Clickbait: The Thin Line..

[AArdvark]

Now, as I read all my news on internet sites, I feel as though EVERY headline is clickbait. I know that there will be ads between every paragraph of any story I choose to read. The only was I have found to deal with this is to disable images in my browser. I've tried various adblockers but....

So my question is: Am I alone here in this point of view? Is all news ad-fueled now?

THE
DRIVING FORCE
AARDVAKR

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I think you're right, bro. I just ended up adding the truly scumbag sites to my HOSTS file so I could redirect them to localhost and never give them the clicks.

There is a bit in Bill James's book "Popular Crime" where he talks about how journalism has been ravaged before. This isn't the first time that you could say that the state of journalism is in awful shape. (And my perspective is colored by video game journalism and political journalism, which are both terrible.) I think another revolution is going to come if the people in these industries want to be taken seriously again like it did after other places in American history. I want to say the Halls / Mills trial was one such event.

[The Happiness Engine]

Managing a hosts file would kill me. Ghostery is blocking 2065 individual trackers and patches its own blacklist, who knows what ublock is catching. UTM Mangler is just fun.

[Flack]

I wrote a little batch file that copies a HOSTS file down from a network share, adds a null entry for a site, and then updates the network copy of the HOSTS file. I don't know how many I've added over the past few years (hundreds?) but it seems like a losing battle. I run AdBlocker in Chrome and now instead of ads I see nag things asking me to please unblock ads, which is almost as annoying. What's even more annoying is how these tactics are spilling over into real life. I heard a news reporter the other day say, "Coming up, the top 10 New Years Resolutions. Number one will absolutely shock you!"

[The Happiness Engine]

THAT'S the one I couldn't remember: https://github.com/Mechazawa/FuckFuckAdblock