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Comment by nogridbag | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I'm not if I have malware installed or if this is just the state of the web right now: https://imgur.com/a/wzb8fAT

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I can't imagine browsing sites without an adblocker.

Sounds like a good statatement to print on t-shirts.

Ads Are For Suckers

reads more succinctly. (And no offense to OP.)

No offense taken. Unlike my childhood where I used to navigate via webrings and questionable search engines, these days I rarely visit anything but HN links. So I haven't had much of a need for an ad blocker.

Occasionally I'm surprised links like these get to the front page, even with all the ads and horrible UX. I must admit, I too wanted to believe so badly we can communicate with whales, that I managed to scroll down to see the first paragraph below the fold. But quickly closed it shortly after to read the HN comments.

Yeah, it is too bad this crap is the new normal for web sites. It saddens me that Gen Y (or what have you) never knew an internet before it became a marketing landscape.

Related: there's a snazzy uBlock Origin logo T-shirt for sale online, but I won't link it right now, because unclear whether it's approved by Raymond Hill, and I don't see a mention of what the proceeds support.

my guess based on his strong (and extremely venerable) principles against monetizing uBO is that it's not approved by him, although I think him selling merch would be an awesome way to fund development. I would gladly buy some uMatrix t-shirts if it meant a resumption of uMatrix dev! :-D

A vanilla browser is genuinely malware that needs an adblocker to act as an old school antivirus.

I think the problem is that you have one population of readers who go with the ad blocker, and they don't know that they are about to send everyone to this eyesore. The other population is people who don't use ad blockers, but also who would never visit this site, because it's an eyesore.

For that second population: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/285cs

The overwhelming remainder of people are in neither: they don't block ads, and they don't care. And their TVs are on all day long.

If you define a browser without a content blocker as 'malware' the answer is 'yes, you have malware installed'. Get a content blocker - uBlock Origin works fine in Firefox and still works in Chromium - and take the road to sanity. As far as I'm concerned the commercial web is unusable without at least a single layer of defence against advertisements and advertisers, preferably several layers - DNS or hosts file, content blocker, etc.

Ironically that imgur link on mobile is essentially a page of visual noise

About 40% of the screen is pestering me to download their app to look at an image. That I always find the most annoying. I kind of wish product managers would start from the assumption that users don’t care about your company at all. Impress me and give me a reason to care before pestering me!

Yeah, it's 2023 and there's still no great way to share images besides self-hosting or the hacks mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31631144

I strangely forgot the screenshot tool I'm using, Cleanshot X, actually has a cloud-share feature built in. I've never used it since 99% of the time I'm pasting these images into issue trackers, slack, etc.

I use vanilla firefox on Android and dont se any shit like that. So i say you have maleware

how'd you make the Memegen overlay text?

I use CleanShot - an OSX screenshot utility. Highly recommend if you spend a good portion of your day in issue trackers or doing project management work. Besides quick annotations, it's easy to capture gifs, videos, scrolling screenshots, etc.

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