this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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I briefly wrote articles for an oldschool PC hardware outlet (HardOCP if anyone remembers)... And I'm surprised any such sites are still alive. Mine shut down, and not because they wanted to.
Why?
Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on? No one, except me apparently, as their journalistic integrity aside, I'm way too impatient for youtube videos, and am apparently the only person on the planet that believes influencers as far as I can throw them.
And that was before Discord, Tiktok, and ChatGPT really started eating everything. And before a whole generation barely knew what a website is.
They cited Eurogamer as an offender here, and thats an outstanding/upstanding site. I'm surprised they can even afford to pay that much as a business.
And I'm not sure what anyone is supposed to do about it.
From the reader's experience, sites like IGN became completely unusable without ad blockers; I still remember the X-Men (2? Origins: Wolverine?) ad where Wolverine slashed through the page in a flash animation that prevented you from clicking on the thing you wanted to read underneath it. Then the information that you wanted could have been communicated in a headline, and it just becomes frustrating. That said, I'll still reviews if they didn't annoy me too much on my way there. I'll still read Schreier when it isn't paywalled. I read NY Times articles like the one they just did on Alexey Pajitnov. Rebekah Valentine and Jordan Middler do great work. In a lot of other cases, opinionated essays on video games benefit greatly from supporting footage in video format, and even without ad blockers, the YouTube experience is far less annoying on average.
Are you sure about that?
I opened YT links without premium on a new browsers and holy moly! I got 1-3 minute unskippable ads every time.
I immediately clicked them off, of course.
You can tune out and do something passive while the ad plays, and eventually the information you wanted will appear, as opposed to trying desperately to find your article as you scroll and having pop ups and other things interrupt you as you read. Perhaps this is all just a matter of perspective though.
Joke's on the websites, as I run Cromite, so no pop ups or anything.
...But also, most of the written web is trash now.
:(