alt Hacker NewsThese days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort.
Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access.
I no longer think about it as by now my actions are automatic. Rarely do I find an important story that's just limited to only one website, generally dozens have the story and because of syndication the alternative site one selects even has identical text and images.
My default browsing is with JavaScript defaulted to "off" and it's rare that I have to enable it (which I can do with just one click).
I never see Ads on my Android phone or PC and that includes YouTube. Disabling JavaScript on webpages nukes just about all ads, they just vanish, any that escape through are then trapped by other means. In ahort, ads are optional. (YouTube doesn't work sans JS, so just use NewPipe or PipePipe to bypass ads.)
Disabling JavaScript also makes pages blindingly fast as all that unnecessary crap isn't loaded. Also, sans JS it's much harder for websites to violate one's privacy and sell one's data.
Do I feel guilty about skimming off info in this manner? No, not the slightest bit. If these sites played fair then it'd be a different matter but they don't. As they act like sleazebags they deserve to be treated as such.
Replies
> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription and you have an ad blocker running to deny any revenue generation opportunities.
Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going to contribute revenue anyway. You’re doing them a very tiny favor by staying away instead of incrementally increasing their hosting bills.
Something about these JS-heavy sites I haven't seen discussed: They don't archive well.
Websites that load a big JS bundle, then use that to fetch the actual page content don't get archived properly by The Wayback Machine. That might not be a problem for corporate content, but lots of interesting content has already been lost to time because of this.
> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
Seems like a gross overestimation of how much facility people have with computers but they don't want random article readers anyway; they want subscribers who use the app or whatever.
> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
No.
"savvy" web surfers are a rounding error in global audience terms. Vast majorities of web users, whether paying subscribers to a site like NYT or not, have no idea what a megabyte is, nor what javascript is, nor why they might want to care about either. The only consideration is whether the site has content they want to consume and whether or not it loads. It's true that a double digit % are using ad blockers, but they aren't doing this out of deep concerns about Javascript complexity.
Do what you have to do, but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us.
> We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access.
Where do you trust to read the news? Any newsrooms well staffed enough to verify stories (and not just reprint hearsay) seem to have the same issues.
I don't understand all these sites with moving parts even with muted soon, like if everything was a collection of GIFs. NYT followed this path and started to insert muted clips preheminently on their page one, very very annoying.
Do you think youtube will continue to make it possible to use alternate clients, or eventually go the way of e.g. Netflix with DRM so you're forced to use their client and watch ads?
What does playing fair mean in this context? It would be one thing if you were a paid subscriber complaining that even paying sucks so you left, but it sounds like you’re not.
The NYT is comically bad. Most of their (paywalled) articles include the full text in a JSON blob, and that text is typically 2-4% of the HTML. Most of the other 96-98% is ads and tracking. If you allow those to do their thing, you're looking at probably two orders of magnitude more overhead.
It’s hard to beat https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org (I imagine their own employees likely use these as well) or https://newsminimalist.com