hat is the one question website managers must never let their
readers ask? The answer, of course, is “is the writing here
good enough to pay for?”
To a bean-counter, that question may be irrelevant. But by forcing the reader to reconfigure his browser—either to disable some blocker he didn’t even realize was there or to clean out his bookmarks—it forces him to ask the real question: do I trust them?
Let the ads through and the site could become unreadable. Maybe young people don’t mind animated popups that jump around, cover the text, and disrupt your concentration every three seconds. But young people are all broke and they’re all on Tik Tok.
The mainstream media has long been in a losing battle with the Internet. Paywalls are an admission that websites are also uncompetitive. So the latest enemy is social media. It is harming kids, so kids must be ‘protected’ from it. The UK, Australia, and Europe have all taken steps in that direction. There’s a strong movement in the USA to ban it as well.
The obvious goal is to eliminate the competition by having the government censor it. Even normally skeptical conservatives are falling for it. If they succeed, it won’t address the real problem, which is that all our sources of news and information have lost their credibility.
Opinions hardest hit
It must suck to be an opinion writer. There are only two opinions in this world: the ones we already agree with, and the ones we don’t. The ones we don’t agree with have already been dropped. The rest are by definition predictable.
I happily pay sites if they have good writing, don’t lie too much, don’t try to start a war between men and women or between the Gen-Z and Boomers, and don’t try to extort me, but there are very few of those left. A site that tells me sex is a continuum, Covid vax skeptics are conspiracy theorists, and industrial civilization is heating the planet doesn’t deserve the effort of clicking. These sites know that, so they put land mines in every article saying you must subscribe to read the rest. They only exist to sell a product.
But for the rest, it’s a software problem. Why do ad blockers tell the site what they’re doing? How hard is it to write one that simply downloads the ads but reformats the page so they don’t interrupt the content? Or better, puts them in a separate window so we can view them later? Download all the crap the site wants, then hide it or at the very least stop the animation. (You can turn JavaScript off altogether, but many sites are so badly written you simply get a blank white rectangle; and not all animation is JS.) These solutions would help with tabloids like the UK Daily Mail that fill their main page with speeded-up clips of idiotic people appearing to be fighting furiously. And they’d improve your reputation as a credible source.
Censor the Internet, and it becomes television
Finding accurate information on the Internet is hard enough with bad search engines, dishonest fact-chuckers, and ‘encyclopedias’ that even get simple, nonpolitical facts wrong, like—my pet peeve—the one that claims that the airplane in the movie Horizon Line is a Cessna 180 when it’s obviously a GippsAero GA8 Airvan. Everyone repeats it instead of asking whether it’s true. It’s enough to kill what’s left of my faith in humanity.
At least with TV, the commercials only last 5½ to 6 minutes and there are only 4 or 5 breaks per hour. Most commercials are now 15 seconds long, so it’s only 2,122 to 3,456 commercials a day. They’re conveniently bunched up, making it more convenient. Unfortunately, the commercials are all racist and there’s no content worth watching, so it still doesn’t help. And one more thing: why are TVs so damn big? It's like when a star expands and turns into a red giant that engulfs everything at the end of its life.
Advocating censorship is my red line. Yes, social media is full of hate and foolish celebrities. I never understood the appeal of having words pop up and hop around every time somebody says something. But young people go to social media because every other source costs money and is full of lies. If the people clamoring to ban social media really wanted to solve the problem, they’d find a way to change that. What they really want is to censor you. They’ll say anything to get you to let them do it. But the one thing it will not do is drive revenue to your website.
jun 26 2026, 6:55 am
