I blocked 2leep – The Internet feels right again

So I think that by pure virtue of the fact that I know of it now means that everyone who owns a computer has passed through the site at one point or another, but for the sake of completeness, I’ll explain.  2leep (and a few sites like it) is supposedly a blog aggregation/link sharing service.  You include a little widget on the side of your site, which shows links to other blog entries (it’s kind of sad, but most of the things that are linked to are just picture dump posts).  The biggest problem is that when you try and click on it, you don’t get sent to the post you were looking to go to.  Instead, you get put on a 2leep page which spawns a popunder and is basically a page filled with post links.  You have to find the post you wanted to see on the page (admittedly not hard, but still annoying) and click the same link again before you can see the post.

I thought it was kind of annoying the first time it happened, but by the sixth, I was fed up.  I’ve been looking for a way to just bypass the service altogether and be directly linked to the post I wanted to see, but I haven’t found anything.  I do suspect, however, that making a greasemonkey script to perform this task wouldn’t be hard to do.  (Get the next site, find the link accompanied by the text of the link you just clicked on, and serve up THAT page instead)  Alas, I haven’t found one like that, so my next best option is to break out old Adblock Plus and just plain block everything from the site.  I have two filters right now, “*2leep.com*” and “*wahoha.com*” (wahoha is a clone of 2leep), and the Internet now looks a little more like how I remember it.  There’s a bit of text left over where the widgets used to be, but that’s easily ignorable.  Pages look so much cleaner now.

Now, this of course brings up the old debate about supporting content creators.  These aggregate sites probably are helping content producers out a good deal; driving traffic to their site and increasing visibility…  But I think that there are much better ways to go about it.  For example, I get to nearly all of these sites by stumbling on them.  Using StumbleUpon means that you’ll probably drive less captivated traffic to your site, but unless your 2leep submission has a provocative photo associated with it, chances are you’re not going to drive much traffic to your site anyway through that service.

There wasn’t really a point to this post, I just wanted to share.  There are some things on the Internet that I can’t stand, and 2leep does just enough to put themselves in that position with me.  So goodbye, and I hope you die a slow and obscure death, 2leep.

I’m quickly getting annoyed with sites that automatically start streaming video or audio when they really shouldn’t be.  You’re next.

~ by buncythefrog on January 25, 2011.