Castle Magus

...if you ever run a news website or a video game blog or something like that, and I ever even once see you hold your content hostage behind a paywall, then just know that I'm going to go out of my way to make sure that I never see your website or blog show up for me again, whether that's in Google searches or in my news app or whatever. It's actually worse when you have it set up to let people read two or three articles/entries for free, before throwing up the paywall. ("FiRsT oNe'S fReE" says the skeevy drug dealer or the scummy casino barker.) Your content is not something I can't do without, so don't even try to act like it is. Your content is not that valuable to me.

(Then again, for the most recent site in question [which I won't even name here, so as to not give them even that much more traffic], I suppose I should have heeded the earlier red flag that was them trying to get me to sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription just because I happened to hit reply on one of the comments under one of their articles to see if I could make a comment without having to make an account [since some rare few websites still let you do that]. Merely having to sign up for something for free is bad enough, and I usually don't bother with even that much. Being faced with an option select for a $7-$99 monthly/$70-$999 yearly subscription is on a whole other level entirely[1] and is a "fuck right off" moment.)

Find less obnoxious, insufferable ways to make money.

[1] - And even for that link there, I had to replace the original one with an archive.is variant, because the original one was, yes, partially behind a paywall.

"The experiment is meant to urge users to disable their ad blockers or subscribe to YouTube Premium."

Yeah, and Youtube can eat shit and die, then.

Haven't seen this bullshit myself, yet, but I will be sorely tempted to just straight up delete my account and never use Youtube again, if I ever do get hit with it.

Fuck advertising forever. Fuck marketing forever. Fuck commercials forever. Fuck paywalls forever. It's also because of advertisers that Youtube content creators are becoming so limited, like being forced to not have swears or whatever in the first arbitrary number of minutes of a video or else be demonetized.

Remember when one of the main reasons people switched to cable TV versus regular network over-the-air TV was to get away from commercials? Remember when commercials almost immediately came to cable too, and people switched to online shit like Youtube and streaming to get away from TV commercials? And then when ads came to Youtube and streaming (and the Internet in general), people started using ad blockers? I'm not sure what comes after the attempts to threaten and bully people into not using ad blockers, but I doubt it will be pleasant for anyone involved.

Ads are bullshit. They always have been, and they always will be. Find less obnoxious ways to make money, Internet.

( Embedded tweets behind cut )

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Addendum not included in the above (obviously): it is actually ridiculously easy to bypass the paywall on the website I'm ranting about above that I won't name here. All you have to do is have NoScript installed on a browser and have it turned on (which, just on general principle, is the default state for pretty much every website I view on my desktop PC, outside of a very rare few). Even so, I would prefer to simply not view said website at all, if I can avoid it, which is why I also have it blocked via Personal Blocklist so that it doesn't even show up in Google search results for me anymore. That's how much I fucking hate total paywalls.