In This Episode: Lunch on Zoom, surfing so good it’s out to the trash cans, catastrophes that are not, alone in the wilderness (with technology), some more Nordic Noir, and some preaching about ad-blockers
This week the TEH Podcast is hosted by Leo Notenboom, the “Chief Question Answerer” at Ask Leo!, and Gary Rosenzweig, the host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.
(You’ll find longer Bios on the Hosts page.)
Show Notes & Links
- Gary: Solved my home Wi-Fi problems with… Google Nest.
- Leo: Tech frustration segment: Clickbait headlines are misleading… until you do a little math. (Inspired by Tech Site Journalism Reaches All Time Low)
Ain’t it Cool
- Gary: Middle of the new season of Alone
- Leo: We’re in another season of DeadWind (aka Nordic Noir)
- Loving Perry Mason (speaking of Noir)
Your rant against ad blockers omits the fact that lots of sites these days are absolutely unusable without them; you can’t manage to read the articles because you’re always playing whack-a-mole with popup ads, and the screen is taken over with interstitials, and it saps your bandwidth starting up animations and videos and blasting audio at you and sometimes it refreshes to a different page before you can read it and sometimes it crashes or hangs your browser altogether!
There are absolutely sites like that. And the best way to deal with them? Never return. Vote with your feet. 🙂 🦶🦶🦶
Dan is right!
Leo is right too, to a point. Sometimes I need to get info from a site where that’s the only place for that info. I am actually looking to see if there’s an anti-ad plugin not necessarily to block ads, since I agree sites need to pay the bills somehow, but to block autoplay videos. They drive me crazy; they suck up my limited bandwidth and often cover the content. You stop it at the top of the page and scroll down …and they insist on putting a smaller video window over the content that stays there as you scroll. It’s the worst user experience, and a LOT of news sites do it. 😒
I agree with Leo. You can almost always find a with similar information, unless you are doing research and particularly want to see what that website says about a specific thing. But even then, if the value of the information to you is great enough, you can put up with whatever mess they have, whether it is ads or just bad design. For most people and most sites it is just a matter of not using that site.
I think this is far better that saying that because a few sites are bad, you’ll block ads on all sites. That will just lead to the creators that do it right being penalized for the mess others make.