Most people here probably came from slashdot originally, so it won't need much introduction.
The owners of the site have decided to go all in on advertising enshittification, and anyone visiting any page with an adblocker installed will be greeted by several seconds of JS bloat trying to inject ads past your adblocker, followed by a message box that demands you disable your adblocker, and forces a page reload.
[Editor's Comment: DotDalek has been in email contact with "whipslash" on Slashdot and he has asked me to give you a summary of part of the email exchange:
Quote: I posted some information about this in my recent comments, with links to comments by whipslash (Logan Abbott, the guy who owns Slashdot) and my own personal communication with him. Ad blockers aren't banned on Slashdot, whipslash apologized and removed the advertiser who caused this, and he at least seems open to allowing users to subscribe again. As I said, a subscription-model is a much better way to raise revenue than inserting more ads. We'll see if Slashdot actually offers subscriptions to raise revenue, but whipslash seemed open to it. If you're going to run the story that was in your queue, I ask you to please make sure that it includes accurate information. Incidentally, this is why SN needs people to subscribe, and it would be a good opportunity to further remind people of this. End Quote ]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, @04:17PM (1 child)
https://soylentnews.org/~ElizabethGreene/journal/18912 [soylentnews.org]
greensite will never be what it once was. When they first enshittified long ago, they lost many good people to many other sites, many (most) of which are now also enshittified.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Friday January 17, @04:41PM
It is a shame. For me /. still has a special place in my heart and in online history (and not just because its name can be fully represented by symbols). I knew it was dead a long while ago, SN is very much in my mind the spiritual successor, both due to the continuity of design and structure but also the community (albeit much smaller).
Perhaps we will get another wave of /. refugees joining us?
The wider issue of enshittification is something however I don't have an answer for, except to say SN is the only interactive platform I still use by choice (i.e. excluding things like Linkedin which I am forced to use for work).
I was surprised when I look into my history how few websites I actually visit, I would say less than 20 over a year, just that I visit those repeatedly. The further back I looked into my history the wider the range of websites I used to visit. Many of which no longer exist, but are not being replaced by anything worth spending my time on.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crm114 on Friday January 17, @04:47PM (3 children)
I noticed the ad-blocker thing the other day. I check both sites, and decided to remove the green site from my favorites list. If they fixed their problem, then no change.
It /was/ a nice reminder to check my subscription. I was good until June 2025. Resubscribed anyway. Good to go until 2026.
To all the admins:
Thank you for your hard (and sometimes thankless) work to provide a community forum of topics that interest us. Thank you for keeping the spam & vitriol at near 0% levels. Thank you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, @05:12PM (2 children)
They (whipslash) fixed the adblock problem, but the site is still awash in ads. I don't mind a few passive ads, but anything moving, anything that pushes into where you're trying to read such that you have to click/tap/drag to get rid of it and I'm too bothered and distracted and lost interest and close out the tab.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, @05:44PM
Welp, just for fun I'm teaching my uBlock Origin to block /. ads. They kept regenerating, me teaching blocker again. After 4 or so cycles of this, I'm getting that huge popup that complains about the adblocking. Then after a few seconds that goes away and you're left with /. but looking like no css working.
Alternatively you can read /. with javascript OFF but so far I can't get it to adjust reading level, so many comments aren't visible.
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday January 17, @11:03PM
Same with me. One thing In sick of online are newsletter subscription popups (overlays). So many sites hit you with it, 10% off your next order, blah blah. The other one is cookie notices. But I’m thankful for those, thankful to the Europeans for their GDPR that led to it. But I’d love for browsers to implement an option for “always accept” or “always deny except necessary” cookies. I’m always opting for the latter, where possible and it takes up time to piss off those overlays/boxes at the bottom of websites.
One more (actually I have lots), is the Google sign in boxes that appear on various websites such as Reddit. Obviously Google are tracking me but I don’t want that nor to log in with them. So I’ve created uBlock rules for the login boxes, but annoying nonetheless.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tork on Friday January 17, @04:48PM (2 children)
I'm bitter. The specific error I got was my ad-blocker wouldn't let a video-ad play. Of ALL the sites in the world to pull that one on me....
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, @05:28PM (1 child)
Which blocker? I've had video blockers that stop the playing, but I need a good video blocker that can block the background downloading.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18, @03:29AM
I believe the DuckDuckGo browser will happily gobble up all the cookies anyone wants to feed it, then forgets them all upon leaving the site, unless you "fireproof" that site
Is anyone running the Proxomitron on Android? I liked it's ability to return anything in response to device queries, so I could respond to businesses whatever device they were looking for.
(Score: 5, Informative) by HeadlineEditor on Friday January 17, @04:58PM (2 children)
Not sure if this is common knowledge, but there is a really nice green site digest here:
https://alterslash.org [alterslash.org]
No ads, no filler, just articles and top comments. I very rarely go to the green site these days.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Friday January 17, @05:20PM (1 child)
Whoa...my eyes hurt so bad now that my ears are mourning in sympathy.
I like this format better, spank you very much.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday January 17, @07:53PM
Gah, no kidding. Who picked that background color?
