Memes

Surprisingly, yes. I have no idea why people put their email addresses in those things, but they do. I put a tiny email capture on one of my websites once as an experiment. I didn't even offer anything, It just said "Keep in touch", and thousands of people signed into an double opt-in mailing list in the 3 weeks I had it up. Fucking weirdos.

• 30 mb of JS for 1 kb of text.
• Can't zoom or scroll freely without JS interfering.
• Double-click on a word and it calls another script for 'assistance' instead of selecting the word.
• Right-click is disabled or bring their own 'menu' that does nothing.

Interesting approach, gonna think about it. So far I didn't take disinformation as a result of news companies going broke.

Why would people forget that the BBC is more trustworthy then someones uncle, just because his opinion is for free? The distrust in "old authorities" like big newspaper or governments is, in my opinion, a long-term result of the broken promisses of the hegemony they are, or seem to be, part of.

The concept "people have to have to pay for quality information" doesn't sit right with me. Relevant info should be available for everyone! And trustworthy news orgs should be funded pubicly.

Most websites started out free because the Web is very close to being "post-scarcity".

Running a simple but successful website used by tens of thousands of people can be done in your spare time for cheaper than a Spotify subscription. A hobbyist website about fishing with 10.000 monthly users can probably be hosted reliably enough for $10/mo, plus a few hours of work. Even if you value your time highly (say, $50/h), that's still a "$200/mo" website (almost all of which is time you're billing to yourself). The breakeven point is then at $0.02/monthly user (and the more users you have, the lower the cost per user, down to fractions of fractions of a cent for a really big text-based website).

In that context it's next to impossible to fairly pay for the service of running a text-based website. Payment processing costs are going to be, by far, the biggest share of the pie, which is ridiculous. So, advertisments and datamining it is (or was; datamining without explicit consent is at least illegal in the EU). Alternatively, donations (this is Twitch's core business model, with which they're even profitable in some markets, despite offering the most expensive service: realtime transcoded video).

Of course a news website also has salaries to pay. That significantly shifts the balance in favor of "pay for the service", unfortunately that runs counter to user expectations. Plus the historical context of traditional news orgs subsidizing their new websites with traditional revenue streams, then finding themselves cornered when the web turned out to be more than just a fad or a hobby.

Another problem with additional revenue is feature bloat. Look at reddit, the website originally was actually really cheap to operate and was actually profitable on Reddit Gold alone (donations being a very common business model on the internet which IMO makes the most sense in most situations given the low costs).
But they had to add an image host (sure, imgur was probably not happy to be footing the bill) as well as a video player (why?), chat service (where's the business value?!), a brand-new but completely unoptimized front-end UI, a mobile app (despite third-party devs already offering superior options FOR FREE), etc.
Reddit's enshittification was caused by an overabundance of revenue from external investors asking for continuous growth, not from any inherent shortcoming in the original business plan. Same goes for pretty much every other enshittified website.

Truth is the internet always sucked.

God forbid I get an actual solution to a Windows error I'm googling instead of every partition manager program telling me to buy it for some reason.

Fuck flash, good games and fun memories, but also good riddance for accessibility.

There are a few extensions that try to automatically handle different cookie popups with your pre-selected preferences. Consent-O-Matic is one.

This? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-auto-decline/

Link please?

You can easily host a static website on a dirt cheap VPS. The Hetzner ARM boxes are less than $5/mo with an IPv4 address and are going to be more than sufficient for the average static website... My website is on a cheap VPS with worse specs than the Hetzner ones and it does not take 30-45 seconds to load.