Love both of them. CNN has become a bit "left-leaning Fox News" for my taste, though.

If Al Jazeera or BBC had a similar text only site, that would be best. I really love the different perspectives.

I mostly use brutalist.report to find the articles, then deal with them on a case by case basis.

Ahh, I love them. The fact that they are fast, give you the exact thing you are looking for without any other noise is just amazing!

https://lite.cnn.com seems to load 200KB of CSS

I’m honestly dumbfounded that these exist

In the past some site had light versions, but I haven’t come across one in over 10 years

Makes me wonder if this isn’t just some rogue employee maintaining this without anyone else realizing it

It’s the light version, but ironically I would happily pay these ad networks a monthly $20 to just serve these lite pages and not track me. They don’t make anywhere close to that from me in a year

Sadly, here’s how it would go: they’d do it, it be successful, they’d ipo, after a few years they’d need growth, they’d introduce a new tier with ads, and eventually you’d somehow wind up watching ads again

> They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription

I subscribe, and yet they still bombard me with ads. Fuck that. One reason I don’t use apps is that I can’t block ads.

I'm about to go full cycle.

For a while it looked like companies were going to offer a good product at a fair price. I started getting a few subscriptions to various services.

Then all of those services got enshitefied. I got ads in paid accounts, slow loads, obvious data mining, etc.

Paying for services now often offers a degraded experience relative to less legitimate methods of acces.

"Why would you feel guilty for not visiting a site you’re not paying for and where you’re blocking ads?"

This isn't a simple as it sounds, in fact it's rather complicated (far too involved to cover in depth here).

In short, ethics are involved (and believe it or not I actually possess some)!

In the hayday of newsprint people actually bought newspapers at a cheap affordable price and the bulk of their production was paid for by advertisements. We readers mostly paid for what we read, newspapers were profitable and much journalism was of fair to good quality. Back then, I had no qualms about forking out a few cents for a copy of the NYT.

Come the internet the paradigm changed and we all know what happened next. In fact, I feel sorry about the demise of newsprint because what's replaced it is of significantly lesser value.

In principle I've no objection to paying for news but I will not do so for junk and ads that I cannot avoid (with magazines and newspapers ads are far less intrusive).

So what's the solution? It's difficult but I reckon there are a few worth considering. For example, I mentioned some while ago on HN that making micro payments to websites ought to be MUCH easier than it is now (this would apply to all websites and would also be a huge boon for open source developers).

What I had in mind was an anonymous "credit" card system with no strings attached. Go to your local supermarket, kiosk or whatever and purchase a scratchy card with a unique number to say the value of $50 for cash and use that card to make very small payments to websites. Just enter the card's number and the transaction is done (only enter one's details if purchasing something that has to be delivered).

That way both the card and user remain anonymous if the user wishes, also one's privacy is preserved, etc. It could be implemented by blockchain or such.

The technical issues are simple but problems are obvious—and they're all political. Governments would go berserk and cry money laundering, tax evasion, criminal activity, etc., and the middlemen such as Master and Visa cards would scream to high heaven that their monopolies were being undercut.

In short, my proposal is essentially parallels what now exits with cash—I go to a supermarket and pay cash for groceries, the store doesn't need to know who I am. It ought to be no big deal but it isn't.

It seems to me a very simple micro payments system without name, rank and serial number attached would solve many of the internet payment problems.

Sure, there'll always be hardline scavengers and scrapers but many people would be only too happy to pay a little amount for a service they wanted, especially so when they knew the money was going into producing better products.

For example, I'd dearly love to be able to say purchase a copy of LibreOffice for $10 - $20 and know there was enough money in the organisation to develop the product to be fully on par with MSO.

Trouble is when buying stuff on the internet there's a minimum barrier to overcome and it's too high for most people when it comes to making micro payments (especially when the numbers could run into the hundreds per week).

I cannot understand why those who'd benefit from such a scheme haven't at least attempted to push the matter.

Oh, and that's just one aspect of the problem.

"…but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us."

Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues. The profitability of newspapers and magazines has been slashed to ribbons over the past couple of decades and internet revenues hardly nudge the graphs.

Internet beneficiaries are all new players, Google et al.

Depending on the site, unfortunately that might be interpreted as a feature and not a bug.

If Google were just starting YouTube today then DRM would likely be enforced through a dedicated app. The trouble for Google is that millions watch YouTube through web browsers many of whom aren't even using a Google account let alone even being subscribers to a particular YouTube page. Viewership would drop dramatically.

Only several days ago I watched the presenter of RobWords whinging about wanting more subscribers and stating that many more people just watch his presentations than watch and also subscribe.

The other problem YouTube has is that unlike Netflix et al with high ranking commercial content are the millions of small presenters who do not use advertising and or just want to tell the world at large their particular stories. Enforced DRM would altogether ruin that ecosystem.

Big tech will slowly enforce "secure browsing" and "secure OS" in a way that will make it impossible to browse the web without a signed executable approved by them. DRM is just a temporary stopgap.

It is strange to hear these threats about avoiding websites from people who are not subscribers and also definitely using an ad blocker.

News sites aren’t publishing their content for the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing their visitor count go up. They’re running businesses. If you’re dead set on not paying and not seeing ads, it’s actually better for them that you don’t visit the site at all.

I am a paid subscriber to NYT and have been reading it paper / internet for 30+ years. It is an Enshittification winner in terms tracking and click bait. It doesn't feel like a serious news outlet anymore, feels like Huff Post or similar.

I'd like to answer that in detail but it's impractical to do so here as it'd take pages. As a starter though begin with them not violating users' privacy.

Another quick point: my observation is that the worse the ad problem the lower quality the content is. Cory Doctorow's "enshitification" encapsulates the problems in a nutshell.

You're right, it means nothing. But it cuts two ways. These sites are sending me bytes and I choose which bytes I visualize (via an ad blocker). Any expectation the website has about how I consume the content has no meaning and it's entirely their problem.