I block everything for everyone, no qualms anymore. Ars technical called me out on it when I setup my current very extreme blocking setup. I like them so I gave them money. I’d be happy to do the same for BB if there was an option. As is I now give them less than before and I’ll never buy a single thing from a BB store ad. I may have once bought something from an actual recommendation by an actual staff writer but that’s rare since I don’t come here to buy stuff.
I thought it might be possible to just ignore the problem of ludicrous bb store ads by muting the @boingboingshop user. But, not so fast! @boingboingshop is classified as a ”leader" user and as such can’t be ignored or muted.
Here’s a generous interpretation of what is happening. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been noticing that roughly half of the posts are for the store. It’s possible that regular BB authors are on break and we are only only noticing the sponsored posts more. Once the holidays are over, sponsored posts will go down to a more manageable 20% of all posts.
Though, this begs the question as to whether or not this is still too many and what to do about all the site trackers. I still find BB valuable and I like the the bbs, so I’m not (yet) willing to give it up, but this is trying my patience.
I can’t even read the BBS on my android anymore because the ad scripts interfer so much with the infinate scroll/pagination. 100 long comment posts stop after 10 with an ad and a blank space. The site is so overburdened with ads it literally doesn’t work properly anymore. Whoever is administering this dumpster fire has lost control.
Patron won’t work. The market for that is the BBS community, which is the thinnest slice of the BB readership, the 1%, the vocal minority. The $30 they’d get from regulars won’t keep any lights on. Besides is the content BB provides really worth a patreon? And I ask that as a regular reader. A lot of posts these days are just curated tweets with some commentary - is that something you’d pay cash for?
But there has to be other ways. The site has existed for well over a decade and it’s never been even close to this bad. The content used to be better, too. Sorry, it did.
Perhaps simply partnering with a less skeezy merch provider, or (with all due respect) being smarter about how you make money. In 2020 the digital economy has changed, we have 8 year old millionaire YouTubers. Stack social doesn’t belong anywhere, let alone a legitimate website with actual readers the business doesn’t hate. It’s lazy short term greed that will eventually plow the site into insignificance.
I hadn’t consciously noticed the post quality going down but that’s probably because even crap posts are so much better than the constant stream of store posts. As I think about it though there is less great content than when I started reading BB many years ago.
So, here’s the question: what’s a good replacement for BB? Who’s doing it better?
Though not a satisfying answer I know but here is a Ublock rule to hide all post by user “Boing Boing shop” :
! BB.net : block featured post from Boing Boing's Shop user :
boingboing.net##div.morefeatures:has(a[href="https://boingboing.net/author/boingboingstore"])
boingboing.net##div.feature:has(a[href="https://boingboing.net/author/boingboingstore"])
Just put this in the “My filters” tab of Ublock settings.
@Lanthade : A lot of stuff on BB comes either from imgur or slashdot which itself is heavily pumping it’s content from news.ycombinator.com .
I grew up too with tv and radio adsb, and also TV licensing. Magazines, even those most “leftist” had a lot of advertising. But they were more civilzed times, and the only information I gave them was my address to mail me the magazine.
And except the yearly remember to subscribe for the next year or the special offer for a book with Calvin&Hobbes or Doonesbury strips, all in color, no targeted ads were sent to me.
Adding to this on plain old TV there wasn’t a back cannel that gave back info and consumed band to send invisible ads. In 2019 inernet one pays for getting ads.
For some time there’s a solutiion… but it’s cumbersome.
I’m not going to give you a list of my friends and collegues who I’ve directed to boingboing who think it’s a scammy website full of trackers. Sorry. What, would you harass them too?
Perhaps it also has something to do with Congress being on break, thus eliminating the need for Political Hot Takes?
Then again, I haven’t seen any posts about the CBC cutting Trump’s cameo in Home Alone 2, which the news sites seem to have been racing to cover in great depth. Perhaps some level of standards yet prevails? Or maybe people are indeed on break.
I wonder: do the posters with the strongest complaints about the store view BB in the standard view (https://boingboing.net) or the BBS view (https://bbs.boingboing.net/)? For the latter, the store posts are easily identifiable and skippable.
Since I’m the one who started this stuff, my complaint is about the standard view as that’s what people who first come to boingboing see. If you turn off all ad blockers and trackers the site is woeful. The store stuff is nearly indistinguishable from the site, there are video and audio ads all over, a few have redirected me to fake “you won a gift card from amazon” sites, etc. The bbs view is less problematic but is more a community than a “cool things aggregator” and my friends generally don’t like interacting on the internet anymore.
Then alternatives like a subscription or donation model probably aren’t going to work for them either. BB has actual costs associated with it: as a high traffic site they will have serious hosting/CDN fees, they have a paid staff for moderation and web management, they probably pay for the enterprise version of Discourse to keep @codinghorror clothed and fed. The money has to come from somewhere. I don’t believe that the BB owners are upping the levels of ads in order to buy new Teslas. (Have you seen what @jlw gets around in?)
They could probably cut the costs by pulling the forum. Then the actual costs would go down, the potential liability costs would go down, and the irritation costs (from people attacking the BB owners — like in this thread!) would disappear.
I don’t think anyone disputes the necessity of ads, people are complaining about the ads being intrusive, overwhelming and misleading (ads disguised as genuine articles). I’m also one of those who used to whitelist BB but not anymore; what’s more, nowadays I don’t recommend BB to friends unless I know they use adblocking.
The majority of dedicated BB users use the blog view: https://boingboing.net/blog, because changing to the current main page is often regarded as a mistake. I actually stopped going to BB until I found out about blog view.
Thank you 