I ran into this as well about 2 years ago. I thought it’d be cool to create a site that’d algorithmically estimate the snowpack for mountains based on observations and elevation. It was a very rough estimate, but still better than using 1 square mile observations, which obviously could vary by 10k+ feet of elevation.
When I tried putting a few Google Ads on it to pay the hosting costs, it rejected it until I added long-form descriptions of the content. So instead of a useful chart and table, I ended up having long-winded descriptions of the location, algorithm, search, elevation’s effect on snowpack, and all that.
It was so fucking stupid I just up and deleted the whole project and never looked back. I’m sure I could have made the tool better and charged a subscription or something if it was actually useful, but it just kind of made me jaded on the modern web. I gave up and went hiking.
Ah so this is why recipe websites are straight out of some demonic fever dream where you have to scroll 1 mile past 30 blocks of text, video, ads to get to the ingredients, then 1 mile further to get to the instructions.
All of those sites should be banned - but now i see it's Google encouraging them - such an extreme downgrade in usability from a basic html site from 30 years ago.
Something has gone extremely wrong on a huge scale culturally and politically.
I wonder if you could DIY your own ads via an amazon affiliate account. I've used one in the past for actual product reviews, but now I'm wondering if you could hack it in in some way.
When I tried putting a few Google Ads on it to pay the hosting costs, it rejected it until I added long-form descriptions of the content. So instead of a useful chart and table, I ended up having long-winded descriptions of the location, algorithm, search, elevation’s effect on snowpack, and all that.
It was so fucking stupid I just up and deleted the whole project and never looked back. I’m sure I could have made the tool better and charged a subscription or something if it was actually useful, but it just kind of made me jaded on the modern web. I gave up and went hiking.