“Your frustration is the product”

Ad-Driven Degradation of News Sites

• Many comments describe mainstream news sites as nearly unusable without blockers: huge payloads (tens of MB), hundreds of requests, constant popups, and dark patterns.
• Several argue this is deliberate: maximizing clicks, view time, and auctionable ad inventory matters more than UX or journalism.
• Some note you can have fast, ad-supported pages; an example is cited where cleaning up a mobile site improved UX and raised ad revenue, implying current bloat is a choice, not a necessity.

Subscribers, Paywalls, and “Double-Dipping”

• Multiple paying subscribers report that subscriptions often remove only the paywall, not the ads or trackers; NYT is cited as an especially egregious example.
• Others counter that historically subscriptions barely covered print and distribution and ads always paid the bulk of costs, though this is challenged with current revenue numbers for specific papers.
• There’s frustration that even “premium” offerings (news sites, Apple News+, cable/streaming analogies) still layer on heavy ads.

Economics of Journalism & Who Pays

• One side: digital “everything should be free” expectations plus wage stagnation push outlets toward surveillance ads and enshittification.
• Counterpoints: wages haven’t universally stagnated; news orgs have also mismanaged the web opportunity and hollowed out their own credibility.
• Several note that news was never ad-free; classifieds and display ads historically subsidized reporting.

Ad Tech, Tracking, and Publisher Control

• Commenters describe marketing stacks full of third-party scripts (often via tag managers) that few inside the organization understand or can safely remove.
• Some recount cases where publishers had effectively lost control of their own sites and even needed server-side “ad blockers” to stop rogue ad code.
• Surveillance and security concerns (malvertising, tracking across sites, ad networks as malware channels) are repeatedly cited as justification for blocking.

User Responses: Ad Blocking and Alternative Tools

• Heavy use of uBlock Origin, DNS-level blocking (Pi-hole, NextDNS), VPN-based blocking, and browser reader modes is reported as essential for a tolerable web.
• Some refuse to visit hostile sites at all or rely on archive sites, RSS, lite subdomains, Tor onion mirrors, or custom “reader” redirect tools to strip cruft.
• A few note that with JS disabled, many news pages become simple, fast text—when paywalls allow it.

Micropayments, Bundles, and “Ethical Ads”

• Many say they’d happily pay small per-article fees, but cite missing infrastructure, mental transaction costs, and resistance from the ad industry as blockers.
• Interest in “Netflix for news”–style bundles exists; Apple News+ and similar services are seen as partial but flawed implementations.
• Some mention or build “ethical ad” models: static image/text ads, no tracking, contextual targeting only, hand-approved publishers and advertisers.

Nostalgia for Early Web & Cultural Shift

• Several contrast today’s ad- and SEO-driven web with an earlier “fan site” era where people shared content for fun rather than monetization.
• Others argue the signal-to-noise ratio collapsed under spam, SEO, recommendation engines, and “creator economy” incentives, making small, non-monetized sites hard to find.

Apps vs Web and Push to Native

• The push to funnel users from web to apps is widely blamed on better tracking, push notifications, and tighter control over the user, not UX love for the web.
• Some speculate product decision-makers themselves use blockers or special internal builds and never experience the full hostility of their own consumer sites.