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a stinky ox 🐂

Started reading a webpage with an article about the relentless ongoing enshittification. Before I'd scrolled down more than a page or two I saw the lines of text progressively start to fade out and thought "on *this* article? surely not?"

But yeah, it faded to nothing and the fucking "Subscribe to read more" box scrolled on.

Fox ache.

🐂

@llamasoft_ox
Eesh. The needle on the ol' irony meter is just spinning like a cooling fan at this point.

@llamasoft_ox Right-click, inspect, find the overlay, nuke it. If scrolling fails beyond a certain point, find the parent container with limited height, un-limit it. If scrolling doesn't work at all, find the element with overflow: hidden, and remove the limit.

Make note of the changes made, apply them in a User Styles CSS override. If the site has an anti-adblocker popover, eliminate **it** in this way.

It's an arms race.
One content producers can't win.

@alice @llamasoft_ox and when they inevitably lose, bye bye websites.

@VGPMedia @alice Again, the problem is that they are too heavy-handed with this shit. I've just followed a link and landed on your site and after reading a page and a half I'm supposed to decide to *subscribe*?

It'd be much better if it were possible to include some near-frictionless microtransaction ("pay 5p to read the article").

Subscriptions, especially coerced ones, smell of the kind of thinking that hopes you'll forget about them and just carry on paying forever regardless.

@llamasoft_ox @alice Less than one in 250,000 visitors will pay even a microtransaction to read an article.

@VGPMedia "The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead." They've already lost; even sites which incorporate captchas and whatnot have; uncapcha2 is a thing. (It's faster to have software solve these than for humans to. The irony.)

Microtransactions require zero-friction browser integration, and it's difficult to trust that. I even tell my browser to NOT advertise that Pay is possible, though I do actually trust that implementation.

@alice Fine if you're ok with the web only hosting sites that can afford to lose money, let's see how that goes I suppose.

@VGPMedia Too quick to judge, there. While I was writing my follow-up with a solution. Aggregate subscriptions.

@alice You mean one subscription that unlocks multiple sites? Has that ever worked? (not sarcastic, I genuinely don't know)

@VGPMedia Yes.

Example: Amazon Prime. Gets me Amazon Video, a happy Twitch streamer, various discounts and promotions, and as a side effect: actual reliable Amazon delivery.

(Yes, I count the original point of the service to be a side-effect, at this point.)

Oh, and iTunes Match (I have a massive music library) for music, and I'm sincerely hoping News+ for access to news articles.

@VGPMedia Crikey, you're a speedy one. Look again.

@alice Hmm that's reaching a little. Amazon prime is just one website that happens to do both streaming and sell you stuff. It's a nice idea though maybe it could work for some sites.

@VGPMedia See also the other examples I've mentioned.

27,423 songs by 1,392 artists in my iTunes Match library.

@alice Yeah, I mean I suppose, sort of. If there was a netflix but for content websites, it's a nice idea sure.

@alice but then so was the acceptable ads policy that websites could sign up to...and that seems to have pretty much fallen flat I think.

@VGPMedia I've been weighing my options. I subscribe to iTunes Match to let my monthly subscription fee be distributed amongst the artists I listen to that month. I'm hoping News+ does the same, with the articles I read. Only gotcha: does subscribing actually remove the in-article advertisements? That really needs to be a one-or-the-other situation.