Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that's supposed to make it easier to cross-promote your pages and analyze how people enter & use a site. It can verge on black-hat, but mostly it's been a positive.
Today they decided to turn on an ad banner inside the WordPress admin, on every page, with an impossibly tiny little (x) that you can't actually hit first time; so they must think they have the best click-thru rate since the spank-the-monkey banners of the '90s.
So I've uninstalled Yoast, gave them a 1-star review like many others. I'll find other, ethical ways to "build engagement" and "brand" and all that. I don't know what kind of data they managed to extract from you in the time I had it, and for that I'm sorry.
I would say I'm shocked a company misread their audience's tolerance for being preyed on, but waves generally at the Internet it's really not that unusual.
@jeffmueller It's been problematic since the start, but always made itself just useful enough to be worth running until this pushed them far underwater.
@mdhughes I’ve hated that plugin for ages now. Glad they’ve finally 86’d themselves.