"Why do people not read articles anymore and just go by what the headline says?"
The articles people are supposed to read:
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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I have said it before, and I'll say it again.
An adblocker is part on my security suite on my computer.
Ads can be hijacked to spread malware, and unless the site owner agrees to take both financial and legal liability for the possible dammage caused by their website I will never consider removing my adblocker.
If they agreed to take on the responsibility, I still wouldn't remove my adblocker, but I would consider it.
I mean, even CIA recommends the use of an adblocker for personal cybersecurity. And one or two other US agencies too.
The FBI too recommends adblockers as part of general web browsing security.
On top of three letter agencies, basically every cybersecurity expert that publishes a "basic tweaks" article recommends uBlock Origin.
What’s your preferred adblocker?
Ublock origin does a pretty solid job, I'm always mildly horrified when I have to use a browser without it. Is that really what other people see when they browse the web?
Yes. Average people don't know what an adblocker is or even that there are different browsers. Let alone know how to install an extension. We're fucked
NextDNS + uBlock
uBlock Origin
uBlock Origin is the gold standard, but you need something that supports the full version. Plain Chrome (and most forks) are not good enough.
Firefox, Helium, and/or Orion would be my top picks.
This is basically the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Better?
I don't understand how this serves the purpose of ad blocking.
taps temple
Ads won't load if browser literally can't load em.
Dillo is not a daily driver...but it is occasionally fun to pilot. Breaks on a lot of sites tho...but god damn is it a nice little browser.
uBlock Origin
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Unless the user is actively navigating, the header is dead weight. The header should hide on scrollDown and reveal on scrollUp. Let the content breathe.
This one I actually hate. Often I just want to scroll up a few pixels, either to satisfy a mild compulsion or to align the content so I can see most of it. This is completely ruined if the navbar pops back in. Leave it at the top of the page, where it belongs, not at the top of the viewport!
It really depends on the site for me.
What I really hate is a table that's multiple scrolls long where the header row doesn't follow.
IMO the header should stay at the top as part of the page. I know where it is, I'll scroll up to it if I need to.
Like you, I find a header appearing and hiding quite difficult in specific circumstances.
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I feel your pain. The really good ones plan for this, some pop up immediately when you scroll up and that sucks. The proper thing to do (imo) is to wait for the user to scroll 80% of the viewport back up, only then letting it begin to slide in, and have it slide in at a rate 1/2 of the page scroll. I do like having it easily available, but it should feel like it's trying to stay out of the way.
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If you miss how the web was before everything became Plattform, this might be a good place to drop kagis small web initiative: https://kagi.com/smallweb
I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?
I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.
It makes me glad for having been born when I was. I am a younger Millennial, so I wasn't online for the early internet, but I am old enough that when I read this blog post, it reminds me that I have seen firsthand that it wasn't always this bad — even if, like you, I was surprised to realise how bad things have gotten. I feel like a frog boiling in water that started cool, but gradually became hotter^[1]
I feel sorry for Zoomers and younger, who have grown up only knowing the walked gardens of big tech. It invokes an odd sense of ethical duty in me; many of them believe they hate tech in all its forms, because all they know is the toxic cycle of dark patterns and a culture that expects them to be always contactable, making it hard to disengage. However, there's an entire world that they don't know that beyond the walled garden. I wish I could show them what I have seen, but you can't easily convey the magic of a memory — after all, the internet that shaped me no longer exists.
So I guess the challenge ahead of me is trying to figure out how I can work with them to co-create a vision of a better internet. We can't put all the enshittification and spambots back in Pandora's box, but maybe we can build something new if people like us can use our memories to distribute hope to where it's needed.
You say “after all, the Internet that shaped me no longer exists.”
In a way, that’s true, but the reality is that most of it is still there; it’s just dwarfed by what came after.
I can still log on to mume.org and play on a Middle Earth-based MUD. I can still connect to IRC.
