Every site is trying to pull a Bonzai Buddy now.
“We need all your info for advertising, not you can’t opt out unless you make an account and give us your email. Oops, looks like I hid the opt-out under a subheader. Amazon is now profiling you.”
WE USED TO CALL THAT SHIT A VIRUS.
ITS EVERY. FUCKING. WEBSITE. NOW
“Hi I’m going to block this entire site until you give me your info, this is very cool and normal.”
Capitalism ruined the internet. The whole thing is malware now.
I still can’t see any links my friends send me if they’re from twitter, facebook, insta, etc (half the time anyway, seems to let me sometimes for short amounts of time) because they block the site with a wall telling you to log in.
If you’re looking to view twitter posts your friends send you, just replace the url from twitter.com or x.com to nitter.net
For added convenience, there are helpful plugins that can perform this task for you, such as LibRedirect.
I thinks it’s good practice to remind friends that you cannot view this or that link everytime they send one. I constantly remind my friends that insta doesn’t work for me (or the other sites). A few of them did start to realize how much of their daily habits takes place on these privately owned platforms.
I also like to remind some friends who think they partake in some sort of activism by liking or subscribing to certain instagram posts or accounts. They are now basically consuming a constant stream of advertisements voluntarily.
that’s why the fediverse a) so important as it is owned by no one but run/maintained/managed Democratic ally by us (“the public”) and b) so foreign for many people who have become accustomed to algorithmic feeds, constant bombardment by dopamine-optimized and subtle personalized advertisements that seeing organic content not selected by “engagement” (triggering, enraging, divisive, etc) that they are weirded out by it.