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
all other chromium browsers cannot have signed widevine support?
Firefox however solves both ublock and widevine
Why can't anything simply be "disliked" anymore?
I get you don't like it.
But abused?
Because there's a slide-in?
On a site run by volunteers?
For open source software you get for free?
That you freely choose to visit?
Calling that abuse seems... off. I have no concerns with people saying the don't like something. But the current nature to be hyperbolic is off-putting to me.
It's not a flavor of ice cream.
It's an intentional act performed by a party upon another party, in the full conscious deliberate knowing intent to do something other than be nice or even neutral to the other party, but to bother and annoy them, to consume attention and time that they did not willingly give.
It's not the worst crime of the century and so it is a small abuse, but abuse is still the correct word. And it's not a small abuse when performed on a million people instead of one.
If you don't think so then you must be ok with me stealing a single cent from you, and everyone else. Surely you merely dislike that and would defend my behavior against anyone trying to do something so dramatic and hyperbolic as to involve law enforcement over something so small.
python.org might be asking your user agent to do it, or it might be asking a third party to do this; either way the interpretation of how to display that is down to the user agent. I don't see any popover/slidein but I'm running uBO which is probably blocking this. I do this because I don't want the 'abuse'.
The only time that is true is when Edge throws up it's own popups when you go to a chrome or firefox download page.
Outside of that singularly outrageous example, the browser is doing everything it promised to do and everything the user asked it to do, which is to render the data coming from a server, as so no, the browser is not the abuser.
Unless you are still just a kid or something that has just never really thought about anything yet, then you understand this perfectly well, and so your attempt to think up some contrary argument is not merely in honest error but disingenuous.
A thing that the user does not want, but is presented on top of content that they do want, is not serving user intent.
Of course, it's serving the needs of the project, theoretically. (Organizational capture of organizational perpetuation at the expense of organizational goals are a common problem, but I don't have any opinion or knowledge of this case.)
Adopting the user-hostile behaviours of advertising and perpetual fundraising are not a great way to make users happy. But they work, I guess. At some cost.
Don't ask me, I voted by disabling JavaScript and running Firefox. I don't have these problems.
a) Any Internet-enabled human should have seen and avoided this problem from a million miles away.
b) "We expected feedback" ?? this phrase is fucking insulting, sorry.
c) Not next year. Take it down now and preserve some credibility. What is wrong with you people?Thinking about making a new thread to ask it to be taken down for good.
Unmitigated arrogance combined with scathing contempt for their user base, perhaps?
I'd expect nothing less from the people that botched the Python 2.x to 3.x transition, burning billions of dollars of software value and countless hours of development effort in the process. Or the people who repeatedly failed to come up with a sane library and package system.
Python demonstrates that having a standards body and caring about backward compatibility are not bad things, and that a platform's most important job is to absorb pain, not multiply it across millions of users.
It comes as no surprise that even their web site would migrate to the latter camp.
It doesn’t imply the strength of the word in “sexual abuse” or other law-related contexts.
I don't care what the commercial status of the site is that I'm visiting, you will not hijack my attention.
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.
Google for quite a few years was seen as a good steward of the free and open Internet.
To assert people shouldn't feel betrayed because "it's a company" fundamentally ignores why people had different expectations for Google to begin with.
Firefox still allows uBlock origin, and even on mobile.
Even moreso - uBlock Origin doesn't block the modern equivalent of pop-up ads unless you manually block elements. Even then - half the time the block isn't even saved and needs to be redone every page visit.
Have you got an example of that?
That strategy did not come into existence through some abstract entity
Remember when we had to listen to Windows users complaining about irritating OS behaviour (performance problems, BSOD, ribbons, clippies, Activation Keys, terrible networking protocols)? After we reached age 15 or so, we learned to politely hold back from saying "yeah we know, use a better OS"?
This feels very similar. I'll be polite. :)
You're mixing "badly implemented operating system", "UX patterns I disagree with", "dark patterns pushed by corporate greed", and "Turns out you need money in order to pay developer salaries even in an open source project".
I'll be polite as well and not elaborate further...
But it's also the best-available solution. The problems described do not exist on the other side of the fence. Others have different criteria, but we are happy with ours and wonder if y'all might be too.
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?"
If you (generic "you") make me accept that deal, guess what: I won't (and I actually don't, this happens routinely to me since I'm european -- I always close pages that ask me to "log in or accept our cookies").
Feel free to block me. I don't care that much about your content anyways. I won't see ads one way, or the other. And I will work hard to make this the default experience of my friends and family.
I'd gladly click a checkbox "tell the server I'm using adblock so they can block me". I don't care about your content that much. It's often crap and low value, that's why you do drive-by advertising with clickbait titles and low effort mass slop.
