Southern Alamance Middle School in Graham, North Carolina has taken drastic steps to reduce the time kids spend outside of class.
  • rifugee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    912·
    10 months ago

    Companies wonder why people use adblockers; this is my experience trying to read this article on mobile without an adblocker:

    Picture of the outside of the building.

    Three paragraphs, each composed of a single sentence.

    Ad.

    Two paragraphs, each composed of a single sentence.

    Ad.

    A teaser block trying to get me read another article on their site.

    Ad.

    A stock photo of a public bathroom with mirrors.

    A teaser trying to get me to follow them on Google News.

    A single sentence with eight words.

    Ad.

    Another sentence, which is a quote from a school admin.

    Ad.

    Two paragraphs, each consisting of one sentence each.

    Teaser block trying to get me to read more articles on their site.

    A stock photo of some social media platform logos.

    A trending block with links to more articles on their garbage site.

    Two more paragraphs, each consisting of one sentence each.

    A distracting carrousel of images that are links to more articles on their site.

    Two more paragraphs, one of which actually has two sentences!

    Links to their social media.

    Is that the end of the article? I think so, but I’ve missed things before, so better keep scrolling a bit just in case.

    Related articles section.

    Ad.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    Link to another article.

    Ad.

    Comments section.

    Editors pick section of articles.

    Ad.

    Ad.

    Okay, pretty sure I’ve read the entire article now, but let’s keep scrolling to see how far this bullshit goes.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    Link to another article.

    And then the following pattern SIX times:

    Ad.

    Link to another article.

    Link to another article.

    Link to another article.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    FINALLY a whole bunch of links to other articles, some of which are promoted by Taboola, whatever the fuck that is.

    And the entire time there was a red popup for “breaking news” taking up 1/5 of the screen.

    For those keeping track at home, the article was a total of fourteen sentences, one photo of the school, and two stock photos. And no photo of a bathroom without mirrors.

    • IndiBrony@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      10 months ago

      Thankfully, most of the ads were quite well hidden on my Firefox mobile with the ublock origin addon, but still plenty of bullshit to trawl through.

      Are there any extensions which can filter out that “Read more”, and “follow us” crap?

      I suppose the last one isn’t bothersome, but the first two are still annoying.

      • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        10 months ago

        I run a pihole and see basically the same thing you do. I think the stuff that’s left is built in, hosted on their own domain. If that’s the case, probably not blockable across the board.

        With a quick search I found an extension called ‘block “read more”’, but it’s 2 star with 2 users so… idk maybe there are better ones but it looks like that extension had to be done for each website, rather than universally, so it’s a very small list.

        If you don’t mind doing a bit of work for it, and the complaint stems from the same set of websites, there’s an extension called element blocker that lets you block whatever you want from a given website, like chat popups and stuff.

  • anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    19·
    10 months ago

    I don’t get it…any phone that runs tiktok has a front-facing cam, right? The article says the mirrors “were featured heavily” in the tiktoks they saw. Idk seems heavyhanded and misguided to me.

    • Linkerbaan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      10 months ago

      Someone probably broke the mirror and this is just an excuse. Parents see TikTok blamed so all gud.

    • Communist@lemmy.mlEnglish
      72·
      10 months ago

      We could simply eat the children and then they won’t make tiktoks.

    • expr@programming.devEnglish
      118·
      10 months ago

      I don’t think you realize how fitting that analogy actually is. Kids so addicted to tiktok that it’s as essential to them as air. Pretty depressing.

        • expr@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          I don’t think it would be effective, I just found a certain amount of irony in the analogy.

          I do think smartphones should probably be banned in schools, but that’s another topic.

        • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          I mean, it was obviously a hyperbole, that they need it as much as air, but TikTok (like many other social media platforms) has addictive qualities.

          The first ingredient for addiction is to somehow cause joy without requiring much effort to be put in. Whether that’s heroin, sugar or funny memes, short-term they will cause happy brain chemicals to be released.

          If you’re completely abstinent, you’d need to put in work + achieve something, to get those happy brain chemicals, so it requires more effort.

          (That’s only short-term. Long-term, having achievements to look back to, can instill more happiness, but it can be hard for our brains to conceptualize long-term.)

          One way in particular that TikTok et al are similar to an addictive medium, is that scrolling through posts is a bit like a slot machine. Since the order of posts is largely random, you never quite know, if the next scroll is going to have the funniest meme, much like each pull on a slot machine might have you winning money.
          As such, even if you’re ‘losing’ most of the time, you’ll just keep scrolling, hoping for that random win.