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It's not just news. It's ever website, with some notable exceptions, such as HN (minimal, curated, informative headlines, no bloat) or some private blogs (as th
by 0x5002 7y ago
It's not just news. It's ever website, with some notable exceptions, such as HN (minimal, curated, informative headlines, no bloat) or some private blogs (as the one linked - 2.2KB, 0 trackers, yet questionable headlines).
Recipe websites (and I'm not even talking about big names like allrecipies) give you the author's life story (for SEO) and a mountain of trackers, ads, and javascript. A recipe on "TasteOfHome" yields >200 requests, 4MB of data, and just uBlock Origin (which is the 2nd stage after my piHole's DNS based blocking) already blocked 42% of the website's content. Not to mention a plethora of websites rendering "support chat" overlays or pesky newsletter popups. I'd much prefer some sponsored content - "This recipe works best with a KitchenAid(tm) blender! Buy one here!". Seems to work for YT creators.
And "Tech" sites like TheVerge throw a compressed 5MB at you, with about 20% blocked. The layout is confusing and most of the stories are what I like to call "the stage before clickbait" - the ones addressing the user directly, presumably to create some sort of personal connection to spark interest ("OnePlus 7 review: designed to make you want the OnePlus 7 Pro"), or headlines with 0 informational content ("Laptops are getting weird and wonderful again").
Aggregation sites like reddit are unusable on a phone (not to mention the content). On every refresh, a popup prompting me to install their app shows up. A total of 3 screen elements are used to push me to their app - which is not going to happen, as I only use reddit as a search engine flag every once in a while.
One of the few decent ways of reading the news (for me) is to rely on the WSJ's iOS App (if you are a subscriber, the iPad app gives you a very useful, traditional newspaper layout that is easy to navigate and read, and so are their notifications). However, I would highly doubt I'd become a subscriber by bothering me with paywalls.