Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

channel 4 on demand requires you to switch off ad blocking s/w in order to watch anything.

i really hate sites that have a surrounding advert, 'lo allmusic,p-fork, and yesterday, the guardian.

I wish the Guardian website would go to a subscription model. I would be happy to pay a reasonable amount each month if it meant getting rid of the adverts and (hopefully) some of the loopier BTL commenters.

I might buy this piece of tripe for the first time for the LOLz when (hopefully) Corbyn wins tomorrow.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/matthewzeitlin/the-washington-post-begins-blocking-ad-blockers#.fbomDrXR3

bezos/ios9

http://i.imgur.com/aJq88vJ.jpg

A Fat Duck that is only accessible to a tiny elite is at best a curio, if not a source of resentment. A democratic Fat Duck would be a point of national pride and far more enjoyable for the people who worked there. Who wants to feed the jaded super-rich when you could be serving genuinely excited new customers? So, how could Heston Blumenthal subsidise a new, socially inclusive Fat Duck?

"genuinely excited new customers" are what's wrong with everything.

http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/oct/05/the-avocado-is-overcado-how-culture-caught-up-with-fashion

if you really want to get to grips with the meaning of modern life, look no further than the avocado. Or – to give it its most up-to-date name – the overcado.

It is still on every fashionable cafe menu, but it is now basic. Basic in the Kate-Moss-Easyjet sense of the word, meaning that it aspires to values that are now too generic to be aspirational.

Is the iphone app constantly crashing for anyone else?

Yes

Well great, I'll just have to cross the room to my laptop fml

The website constantly crashes and reloads in Safari and Chrome on my iPad too.

the mobile site is unusable on anything other than an adblock browser

It the app keeps crashing for you, you can do me a massive favour by emailing userhelp at the guardian dot com to complain.

Just tell them what phone you're using, and what version of the app (you can this by going to settings > about. oh, you get to settings by clicking on that 3-line icon in the top left that some people call the hamburger)

The apps team do their best to test, but often only really realise there's something badly wrong when lots of people email. They really welcome crash reports.

Same goes for persistent website crashing too.

The app doesn't stay open long enough the click the hamburger at the moment.

Yikes. Well, try updating the app and if there's no update available then you can just tell them you're on the latest version.

well, there's a few reports on twitter as well that the app's broken as well - so guardian dot com should twig eventually that something's up.

I sent an email

old school

Sirs,

The Mulberry ad on the iPad app, telling me to rotate my device for the best experience, really takes the biscuit for misplaced presumption.

First line of the headline must be deliberate?

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/nov/07/iaaf-dick-pound-sebastian-coe-lamine-diack

(A delete and reinstall seems to have solved the problem btw)

Are you sure you want to 'solve the problem'?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/09/jeremy-corbyn-mark-e-smith-politics-labour-leader-indie-band

Tim Jonze

What are you looking at? That is his best work :p

"We notice you're using an ad-blocker. Become a supporter from just £5 per month to ensure quality journalism is available to all."

what, you mean 'quality journalism' like that?

The text of Gordon Brown’s speech runs to around 8,000 words. It does not appear to be available online yet, but I hope at some point it will go up on Brown’s website. It should do. Apart from the fact that it is borderline unreadable, it’s excellent.

What makes it so hard to plough through is that it is saturated with figures and statistics. Brown joked earlier about not being very good with statistics (see 1.03pm), but that hasn’t stopped him overloading the speech with them. There are countless passages where fine writing is hobbled and swamped by an overload of numerical facts.

But it is worth (just) getting past them because as well as containing the well-trailed attack on George Osborne, the speech offers a wide-ranging analysis covering the historical nature of poverty, and how changes to the labour market have affected it.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/21/a-letter-to-my-godson-with-whom-ive-decided-to-sever-ties?CMP=share_btn_tw

uh what is this and why is it on the guardian website

because it's hilarious?

somewhat surprised and disappointed that the 'lbzc' did not manage to do a rolling dave simpson thread from that era when discussing guardian music writers was responsible for about 13% of ilx threads

Xp I could use 25 quid, I'm up for this

A letter to the bloke stood next to me at the bar who got served before me even though i was stood here first

I’m not sure when your father started to dislike me – perhaps when I had the audacity to betray my working-class background and go to college. Actually, not just college, university.

What age is this guy? In his 90s perhaps?

They do need to refresh a lot of the columnists.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/22/why-the-hidden-work-of-women-needs-to-be-recognised

I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I'm not convinced that this journalist is any longer in touch with modern Britain and its issues:

For example, as I’ve said before, the young women sent out to marry Englishmen ruling India had to control all the staff and cater for the whole outfit – the kind of stuff which would have counted as a serious job if a man had been doing it.

Otoh I'm sure the columnists are refreshed enough most of the time

somewhat surprised and disappointed that the 'lbzc' did not manage to do a rolling dave simpson thread from that era when discussing guardian music writers was responsible for about 13% of ilx threads

This would be premature and grossly unjust considering there is still no Paul Lester thread.

On the plus side, it was good to see news today of Max Gogarty, after his abortive gap year column some years ago.

Otoh I'm sure the columnists are refreshed enough most of the time

LOL, indeed. Earlier I wondered if the guy who wrote the letter to his godson was in his 90s, well Katharine Whitehorn is 86.

This obituary seems to be more about the author than the subject. http://gu.com/p/4ejb7?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Didn't seem too bad to me, though much of the material has already appeared in the Telegraph obit last week.

https://twitter.com/Ben_Everitt/status/679657860280758277

great stuff from the guardian.com

Now I do politicsy stuff in the countryside and strategyish stuff in the City. Views my own, etc

Recycling Twitter posts is quite lazy, isn't it?

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/dec/29/lemmy-from-motorhead-is-dead-and-the-internet-pays-tribute

There were five other piece though

http://www.theguardian.com/music/motorhead

Yeah, my irritation is with the idea that collecting Twitter quotes is worth doing. There might be an argument for an article saying something along the lines of "Traditional media doesn't cover this well or reflect how people feel about this or misses the point" but the link quoted just seemed silly.

As with many of the things posted on here, it's not a Guardian specific criticism, either.

Yeah, I kind of hate that these round-ups are branded as "the internet/Twitter reacts", but I think it's probably worth collecting these quotes. Ideally, they'd be combined with a ringaround for fresh tributes, but it was the middle of the night and tweeted reaction is there for the taking.

I guess I take issue with the word "lazy" as it implies nothing else was being done.

Not for a second suggesting The Guardian's coverage as a whole was lazy. Actually, it makes me wonder what I'd hope for from a new source - initial news story, fleshed out news story, obit and (later on) more considered piece, maybe? So, I'll be on here later whinging about too much coverage ...

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/08/alanis-morissette-to-be-guardian-weekends-new-advice-columnist