Not really sure if this is the right place to post this but I just need it written somewhere for reference when people inevitably give me shit for "not reading the article". Here's the thing:

1. The only thing you've provided is a clickbaity title and a link that tells me almost nothing about the content of the article. This actively makes me not want to click. Include some context in your post, or add it to the title. I know you're not supposed to "editorialize" the title, but I think it's fair to make an exception in the case of clickbait.
2. Site is broken/paywalled/blocking my connection or otherwise inaccessible. If you link to an Archive site, those are inaccessible 100% of the time. If you send me to Nitter, it will almost certainly be either broken or block my access. Invidious is almost always broken. Even if you pay to share a NYT link with me, they will still refuse me access until I give them an email address. Sorry, not doing it, don't care that much.
3. The post/article you've shared is just a long drawn out post with gobs of unnecessary context about a 1 or 2 sentence Xeet or Reddit post. Just share the source content.
4. The post/article you've shared does not contain a source of the information at all. It's so patently absurd that we allow publications to get away with this. They often have a couple dozen links that go nowhere except back to their own page.
5. Advertising. I do not consent to sharing my cookie information with your 1056 advertising partners. Nor do I want to click your pop-up banner to allow "strictly necessary" (whatever the fuck that means) cookies. If I use my adblocker to remove the cookie banner without actually giving them any permissions at all so I can see the God damn page, it often breaks the page . If my ad blocker misses it, I'm just leaving .
6. I'm not spending 1 hour watching your clickbait video. YouTube incentivizes creators to make longer videos, and so the creators will fill them with a ton of bloat to lengthen them. YouTube also very often blocks me as well, prompting me to "sign in to confirm you're not a bot". I'm not doing it.

In short, the modern internet just fucking blows too much for me to even bother trying to work around all this bullshit. If you link to some obscure blog from a URL I don't recognize, I'll probably click and read it, because those are the only selfless unmonetized publications left.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Perhaps we can make a list of acceptable sources?

I relate to this very much. Most media sites are unusable, and I don’t care, I am not lowering my standards. However, I kind of have a workaround when browsing lemmy on my phone:

• click link
• click share button in the app
• select GoodLinks and save it
• immediately close the page.
• open GoodLinks. If the content loads and I can read it, I give it a go.
• Otherwise, fuck them, I won’t read the article.

There are headline styles and domains that I learned to avoid, because no real information can be expected to be found.

Click link

Click through cookie banner

Click through subscription splash

it’s not x, it’s y — you see, because thing.

The internet is dead.

I agree with the sentiment, but with a platform as small as Lemmy that's basically a death sentence. That list would probably be small and would need to be maintained by volunteers. It also needs to be actively monitored and judgement calls be made when something is posted off list but still acceptable. This means a lot of extra work. New people sharing stuff might get their content removed, probably leading to them not posting new content anymore. When something is only available on banned sites, that content will be missed entirely.

Lemmy needs content to grow and is already short of people doing all the work. Putting in restrictions will limit the ability to grow and might put it into a death spiral. It's why small niche communities don't work, the limits prevent a sufficient amount of content for people to stick around. Even niches with large audiences, like for example the game Silksong failed. The community came over, posted a whole bunch in the first week, then it died within a couple of weeks. Not enough content, so people left.

You're right. Maybe we could just mark the unaccepted sources like how there's a warning about believing stuff from just one post. That way, people can be warned to look at certain sources with more skepticism, but the content is not blocked.

This is also aggravated by the amount of posters who predominantly post from the same obscure source with no explanation.

I am not gonna vet your preferred news source. I will assume they are fringe and biased unless you make a case for them.

(This is also aggravated by RSS repost bots that cannot vet their content or its validity or appropriateness for the community in question. I tend to just block those firehoses.)

Proposal:
7. AI slop thumbnail.
8. Poster defending slop in the comments
If the thumbnail, the thing the content is supposed to put its best foot forward in, is slop... I have no hope for the rest.

AI slop is disrespect of my time and a sign the thing does not deserve my attention.

My first stop is always the comments to see if some kind soul has already read the article and left a comment with pertinent quotes. If no one has, I often try to do it myself, though with my own weird commentary or warning about the site's credibility that is usually not very well received.

The post/article you’ve shared does not contain a source of the information at all. It’s so patently absurd that we allow publications to get away with this. They often have a couple dozen links that go nowhere except back to their own page.

I'm pretty sure these are just AI generated articles

Absolutely right on the spot. If one is too lazy to post a piece of information in a proper way, maybe just leave it to those who can.

OP should be doing that in the post body. Or at least be posting the actual primary source instead of posting some blogspam reiteration of the primary source.

Goodlinks is something I hadn't heard before. Seems to be a single-platform pay-for app you need to download, which means giving your info to Apple. Even if I had a modern enough Mac to run it... fuck that.

Sure. The point is, reader mode, whatever way you get there, prevents the display of anything other than the article. No popups, banners, cookie consent.