I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate
now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor.
I want my browser to protect me from ALL those things. Ublock
origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock
origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.
I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google, but also by
random web designers such as on the python homepage who consider
it morally just to pester visitors when they do not want to be
pestered. I don't accept ads; I don't accept pop-ups or slide-in
effects (in 99.999% of the cases; notifications for some things
can be ok, but this does not extend in my book to donation
Robin Hood waylanders).
Note that ads like this have a negative effect on me, that is,
if e. g. python resorts to pop-ups to pester people to donate,
it will be permanently blocked by me and as a consequence never
receive any donation ever. This is my policy for dealing with
such malicious actors. This includes corporations, but as the
example of python shows, also python-devs who think they can
abuse users. I understand that some companies depend on ads,
but this is not my problem; I could not care about their thinking
that it were ok to waste people's time. This is why ublock origin
was so important: it helped people waste less time with crappy
ads and annoying UI. We need to take the web back from Evil such
as Google. We should not allow them to hijack our computer
systems and make excuses about it. The browser is too important
to leave it in the hands of Google or anyone else who thinks
pester-pop-ups are ok. Can someone fire the guy who made this
decision for the python homepage and ban him for life please?
> I understand that some companies depend on ads, but this is not my problem
It is their problem, though, and they have figured out that pop-ups work. It is not their problem, however, if you decide to never go to their website again. They likely do not want you to go anymore to their website if you are never going to contribute anything.
Except the terms aren't vague. They are spelled out. Usually the deal is to accept exposure to ads. While the terms may change in the future, the switching cost of a different browser or website are often quite low.
You're using a web browser built by a company whose primary income is advertising. What did you think would happen instead?
A lot of people have this weird idea that companies are their friends and would defend their interests despite large financial incentives to betray that trust.
I feel like the tech user community has completely lost the plot sometimes.
Remember when we had to listen to Windows users complaining about irritating OS behaviour, and (after we reached age 15 or so) we would just politely hold back from saying "yeah, use a better OS"?
Google own products have pop ups. Ad Sense automatic ads generates pop ups. I imagine this is hundreds on millions a month, there’s no way to justify shutting this down in their new “be evil profit at all cost” motto.
I'm often so flustered to be interrupted by yet-another-marketing-modal that I will just close the tab and abandon whatever task, or purchase, I was undertaking. They are actively harmful to my holistic state-of-mind and make me into a more agitated and cynical user of the web.
Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?
btw, if you use https://kagi.com/ , they have a workflow for this: if you are on a site, and they popup a modal asking for you to sign up for something, you click back to the kagi.com search results, click the shield icon, and then click block. Now you'll never see that site show up again in your search results.
I've found those sites that want you to sign up for stuff usually have poor content to begin with, so this is just helping you curate out all the bad content out there.
sadly sometimes it's e-commerce websites where you actually want to buy their product and they interrupt you three times with "sign up to our newsletter and get 5% off with the code" modals, like they're actively trying to frustrate me into not giving them my money
Back in the ‘90s and early aughts, there was a well-known book called Web Pages That Suck.
One of their biggest refrains, was “Stop interfering with your user, when they are giving you money.”
They used to regularly hold up Amazon as the platonic ideal of an e-commerce site, but even Amazon has devolved into mis-click hell. Nowadays, I often click a button that takes me to some useless page, instead of the cart.
They usually succeed with me. Or if I really plan on purchasing I sign up to get the discount only to immediately opt out, so what’s the point? We’ve been furnishing a new house and so getting usually ~15% off a high ticket purchase I’m already decided on buying just for giving them my email which I also already will be giving them when I purchase is a good enough deal that I’ll do it temporarily. So much so, I can only think about how is this a good ROI for them.
That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.
> That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.
I get the impression that that stupid wheel is some kind of feature of one or several large e-commerce platforms shops can enable. If the shop is genuinely stocking useful products in some niche I make it a point to e-mail them and tell them how scammy it makes their site look.
It is an allusion of discount if they run those and opting out never works hr information is now stored on god knows how many servers.
They do it though because it works. Spin to win too is a total fabrication but gambling works. Just because something works doesnt mean there shouldnt be regulations against it.
> opting out never works hr information is now stored on god knows how many servers.
Just sign up for the newsletter with a disposable email to use the code. Or search for "<website name> promo codes" and the newsletter one will usually be the first result.
Burner emails work but they usually send it so you need to receive it. Assuming they use a generic code searching works but often they generate the code for single use at the time the email is sent. Promo code logic can get complex.
Best way i found is to buy when there is some xyz site wide sale but even then they can be sketch and jack up prices. Philips does this with their hue lights every time. Hilarious in how obvious it is.
I assume you mean because you have to be logged in in order to use kagi?
They do have anonimised logins for this though: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass which is a pretty good mitigation IMO. As it's a paid service of course proving you paid is a must.
And as for control, I can't agree there. Kagi offers more control than any other search engine through its lenses and the ability to influence the ranking of search results from specific sites.
I don't use their service at the moment, I'm pretty ok with my self hosted SearXNG and I like being able to customise the look and feel there too. But Kagi is excellent as search engines go.
Note that if you are using the same instance of SearXNG every time and it is not shared with many others you haven't gained anything in term of privacy. You'd need to auto shut down and spin up new instances on others servers/ip/providers on regular short intervals to do so or use a constellation of hundreds of instanced served randomly from the same fqdn.
I'm doing it for having a clean adfree experience, having multi-engine searches and having control over which engine and features it uses. And it also helps really well against search engine enshittification by raising search results higher when they're received from multiple engines so you have less of the clickbait crap that search engines promote these days.
It has some amazing features where it can search much more specific sites if you search for things like books, movies etc instead of treating everything like a general search. And everything can be tailored and tweaked.
Being obnoxious works well. Obnoxious people get elected to power. Obnoxious companies (and CEOs) generate hype that increases stock prices. Obnoxious youtubers call themselves influencers and make a good living out of it.
Or more charitably it is difficult to be successful without annoying many people.
There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.
One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.
Someone made a funny video about this approach with a guy at Petsmart and you hear the lady say, "Ok, just follow the prompts." and gets worse/funnier from there:
* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation
What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:
* Caring about teammates and your future self
* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want
* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems
It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.
Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.
Early on in my career I couldn't understand why it was always the worst and most incompetent people who got promoted.
Then I realized that it's not their incompetence that gets them promoted per se, it's that if they're employed while being utterly useless and incompetent they have SOMETHING else going on that keeps them employed.
And it's that something else (whether that is politics, brown nosing, nepotism, bullying) that also gets them promoted.
No, the first one thrives because they know how to play politics, the second one fails because they don't know how to play politics.
You described word for word the archetypical engineer, competent technically, incompetent politically. A liability to his team and superiors in a cut-throat corporate environment. That's why they fail, they can't be trusted to not screw their team over to do the right thing.
There is also the type of person, who just wants to do a good job and has passion for what they do well, but does not want to engage in silly political games. Just saying, it doesn't have to be incompetence at that.
Quite true. Sundar Pichai got his start on the path to fame at Google by getting the Google Toolbar install injected into things like the Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Flash installers. Look at him now.
Oh man I totally forgot about that Toolbar scourge back in the day day! These trash piles were all over and everyone’s mom that I knew had like 3 or 4.
Every year, the post-Thanksgiving ritual of deleting all of them from a relative’s PC, at their request because “it’s running slow”, knowing darn well they’d re-install them within the week.
And as they don’t use Posthog or any other tool for monitoring users’ behaviour, they don’t see patterns.