On the other hand, they didn't make any deal not to show you pop-ups. And they have no obligation to you as a user, nor does it seem they have incentive to change their approach.
In the physical world, common spaces can be regulated. Signs, billboards, radio waves, public right of way and similar goods are public property and often the government will lease common space in exchange for some benefit to the commons. This might be revenue (collecting some fee for the license to put billboards on the highway) or a more abstract benefits (the public benefit of information dissemination when leasing radio spectrum). This at least allows citizens to participate in the process and benefit from the outcomes, even indirectly. In exchange, private companies use various methods (including ads) to recoup their costs.
On the internet, though, it feels like the balance has been disturbed. The benefits the public get from the maintenance of the infrastructure that provides these services (cables running through public and private lands, radio spectrum for wireless services, maintenance of domain services, etc.) isn't really commensurate with the massive profit organizations get from using them. I'm not sure how we got to the point where Google can cash in so much on the commons and we get popup ads as a thank you. I don't know what regulatory framework will work, but I hope we find one.
Exactly my point! The only deals websites and I made are TCP, TLS and HTTP. That was in response to GPs mention of a deal where I somehow have to watch ads because I made an HTTP request.
Ok fine, but those users surely use patreon then? Well conversion rates for "viewer to paying subscriber" are <1%.
Again, I'm not pointing the finger at you individually, perhaps you always send tips and subscriptions, but overwhelmingly, the vibe of people with your feelings have a mindset of "I'm entitled to free stuff, they're bad if they want money, and I'm fighting a righteous crusade"
Meanwhile the Internet is going to shit catering only to people who cannot figure out ad block....
It feels good, but comments like yours need to be meaningless and repetitive, not celebrated because it gives freeloaders a sense of contributing.
C'mon
(or you can do what most people do)
I personally don't watch talking heads on youtube, but let me tell you that no way I'm subscribing to every "influencer" that wants me to pay a silicon valley starbucks latte per month. Begging for subscriptions isn't the solution.
A lot of times nowadays it's actually the users themselves creating the content which the platform uses to secure its network effect to have visits in the first place. Should those creator users then be paid as well or not?
If you create something in a field that is so infinitely commoditized that there aren't even any paid options and thousands of competitors that would instantly jump at the chance to be a replacement just for popularity's sake, you are frankly deluded to expect anything in return for your work. Best you can expect is to have some influence over others through your direction of the project, which is something that you could actually sell and I'm sure they do. Just look at Zig.
Any donations they get are completely against any market common sense and just people's good will. Demanding anything is so hilariously out of touch with reality.
How much were you donating to them before the pop-up?
Had you already paid for it ahead of time?
Or to fund more integration with github, or remove more features?
Visited python.org and... you were not exaggerating! wth!
> 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 wonder now how many of these I've been missing because of uBlock Origin + DNS Blocking + JS disabled. Last time I tried a normie browser (my mom's), I had to install uBlock Origin there, because I just couldn't use it that way. I feel sorry for the majority of web users, who don't have any protections against popups and invasive advertisements.
Perhaps it's cultural - where I live repeatedly asking for money is highly frowned upon and only lowers the reputation of the non-profit doing it. The non-profits who only ask once are much more likely to receive multiple donations from the same person.
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.
Pop-ups working to get money and pop-ups working to alienate users are not mutually exclusive.
But ok, if we want to play with made up numbers, pop-ups working with the 0.01% of viewers that are willing to spend money are worth alienating even 10% of people that will never spend a dime.
You are assuming every visitor is the same, when most are just a waste of resources.
They even locked the thread on discuss that was asking for its removal.
Just don't use chrome.
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.
Somewhere along the line (when Prabhakar Raghavan was running search maybe?) that seems to have changed. Part of it might be cookie popups (thanks EU*). Part of it might be giving networks using Google’s own ad networks a free pass. In any case, webmasters had no reason to stop abusive/dark UX any more.
*This is not an anti-EU jab. It’s a jab at an inadequate technical measure. Given how many sites people visit, cookie consent popups do not provide informed consent, and further legitimise popups.
During Sunday Pichai, google has become a S*t hole. He sucked up all goodwill
the problem isnt the EU, it's the websites
Note: I work for sentry.
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.
* 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.
"Having friends is a skill."
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.
https://tcpca.org/blog/2019/2/1/when-complacency-is-complici...
During the rise of the Third Reich, a German named Dietrich Bonhoeffer rejected the path of comfortable ignorance and valiantly chose instead to stand against the banality of evil in his land. May his words haunt the collective soul of our country:
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
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.
And how do you suppose people find out about that product?
Like, I hate the modern ad ecosystem as much as the next person, but I also understand the abstract need for the existence of advertisements of some kind.
