News Site: “You have ad blocker. Please turn off.”

Me: “I don’t mind you showing ads. I do mind your ad network tracking eveything I do and reporting it to Google. Hence the ad blocker.”

News Site: “Turn off blocker.”

Me: “No.”

@bradenslen I like doing that too. If the news site don’t like my preferences, then it’s the news site’s problem. I can find the information they supposedly provide elsewhere.

@bradenslen @odd I don't block ads. I just refuse to run their scripts on my machine. If the news site just serves up advertising from their own site, I'll see it.

@philipbrewer That’s probably even better for most sites.

@philipbrewer @odd I went many years using only a popup blocker because I didn't mind the ads. But the tracking of our browsing across the Web has gotten out of hand and frankly the ad networks are cheating the publishers by paying them so little so I just opted out.

@bradenslen @philipbrewer I get most of my information needs via my RSS-feed where I subscribe to mostly not-for-profit outlets, but only sometimes I wander off into the jungle that the news organizations have become. I have a very tight budget, so, if I could say to Apple, (my OS manufacturer): Here’s $100, now give me all articles from these outlets for a year, within these categories, don’t show me any ads, and don’t ever ask me to log in. This would be my dream scenario.

@bradenslen I pay for a subscription to one local news outlet and one national. I keep my ad blocker on and get no complaints from those sources when I’m signed in.

It’s not ideal. I would like to see what @odd and @philipbrewer suggest become more common practice.

@odd In the US, this is almost News+. It lacks local outlets tho.

@philipbrewer Is there an easy way to do this?

@odd I like the idea of a consolidated subscription service. Everybody, from streaming services to news wants me to pay subscription fees and it's just too many seperate places to have my credit card info online and it all adds up to a sizable sum of money quick.

@fgtech I need to do the same.

@bradenslen I use an extension for Firefox called uMatrix. It let's you selectively enable scripts, but also cookies, CSS, images, frames, etc. on a per-domain basis.

The default is to have everything ON for the domain of the URL you went to, but all other domains turned off. That breaks most web pages, but you can pretty quickly figure out which domains provide stuff that pages need to run and turn those on permanently. Do that and things start to work pretty automatically.

@philipbrewer Thanks! I'll look into that.

@mcg Yes, I wish those were on board too, and that we had something like that here.

@odd I must say, back when I still had an iPhone, I did like Apple News app for a quick overveiw of the news.

In general though I dislike news apps like Google News that "learn" what it thinks I like and feeds me more of it. I also dislike those that track me and report to the mothership so they can feed me more ads.

With that said, I have been using the Web versions of MSN News, BBC News and Yahoo News. No privacy with any of them but MSN and Y! are useful for getting around the paywall of the bigger newspapers.

I'm using a RSS reader for keeping up with blogs and niche news sources.