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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 there 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
Ads are content too, you know?
Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.
Now a lot of sites have scammy full page js-popups of the kind that were only found on dodgy websites in the 90s.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
The trick is it’s priced assuming that discount will be taken off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
Chrome & Safari are operated by advertising/surveillance companies, so no dice there.
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.
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.
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.
As is disabling javascript on a site to get past this FE non-sense.
Otherwise, i'll just get the information / content elsewhere.
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 note the article itself does not attempt to. Telling.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.