Probably by having a good website, that is easily searchable for search engines and found with the right keywords. If I have a need for something, I should be able to search in a search engine and their website should show up in the results. The results should also be specific enough to my query. If I search for some business or solution in my area, it should surface things in my area predominantly.
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.
Unfortunately as the opt out flow is tweaked more often than the accept all flow (as cmp vendors work to minimise opt outs), this does mean it breaks more often on sites so sometimes it fails to remove the banner
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.
Preferences and Functionality
Performance and Analytics
Information Storage and Access
Content selection, delivery, and reporting
Ad selection, delivery, and reporting
Other Purposes
I detest newsletter modals.
Followed by something about 1800+ companies they want to sent my data to .. :|
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.
You were absolutely correct that it's a bad experience, and that probably a lot of people hated it and think less of your company for doing it. But since every site behaves this way it's not a deal-breaker for people anymore. People either find a way to get around it or just suffer with the crappiness of the modern web and your metrics just go brrrrr.
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?
If you get more than "insignificantly little" spam in your inbox, you are using the wrong mail provider.
My email address is on every spam list under the sun. I get 600 spam messages per day[0], but only a few per week hit my inbox.
[0] It was 600/day before I made a small change to my mail configuration. Now it's only about 50/day which is few enough that, every month or so, I actually check for false positives. I occasionally see a low-value marketing list message that isn't technically spam in the sense of being entirely unsolicited, but content-wise it's not differentiable. Zero legitimate personal messages. I can live with this.
It is the worst of German "incumbents über alles" and American legalism. "Respect DNT or go to jail" would have been fair and easier to administer but Big Tech lobbyists helped design the GDPR to stifle smaller competitors who couldn't laugh at the occasional fine for malicious compliance.
It's trivial, truly trivial, to not need a cookie popup. I never put them on my website. We must then conclude that people are putting them on their website because they want to annoy users.
It is actually trivial to comply with GDPR for smaller companies than for incumbents simply because smaller companies don't collect and sell copious amounts of user data.
What people are tired about is "technologists" completely absolving the tech (that they are a part of) of any wrongoping in this. "Oh, the EU made these mandatory" they cry and happily impöement dark patterns to collect and indefinitely store all your data.
The only blame you can lay on EU is not enough enforcement.
That's a very big "only". Malicious compliance (and non-compliance) was an easily predictable consequence of the law, they've completely failed at responding to it, and the web is now worse as a result.
Note how you, too, absolve the companies of any responsibility because it was apparently "an obvious and expected response" to a law which only asks to not track without consent.
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.
If content you see laden with ads was not "real" enough to earn from sufficient readers, you would not be seeing it.
Edit: what I mean by that is: I think your comment implies there's some sort of meritocracy to content people see online that isn't easily gamed. My various feeds, search results, etc, convince me otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
you don't have any "voice" about ads so your choice is to "exit" by running an ad blocker. Obnoxious advertising tactics, scam ads, and other problems in the advertising system lower people's responsiveness to advertising. We need to restore the responsiveness to weak signals (bidirectionally) that Vaughn talks about in The Challenger Launch Decision and her book about her divorce Uncoupling.
wrt Exit vs Voice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376098
What's odd is when people here complain of screening by ads because they'd think screening should instead be by money. It is proper that the choce for the publisher's site is made by the publisher and for the reader's visits is made by the reader.
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.
Honestly, no.
Perhaps I am just lacking imagination; can you think of any content compelling enough that a) I am not prepared to pay to get it and b) I am still prepared to view ads to get it?
I can't imagine any type of content that I both don't want to pay for and feel it is worth sitting through the ads.
I expect the ratios matter as well; the average webpage/site has more ads than content that I specifically want. If I had to sit through a 10s ad to see a 90m movie, I might do it. As it stands, right now on youtube, there is a 30s-60s ad shown between 5-minute videos.
So, when I am not using Firefox, I simply don't go to youtube.
I didn't say anything about content I can afford to pay for. I am talking specifically about content that I am unwilling to pay for, yet am willing to put up with ads for.
Like I said in my previous post, the ratio matters a lot, here.
If it’s that valuable, just let me pay a fair price to see it.
In general, I’d like to see personally targeted ads banned entirely and a legal requirement for a fairly priced (i.e. same order of magnitude as the lost ad revenue) ad free option.
Now a lot of sites have scammy full page js-popups of the kind that were only found on dodgy websites in the 90s.
But I feel that their choice of advertising revenue as their predominant income stream set them on a trajectory that gradually and inexorably led them further away from their original principles.
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.
Web ads exist because they are one option that serves the needs of content providers and consumers alike.
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.
... and should be treated with exactly the amount of respect or deference it would be in real life -- avoid (don't follow links to sketchy sites), de-escalate or ignore (close the tab and walk away), or defend (block JavaScript).
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.
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.
