Unpopular Opinion

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As someone who worked (briefly) as a freelance writer online, the tl;dr bot is my enemy and I want it dead. (lemmy.ca)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The tl;dr bot that pops up on every link to an article on Lemmy is depriving those websites of clicks, which deprives them of ad revenue.

The only thing that will accomplish is forcing those websites to do the very thing that we rail about; replacing their writers with crappy A.I because they can't afford to pay for actual content.

We rail against the enshitification of the internet, but when there's a legitimate way to fight back by giving these websites a page view/read/click etc... so that they can attract advertisers, we would rather have a bot summarize it for us, giving them nothing.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (2 children)

You can blame the bot for decreased ad revenue all you’d like but it’s malarkey.

Websites have poisoned the well, so to say. It is simply not smart to browse these sites without ad blockers. Constant popups, cookie banners with 100s of toggles, flashing ads for random junk, and so on were driven by greed originally and are now driven by survival. If the greed could have subsided just a bit and website owners not tried to make all the money, people wouldn’t need to use tldr bots or adblockers.

Sorry not sorry, fuck your ad supported content.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Yeah, gotta agree. Sites got greedy. One or two out of the way ads on the top or side? Didn't care, show them. Go to any news site or article now and you get top, bottom, every paragraph, flashing, pop up, when you go top left to close, and also accept cookies plz.

No, they're the ones to blame for making the web like this. They ruined ad revenue themselves, they can figure out a new way.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

The problem is that people hate pay walls even more than ads.