> Even informational articles might only have a paragraph of text between ads.
The thing that made me realize how bad it's gotten was ironically an inability to use ad blockers. At one job, we weren't allowed to install any adblockers to the browser (there was a lot of bureaucracy so I never figured out why). Ended up writing my own JS bookmarklets to remove ad elements from sites I commonly visited. Also started browsing the web more in the terminal with Lynx because there are no images, it's just text. No distractions.
Taking your typical "How do you frob a xyzzy in the foo framework?" Medium article, the entire thing would usually fit on my screen in the terminal. The GUI browser had one or two lines followed by an image of ad.
> At one job, we weren't allowed to install any adblockers to the browser (there was a lot of bureaucracy so I never figured out why).
It could have been the IT department fielding too many "this web-based app" isn't working requests due to ad-blockers. A lot of time can be spent trying to troubleshoot an issue before figuring out the cause is the ad-blocker.
Edit: It could also have been a policy to disincentivize people to use their work computer for non-work-related tasks. Ads typically don't pop up on work-related web applications.
The thing that made me realize how bad it's gotten was ironically an inability to use ad blockers. At one job, we weren't allowed to install any adblockers to the browser (there was a lot of bureaucracy so I never figured out why). Ended up writing my own JS bookmarklets to remove ad elements from sites I commonly visited. Also started browsing the web more in the terminal with Lynx because there are no images, it's just text. No distractions.
Taking your typical "How do you frob a xyzzy in the foo framework?" Medium article, the entire thing would usually fit on my screen in the terminal. The GUI browser had one or two lines followed by an image of ad.