FirstClass BBSes, Hermes BBSes, Hotline servers and trackers, a plethora of self-hosted HTTP1.0 compliant sites, Gopher servers, FTP sites, and more.
The only real victim that I can think of is Usenet; AIM servers are back again, as are ICQ servers, shoutcast servers and battle.net servers.
Dialup is gone, but people have built TCP wrappers so all the old dialup stuff can be used over the Internet. You can even run the operating systems and software packages just the way they were in 1979 (or the year of your choice).
The callenge is finding all that when your phone and computer do all they can to direct you to Instagram, Tiktok and Temu, and system defaults use add on technology that has only existed for a decade max.
I do agree that there is much that remains. Indeed, I have found a lot of joy by discovering all the weird little personal websites that people are building as an act of rebellion. However, the culture has irrevocably changed. It makes me think of the line "man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man".
Many of us who grew up on a more free and chaotic internet have become jaded over time. If I went back in time, I wouldn't be able to enjoy the internet in the same way I used to because I'd be too acutely aware of what lies ahead. That's why I prefer to focus on moving forwards — it feels like a kind of healing
It is mostly because the bar is measured in time to display content (forgot the name of the metric)
So the huge about of bullshit gets hidden by fast internet and asynchronous jobs.
I think it’s “First paint” or something like that.
Ironically somehow AI is making disabling JS better nowadays, because text/markdown is becoming normalized, so receiving a pure text version of a page is a thing again.
How did this get normalized?
The average user doesn't know or understand technical details, and don't believe they have any power to change anything
Also capitalism means a small number of assholes make most of the decisions for reasons that benefit them
Just like the bad old days, when entire sites were made in Flash and Linux users were shafted. Ridiculous.
Obligatory: https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/
I prefer http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ because it doesn’t think it knows better than I do what width I want my window to be.
From Website Carbon:
Nice! Less than 0.01g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page.
Holy shit! That web site lives up to its name! I want to redesign my site to be that fast and elegant.
Yeah I'm not convinced that this site is accurate. According to this my blog pollutes more than facebook . com (I'm apparently as dirty as netflix . com) and is only slightly dirtier than newyorktimes . com... And images . google . com gets an A... I ain't buying it.
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Pretty ironic this blog runs multiple scripts that get blocked by ublock origin
They seem to be for goatcounter, an "Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data." and cloudflare insights.
The entire blog post is still just 750kB in total.
I purchased Ad Guard for my Android phone seven or eight years ago and it's a game changer. I despise ads and it's jarring to use someone else's phone.
On the topic of load time, it didn't even mention the compulsory "prove you are human" Cloudflare gate on practically every website these days. Add 10 seconds to every visit.
Meanwhile people out here hosting websites on disposable vapes.
It's not all that impressive if you're familiar with microcontrollers. Running a webstack doesn't require much compute power.
I want to know if it can run Doom.
Sort of, it's just short on internal memory so they mostly render on PC to the screen on the vape.
So no, it can't run Doom.
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Let's go back to gopher?
Read the guardian over the gopher protocol at my gopher hole:
gopher://theunixzoo.co.uk/the-guardian
Thank you for this, it makes for a nicer reading experience than their own website! Is the code open source by any chance?
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That was a great read. I have worked at companies that lived on display ads and it’s a terrible, desperate business to be in. Personally I think branded display ads have always had zero value (or even negative value) and the better the net has gotten at tracking their value, the more this has come to light, the less advertisers are willing to pay, and therefore the more fuckery publishers engage in to try to survive. It’s extremely hard or impossible to deliver a good user experience under this set of incentives.
Thinking back to the print news era, a lot of the ads were local, which made them much more valuable. But now the net has snuffed out local retail too, so that model isn’t even there to fall back on if we tried.
I’m grateful now to be working somewhere that doesn’t survive on display ads, and that may be one of the big reasons I’ve stuck with this employer for almost a decade now.
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