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, @05:06PM (2 children)
I'm still logged in there, and I have no problem. I'm not a paid subscriber or anything either. I use a *script* blocker, not an ad-blocker specifically. I enable just enough domains to make sites work. Sometimes it gets to be a real PiTA and I set all to temporarily trusted, what a fester cluck of never-ending nested subdomains you can get, and then I'll just give up unless it's high reputation and value. It's not too bad for the finance site where my actual money is; but it's getting there. Fuck the web and everything it's become.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Gaaark on Friday January 17, @05:22PM (1 child)
and a lot of people STILL use Windows too... doesn't make you right. Just makes you sheeple. ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18, @12:01AM
So what are you saying? That I should ignore all media? That I should call my broker and place trades like that? Send him a FAX for options quotes flown in on the 5 o'clock autogyro? Get real. Script-laden web pages have nothing to do with Windows.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Friday January 17, @06:04PM (1 child)
Let's be honest, folks, the ad blocker ban isn't the first, second, or even third "enshitification" of Slashdot. It's almost completely a cesspool of trolls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18, @04:15AM
That's the name of my punk band in high school...
(Score: 2) by Revek on Friday January 17, @06:22PM (2 children)
I never used the opt out of ads option on /. but I see now that it is simply gone. Guess its time to null route their advertising addresses at the router.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ls671 on Saturday January 18, @12:02PM (1 child)
I don't think it would work but it's sure worth a try! What they use uses javascript back and forth and the ad provider keeps on changing/tweaking things all the time. You may get around it for a day then, the next day, there it is again:
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Monday January 20, @02:44AM
I just loaded of pfblockerng and used one of the baked in adblock list. Working so far.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 4, Insightful) by esperto123 on Friday January 17, @06:55PM (1 child)
If a user go out of its way to use an adblocker that users does not want to see ads in any way shape or form, specially an intrusive, very big, and very annoying one, like the ones that plagued /. for the past few weeks, I actually changed from adblock pro to ublock because it was being capable of blocking the ads and basically only ran the site with slashdot.com scripts enabled in noscript, which basically only allowed me to read the story and the top comments, I was really this close to not accessing the site again but it seems the ads are tamed now.
I know everyone has bills to pay, but the best way to kill your site is force on your user something they don't want, this is double for a site with a tech savvy audience like /., subscriptions, tip jars and the like may not have the same revenue stream but will certainty not scare your user base as much.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday January 17, @09:07PM
It's a never-ending arms race: The advertisers want to plaster ads absolutely everywhere they can and force audiences to see them. Users don't want to take up valuable real-estate, brain-space, time, energy, etc with ads so they try to block / bypass them whenever possible.
The adblockers get more sophisticated, the advertisers come back with more sophisticated adblock evasion and detection. So the adblockers get more sophisticated, etc etc etc.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Informative) by beernutz on Friday January 17, @08:26PM (3 children)
I fought this for awhile, then realized it is MUCH cleaner to selectively disable JS on /. then pick off the ad blocks with adBlock Origin.
Much faster this way, and you can still moderate.
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday January 17, @11:05PM (2 children)
How do you selectively disable JavaScript? NoScript has this capability?
(Score: 3, Informative) by BigDog934 on Friday January 17, @11:59PM (1 child)
uBlock Origin has this capabilty. It's what I use to block the scripts on /.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday January 19, @02:28AM
Cool, thanks.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, @10:03PM (1 child)
It's been going downhill since 1998.
(Score: 3, Funny) by hopp on Saturday January 18, @06:01AM
Came here to say similar but I peg it at Tue, 14 Mar 2000 -- the date BSD began dying. Still happily driving that apparently long dead corpse daily.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, @10:49PM
I run ublock and eMatrix and the page loads, but is blocked by a popup. Closing the popup dumps you in a page that clears the article in the background and tells you to allow html-load.com.
Turning off javascript completely makes everything work.
(Score: 1) by MonkeypoxBugChaser on Saturday January 18, @01:31PM
Aren't they a bit low on that front? Who are the ads being sold to? Maybe they are trying to finally end having to host the site. In any case, it works with uBO and I had no popups.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jman on Saturday January 18, @05:54PM (1 child)
I moved over here when their email digest stopped working. For the nth time.
The last real digest I got was April 9, 2019. Then they switched mail providers and, since I don't read HTML messages, there was no appreciable content.
At first, the messages had a line: Want to receive this in text? Change your preferences here
Updating said preferences had no effect.
Sent messages to the feedback address a few times, but never got an answer (or a digest).
Eventually the messages contained a line saying: We apologize for the inconvenience but our plain text email is not currently working. We encourage you to switch to our HTML Version of the email.
In November of 2019, sent a polite snail mail to their HQ (San Diego now, but IIRC the letter was sent to Atlanta) and got a hand-written postcard back from someone deligted that USPS apparently still existed.
But still no digest.
Welcome, Soylentils!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19, @02:38AM
For years I tried to view /. on cellphone browser with JS turned off. It would throw an error, tell you to enable javascript, or go to the desktop site, which would be a link. But tapping that link would just bring you back to the cellphone version site and same error page. I suppose I could have messed with browser's user agent and other identifying info to make /. server stop redirecting me, but was too much bother.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19, @02:57PM
Slashdot has become a dumpster fire of right-wing, antiscience loons.