I have a bit of a TV Tropes habit. So I was a bit disconcerted to see this:

I have a “dark mode” browser extension, but I have it disabled for tvtropes.org; that dark gray text on a darker gray background is their dark mode. I consider that a clue as to how much care and forethought went into their decision to turn up the adtech enshittification dial yesterday afternoon.

I didn’t have this issue Tuesday; I discovered it when I went to check on some open browser tabs yesterday evening after work. And the complaints on Reddit started yesterday evening at (fuck Reddit’s “streamlined” time stamps) somewhere around 6 PM Eastern.

TV Tropes’ ads are infamously obnoxious. And their ad partner is Google Syndication (or Google Ads or whatever they’re calling it this year), a “service” I’ve mentioned before as a malware source. My ad blocker also spotted elements from Big Crunch (probably adtech backend), Quantserve (for tracking and data mining), and Scorecard Research (for more data mining).

The ad blocker stayed on.

Some complainers reported getting shut out even with their ad blocker turned off. And reports vary as to whether or not creating a user account and logging in makes a difference.

And $5 a month is a stupid fucking price to charge, and I won’t be paying it. $25 a year sounds a bit more reasonable… until I compare it to, say, a digital magazine subscription. Magazines have to pay for their content; I suspect TV Tropes is just charging what they think the market will bear.

There’s also a mobile app… which has the same obnoxious ads and the same too-high prices to remove them. And while the permissions are actually almost reasonable, its download size is over twice as large as Chrome. That makes no sense for what’s essentially a web wrapper… unless it has more adtech, tracking, and data mining built in. Hard no.

 

This morning, when I double-checked, the ad dial had been turned back down. Apparently TV Tropes is a small enough outfit that it’s at least somewhat responsive to user feedback, and the user feedback I’d seen was almost universally negative (the ads make the site unreadable, time for a boycott, it was nice while it lasted, I can’t even create an account on mobile to try out that alleged workaround)…

Good thing, too, because I would have been one of the ones boycotting. And I didn’t dive right back in this morning and find a rabbit hole to go down, either; the whole incident has left a sour taste in my mouth that might linger for a while.