photo of the school, and two stock photos. And no photo of a bathroom without mirrors.
Thankfully, most of the ads were quite well hidden on my Firefox mobile with the ublock origin addon, but still plenty of bullshit to trawl through.
Are there any extensions which can filter out that "Read more", and "follow us" crap?
I suppose the last one isn't bothersome, but the first two are still annoying.
I run a pihole and see basically the same thing you do. I think the stuff that’s left is built in, hosted on their own domain. If that’s the case, probably not blockable across the board.
With a quick search I found an extension called ‘block “read more”’, but it’s 2 star with 2 users so… idk maybe there are better ones but it looks like that extension had to be done for each website, rather than universally, so it’s a very small list.
If you don’t mind doing a bit of work for it, and the complaint stems from the same set of websites, there’s an extension called element blocker that lets you block whatever you want from a given website, like chat popups and stuff.
Don’t look at it Marion!
(Seriously, I don’t think there is).