Today I tried to read a few links off HN and hit endless paywalls and ad infestations, all for a paragraph of fluff. I logged onto Facebook and my feed was crowded out with promoted posts and memes. I went on Reddit and the tiny bit of great content was crowded out with memes. I realized this is it. The web has fully lost it's early magic and it will never recover it in this iteration. There are ways you could fix it, but it's too late and all the players are too entrenched for anything to change. The monetization model is broken. This pony is all out of tricks.
We'll need to pioneer the next platform for tech to be exciting and fresh again. Probably VR, possibly AR. I'll see you guys there.
Facebook has outlasted everyone else working on VR, so now they get to own that platform. They were sad they didn't get an app store monopoly like Google and Apple, and now they have one. Better luck with AR I guess, where our best hope is that at least the current tech oligarchs compete for it rather than just allowing one of them to take it like they let Facebook take VR.
If everybody here would flag the paywall'd junk and not upvote it, it could be a nicer place.
Liberally using the 'hide' button also helps, but only yourself. You kind of need to cull out a third of it. One of these days I'm going to make a custom skin that filters out the worst of the hosts that clog up the front page.
A few hacks that don’t fully solve it but do help to some extent: adblock plus, just read, incognito mode, searching the article title and clicking through from google ( or the “web” link here in Hn ).
We'll need to pioneer the next platform for tech to be exciting and fresh again. Probably VR, possibly AR. I'll see you guys there.