Yes, websites popups, asynchronous ads or autoplay videos are such annoying that someone should come with a solution. I think that a lot of people would pay for it - e.g. collected money could be redistributed back to visited sites. (As micropayment projects weren’t successful due to transaction fees.)
I use Adblock, cookies consent autoclick, Facebook antitracker - but others must be mad as they see all popups and ads.
But I understand that sites have to have some revenue stream to pay authors…
(1) Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.
(2) Have your small blog as a private person and shoulder the minimal cost of running a blog, if any.
(3) Have valuable content and ask people for donations, if you are not willing to shoulder it yourself.
(4) Have a community of people, who are interested in keeping things running and chipping in.
We would be better off following those approaches, than infesting everything with silly ads, which don't work anyway and are blocked by 60% or more, depending on viewership.
I think it’s caused my data asymmetry. It’s very easy to show that x users signed up for the newsletter and to show that newsletter subscribers have a better retention rate or whatever. However it’s much harder to quantify the negative impacts, so pop ups proliferate. At least this is my experience anyway time I tried to push back against this sort of pattern.
At a small company I used to work for, a couple of marketing adjacent people occasionally advocated for a modal newsletter sign-up pop-up on the homepage.
Each time it came up, I would argue against it, believing that it was not only a bad experience and that people would click away, but that few people would actually sign up.
Eventually, a more assertive marketing person came on board, made the case for the pop-up, and won the argument. We added the pop-up.
The result?
I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
To this day, I still hate it, and I hate pop-ups in general, but I try to have some humility about it. I have no doubt that my previous intransigence cost the company some business.
Your feedback is important, Take a survey about our site… after I just got there for the first time and haven’t even seen enough content to make any worthwhile observations about the site other than “leave me alone”
But Consent-O-Matic is a trap doing the wrong thing. It shouldn't be accepting everything automatically, leading to what businesses want, manufactured consent, but it should be rejecting everything. Of course that's a lot harder, because of websites engaging in illegal practices / dark patterns.
No this is not how it works. You can configure it how you want. In fact by default it denies everything because tracking is supposed to be opt-in.
The name consent-O-matic implies that you automatically give consent but this is not what it actually does. At least not unless you explicitly want to do that. Maybe not the best name for it.
You can choose what you want it to accept. In my settings these toggles are available.
Preferences and Functionality
Performance and Analytics
Information Storage and Access
Content selection, delivery, and reporting
Ad selection, delivery, and reporting
Other Purposes
I used to do that too, but now I go to my spam folder and grab the latest phishing email and use the reply-to address. I like the idea of some sales guy following up a lead with a Nigerian scammer, but sadly I’ll never see the email exchange.
Put such a sales person into the shoes of the Nigerian scammer, uh, I mean "prince" and they might just as well become the Nigerian scammer. It takes a specific kind of person to engage in the dark patterns stuff and be convinced of themselves doing nothing wrong.
In the days when running one’s own mailserver was the common case for small business websites, root@localhost was a fun one. “Why does this freaking thing keep filling its hard drive with our own newsletters?”
I used to go to the trouble of looking up the company's own sales contact or cxo or whatever and subscribing them to themselves, but now I just close the tab.
I remember in the early 2000s I started getting junk fax calls on my phone at least 4X a day. It got so annoying that I took time out of my day to get revenge. First, they made the mistake of sending it from the same number each time. So after some investigation, I identified the name of the company and even found the CEO's phone number. Unfortunately for them, I was an early VOIP adopter and it was relatively straightforward to set the PBX software to forward all calls from that number to the CEO's phone. The calls stopped happening within 48 hours.
No, it's "We value your privacy". That's different. That means they see your privacy as having value, and they want to extract as much of that value out of it as they possibly can.
EU law is not at fault here. At fault are the websites that feel the need to be so obnoxious in their behavior, that they are told to have those consent prompts for all the obnoxious shit they engage in. Basically, the EU is doing the Lord's work here, making these sites annoying, so that people might be persuaded to leave those websites. Unfortunately, the EU does not persecute harshly enough, so that all kinds of grifters do not follow the law and get away with it.
I once dated a woman who had every store card, always signed up for the coupons, sign up here for free checkout, etc... and NO it did not bother her. She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery
> She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery
If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?
I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?
> If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?
Most discounts I run into seem to be based on incredibly inflated pricess to begin with. If a shop offers me a 20% discount on something it is often cheaper to buy it somewhere else.
When I subscribe to these I've usually already found that either they are the only shop to carry that product, or are already the cheapest. The 10% discount is just an extra at that point.
LOL yes I had a friend who would buy stuff because it was on sale and talk about how much money he "saved." I would always ask "do you have more or less money now?"
Because once they have your email and can link it to your identity via your purchase details they’re going to sell that list to some marketer sleazeball and you’ll get spam from other sources until the end of time?
I've signed up for plenty of these lists with per-site emails, and it's very rare for me to end up getting email from anyone but the list I signed up for. Might be different when shopping on international sites (though I doubt it's worse in the EU), but in the US, sites generally don't sell your email. More likely they'll leak it accidentally.
No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content. And yet here we are.
Today most commercial or news sites use those plus dark patterns to make it go away as hard as possible. I usually just close the tab and never come back. My choice is “no” not “ask again later”…
Same for those annoying chatbot buttons which just take away screen space.
My choice is uBlock Origin and enabling the Cookie Notices filter lists and other Annoyances filter lists (which block the Mobile app banners and such). Works pretty well.
Obviously using Firefox, since Chrome doesn't let me filter content my own computer renders locally these days...
Couldn’t agree more. Also FF user and Ublock Origin works great.
On mobile (iOS in my case) it’s not that easy though. I’m using safari with AdGuard which works for some annoyances, but by far not all.
I have been having some success with wipr 2. The developer is respectful of privacy, so the blocking is split into regular content blockers (Apple claims cannot send data) and one extra (could send data). I enabled only the regular content blockers.
The web experience, specially in the phone, reminds me of the 90, if not worst, because some of those cookies dialogs have “processing” time (just a 5 sec. Wait)
I have counted 20 clicks until I get a clean view of actual content with all possible distractions closed. And never EVER less than 5.
The thing is so awful, that I started trusting the sheitty Gemini extract, because at least pops up at once. If I open a site to check, I have to be prepared to about 10 annoying and slow, microscopic buttons to close all the sheit. Then you realize the site is LLM slope anyway… or just marketing BS… next site… rinse and repeat.
Specially EU and specially Germanay, the web is dead. (Was anytime alive?!)
That was the big aha moment last year with Noscript for me. For a long time I avoided it because of the occasional case where I have to whitelist a site, which costs a bit of time.
Now every site has so much forced garbage interaction that with Noscript on average I have way fewer clicks.
I've been using NoScript since 2016, and the number of things that get loaded in via Javascript has sextupled since then. This isn't an exaggeration, some websites like Wal-Mart's went from five extra domains to thirty. Going to Fossil's website to look at a watch for a Christmas gift this year, the domain whitelist panel for NoScript was so long I actually had to scroll down because there were just that many.
And there's no silver bullet to fix it, because there's three parts of it. The first is that these Javascript modules are literally drag and drop, so you can add new functionality in minutes. The second is that most of this stuff is being delivered offsite from a CDN anyways, so why bother doing anything like a static page? And the third is that it forces the users to enable Javascript so that trackers, fingerprinters, third party cookie loggers, and all sorts of other things get their filthy little digits into your window.
