Now age verification should be added to the list, especially if you want to browse 18+ sites like about how to pay taxes or learn to drive
What about the step where you change VPN servers because cloudflare blocked the first one you used?
Alternate version:
- You don’t even bother going to a search engine because they’re mostly terrible anymore
- You ask AI to search / parse the web site - bot reads the web site
- Site doesn’t get any revenue because the site’s so terrible, but you are supposed to feel bad
The open web has been in trouble for a while, and enshittification is just accelerating it.
Problem is that good sites, which do not do all the garbage listed above, do not get rewarded for that when being consumed through AI. And in that case you should in fact feel bad
Nah, the good ones you subscribe to with actual money.
And then they sell you LLMs as the solution.
- (optional) Set up a pihole or pull something like stevenblacks hosts to your /etc/hosts
- Install a adblock browser extension
- Browse website
I’ve got that. It doesn’t help with GDPR popups, notification requests, app pushes, etc.
If you enable the annoyances and cookie notices filters in uBlock it gets rid of a lot of them.
For specific sites you can also use the element picker mode to create your own custom filter and remove elements. Handy for sites you browse without an account and have popups bothering you about it.
There’s extensions that get rid (/autoclick) of those banners. Eg “I (still) don’t care about cookies”
My websites: no cookies, no tracking, a few KB of JS, rest is pure HTML and CSS. My sites load 10x faster. Meanwhile every other company is running some overly bloated WP. Its kinda of mind blowing how dumb some of these sites are.
WP is easy to use, that’s why it’s common.
Adblock as a concept has existed for 20+ years. No excuse to be so willfully ignorant of it.
Just posting here the always relevant reminder that Firefox still has real ad-blockers.
And you can also configure it to auto-decline requests for geolocation & push notifications.
