I don’t know if it’s just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It’s getting to the point where adblocking isn’t an optional luxury - it’s a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.

Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.

    • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 months ago

      I tried that, and for some reason it redirects me to an outdated version of the wiki I’m trying to browse.

      Logopedia especially is one of my favorites, I just wish it moves out of Fandom. Using Indie Wiki Buddy, it pretends the current date is a few months back, which is kinda odd.

      • Joe Cool@lemmy.ml
        1·
        4 months ago

        That is odd. Something must be broken for the wiki you tried. It’s most useful when there is a real alternative like for the various minecraft wikis. Here is a full list of alternatives: https://getindie.wiki/listings/

        Sometimes you just have to check wikia fandom because they are the only ones with an up to date page. But I’d rather avoid it.