There Is No Cat - Falling prey to the dark side

Hollering into the void since 2002

Sunday, July 13, 2003

Falling prey to the dark side

Earlier this week, UK newspaper The Guardian announced that they were going to offer an ad-free version of their web site for a £20 per year fee. This weekend, it appears that the other shoe has dropped; they've made the ads on the existing version of the site so fµcking annoying that they'll drive anyone who tries to actually read the site mad. It's bad enough that every page has an seizure-inducing blinking ad for something that claims to be Napster's replacement. But to add insult to injury, every single page also has the most annoying pop-up window I've ever seen. It starts as a small window in the upper-left corner, then gets longer until it takes up the whole left side of your screen. Then it expands to cover the entire screen. I have no idea what the ad is for, because this jarring experience lasts long enough that I'm able to whack the mole before it fully appears. But damn, is it annoying. I want to throw something through the screen. If I could be assured that the rock I tossed would come out the other end in England and knock some sense into the jerks that decided upon this supremely annoying tactic, I'd be willing to sacrifice the monitor. I'm amazed that a paper that until now has been so clueful has done something that displays such contempt for its audience.

I love reading The Guardian, and I was considering subscribing to the ad-free version and to their upcoming US-based weekly magazine to support their up-to-now enlightened approach to the web (open archives, in particular) but I won't be visiting it any more. Fµck you with a chainsaw, Guardian web overlords.

Posted at 9:54 PM

Comments

Note: I’m tired of clearing the spam from my comments, so comments are no longer accepted.

Nice use of Greek there.

You made the pop-up ad sound so interesting I stopped using Mozilla for a minute and booted Internet Explorer to see it for myself.

Posted by Mike at 10:05 PM, July 13, 2003 [Link]

Indeed, I had to switch back to IE before I could actually see the ad. In Mozilla, the annoying ads don't show up, and the banner ads can be blocked too.

Unfortunately a number of other sites do this too.

Posted by Neil T. at 10:14 AM, July 16, 2003 [Link]

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio