How I Experience Web Today
how-i-experience-web-today.comSo true, so sad.
These days, when even a few hurdles of crap present themselves, I often just leave. I don’t care what the site has to say or sell me.
Whenever I come across a site that just displays content immediately, it fills me with joy. Usually it’s some obscure personal or academic site, but for a moment I feel like I’ve found a gem in the desert and I browse happily for a while…then I promptly add to a list of non-crap-peddling sites. I long for a curated list of such sites.
I'm still amazed that https://gail.com/ is still just a pleasant personal website that reminds me of the early days of the web...
The HTML is delightfully retro,
<p align="left"><font size="+1" face="ARIAL,HELVETICA"> Q: Interested in selling gail.com?<br> A: Sorry, no.</font></p>
> I long for a curated list of such sites.
I don't know if this is good news but I started doing this a while back and found so many sites that it was futile to keep them in one list. These days I tend to keep them in contextual notes or databases.
Also many of them fail to pass one or two annoyance tests, but I find that they're worth it anyway. For example they are not mobile friendly in some minor way, like the touch target for their menu is annoyingly small, or they are a little bit cluttered, or use more CPU than I'd like (specific mapping sites).
So it's not easy to fit a perfect list, but it's impressive to me just how deep the less-discovered, high quality web really is.
(Also I try to make my own obscure personal sites all the time as my contribution to this mess...)
My god, the web has become so garbage that we're going back to web directories...
Maybe we should have never left. It's Google search and their advertising that destroyed the web we all used to enjoy.
This is not the case. At least it wasn't the case in the late nineties and early naughts. The web then was full of banner and popup and pop under ads (punch the monkey, remember?). Google was a breath of fresh air then with a clean site and text only ads. No question they strayed from that early vision but they are still far from the worst offenders.
> but they are still far from the worst offenders.
Maybe in the type of ads they show. But don't forget increasingly garbage search results that are also indirectly related to the whole ad-tech business they facilitate.
Which search engine do you find shows better search results? I keep coming back to Google because no one else even comes close to the quality of search results.
That was true even more so when Google started out. Their competition was Yahoo and AltaVista, which were practically useless. I'd argue that Google has done a lot for the web. But I can agree with the sentiment that they took a turn for the worse at some point.
If what you are looking for is primarly better search results and you do not mind paying for it, check out https://kagi.com
Exactly. After they bought Doubleclick and promised they wouldn't merge the two third-party cookies and the associated data, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. No display advertising ever again!
And the web smelled like roses ever since.
I doubt they ever went obsolete, insofar as they are essentially categorized lists of links to things...but from a more cultural/ephemeral viewpoint they do hit different. :-)
In my experience, the more subjective they are, the better, so I'm not sure I'd have much use for the generalized kind anymore. The criteria can be way too loose if you're looking to meet a qualitative standard...
Yes, we're "reimagining" web directories.
Someone needs to just scrape the web for light weight websites then offer a search engine just for these sites. Rid the corruption from the web please.
Try https://wiby.me/
Did that here https://teclis.com
Very fun project and still working on expanding the index. The condition to get into the index is no/low bloat/tracking/spam.
But would anyone pay for it? Basically a relatively closed and essentially almost manually curated web ring seems like it'd offer a lot of value, but who pays?
Maybe it could work if you charge users a super small base fee (let's say $1/month), and charge commercial sites that want to be listed in certain verticals?
> But would anyone pay for it?
Content owners' greed is ruining the web. Build websites without any intention of monetary gain and you'll find a much better experience in the web.
It's unfair to demand all costs from content generation to hosting to be borne by the "owners." For the web to work better, we need more aligned incentives, not to disregard the understandable demand of creators of websites and services to get somehow compensated. I do find ads annoying but I find the expectation that everything be absolutely free on the internet quite ridiculous.
Also, even when websites are built without any intention of monetization, there are still goals which the creators want to achieve. Some sites are free because they want to change public opinion or facilitate cooperation between groups of people for a common purpose. Others are made to showcase skills or for academic purposes. Lots of people are making all kinds of websites. Some want to be paid and that's fine.
> It's unfair to demand all costs from content generation to hosting to be borne by the "owners."
That's, like, your opinion... man...!
> For the web to work better, we need more aligned incentives, not to disregard the understandable demand of creators of websites and services to get somehow compensated.
I disagree. I think of the web and the internet like art. Nearly all of the (arguably) best art was produced without compensation.
> Also, even when websites are built without any intention of monetization, there are still goals which the creators want to achieve.
Yes, but financial gain shouldn't be the primary motivator. When it is then it has a tendency to corrupt everything.
> Lots of people are making all kinds of websites.
Great!
> Some want to be paid and that's fine.
Not so great!
I was talking about who would pay to gather and curate the content. The larger the ring the more effort it would take, and someone has to run that service/pay something (whether it's money, time or effort) to keep such an effort going and worthwhile.
Curated = the next round of “help I’m being censored”.html
I'd be happy to pay per month but if a commercial site can just buy sponsored posts I'm out.
Well I didn't think about it too much but the idea is that the more "salesy" the site (i.e. the further they stray from the ideals of the webring/directory), the higher the price.
Also, I wasn't thinking of a stream-of-posts type thing -- more like private, curated search but I guess having a stream makes sense too.
Either way, the question then becomes would enough people pay whatever monthly fee would keep the site viable (pay for the curation, bandwidth, etc) to prevent the people running the service from making compromises on the vision...
I have an old style HTML (and a little CSS) personal website, but making it responsive (mobile compatible) is a lot of extra work. It would take me a few months spare time to fix all my hunderds of pages.
Even if your site design consist of static table td cells - modern smartphones should be able able to read it, for example Opera mobile browser will realign the text. Old sites tend to be designed for 800x600 screens and that will also be fine on a modern smartphone.
Making a site mobile friendly is tricky as you need to allow users to zoom and change the text size - no element can be static in size. Often old web sites does that by default - while many modern sites think they are printed media.
As an alternative suggestion: don't. The web was fine when you had to zoom in and out. If anything, make it "responsive" with dynamic font-size scaling.
> …but it's impressive to me just how deep the less-discovered, high quality web really is.
Would that there were a search engine out there that prioritised the indexing of these high quality ‘well behaved’ sites.
You’re looking for https://millionshort.com/
I’ve found very many niche sites, blogs, and information dumps with this engine. It’s astounding how much is never surfaced on google or DuckDuckGo.
How do you use it like that? I typed in "falafel" as a test and the first result was JS heavy foodnetwork.com.
You have to tell it how many of the top sites you want removed from the results. For instance you can remove the top 1000 sites and it will remove that foodnetwork.com result.
Interesting it occurs to me that google search could do this, but they have a conflict of interest - adsense.
Million short sort of does this
That would be a joy to have.
> These days, when even a few hurdles of crap present themselves, I often just leave. I don’t care what the site has to say or sell me.
I find that disabling JavaScript often helps. I have it enabled by default, but disable it in uBlock on a per-site basis if some crap pops up. A lot of the times that fixes things.
For example for some reason the BBC thinks it's helpful to display a big fat "Register for an account today!" every fucking time I visit their website, but with JS disabled you don't get it. I think missing out on all BBC content would be too high of a price to pay, especially since most news sites do something similar (or worse).
Downside is that sometimes stuff like images no longer work. It's usually not a big deal.
I tried disabling Javascript by default, but there are too many important sites that require it.
My browser's "disable javascript" extension can disable on a per-domain basis, but really what I'd like is on a per-URL-pattern basis, so that <google.com> is disabled but not <google.com/maps>.
Sometimes disabling scripts is not enough, so I also disable CSS. This makes images huge at the top of the page (navigation icons, etc.). So, then I disable images as well. Then there are huge vector graphics of some kind; I can't tell if it's SVG not counting as an image, or just really large font sans CSS to size it.
Maybe one of these days I'll write a "no bullshit" firefox extension that carefully applies these restrictions except for in a user-defined allow list.
edit: oh yeah, I could call it "reader mode." Hm...
> what I'd like is on a per-URL-pattern basis, so that <google.com> is disabled but not <google.com/maps>.
Try out uMatrix.
I went a few years liking firefox's reader mode. But it's worth noting that reader mode does _not_ disable javascript.
I started just leaving as well. If uBlock Origin failed for any reason I just closed the tab.
Now this site is the only one I still actively browse.
https://wiby.me/ is a cool search engine for classic internet sites you might like
it's not a curated list, but there is a "surprise me" button
It's seemingly becoming harder to have an "experience" on the Web, and I find myself turning away from progressively more sources as a result.
In the 2000s, running with an ad blocker was a near surefire way to speed up loading a page without any functional issues cropping up - the ad blocking tech even then was _good_.
Then came paywalls - pay for this content, or you won't see it. I suppose, then, I won't see the content.
Then came JavaScript frameworks in the 2010s - ads weren't assets anymore, they were actually part of the content. But for the most part, the Web still worked without JavaScript, and many sites (for what reason, I still don't totally understand) would gracefully fall back to presenting "just the content" if JavaScript was disabled. So I traded an ad blocker for NoScript, turning the lot of it off instead. Some sites need a minimal amount of JS to function, which I'll allow (first-party and CDNs like `jsdelivr`). But if you require JS from stripe.com, I suppose I also won't see then content.
But eventually those JavaScript frameworks became bold - displaying partial content, or no content at all, became the fallback. I count the "Continue reading" button among these (and I get why - tracking who actually read the article must be vastly more lucrative than counting pageviews), though some pages are so bold as to display _nothing_ but the "You need to enable JavaScript" text itself.
Most recently, I've noticed a new tactic: setting a CSS "opacity: 0;" on the page, then removing it with JS, even when JS is not required to load the page. Removing the rule with dev tools shows the entire page. I can only assume this is a way to make sure the page doesn't become visible until all of the content is loaded, but again, the content includes the ads, upsells, and otherwise.
Thankfully I've logged into Hacker News and posted this comment without JavaScript enabled. I wonder how long I'll be able to do that.
>setting a CSS "opacity: 0;" on the page, then removing it with JS, even when JS is not required to load the page
Reader mode (ctrl+alt+r) instantly gets rid of this kind of crap.
> Whenever I come across a site that just displays content immediately, it fills me with joy.
Web search for such websites: https://wiby.me/.
This is why I love the gemini space. It feels ... unadulterated somehow.
Gemini is a dead end.
If it was backwards compatible with gopher, with added TLS I might even consider it a good idea, but this is just plain text with links.
The true power of web used to be self expression. This is why geoticies was a big thing, why myspace worked, and why Flash defined an era.
It's not a great idea to reduce options for creativity; instead, we should encourage it again.
> but this is just plain text with links.
I think this unnecessarily reductive. I disagree for two reasons.
1. Technical. The restrictions are on the protocol side. Not the browser side. It's up to the browser to convert links to "more than" links.
The Lagrange gemini browser is a good example of that. E.g. if it detects a link to an image, it adds that image inline.
2. Behavioural. Protocol restrictions do not immediately equate to inability to be creative. In my short stint in geminispace I've already witnessed some wonderfully creative content, ranging from writing, poetry, ascii art, a tictactoe/chess server, and even interactive fiction games.
No is not. It's just Gopher rethinked for display-independent devices.
Most Gopher users are aware of Gemini and viceversa, so often provide both services.
Also, Gemini provides options to set ascii-art as -optional- making Gemini one of the best hypertext services for the blind ever.
Gemini is awesome, but it's lack of ambition is what really kills it for me. I appreciate their minimalist take on the web, but if their implementation is less robust than what we currently have, I have very little incentive to host a site there.
Are you talking about this?
yes.
My favourite gemini browser is Lagrange. Makes a nice experience even better.
Here's mine: https://danuker.go.ro/
Tip: add your site to your HN profile, and look at others' profile.
Thank you - great tip, and great site! I like that you also mix in articles in, what I presume, is your native Romanian.
It has a fixed floating header though.
Some more lightweight old-fashioned internet portals other than the ones mentioned before:
https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/
https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/
https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/
I keep a list of personal/small websites as well. Sites that don't have this endless amount of marketing and tracking cruft.
Unfortunately it makes for pretty boring reading. So many sites out there have like 4 or 5 blog posts, and that's it.
You can use the Reader View in Firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...) or Readability bookmarklet in all browsers (https://ejucovy.github.io/readability/) instead of leaving the page.
As an alternative, there is FrogFind search engine (http://frogfind.com) for text-only websites.
> I long for a curated list of such sites.
Like you, I'm a fan of this kind of websites. I have one of my own in fact.
And since you're after curated lists, let me share a few links:
https://512kb.club/ https://terra.finzdani.net https://gossipsweb.net/directory https://theforest.link/ (I built this one for fun)
> I long for a curated list of such sites.
Text only websites - https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html (Disclaimer: The author has kindly included couple of my websites in the list).
thank you for that - great list
Sometimes you need the content and for that I use browser reader mode or if the content is really good, subscribe via rss. If they don't have rss, use a service to build one for the site
Also, with javascript off, it doesn't work hardly at all. Just like a real site.
If it's straight HTML and some CSS, I just can't do anything but smile. I love the people who just keep with the old way cause it will be the easiest to support and last the longest. After all, it's just text.
Honestly the site is way too performant to be realistic. All those buttons worked nearly instantly. I'm assuming you're missing the awaited tracking networking calls.
I am not seeing any autoplaying videos unrelated to the article that pop into a PIP window in the bottom of the screen as you scroll causing the amount that you've scrolled to jump so you lose your place
We will be paying the price for Facebook's 2017-era "Pivot to video" advice for years to come.
I didn't know Facebook _advised_ publishers to pivot to video? I thought that trend started with publishers themselves noticing that video had better engagement?
They overstated the average time that video was viewed in the newsfeed by only counting views of at least 3 seconds in the denominator of the average, but counting views of less than that in the numerator [0]:
> About a month ago, we found an error in the way we calculate one of the video metrics on our dashboard – average duration of video viewed. The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn’t – it reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of “views” of a video (that is, when the video was watched for three or more seconds). And so the miscalculation overstated this metric. While this is only one of the many metrics marketers look at, we take any mistake seriously.
So advertisers, who had believed that video content had high engagement due to the misleading statistics, and so made business decisions based on that (laying off writers in favor of video producers), saw video view times drop 60%-80% after the fix, because the view time was inflated by all the 0.5s-1s views initiated while users were scrolling past videos and not really watching them. This was corrected in 2016 though, but perhaps many news sites, and society in general, are still feeling the effects of writing being deemphasized in favor of video.
[0]: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metric...
I have no idea how anyone browses the web without NoScript.
I used NoScript heavily for years. No ads on Youtube all that time. A couple of months ago something went wrong and I started seeing ads again (wow, that was literally a headache for me). No matter how I configured No Script, I still wasn't able to get rid of the ads. After trying uBlock - because a lot of people here recommended it - it works fine again.
YouTube Premium is $12/month. If we don't pay for content, the only stuff that will be left is crap.
I use ublock, and now somehow now have double the ads in Youtube (the ads auto play, but the actual video does not, and then clicking play on the video triggers a second cycle of ads).
I havent yet figured out what changed in my ublock to cause it.
They give up and browse facebook instead
I had used uBlock Origin for years and years but recently had it with paywalls. Installed NoScript and took a few days to manually OK the stuff I need. Now during a work day, I find I OK something here or there but it’s made everything so much faster and cleaner. I can’t go back.
You can disable / enable js in UBO on per-site basis. You can default disable js and enable when needed, or disable for certain sites only.
Cool, but I have no issues with UBO. My post was about also adding NoScript and much additionally better than has made things.
After all the popups, it needs a last one saying "this site works best in our mobile app".
I really hate that about Reddit. I liked browsing discussions on my phone occasionally but the web page kept nagging me into using the app instead. So finally I installed it. But now when googling for information and finding Reddit boards about my topic of interest clicking on „use app“ does not open Reddit app but instead directs me to the stupid App store. Useless! But maybe it’s Apple‘s fault here?
Nope. Deep linking to apps is a solved area. Reddit completely drops the ball on this, and has for years. Their engineering is a complete shambles. The only reason they survive is their market share, not for any reason of 'good experience'
I'm almost tempted to apply for a job at Reddit to see why their engineering is such omnishambles. It's impressive in a way. The only good thing I have to say about it is that they're committed to keeping old.reddit.com alive indefinitely.
Because the team that built old.reddit.com has long since left? And now this is the only artifact they have from an era of decent engineering?
haha clone of my comment at the same time
Great minds think alike ;)
Nope. Decent programmers know how to deeplink into apps, it's completely possible.
That includes the vendor of my third-party Reddit app (Now for Reddit).
If I tap a Reddit link from a page of search results, the link opens in the app.
It's shocking that the devs of the official app don't even bother to do even this bare minimum.
Reddit is by far and away the most mismanaged site with hundreds of millions of users. I wonder what the internal politics are like. The leaks have consistently been pretty bad.
Twitch is a strong contender for this accolade too.
I wonder about Reddit's redesign. Was it a case of malice - we want to force everyone to download our native apps so we can track the users better, so we made our website as unpleasant to use as humanly possible - or incompetence - we over-hired and had too many frontend engineers and UX people with nothing better to do?