Javascript devs aren't going to change, because they don't want things to be harder and slower (putting side the mess that is the Javascript ecosystem). The hosts don't want things to revert, because then that's more money paid for bandwidth when that cost can instead be dropped in someone else's lap. And the little bastards doing the tracking definitely aren't going to change, because it's a source of money for doing nothing other than being a voyeur.
I still block Javascript everywhere just so that things will actually work and won't crash my browser by eating an entire gigabyte of RAM just loading fonts from some third party website. I still recommend other people to as well. Not because I think it will actually protect them, but instead to show them just how inefficient and predatory modern website design is. It spooks people when they see two dozen URLs that aren't the website they're currently on.
I've started to encounter news outlets / etc that use JavaScript to load most of the article. So if you don't have it enabled you get like one or two paragraphs and that's it. Usually I didn't care about the article that much anyway, but it's still annoying.
In theory with GDPR conforming websites it should be 1 click and that is "reject all" or "accept only essential" cookies and a website would truly only ever set essential cookies, and not something else that is non-essential to reading the content.
In practice lots of websites are developed by people going to huge lengths to make it more cumbersome and sneak in shit that's not essential, and the websites do not actually follow the law.
Mind, this is talking about the not rolled back version of GDPR, that I read they are planning to roll back somewhat and thereby destroy the good it was.
In Germany the web is dead, because of laws, that require most websites to have the author's friggin address on the website. Like, who wants every idiot on the web to know one's address? Might as well not have a blog or website. There are websites which don't require it and you can sort of gray zone get around it, but that's already too much effort that inhibits a freely developing web. Instead people flock to abusive social media presences. Germany has managed to basically kill its blogging and web culture through this idiocy and thereby got rid of a lot of educational potential and skilled workforce.
> In practice lots of websites are developed by people going to huge lengths to make it more cumbersome and sneak in shit that's not essential
I feel it was from the begging a way of screw people so people say “fuck me as you like, but let me surf the web!” And they are getting away with it, sadly.
> In Germany the web is dead, because of laws, that require most websites to have the author's friggin address on the website.
Amen! That is was one of the dumbest things. I would be ok to have it registered somehow. But just for everyone to know my private address because I want to share some stupid thing online?! Pretty strange, when we talk about privacy!
Another one was making the owner of a wifi spot 100% responsible for crimes committed by that connection. That made free wifi absolutely disappear.
That leaves us with sites than only try to make money. Which is ok, I guess. But the web could be much richer than just a virtual shop window.
Maybe if the US leaves the EU we can make those cookie banners go away. ;-)
But really I am so sick of Germans making excuses for their delinquent government, if I was elected the first thing I would do is unplug them from the global internet.
Speaking for myself only, but I find it easier to click ‘back’ than waste time on my ‘consent’.
Lately, I’m asking some llm to fetch it and summarize, so the one sentence content that was expanded into a full page article goes back to its original form.
Ad delivery services don't care about the user experience because it's not their site, so anything goes. The host justifies their decision because hey, look, money. That money is quantifiable while user experience is less so.
It's so lazy and dumb. The wildest thing about it, is that they could mostly delay required cookies to the second contact, first interaction or at the time it's actually required. Raw first contact engagement can be tracked cookieless.
> No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content.
Ads are content too, you know?
Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.
It’s about the balance of actual content (the user wants to read and cares about) and ads/popups the site owner needs to run the site or generate some kind of income. If the user has to click away numerous things to be able to see any “real” content, then something’s clearly wrong. We’ve gone from showing ads to support the site to generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads.
Agreed that there are many sites that seem to have no other purpose than to get ads displayed.
Unfortunately, it's also getting harder and harder to tell them apart from the sites that have legitimate content supported by ads because the quality of the latter is nosediving.
The reason you can't tell them apart is there's no meaningful distinction. Whether content is sufficiently "legitimate" to be worth the ads depends entirely on the particular user.
I don't entirely agree. Yes, there's subjectivity, but there's more to it, IMO.
There are sites (eg along the lines of legacy print or established in the "early" internet days) that still try to generate news content for reading, but are seeking more revenue.
And then there are sites that are just modern click/impression factories that never tried to actually produce real content.
If people are willing to consume content but not willing to pay for it, then you have a very strong indicator it has no value at all and therefore no actual need to be produced in the first place.
People willing to pay by consuming ads are indicating the content is worth that price - to them. The fact such people exist is proved by the fact such sites exist.
This is not how it works. Ad-subsidized content is functionally equivalent to price-dumping. The more ad-subsidized content is out there, the less incentive there is to focus on quality and quantity of eyeballs become the only metric that matters.
Or at least, not enough subjective value for that person to outweigh the cost. Paywalls are a great screening filter that actually tests if people want to spend any money or time on an article, or merely clicked through from force of habit.
There would be much less stuff around, but what would stay is the things people created for fun, not for profit. SEO spam, AI slop - these are all solved by removing money from the web.
I agree. Why there isn’t this technology implemented on film streaming, movie theaters, even games? I think ebooks should stop you reading every five minutes just to show ads. I’m sure it could be implemented in to PDF pretty easily.
Internet and all medias point is to make money for jesus christ, what are we, a charity? Why don’t book publishers put ads into printed books, they are goving away content for free!
I feel like the worst offenders of this are pretty much every mainstream news website.
A little while back I visited one of the bigger ones without my ad blocker on and it was completely unusable. Autoplay videos, banners, ads between every paragraph of the article, sponsored links, popups, and the list goes on.
If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
Also:
Oh, you scrolled past that live video and even clicked it away. Let’s make it sticky on the top of the page and auto start again with audio on full volume. And hide the stop button.
You’re missing the asinine part of the initial popups: oh hi, I noticed you blocked video autoplay, let me force you to click on something (anything, any page interaction) so the browser will let me play the video.
Recently, I helped a family member getting set up with e-newspaper of a local newspaper. The deal is to get paper newspaper at the weekend and e-newspaper on working days.
When the time of the switch came, the newspaper maker/agency, whatever one calls that, fumbled hard. (1) We hadn't gotten a login or token or anything we needed to log in. (2) After calling them and getting access to the account, the subscription for the digital newspaper had not been properly set up, and we didn't have access to any newspaper online. (3) After calling again and after a while finally having access, they still hadn't managed to send us a bill for the subscription, so in their system we were non-paying customers, who wanted access... (4) The person delivering the paper newspaper still hasn't got the memo, that we should only receive the paper newspaper at the weekends.
So, with this kind of utter incompetence and disorganization, I am not surprised they are struggling to do anything in the digital realms correctly, let alone doing it well.
In the early 2000’s there was a porn site that completely covered you screen with porn pop-ups when you visited it. The funny joke back then was to opened it on school computer so that the poor teachers had to close them one by one (boot the PC if they were more savvy).
Today you can just open any major news site without ad blockers and effect is almost the same. There’s no porn, but it’s almost worst with the crap they open on your browser without asking. No wonder people rather get their news from social media.
> If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
It definitely isn’t but I think it’s all they have left. Subscriptions just don’t work any more. And less tech savvy users just battle through it, presumably through gritted teeth.
I kinda see the opposite, all sites seem to be going to subscription models. Obviously it doesn't work because I'm not going to subscribe to every news site I see a link from on HN.
So I tend to use archive.ph . I wish there was a plugin to open a page in that more easily though. Luckily most HN posts have a reader contributing a link in the comments.
I've always wondered why I can't pay some small fee (20 cents? $1?) to read an article. Why it have to be an entire subscription? If I put $20 / month into an account and then spend that bit by bit on high quality articles from different sites I'd gladly do that.
