SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
... or so some web pages are now saying according to an article published by El Reg:
The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post has become the largest newspaper to refuse to serve readers who filter out advertisments.
The Post described it as "a short test" to gauge what users who use blocked blockers will do next. "Often, we run tests like this not in reaction to a problem, but to learn," said the paper in a statement.
Last week, Google also began to nuke the filters used to block preroll ads on its YouTube service. For extra punishment, YouTube viewers using AdBlock Plus had to sit through the full ad, by disabling the 'Skip Ad' button.
Around one in seven surfers use ad-blocking software, although the proportion rises when the demographic mix skews towards middle class and wealthy, and young and male, according to the latest annual PageFair report... into ad filters.
There is a reason why people use ad blockers. Sometimes it's for purposes of sanity, to avoid the very annoying auto-playing ads that more and more web sites now host. Others block them for security purposes, limiting one's exposure to the nastiness that can sometimes come from unscrupulous advertisers. Still others block them to reduce the draw on their precious bandwidth, especially those who get throttled if they use their monthly limit. Perhaps the Washington Post should be more careful with who they sell advertising to and more strictly limit the format of the adverts their sponsors pay them to publish instead of punishing those who block all of them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:19AM
That's all fine and dandy, unless you have no alternative choices. Alternatives to Youtube for video content are pathetic at best. So... you're pretty much stuck with whatever Google wants to shove down your throat if you want to watch videos online.
I just download videos with youtube-dl and use adblockers and other anti-garbage plugins; no problems with ads or anything else. Even if they somehow stopped that, it's not like you need Youtube videos at all. I'm not sure I see the issue.
Same for Google search - sorry, Bing, DDG or Blekko just don't cut the mustard.
I use DDG and it seems fine to me. I have no trouble cutting off Google.
There's all kinds of other garbage in addition to this ad nonsense. I frequently see sites that want me to connect to over 20 third-party sites, all blocked by RequestPolicy. Not surprisingly, these same sites are often completely dysfunctional unless you allow a bunch of the third-party sites to load, and even then it's not certain that they'll work. And then there's "Comments powered by Disqus". "Comments powered by concentrated liquid feces" is more like it. It seems very few people know how to design a proper website, so it's not surprising they're making dumb decisions about advertisement policies.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:37AM
I use DDG and it seems fine to me. I have no trouble cutting off Google.
Likewise. I still try Bing (you never know...) and Google if DDG doesn't find what I'm looking for, but I can't remember the last time either actually has.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:15PM
Me too. DDG works fine most of the time for me as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:04PM
I love Duck Duck Go with their bang commands. If I want a Google search of cute kittens because I don't like the results of DDG, I type in DDG "cute kittens !g" (no quotes). There is also youtube search (!yt), bing search (!b), amazon search (!a), google maps search (!gm), and pretty much anything you may want. Hell, there is even a kickass torrent search (!kat).
No way I feel stuck with google for their search engine. But point taken for youtube though, all alternatives are bad. We need a DDG of tubes.
(Score: 2) by TheB on Thursday September 17 2015, @05:07PM
I wish I could cut off Google completely as well, but DDG's search results are often lacking.
Until DDG gets functional date filtering I'll be stuck using Google search occasionally. DDG have been working on it for over 4 years and have only implemented a sort by date feature, which is currently broken.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2015, @11:47AM
Try startpage.com instead.