Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/14/your-google-home-mini-can-go-c.html
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With this post, by my count, nine out of the twenty posts on the Blog view are Boing Boing Shop posts. My count may be off, though, because of all the popup headers and footers and sidebar ads.
Anyway, my point is just this–if you’d just go ahead and get that up to 20 out of 20, which seems to be where this is headed, I could just stay away entirely instead of having to sift through eight thousand lines touting overpriced garbage du jour to find the handful of posts with actual content.
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Would be nice and especially BoingBoing-y if someone wise in the ways of Chrome Extensions made an extension to skip all the BoingBoing Store posts…
I wasn’t counting specifically but yesterday as I scanned the posts, I had the bad feeling that the number of shop posts was increasing and that maybe the editors are tired of the effort the site requires and were just going to slowly increase the shop posts and post less manual posts. Then I said to myself to stop being paranoid. But you noticed this as well.
But on second thought, going 100% store posts would just chase everyone away. Would be much smarter to write a bit of code to aggregate stories that match existing tags and use that to generate posts.
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I already carry around a google spybot everywhere I go. Why would I want to carry around a second one that doesn’t fit in my pocket?
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Why on earth are you browsing the web without an ad blocker? Stop doing that. Besides slowing down everything, wasting power you pay for and making it harder to find the things you’re looking for, ads are a major security risk: they can carry any kind of code that exploits loopholes in your browser and do lots of nasty things, e.g. mine bitcoin, install ransomware, or make your computer part of a botnet.
The site that shows the ads has zero control over which ads are shown to you, all ad targeting is done by shady ad brokers (there is not other kind) who give zero fucks about your security or privacy. Therefore there is no moral obligation whatsoever to take part in that scheme.
Browsing the web without blocking ads is dangerous. Don’t do it!
A handy list of good free adblockers: uBlock Origin (Chrome, Firefox), “AdGuard” (Safari).
Or simply use Brave Browser (based on Chromium) which blocks ads by default (available on Android/iOS/Linux/MacOS/Windows).
YMMV, but with an ad blocker running I have no trouble at all identifying the posts I want to read. On my larger screen I find it helps when I reduce the window’s width until only one post is shown.
I have even occasionally bought a cheap course or subscription advertised on the store, and typically got a fair deal for my money, but I din’t pick the obvious crap, and never physical goods.
Isn’t that your personal chance of becoming wise in the ways of Chrome Extensions? Probably 3-5 lines of code, most of which could be copied from stack overflow. 
Of course you you’d deprive BoingBoing of a part of a non-invasive revenue stream, at least until they do something about it, then you’d have to update the extension, they’d respond to that, and so it goes on.
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Are you able to browse BoingBoing with an ad blocker? It’s been awhile since I checked, but they used to block content if I had an ad blocker enabled, if I’m remembering correctly. It’s one of the few sites I disable my adblocker. But that was probably a couple of years ago, things may have changed, and my current ad blocker (uBlock Origin) does a much better job than my old one, including at bypassing adblock detection…
That’s the thing, I’m glad to support BoingBoing, but not to the point that it become unreadable, which it rapidly is. At this rate I’ll have to get comfortable reading Reddit at some point.
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Yes. Just use Brave for browsing it, works on all platforms.
Also, consider to bypass the blog view and go directly to the BBS, you can jump just as well from the comments to the post.
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This is an excellent suggestion and I am altering my bookmarks accordingly.
Most of the posts on weekends are store ads. I’m constantly surprised folks who have been coming here for years haven’t noticed that sooner. I’m fine with that, personally. Weekdays, the ads are very few compared with the other posts.
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Folks who have been coming here for years know that this is a relatively recent development.
You mean the store posts? Been happening for about the last year, not that recent. And before that? Well, there’s never been more than a tiny handful of posts on the weekends. Now there’s a tiny handful of posts plus a bunch of store posts. And weekdays we get large numbers of posts plus a tiny handful of store posts. I find complaining about it given the volume of what Boing Boing provides to be kind of dumb, honestly.
Now, complaining about how the various ad elements appear, making the page float up and down while it’s loading… yeah, that’s a pain in the ass, especially on mobile devices. Go to click on a story to read it, but the page jumps and I end up poking something I didn’t want.
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