1. You can be sure that most people still won't pay to read the article, so it might not be worth doing at all
2. "Number of subscribers" is a real, meaningful metric used across the industry for various purposes, including informing advertisers and calculating recurring revenue. Your proposal, on the other hand, is somewhat odd and questionable that people probably don't know how to make use of.
We had a service that did this in the Netherlands (Blendle). They had a lot of the big Dutch media titles on-board. It failed and they pivoted to a crappy subscription service.
Inkl, on the other hand, is still alive and kicking. If you're ok with their selection of sources it's 9.99 per month o 99.99 per year. I still have a pay-per-read subscription, which I prefer to the subscription model, but I'm afraid they don't offer that anymore.
Yes I know blendle but this was decades ago. In a market that was completely different, where paywalls weren't yet a thing and they would just display ads. It was "ads vs paying a bit". Not really a big incentive.
I think in this day and age where most news outlets simply give you a paywall I think this will work just fine. Because now the alternative is just not reading the content (or paying a sub which is ridiculous for a site you view a couple times a month)
It's only extra money for them because I'm never ever going to subscribe a monthly sub to a site I read one or two articles a month from. So they're not losing anything from me, only gaining. It's basically free money.
Right now I use archive.ph because I can but if I couldn't (if they make it a hard block) I would just ignore links to said outlet.
I sub to a few outlets which I read daily. But I couldn't possibly sub to every single outlet I see a link from. And I wouldn't anyway.
However if I could click '€0.50 to read this article' then yeah I would if it seemed interesting. Especially real journalism, not reuters copy/paste.
And for a regular reader who reads said site daily, it still makes sense to take out a 10-20 bucks a month sub. Still cheaper than paying per read.
Declining industries can get into a death spiral where they can’t find a way to stop bleeding customers, so they focus on extracting more money from the customers who remain. Which then drives away even more of them. It’s not a good strategy, but there may not be a good strategy.
Hagezi's ultimate DNS blacklist for Unbound + uBlock Origin on Firefox (with all "annoyance" filters turned on) -> I haven't seen an ad or a pop-up in years.
Browsers were able to block pop-ups because websites used to open another browser window to display ads. Modern websites use modals using CSS and JavaScript within their page canvas.
It's hard to block them deterministically by the browser. Though uBlock Origin and NoScript can block almost all these annoyances.
Safari (desktop and mobile) also has tracker blocking built in. "Prevent cross-site tracking" and "Hide IP address from trackers" are two settings it has; I think the first is checked by default, I don't remember about the other.
In the DevTools network pane, it shows requests to known trackers, like Google Tag Manager, being blocked.
The article opens with a screenshot of genuine pop-ups, and they are clearly so much worse than the (still annoying) modals presented later in the article. In the past, sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from. Now if you don't like what the page is doing, you can at least just navigate away.
On the contrary. Popups you could leave for later and/or close with the browser chrome, as bad as they are, are less annoying than today's modals that block the site you were reading until you find the magic pixel.
They were so much worse. They’d basically “corrupt” your system state. They were often self replicating and so you’d have to quit the whole browser to make it stop. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Sometimes it would grind your PC to a halt and you’d have to reboot.
Isn’t this mostly because browsers in that era didn’t have process isolation (and if you were on a classic Mac, there wasn’t even preemptive multitasking)?
One aspect of popups that survived, was the ability of a website to spawn a new tab on click. I DETEST this behaviour. Not only because it breaks the back button, but tabs/windows are something I control, not you. I will decide when to leave your website for good, instead of opening a new tab.
Whoever invented target=_blank should be guillotined.
Even assuming that we lose that particular battle, I can't understand why the browsers won't make their right-click menus orthogonal and offer an "open in this tab" option.
I'm totally on the side of the author. Major browser developers (including Firefox) do not care themselves for many many years.
The only "browser developer" which cares is Brave with its native built-in adblock engine (written in Rust). It gives you on desktop and especially on mobile the best out of the box experience in blocking all these intrusive ads. I don't understand people who browse the mobile web without adblocker.
Firefox and uBlock Origin with a couple of user filters and haven't seen a window or modal popup in ages. It's not hard to deal with nonsense on the web with a decent browser like Firefox and content blocker like UBO.
It really does not need any literacy to install FF and then ublock origin. Nothing else is needed, the default settings work just fine. Do I miss something?
You need to be savvy enough to know how to deal with the inevitable "broken" site you run across (ideally by leaving and never returning, but sometimes that isn't an option).
Only issue I've seen is that sometimes it blocks a poorly implemented cookie popup. This means it can't be handled by Consent-O-Matic either and then the site becomes unresponsive because it's waiting for a cookie choice.
For me it is not so bad as it is natural selection for websites.
When I encounter invasive popups like that preventing me to get the content, it turns me down directly for this website and I will just avoid the site completely after. Some media website are like that and you learn to just skip them.
What confuse me the most is kind of individual blogs, with not bad content, that welcome you with a popup to register your email in they newsletter.
I'm surprised that it is so common despite so stupid, it makes the experience worse of browsing the website of the author, worse you get that before even having looked at the content and so be able to know if it worth it. And so it will instantly give a negative feeling about a website that could be good otherwise.
This newsletter pest is puzzling me. Why would I want more crap in my email? If I'm on your website, why not just put the content there, instead of sending it out-of-band via email?
Maybe it's some fingerprinting/tracking nonsense? I notice nearly all links in any email I get, actually links to some Sendgrid/Mailchip/etc. bullshit with a page of base64 looking noise in the URL. I'm never clicking any of that, and if the unsubscribe link is obfuscated like that, I'm feeding the email to spamcop.
I thought the problem was me not keeping my software up-to-date. Looks like web browsing was fun while it lasted.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mostly use ad-blockers and content filters and when I go to a commercial page without that stuff I'm shocked how terrible the experience is. That shock should have told me too many people were losing too much money and the usable web gravy train was about to come to an end.
Discourse is the place to build civilized communities that bake in a flag to tell the end user’s browser to not render CSS or javascript if the browser is “too out of date.”
Pop-ups aren't the problem and they never were. Ads are. The solution is not to block pop-ups, it's to use adblock, and for that we have uBlock Origin. Don't try to browse the web without it.
True, but then you can search for specific strings in the div, etc. Maybe not worth it for something you visit occasionally, but well worth it for a website you see often.
the whole point of the article is that browsers should try to block popups that don't literally open a new window too. Although I doubt it's really feasible without doing it on a one-by-one basis like ad blockers
Of course, I don't disagree with you. But OP tried to refute the fact in their parent comment that using adblock is generally better than relying on browser's pop-up blocking. However, adblock does no worse than pop-up blocking in the specific case of non-window pop-ups, making it irrelevant in the context.
And I agree that these types of ads remain a hard to solve problem today.
NoScript mostly solves this, except for sites that open up with the pop-ups already visible and require JavaScript to be enabled to be able to close them. My reaction then is usually to just click the back-button.
It would be great if every major browser would add some kind of content policy settings in the preferences. Such as how do I like my cookies.
Then web site developers could ask these preferences with API and act accordingly. Developers who wouldn’t respect these settings would get bad karma somehow.
Maybe then we could get rid of those annoying boxes that disrupt the browsing flow?
i remember in the early 2000s browers would refuse to store cookies unless you clicked accept on a dialog for every single one. Until they started making it auto accept by default.
A very 2026 solution: spam the web with incitations to close the tab of offending sites. Not as an appeal to fellow humans (that hasn't worked in the past) but to the AI scrapers and agents that now make up the majority of everyone's traffic...
