Trying to read this to the end feels impossible - the Guardian keeps flicking the page to show ads and the page refreshes for no reason and I’m sure their ads impressions numbers are going through the roof. Feels like ad fraud.
I remember reading The Guardian back in the oughts when they were winning awards for their UX and they were my go-to answer to the front-end interview question of "Which websites do you admire?"
Ha, they even have their "Website of the year" award linked on their top banner
The Guardian from a desktop browser started confronting me with a paywall about two weeks ago. Can’t even see the front page, and uBlock Origin doesn’t help. Far from encouraging me to subscribe, I think this might actually finally cure my news addiction.
I hate ads as much as everyone, but I think you need to at least take a modicum of steps to block ads before posting to HN that you hate seeing all the ads.
(Perhaps your point though is to broadcast to everyone—who presumably are in fact blocking ads—that the site is pure awfulness without any ad-blocking. Of course you're preaching to the choir at that point anyway.)
The Guardian attempts to stop you accessing its articles if you are using an ad-blocker and don't have a paid subscription. (They didn't always do this. I don't know whether they do it uniformly to everyone or whether e.g. it's different based on their guess of your location.)
Yeah, which is a reasonable statement to make on the website TrainHackersAndPassAvoiders.com. I think its appropriate if you consider yourself in the culture to be reminded of the norms everyone in that culture typically follows.
If jumping the turnstile were legal, yeah. So far anyway, Reader Mode, and various ad-blockers are still legal.
I see your point generally though: accessing content that the publisher has attempted to force you to pay for. My general thought though is that it appears to be a failed (failing?) business model. I just don't know what the solution is. Perhaps if the ads avoided obscuring the content (like newspapers and magazines) I would probably just ignore them and not actively try to suppress them.