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)
Anecdotally, this works for me - I pay for a handful of subs, and I don't use any news aggregators or feeds - the sites with subs I pay for cover everything of interest to me.
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.
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...
The examples of the a la carte exercise brands referenced (SoulCycle, etc) are quite ineffective arguments -- those are successful businesses with loyal, high retention users because they provide specific, high value products to the users.
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.
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.
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.
The web developer is not in this equation, because I have no way to know their server hasn't been hacked, and hence even if I trust them personally, anything they send me is explicitly untrusted
I feel like that was mostly porn sites. I find modals far more intrusive on mainstream sites.
Whoever invented target=_blank should be guillotined.
It's hard to block them deterministically by the browser. Though uBlock Origin and NoScript can block almost all these annoyances.
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.
I know the most popular ad blocking extensions don't make a Safari version but there are ad blockers for Safari.
"Lawmakers should legally set rents to $0, so we can all live for free"
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.
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.
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 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.
"Find the main content, and write an adblock rule hide anything covering it up" is the sort of thing they're actually kinda decent at, and in a flexible enough way that it might be hard to block.
And I agree that these types of ads remain a hard to solve problem today.
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.
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.)
All while failing to block any of the in-page pop ups covering any news article I might click on
As is disabling javascript on a site to get past this FE non-sense.
Otherwise, i'll just get the information / content elsewhere.
I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days but when I wanted Chromium, I chose Brave. It has better blocks for this sort of thing built into it, and uBlock Origin works fine.
It's only the Google Chrome browser that requires the Lite version of that extension. Not Chromium derivatives.
I use Brave + uBlock Origin - problem (for the most part) solved.
The working way is to block ad networks entirely, because online ads have become unreasonably obnoxious. A web site that critically depends on ads may state so, and refuse to run with ads blocked. (When a site I need says that, I disable my ad blocker. If a site I don't need does that, I close the tab.)
I do believe that good web sites deserve support; I may offer a donation if there is an easy way to do so. I don't mind the donation pop-up on python.org, and even in Wikipedia.
If a site only exists for the purpose of making money off ads, not because the owners care about the content, and the visitors don't care enough either to tolerate ads, then I don't see the shutdown of such a site a big loss.
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding the intent of this sentence, but I have not seen a popup in my web browsers for ... so long I can't remember the last time it happened? Years certainly, maybe double-digit years.
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.
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.
I would be very surprised if more than 1% of YouTube viewers use sponsorblock.
> I do think more people would subscribe if sponsors would be blocked on premium.
Definitely agree there!
> It would be great to see less sponsors
You wouldn't see that though. It's pretty clear sponsors pay waaay more than advertising. Creators would just integrate them more into the video so there's nothing to skip. Like instead of "this segue to our sponsor ComfyPants", it would be that their username in the game review is ComfyPants, and they get a skin only wearing pants, and they do the review wearing ComfyPants... you get the idea. Much worse.
And what you describe is hidden advertising. It can also be forbidden. In many countries in Europe it is on public TV, and they have to avoid naming brands, if they show any the label has to be taped off etc.
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.
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
Case solved.
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.
Complaining about ads appearing on adwares will only lead you so far.
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...
1. Every new feature will be used to abuse the user, usually to push advertisements.
2. When browser features are added to protect the user, web designers will do their best to subvert them to abuse the user, usually to push advertisements.
3. When an advertising company controls your web browser, the game has been lost.
Sure there are communities like this but 98% of the internet is a fucking mall. Complete with those pagoda kiosks that have advertisements all over them. It’s disgusting.
Where I play games (Steam), it’s a mall. Where I talk online (Discord), it’s a mall. Legitimate shopping, malls all over the place. Want to do some research? Stop by the kiosk and pay your credits. Want to be able to code and have intellisense work? Pay your credits. Want to invest your money? Pay your subscriptions.
I’m over it. I’m all for e-commerce but it seems like that is all that it’s focused for. To drive ads to sell shit to ignorance.
We invent the best communication technology yet it’s mostly used for communicating who owes whom. It’s sad. Once AGI is here (or something that resembles intelligence) the web will be our prison and your entire lives will be ledger’ed.
This is one future scenario if we keep going down this path.
More like K-Mart, but unfortunately, not dead yet.
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.
Recent experience: trying to search for websites that review products that I'm not familiar with. It was pretty obvious that most of those review sites had never actually touched the products they were reviewing, they all just copied each other.
I don’t think Safari is magical or anything. I just didn’t know this was a problem anymore.
The ads I get on Youtube ...
Facebook doesn't care about scam companies as long as they get paid.
Big tech and scams are becoming a hand in hand thing.
Hope this issue is solved.
Yes, a few web site would become unusable under that setting, but the trade-off would be worth it to me. (Better would be if position:fixed had never been introduced.)
- 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
Be better.