Account Required to Browse Sites

[starbreaker]

IMO, the commercialization of the internet was a mistake. It was one thing to sell internet access or to sell hosting, but trying to sell access to a website is foolishness. News outlets would have done better to only put their archives online, with a delay between paid publication and physical media and internet access to digital archives. And advertising should never have been allowed on the internet.

As to how to pay to put stuff online? Having a day job works for me.

[Fish]

The push to force people to make accounts is sooo annoying. I get some of the stuff for age verification but sometimes I can't even view something my friends send me because I dont have an account for a specific site!

It gets even worse when it comes to new articles, it just feels kinda evil to make people have to pay and subscribe just to get info about the world 

It really makes the world wide web feel small and closed off

[xero333]

IMO, the commercialization of the internet was a mistake. It was one thing to sell internet access or to sell hosting, but trying to sell access to a website is foolishness. News outlets would have done better to only put their archives online, with a delay between paid publication and physical media and internet access to digital archives. And advertising should never have been allowed on the internet.

As to how to pay to put stuff online? Having a day job works for me.

Agreed. Fucking agreed! It's a joke how websites operate now. Multiple pop-ups for mailing lists, subscriptions, cookies, ads. Piss off! Give me a clean website any day, even if it's just plain HTML with no fancy stuff. And agreed on ads too in order to fund the site. You want to fund it? Then fund it. Use your wages. Sell a product. Do anything but cover it in intrusive ads. I've used an adblocker for over a decade and won't stop.

[Neonriser]

I understand where you're coming from. It can be extremely annoying when visiting sites such as Instagram and X. This is why people use Firefox plugins such as Tampermonkey and uBlock Origin.

Seriously, why would I make an account if I use it only to view the cool stuff artists make on Instagram? It's a pet peeve of mine because it's extremely inconvenient for me.

Are there any tools out there to help out people with the same problem as we do?

[PurpleHello98]

Another example is news articles where they hook you with the first paragraph of an article, then you scroll a bit further and a pop-up appears saying you need to pay to read the rest. Piss off lmao.

Vacuuming money out of people's pockets is the general purpose of these things in some way or another (more time on my app = more $$$, which is more important than not addicting a generation to little sheets of glass) but paywalling articles is the most egregious example of this. Whatever happened to the free, accessible exchange of information? :/

[...]

I'm going on a tangent here but I really wish giant corporations would stop implementing the most asinine changes imaginable to their sites. If it ain't broken, don't fix it, you know? It's still unbelievable to me that YouTube flat-out removed the number of Dislikes on a video - a decision that nobody liked, let alone asked for, yet they refuse to undo this. Also, YouTube Shorts has some of the most poorly thought-out design I've ever seen. Why can't you scroll through/seek on a YouTube Short when watching from a PC? Shouldn't that be one of the most basic functionalities of a video on the Internet? The overall layout of YouTube gets worse by the year too. I'm gonna stop here otherwise I'll end up spiraling into a massive rant over it.

Case in point, it's gross how much control these giant corporations have when it comes to making big decisions and drastic changes to their sites. The millions of people who use these services don't even have a say in the matter. Don't like our outlandish changes and ridiculous implementations nobody asked for? Too bad so sad.

Really wish it didn't have to be this way.

Wasn't their reasoning because it was stressing YouTubers out or something? I'd think in the long run, being able to see dislikes would actually be beneficial, since it'd allow YouTubers to see what works, what doesn't, etc., but I suppose YouTube found some way to make more money off of it. And my favourite alternative frontend is slow enough for some reason that I don't really like using it, and I find myself back at YouTube.com again. :/

[bingus_baby]

since it'd allow YouTubers to see what works, what doesn't, etc.

YouTubers can still see the dislikes. They're only hidden to the viewers, but otherwise function how they used to. iirc the real reason was because certain brands and big name YouTubers were getting dislike bombed, and they wanted to hide that from the viewers. Something like that. I think it's a bad move though, since many people used the dislikes to gauge how accurate and helpful a video was, such as with tutorials.

my favourite alternative frontend is slow enough for some reason

I've been using the Invidious set of sites for a while now. Yewtube is good usually during the morning hours where I live. In the evening it slows down, so I'll use this other instance. I really like them, since it's easy to download videos I like! Maybe not the best quality video, but it's easy when I need background noise while drawing. I can only listen to the same albums in my iTunes so many times before I get sick of it lmao