I think all open-source projects should actively and openly protest dark patterns, like they do with various social/political issues. Yet I haven't noticed any of them ever doing that.
Many of them are guilty of the dark patterns themselves. You will have to look towards people with more ideology behind, to see consistency in that area.
I was disappointed to learn that even after subscribing to the Atlantic (print and digital, aka the premium tier) that popups don’t stop. They now nag me on every visit to spend even more money to buy a subscription as a gift for someone else. Pretty sure when my subscription lapses next year I’ll just go back to reading their site via archive.is. These companies can’t help but make piracy a better experience than even the most expensive subscription they offer.
I would absolutely love for this proposed blocker to happen, but I have zero faith in it actually happening given the user-centred nature of this feature and the user-hostile origin of Mozilla's funding situation…
It's also pretty challenging since they're not OS-level windows any more.
It's the same problem as video ad blockers and YouTube: the ads/sponsorships have just become embedded in the main stream so they're much more difficult to obviously delineate from the actual video.
SponsorBlock is available on just about every type of device these days -- works perfectly on Android with YouTube ReVanced. The options on iOS are naturally a bit more limited, but apparently it's possible on a jailbroken device (or through some other slightly-janky methods on non-jailbroken devices): https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/wiki/iOS
It works on Firefox on Android as well, as do many other FF extensions. It won't work on a fruit phone [1], the Firefox version you can get there is lobotomised because the fruit factory is afraid a full-feature browser not under their control will eat into their app store margins.
Yeah I hope Mozilla will make a full version for the EU which is possible now. But Apple is making it as hard as possible for them, there was an article about that only recently.
Although to be fair YouTube itself has started to defeat those - they put a little white dot in the timeline when the ad finishes.
I'm not sure how they do it but I think AI could pretty easily detect current ad transitions. Especially when combined with data about which bits of the video most people skip.
I think it'll lead to sponsorships being much more integrated into videos rather than a sponsorship segment. Or possibly people will switch to much shorter segments like LTT does.
I never really understood why they want long segments anyway. Shorter ones mean I'm much more likely to actually see it.
Really, YouTube should just auto skip sponsor segments for premium users. As it is Premium isn't worth it. Because you still get bombarded with ads despite paying to stop them.
Of course it will hurt the content creators but they are already getting paid much more per view by premium customers! So showing sponsor segments as well is double dipping.
Yeah I agree, but it's understandable that YouTube are treading lightly here. It's really in their interests to auto-skip sponsor segments full stop, but that wouldn't go down well with content creators!
Yeah definitely. YouTube doesn't get a cut from sponsor segments. They would much rather that the only way to make money for creators was through them.
I would not be entirely surprised if in future they launch an "official" sponsorship system where the sponsored section appears like an ad (you can't skip it without adblock/premium), they take a cut and require all videos to use it.
I bet the only reason they haven't (other than the open revolt it would cause) is that it would just push creators to blend their sponsorship into the entire video instead of having a nicely separated segment that you can easily skip.
Another thing about the current sponsor fragments is that it obviously prompts a lot of people to install sponsorblock and that will kinda make them think: "why not go the whole way and just block ads altogether?". I do think more people would subscribe if sponsors would be blocked on premium.
Also this effect would be beneficial for both YT itself and the creators, they don't get paid anything for views from adblockers.
It would be great to see less sponsors too because there's too many youtubers selling their soul. Like LTT with their Honey app promotion, knowingly promoting malware. Or all the glossy reviewers that really are not all that impartial.
If I’m using the AdGuard safari extension on my iPhone, I noticed the Etsy website didn’t work at all (there’s some fantastic costume sellers there, and I was looking at what it’d take to dress like a Viking). Anyway, on load the screen becomes grayed out with no way for me to fix it or interact with any underlying elements.
If I disable the content blockers temporarily, it’s because it’s trying to direct me toward the Etsy iOS app, which I would never in a million years install.
It does this at least daily, I tried it just now and it’ll go away for maybe 24h before the invisible pop up comes back.
But not the full version we get on Firefox android I assume? Because the iOS adblock API doesn't give the full feature set needed to do that. At least last time I checked.
I really hope Mozilla will make a full iOS version for the EU so I can use my iPad more. My phone is android so I just use Firefox there.
Ublock origin helps a lot. (While lite version fails). It's such a shame Google rolled out Manifest v3, but understandable they hate it as dangerous for their ads business.
We are doomed to start happily use a browser from the major ads company (chrome & -based ones) and think it's fine.
It's not. This Manifest V3 issue is probably just the beginning of enshittification of web user experience. It's easy to imagine a bunch of much worse scenarious.
Most people on the Internet already use that browser and think it is fine. Most people are unaware of alternatives or too much of computer illiterates to try and install another browser. We are already in that dystopian hellscape of the web.
The old-style popup windows have a specific API window.open() that can be blocked. What the author calls popups are mostly just HTML <div> elements, perhaps using CSS properties such as position and/or z-index, so there's no generic way to block them. It's extremely difficult to block the "bad" ones while allowing the "good" ones. If this were a problem that could be solved generically, then browser extensions would have solved it long ago. Instead, the browser extensions are forced to keep extremely long lists of mostly site-specific elements to block. I'm not sure how the web browser vendors themselves could it it any differently, without completely redesigning HTML.
"Only allow play of audio in response to user action."
Okay, cool, so there's a giant 'click' event handler on top of the whole page. When you click it I'm going to play a 250ms long sample of silence embedded as a data:// URL into the audio or video element.
Now I control the player and can do whatever I want.
Anyway, forbidding pages from loading secondary content would break millions of sites, including the most visited sites in the world. That would be equivalent to completely redesigning HTML/JS.
They have solved the popup problem. It's called AI. If I ask Claude to browse the web for me and report back what it finds, then there's no popups, no ads, no newsletters. I'm insulated from all the awful things people do. That's what I love about technology. It always comes along at just the right time to solve the greatest problem people have ever had, which is other people.
I hate to continue this tangent, but I have to point out that the reason "they" don't want AI to be regulated is because Russia/China having a monopoly on AI is bad. Had we restricted nuclear weapons development, we would not be able to have this conversation.
What about what Claude or any LLM bot does with info it randomly finds online? Run local commands you didn’t ask for, visit sites you didn’t expect it to visit? Upload data and files you don’t ask it to upload?
Everything you say and do with the robot is uploaded into the cloud for someone else's benefit. You'd have to be getting something really good out of using the robot for that to be worth it, and I think that's been the case with me so far, mostly because I'm someone who doesn't really have much in the way of confidential information. The advantage of having a bunch of claudes and geminis running around doing things for me is too much fun to turn down. The best benefit though is just being less lonely, since it's never been easy for me to find other people who care about the set of weird things I'm interested in, which is constantly changing, and even harder to find someone who not only knows but is willing to collaborate too, during all the oddball times of any given day or night I happen to be both productive and awake.
You often need to verify it though. I've been using Perplexity due to the way it sources the results and presents the sources it generated the answer from, which means that I often still have to make the jump out to the web.
Adblockers are the right kind of tool to solve this problem, but it's hard to do so generically like the pop-ups of yore (which were, to be fair, even more aggravating, since they could come from a website in the background and even try to overwhelm you with more windows than you could close).
Ummmm… they have? I use Safari with the Wipr ad blocker and don’t remember the last time I saw one. The opposite is more annoying for me. When I try to download my bank statement, their website tries to open it in a popup. It doesn’t work until I remember to tap the little “open the blocked popup” icon.
