One unintended positive effect of GDPR, much like “turn off your adblocker or no content!” modals, has been to deter me from reading pages that, by and large, would have been a needless timesuck anyhow.
Same here. But then I also started skipping Medium links for their obnoxious 'let's make it official' sheets.
And as far as I understand, Oath is indeed not compliant with the GDPR, because the default action should be to not permit tracking (opt-in rather than opt-out). But IANAL.
It would be nice if link aggregation sites such as Hackernews or lobste.rs provided a flag to indicate whether a linked page can be read immediately or requires clicking through overlays of any kind, so that those of us who are not interested in that crap can just skip those links.
It would be nice if the web could just return to being hyperlinks between pages of text. Just don't track by default.
That might have been possible if we had continued using gopher :).
Now, it may well be perfectly legal to render the site completely unusable if you don't want the default (I'll let others argue that out) but... it's meant my personal use of these sites has dropped to zero. I literally go "Oh, OATH, never mind."
I might not be in the majority, but it sounds like they could use all the visitors they can get.