Did you know that The Verge delivers you to around 20 companies for advertising & tracking purposes? I didn’t. That might foul up your web experience a little bit. Maybe we should try something different.
The Verge obviously isn’t alone in this. There’s a reason I use an ad blocker.
Hey, Thom!
I don’t want to make a moral judgement…. You are the administrator of OSAlert? Like you get to decide the format and the content (at least the editorial content) of the web site and all? Ok… then, talk to us a little bit about the rationale of using an ad blocker yet having ads inserted in OSAlert? I insist, it’s not that I’m making a moral judgement…. would only like to hear you develop the topic for us.
Cheers!
Simple.
There’s a difference between the relatively small amount of light ads we have, and the insane amount of heavy ads and trackers many, many other sites have.
An adblocker blocks ads indiscriminately by default. You can’t have it both ways.
Uh, it does not. You can fine tune them.
Really? Because the ad providers you use are still tracking me. Ghostery caught 7. 7 or 20, it’s still an invasion of my privacy.
The difference is clear – enable ads on OSAlert (I have) and look at an average page. Now try the same on The Verge… I TRIED but couldn’t even get to the article after a full ten minutes of trying. Discrete and reasonable ads are acceptable. The Verge is NOT discrete nor reasonable – it’s in-your-face advertising with an article hidden… somewhere.
It is not the Ad’s I’m really worried about. It is the tracking sites that give me the shivers.
After all, the ads on a site like The Verge are aimed at people in the US and (thankfully) not the rest of the world. Even so that site is virtually unusable.
That aside, the trackers are the hidden evil (IMHO).
As a registered gumpy old fart, I hate all forms of advertising especially the sort that starts ‘we thought you might be interested in’ and age related [redacted].
The last time I actually tried to read an article on The Verge’s web site, I gave up. I started with all scripts and ads blocked… no article to read. Try temporarily enabling some scripts… still no article, but now getting some “extras” from the site – like links to commercial supporters. Try enabling more stuff, still no article, but more advertising. Each time I enable more, there’s yet MORE to enable, and even more advertising, and still no article. After about ten minutes of a vicious loop and still no article, I gave up and revoked all temporary permissions.
This site frequently posts articles from the verge, but I never get to read any of them for this very reason.
It’s one of the crappiest websites on the net.
I simply refuse to go there now, haven’t for a couple of years now, fuckem!
Given who founded the site, i am not surprised…
Even with ad-blocker enabled performance on theverge is abysmal…
I just disable javascript and decide for each website I visit whether to enable it for that site or not.
Yeah, and what’s up with their front page? Have you ever seen it? Holy clusterf–k, Batman! Whoever came up with that layout should be fired and never, EVER allowed to work in web design again. I can’t even tell in what direction I’m supposed to read that monstrosity.
Not only that, but they have WAY too many SJW bloggers who have hijacked the site and use it as their political soapbox, much like how Thom has done with this site. Someone on G+ posted an article of theirs a week or two ago, where they were talking about Clippy, along with personal assistants like Siri and Cortana being sexist. They have completely jumped the shark. They also disabled comments for awhile; I guess they got tired of people calling them on their bullshit in regard to all the flame bait articles they were posting.
Edited 2015-07-25 03:30 UTC
enabled:
adblock
+ghostery
+disabledflash
+disabledjavascript!!
And ofc a solid state disk might help the browsing experience
As always, “content is the king” !
The front page for The Verge connects you to a total of 22 different domains.
OSAlert tries for 26. But, I like OSAlert, so, I’ll allow it.
But, Flash is always off by default, so flash-based adds don’t get shown. Ever.
As with many other sites I only read TheVerge through Google Newsstand, where all the cruft is removed.
In addition to a good ad blocker like uBlock to get rid of visible stuff:
https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock
don’t forget Ghostery to block all the other crap that is running in the background.
Do you block the analytic software and things like Outbrain and Gravitar too? Just curious.