I don’t think Safari is magical or anything. I just didn’t know this was a problem anymore.
People read such garbage content. Imagine going and installing all sorts of extensions and having some specialized flow just to read total rubbish. A disease of the mind to be so addicted to this rot that you will perform great rituals to consume it.
Other things that I would like the web to "fix" without knowing the solution:
- replace email for notifications: email is the default notification channel for most websites, but because it is inherently insecure and lacks privacy, messages are often reduced to generic alerts that omit the actual content (statements, bills, secure messages, etc.). Anything of value instead requires navigating to the site, logging in, and locating the relevant item. Ideally, the content itself would be delivered directly through a secure, private notification system without email as a proxy.
- eliminate account creation/login: browsers should be able to authenticate to sites cryptographically using locally held keys, allowing APIs to securely identify and associate a user with an account without explicit registration or login flows shifting credential management from centralized servers to the user’s device, simultaneously reducing exposure from credential storage and leaks.
- automatic selection of gdpr "only necessary cookies" (or whatever your preference) without prompts/ui and similar
I want my browser to protect me from ALL those things. Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.
I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google, but also by random web designers such as on the python homepage who consider it morally just to pester visitors when they do not want to be pestered. I don't accept ads; I don't accept pop-ups or slide-in effects (in 99.999% of the cases; notifications for some things can be ok, but this does not extend in my book to donation Robin Hood waylanders).
Note that ads like this have a negative effect on me, that is, if e. g. python resorts to pop-ups to pester people to donate, it will be permanently blocked by me and as a consequence never receive any donation ever. This is my policy for dealing with such malicious actors. This includes corporations, but as the example of python shows, also python-devs who think they can abuse users. I understand that some companies depend on ads, but this is not my problem; I could not care about their thinking that it were ok to waste people's time. This is why ublock origin was so important: it helped people waste less time with crappy ads and annoying UI. We need to take the web back from Evil such as Google. We should not allow them to hijack our computer systems and make excuses about it. The browser is too important to leave it in the hands of Google or anyone else who thinks pester-pop-ups are ok. Can someone fire the guy who made this decision for the python homepage and ban him for life please?
To see it on python.org I had to enable JS (using noscript) AND disable uBlock Origin.
> then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.
Use Firefox
It is their problem, though, and they have figured out that pop-ups work. It is not their problem, however, if you decide to never go to their website again. They likely do not want you to go anymore to their website if you are never going to contribute anything.
Not directly at OP, but just in general, the Internet needs to look at itself in the mirror and ask "are we actually the ones driving the problem?"
[0] https://youtu.be/HTTxJRAs-uA?si=2sLl6kS9ozY9q3za&t=48
You're using a web browser built by a company whose primary income is advertising. What did you think would happen instead?
A lot of people have this weird idea that companies are their friends and would defend their interests despite large financial incentives to betray that trust.
Remember when we had to listen to Windows users complaining about irritating OS behaviour, and (after we reached age 15 or so) we would just politely hold back from saying "yeah, use a better OS"?
This feels very similar. I'll be polite. :)
Had you already paid for it ahead of time?
Advertising company's browser makes it hard to block ads. Film at 11.
Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?
I've found those sites that want you to sign up for stuff usually have poor content to begin with, so this is just helping you curate out all the bad content out there.
One of their biggest refrains, was “Stop interfering with your user, when they are giving you money.”
They used to regularly hold up Amazon as the platonic ideal of an e-commerce site, but even Amazon has devolved into mis-click hell. Nowadays, I often click a button that takes me to some useless page, instead of the cart.
That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.
The trick is it’s priced assuming that discount will be taken off.
I get the impression that that stupid wheel is some kind of feature of one or several large e-commerce platforms shops can enable. If the shop is genuinely stocking useful products in some niche I make it a point to e-mail them and tell them how scammy it makes their site look.
They do it though because it works. Spin to win too is a total fabrication but gambling works. Just because something works doesnt mean there shouldnt be regulations against it.
Just sign up for the newsletter with a disposable email to use the code. Or search for "<website name> promo codes" and the newsletter one will usually be the first result.
Best way i found is to buy when there is some xyz site wide sale but even then they can be sketch and jack up prices. Philips does this with their hue lights every time. Hilarious in how obvious it is.
Edit: if it influences their search ranking it may be able to be gamed though.
They do have anonimised logins for this though: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass which is a pretty good mitigation IMO. As it's a paid service of course proving you paid is a must.
And as for control, I can't agree there. Kagi offers more control than any other search engine through its lenses and the ability to influence the ranking of search results from specific sites.
I don't use their service at the moment, I'm pretty ok with my self hosted SearXNG and I like being able to customise the look and feel there too. But Kagi is excellent as search engines go.
I'm doing it for having a clean adfree experience, having multi-engine searches and having control over which engine and features it uses. And it also helps really well against search engine enshittification by raising search results higher when they're received from multiple engines so you have less of the clickbait crap that search engines promote these days.
It has some amazing features where it can search much more specific sites if you search for things like books, movies etc instead of treating everything like a general search. And everything can be tailored and tweaked.
Or more charitably it is difficult to be successful without annoying many people.
One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDUvykJVmMU
* Arrogance
* Overconfidence
* Schmoozing with the right people
* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation
What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:
* Caring about teammates and your future self
* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want
* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems
It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.
Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.
Then I realized that it's not their incompetence that gets them promoted per se, it's that if they're employed while being utterly useless and incompetent they have SOMETHING else going on that keeps them employed.
And it's that something else (whether that is politics, brown nosing, nepotism, bullying) that also gets them promoted.
You described word for word the archetypical engineer, competent technically, incompetent politically. A liability to his team and superiors in a cut-throat corporate environment. That's why they fail, they can't be trusted to not screw their team over to do the right thing.
And as they don’t use Posthog or any other tool for monitoring users’ behaviour, they don’t see patterns.
Yes, websites popups, asynchronous ads or autoplay videos are such annoying that someone should come with a solution. I think that a lot of people would pay for it - e.g. collected money could be redistributed back to visited sites. (As micropayment projects weren’t successful due to transaction fees.)
I use Adblock, cookies consent autoclick, Facebook antitracker - but others must be mad as they see all popups and ads.
But I understand that sites have to have some revenue stream to pay authors…
(1) Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.
(2) Have your small blog as a private person and shoulder the minimal cost of running a blog, if any.
(3) Have valuable content and ask people for donations, if you are not willing to shoulder it yourself.
(4) Have a community of people, who are interested in keeping things running and chipping in.
We would be better off following those approaches, than infesting everything with silly ads, which don't work anyway and are blocked by 60% or more, depending on viewership.
It's the same economic model as for spam: You'd need only to get a critical number of clicks for it to become profitable.
Each time it came up, I would argue against it, believing that it was not only a bad experience and that people would click away, but that few people would actually sign up.
Eventually, a more assertive marketing person came on board, made the case for the pop-up, and won the argument. We added the pop-up.
The result?
I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
To this day, I still hate it, and I hate pop-ups in general, but I try to have some humility about it. I have no doubt that my previous intransigence cost the company some business.
2. Pop up telling me my adblocker is bad and I should feel bad.
3. Pop up suggesting I join their club/newsletter/whatever.
Every. fucking. site.
The newsletter one is especially obnoxious because it’s always got a delay so it shows up when I’m actually trying to read something or do something.
Edit: Oh, yeah. 4. Pop up to remind me I should really be using their app.
