this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
1 points (66.7% liked)

Unpopular Opinion

6324 readers
111 users here now

Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!

How voting works:

Vote the opposite of the norm.

If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.

Guidelines:

Tag your post, if possible (not required)

  • If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
  • If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].

Rules:

1. NO POLITICS

Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.

2. Be civil.

Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...

Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.

5. No trolling.

This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.

Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
JonsJava@lemmy.world
admiralpatrick@lemmy.world
lemann@lemmy.world
Rooki@lemmy.world
ptz@dubvee.org
1
As someone who worked (briefly) as a freelance writer online, the tl;dr bot is my enemy and I want it dead. (lemmy.ca)
submitted 8 months ago by Adderbox76@lemmy.ca to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world
5 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The tl;dr bot that pops up on every link to an article on Lemmy is depriving those websites of clicks, which deprives them of ad revenue.

The only thing that will accomplish is forcing those websites to do the very thing that we rail about; replacing their writers with crappy A.I because they can't afford to pay for actual content.

We rail against the enshitification of the internet, but when there's a legitimate way to fight back by giving these websites a page view/read/click etc... so that they can attract advertisers, we would rather have a bot summarize it for us, giving them nothing.

top 5 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] hightrix@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

You can blame the bot for decreased ad revenue all you’d like but it’s malarkey.

Websites have poisoned the well, so to say. It is simply not smart to browse these sites without ad blockers. Constant popups, cookie banners with 100s of toggles, flashing ads for random junk, and so on were driven by greed originally and are now driven by survival. If the greed could have subsided just a bit and website owners not tried to make all the money, people wouldn’t need to use tldr bots or adblockers.

Sorry not sorry, fuck your ad supported content.

[–] bleistift2@feddit.de 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I love the tl;dr; bot because it:

  • doesn’t pop up a ‘read our newsletter’ prompt that receives an auto-close click anyway
  • doesn’t pop up a separate prompt to subscribe to the news site using payment methods I simply don’t have because I’m not a credit card addicted American
  • doesn’t throw a consent form at me in yet another popup, in which I need to manually click away 308 vendors to which I do not want to sell my soul
  • doesn’t include useless Facebook-Like buttons that collect data about me even though I don’t even have a fucking Facebook account
  • doesn’t need 8 seconds of JavaScript execution to render fucking text
  • doesn’t load a 8000×6000px image that contains absolutely zero information, but only serves to make me to scroll by one screen to get to the information I actually want
  • relieves me of the burden to follow a link just to find that that content isn’t available ‘because you’ve already met your quota.
  • provides the information concisely instead of using a truck load of unnecessary fill words just to meet an arbitrary 4000 word minimum.
[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Don't forget the unclosable and stoppable auto playing video built into the page that you don't want from a text article!

[–] moody@lemmings.world 1 points 8 months ago

Or the autoplay video that you CAN stop, but when you scroll down the page it moves to the corner and starts playing again.

[–] waz@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)
  • browser popup asking if you would like to receive notifications from random-site.c om