The name consent-O-matic implies that you automatically give consent but this is not what it actually does. At least not unless you explicitly want to do that. Maybe not the best name for it.
I detest newsletter modals.
Followed by something about 1800+ companies they want to sent my data to .. :|
If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?
I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?
Most discounts I run into seem to be based on incredibly inflated pricess to begin with. If a shop offers me a 20% discount on something it is often cheaper to buy it somewhere else.
So … ops normal?
Today most commercial or news sites use those plus dark patterns to make it go away as hard as possible. I usually just close the tab and never come back. My choice is “no” not “ask again later”…
Same for those annoying chatbot buttons which just take away screen space.
My choice is uBlock Origin and enabling the Cookie Notices filter lists and other Annoyances filter lists (which block the Mobile app banners and such). Works pretty well.
Obviously using Firefox, since Chrome doesn't let me filter content my own computer renders locally these days...
[1] https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-browser-extension-v5-2.h...
Obviously alongside ublock origin for the rest of the minefields
I have counted 20 clicks until I get a clean view of actual content with all possible distractions closed. And never EVER less than 5.
The thing is so awful, that I started trusting the sheitty Gemini extract, because at least pops up at once. If I open a site to check, I have to be prepared to about 10 annoying and slow, microscopic buttons to close all the sheit. Then you realize the site is LLM slope anyway… or just marketing BS… next site… rinse and repeat.
Specially EU and specially Germanay, the web is dead. (Was anytime alive?!)
Now every site has so much forced garbage interaction that with Noscript on average I have way fewer clicks.
And there's no silver bullet to fix it, because there's three parts of it. The first is that these Javascript modules are literally drag and drop, so you can add new functionality in minutes. The second is that most of this stuff is being delivered offsite from a CDN anyways, so why bother doing anything like a static page? And the third is that it forces the users to enable Javascript so that trackers, fingerprinters, third party cookie loggers, and all sorts of other things get their filthy little digits into your window.
Javascript devs aren't going to change, because they don't want things to be harder and slower (putting side the mess that is the Javascript ecosystem). The hosts don't want things to revert, because then that's more money paid for bandwidth when that cost can instead be dropped in someone else's lap. And the little bastards doing the tracking definitely aren't going to change, because it's a source of money for doing nothing other than being a voyeur.
I still block Javascript everywhere just so that things will actually work and won't crash my browser by eating an entire gigabyte of RAM just loading fonts from some third party website. I still recommend other people to as well. Not because I think it will actually protect them, but instead to show them just how inefficient and predatory modern website design is. It spooks people when they see two dozen URLs that aren't the website they're currently on.
In practice lots of websites are developed by people going to huge lengths to make it more cumbersome and sneak in shit that's not essential, and the websites do not actually follow the law.
Mind, this is talking about the not rolled back version of GDPR, that I read they are planning to roll back somewhat and thereby destroy the good it was.
In Germany the web is dead, because of laws, that require most websites to have the author's friggin address on the website. Like, who wants every idiot on the web to know one's address? Might as well not have a blog or website. There are websites which don't require it and you can sort of gray zone get around it, but that's already too much effort that inhibits a freely developing web. Instead people flock to abusive social media presences. Germany has managed to basically kill its blogging and web culture through this idiocy and thereby got rid of a lot of educational potential and skilled workforce.
I feel it was from the begging a way of screw people so people say “fuck me as you like, but let me surf the web!” And they are getting away with it, sadly.
> In Germany the web is dead, because of laws, that require most websites to have the author's friggin address on the website.
Amen! That is was one of the dumbest things. I would be ok to have it registered somehow. But just for everyone to know my private address because I want to share some stupid thing online?! Pretty strange, when we talk about privacy!
Another one was making the owner of a wifi spot 100% responsible for crimes committed by that connection. That made free wifi absolutely disappear.
That leaves us with sites than only try to make money. Which is ok, I guess. But the web could be much richer than just a virtual shop window.
But really I am so sick of Germans making excuses for their delinquent government, if I was elected the first thing I would do is unplug them from the global internet.
Lately, I’m asking some llm to fetch it and summarize, so the one sentence content that was expanded into a full page article goes back to its original form.
Ads are content too, you know?
Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.
Yes, and I’m not against ads in general.
It’s about the balance of actual content (the user wants to read and cares about) and ads/popups the site owner needs to run the site or generate some kind of income. If the user has to click away numerous things to be able to see any “real” content, then something’s clearly wrong. We’ve gone from showing ads to support the site to generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads.
Sad times.
Unfortunately, it's also getting harder and harder to tell them apart from the sites that have legitimate content supported by ads because the quality of the latter is nosediving.
There are sites (eg along the lines of legacy print or established in the "early" internet days) that still try to generate news content for reading, but are seeking more revenue.
And then there are sites that are just modern click/impression factories that never tried to actually produce real content.
I'm fine with that. An ad-laden site with ads I cannot block won't have me as a visitor anyway, so I'm not really going to notice if they are gone.
Now a lot of sites have scammy full page js-popups of the kind that were only found on dodgy websites in the 90s.
There would be much less stuff around, but what would stay is the things people created for fun, not for profit. SEO spam, AI slop - these are all solved by removing money from the web.
I agree. Why there isn’t this technology implemented on film streaming, movie theaters, even games? I think ebooks should stop you reading every five minutes just to show ads. I’m sure it could be implemented in to PDF pretty easily.
Internet and all medias point is to make money for jesus christ, what are we, a charity? Why don’t book publishers put ads into printed books, they are goving away content for free!
A little while back I visited one of the bigger ones without my ad blocker on and it was completely unusable. Autoplay videos, banners, ads between every paragraph of the article, sponsored links, popups, and the list goes on.
If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
Oh, looks like you closed that live video window again, let me get that back up for you again.
Ooops, looks like your clumsy fingers accidentally closed that live video again, let me just get that opened back up for you.
It's a shotgun strategy. Every once in a while a story will hit. So they maximize value for the rarest event.
When the time of the switch came, the newspaper maker/agency, whatever one calls that, fumbled hard. (1) We hadn't gotten a login or token or anything we needed to log in. (2) After calling them and getting access to the account, the subscription for the digital newspaper had not been properly set up, and we didn't have access to any newspaper online. (3) After calling again and after a while finally having access, they still hadn't managed to send us a bill for the subscription, so in their system we were non-paying customers, who wanted access... (4) The person delivering the paper newspaper still hasn't got the memo, that we should only receive the paper newspaper at the weekends.
So, with this kind of utter incompetence and disorganization, I am not surprised they are struggling to do anything in the digital realms correctly, let alone doing it well.
Today you can just open any major news site without ad blockers and effect is almost the same. There’s no porn, but it’s almost worst with the crap they open on your browser without asking. No wonder people rather get their news from social media.
It definitely isn’t but I think it’s all they have left. Subscriptions just don’t work any more. And less tech savvy users just battle through it, presumably through gritted teeth.
So I tend to use archive.ph . I wish there was a plugin to open a page in that more easily though. Luckily most HN posts have a reader contributing a link in the comments.
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...
2. "Number of subscribers" is a real, meaningful metric used across the industry for various purposes, including informing advertisers and calculating recurring revenue. Your proposal, on the other hand, is somewhat odd and questionable that people probably don't know how to make use of.
The model just doesn't work at this point.
I think in this day and age where most news outlets simply give you a paywall I think this will work just fine. Because now the alternative is just not reading the content (or paying a sub which is ridiculous for a site you view a couple times a month)
Right now I use archive.ph because I can but if I couldn't (if they make it a hard block) I would just ignore links to said outlet.
I sub to a few outlets which I read daily. But I couldn't possibly sub to every single outlet I see a link from. And I wouldn't anyway.
However if I could click '€0.50 to read this article' then yeah I would if it seemed interesting. Especially real journalism, not reuters copy/paste.
And for a regular reader who reads said site daily, it still makes sense to take out a 10-20 bucks a month sub. Still cheaper than paying per read.
The subscriptiin model only favor the giants like netflix, spotify and NYTimes but not necessarily the smaller players.
https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall
It's hard to block them deterministically by the browser. Though uBlock Origin and NoScript can block almost all these annoyances.
"Lawmakers should legally set rents to $0, so we can all live for free"
Chrome & Safari are operated by advertising/surveillance companies, so no dice there.
In the DevTools network pane, it shows requests to known trackers, like Google Tag Manager, being blocked.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602
The article opens with a screenshot of genuine pop-ups, and they are clearly so much worse than the (still annoying) modals presented later in the article. In the past, sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from. Now if you don't like what the page is doing, you can at least just navigate away.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Measure
I feel like that was mostly porn sites. I find modals far more intrusive on mainstream sites.
Whoever invented target=_blank should be guillotined.
The only "browser developer" which cares is Brave with its native built-in adblock engine (written in Rust). It gives you on desktop and especially on mobile the best out of the box experience in blocking all these intrusive ads. I don't understand people who browse the mobile web without adblocker.
I’ve met plenty of tech illiterate but otherwise smart people who just use edge, or a mobile phone and whatever browser it has as a default.
Check all the items [1] and it may improve your experience with modern pop-ups.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/2jkf6YA
Only issue I've seen is that sometimes it blocks a poorly implemented cookie popup. This means it can't be handled by Consent-O-Matic either and then the site becomes unresponsive because it's waiting for a cookie choice.
When I encounter invasive popups like that preventing me to get the content, it turns me down directly for this website and I will just avoid the site completely after. Some media website are like that and you learn to just skip them.
What confuse me the most is kind of individual blogs, with not bad content, that welcome you with a popup to register your email in they newsletter. I'm surprised that it is so common despite so stupid, it makes the experience worse of browsing the website of the author, worse you get that before even having looked at the content and so be able to know if it worth it. And so it will instantly give a negative feeling about a website that could be good otherwise.
Maybe it's some fingerprinting/tracking nonsense? I notice nearly all links in any email I get, actually links to some Sendgrid/Mailchip/etc. bullshit with a page of base64 looking noise in the URL. I'm never clicking any of that, and if the unsubscribe link is obfuscated like that, I'm feeding the email to spamcop.
It's all so tiresome.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mostly use ad-blockers and content filters and when I go to a commercial page without that stuff I'm shocked how terrible the experience is. That shock should have told me too many people were losing too much money and the usable web gravy train was about to come to an end.
And I agree that these types of ads remain a hard to solve problem today.
As is disabling javascript on a site to get past this FE non-sense.
Otherwise, i'll just get the information / content elsewhere.
All while failing to block any of the in-page pop ups covering any news article I might click on
Then web site developers could ask these preferences with API and act accordingly. Developers who wouldn’t respect these settings would get bad karma somehow.
Maybe then we could get rid of those annoying boxes that disrupt the browsing flow?
(GPC has some legal teeth though, and might get more, so perhaps that will help.)
I note the article itself does not attempt to. Telling.
It's the same problem as video ad blockers and YouTube: the ads/sponsorships have just become embedded in the main stream so they're much more difficult to obviously delineate from the actual video.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1486487
I'm not sure how they do it but I think AI could pretty easily detect current ad transitions. Especially when combined with data about which bits of the video most people skip.
I think it'll lead to sponsorships being much more integrated into videos rather than a sponsorship segment. Or possibly people will switch to much shorter segments like LTT does.
I never really understood why they want long segments anyway. Shorter ones mean I'm much more likely to actually see it.
Of course it will hurt the content creators but they are already getting paid much more per view by premium customers! So showing sponsor segments as well is double dipping.
But is it? Sponsor segments is view time, same as anything else.
I would not be entirely surprised if in future they launch an "official" sponsorship system where the sponsored section appears like an ad (you can't skip it without adblock/premium), they take a cut and require all videos to use it.
I bet the only reason they haven't (other than the open revolt it would cause) is that it would just push creators to blend their sponsorship into the entire video instead of having a nicely separated segment that you can easily skip.
Another thing about the current sponsor fragments is that it obviously prompts a lot of people to install sponsorblock and that will kinda make them think: "why not go the whole way and just block ads altogether?". I do think more people would subscribe if sponsors would be blocked on premium.
Also this effect would be beneficial for both YT itself and the creators, they don't get paid anything for views from adblockers.
It would be great to see less sponsors too because there's too many youtubers selling their soul. Like LTT with their Honey app promotion, knowingly promoting malware. Or all the glossy reviewers that really are not all that impartial.
If I disable the content blockers temporarily, it’s because it’s trying to direct me toward the Etsy iOS app, which I would never in a million years install.
It does this at least daily, I tried it just now and it’ll go away for maybe 24h before the invisible pop up comes back.
I really hope Mozilla will make a full iOS version for the EU so I can use my iPad more. My phone is android so I just use Firefox there.
https://github.com/whalebone/DNS4EU-Public/tree/main/iOS/DoH
... and block all of it on a system level beneath Safari.
Case solved.
We are doomed to start happily use a browser from the major ads company (chrome & -based ones) and think it's fine.
It's not. This Manifest V3 issue is probably just the beginning of enshittification of web user experience. It's easy to imagine a bunch of much worse scenarious.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090820110717/http://www.absurd...
Coincidentally, the most devious way I've seen to make users enable notifications from a site.
Okay, cool, so there's a giant 'click' event handler on top of the whole page. When you click it I'm going to play a 250ms long sample of silence embedded as a data:// URL into the audio or video element.
Now I control the player and can do whatever I want.
You've inconvenienced me for 15 minutes.
Anyway, forbidding pages from loading secondary content would break millions of sites, including the most visited sites in the world. That would be equivalent to completely redesigning HTML/JS.
What about what Claude or any LLM bot does with info it randomly finds online? Run local commands you didn’t ask for, visit sites you didn’t expect it to visit? Upload data and files you don’t ask it to upload?
If you don’t know what I mean, here is a cool talk for you to watch https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-ai-agent-ai-spy
When I asked Claude "AI" for today's news, it gave me only news from days ago.
Blocking modal overlays, cookie banners, sticky elements & scroll stealing - by default - would be a killer feature for Ladybird.
Devs if you’re listening I’d switch to Ladybird in a heartbeat if it did this.
I don’t think Safari is magical or anything. I just didn’t know this was a problem anymore.
Hope this issue is solved.
Be better.
- replace email for notifications: email is the default notification channel for most websites, but because it is inherently insecure and lacks privacy, messages are often reduced to generic alerts that omit the actual content (statements, bills, secure messages, etc.). Anything of value instead requires navigating to the site, logging in, and locating the relevant item. Ideally, the content itself would be delivered directly through a secure, private notification system without email as a proxy.
- eliminate account creation/login: browsers should be able to authenticate to sites cryptographically using locally held keys, allowing APIs to securely identify and associate a user with an account without explicit registration or login flows shifting credential management from centralized servers to the user’s device, simultaneously reducing exposure from credential storage and leaks.
- automatic selection of gdpr "only necessary cookies" (or whatever your preference) without prompts/ui and similar