Found a tutorial about deep linking into web apps on iOS. Funny enough, they use the „Redd1t app“ as the prime example …
https://medium.com/wolox/ios-deep-linking-url-scheme-vs-univ...
IMHO, it should be there as soon as you arrive on the site and then reappear on every page load.
And if you click past it to remain on the web version, you're presented with truncated lists ("Download App to read the rest!") or a slew of missing features.
I have an old Instagram account that I created over 10 years ago. At the time, I used it for the photo filters. Never cared about the social networking aspect. Just a month ago I logged into it for the first time in forever, and realized I wanted to delete those old posts. Guess what you can't do from the website? Yeah, delete posts. Need the app for that!
Not surprising. Facebook has very strict rate-limiting for deletion of posts, unfollowing of friends, leaving communities, and anything else that can potentially reduce your "engagement". Disabling it on some platforms was just the next step.
I think it was just never implemented. The web page is fairly basic compared to the app, and AFAIK always has been (although I never used it much and haven't had an account in quite a while). Quite a few products are actually app-only now, without even any sort of web or desktop version.
A few years ago I had trouble using the Dutch thuisbezorgd food service, I think it didn't allow me to change my address or something and just kept erroring out. I contacted support and they told me to use the app. I told them I don't have a smartphone. They said I was out of luck.
There are popups? I didn't see any. Must be my malware blocker in action.
Especially the 'More options' on the cookie popup. Needs to take at least 20 seconds and reload the page
And ads should load later so if you try to click a link the whole page content jumps down when you click and you click the ad instead of the link.
Maybe you can make it so the ad always loads under the cursor?
And my Laptop fan wasn't spinning up with all those Ads. And web page scrolling started to jank.
I was about to say it needs about 7 or 8 additional ads inserted into the text of the article. Ideally they would load at random times and displace text out of the way as you're trying to read so you keep losing your place.
Also, the article itself is clickbaity garbage that you resent yourself for clicking into in the first place.
Needs more `await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, t));`
LGTM
*Merges "changes to apiPromiseFactory.js"
and the "no" button on the cookie prompt didn't open another page with 50 radio inputs, and an intentionally oddly placed reject all (or none at all)
This is less-bad than the real thing.
[EDIT] I think I figured out the main difference: this lets me imagine that more than 10% of the "content" isn't also SEO garbage, and has actual value.
[EDIT AGAIN] What it really needs is a giant sticky header that hides when scrolling down but pops up the second you scroll up at all, obscuring all the stuff you were scrolling up to see.
Those giant dynamic headers are the worst. If you try to save the page to PDF, those headers will block the content at the top of the page.
I've taken to using the element zapper on Ublock Origin to remove them. Sometimes I worry that it'll break the navigation, but then again I rarely come back to sites like those.
> [EDIT] I think I figured out the main difference: this lets me imagine that more than 10% of the "content" isn't also SEO garbage, and has actual value.
Yup. I think the author forgot to color the main article text, and to label it "also an ad".
How about a "Find everything you needed?" popover that appears near the top when you move your cursor up to the tab bar to close the tab?
In real life, the news article is actually a PR release written entirely by a PR company and fed to some low-level staffer (because actual journalism is expensive and nobody can even tell that this is happening)
If you're interested in this topic, I suggest the short book Ghosting The News.
You can make a bookmark called "Kill Sticky" or something and put this in it [1]:
It will delete any fixed headers and footers on your current page.javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()Those headers are a biscuit(<-euphemism).
IMHO, I think everyone here is missing the big point: all these "features" are being pushed to the web because A/B tests say so. The usual way things go is:
- option 1: don't add feature X
- option 2: add feature X
- option 3: add feature X slightly modified
So, since option 1 is not an option at all (businesses want to grow; they don't want "stable software", they want to push features live every sprint), then lean product managers say "let's do an A/B test and see what our customers like more: either option 1 or option 2!". The A/B test is done and it appears that option 2 increases conversion slightly more than option 1. The team pushes the feature live and everyone call it a day.
The next sprint: the same story. So, the net result is that applications and websites get "features" on of top of each other without any order or purpose, but everyone is happy because metrics look good. I know it's very counterintuitive, but that's how things work these days: no one wants to hear your "common sense" opinion, they only want to listen to what the data says; and data says the more ads the more revenue, the more newsletter pop ups the more user emails store in the db, etc.
I know this because I have worked for such companies, and they are not precisely going bankrupt.
So you're basically telling us they do it to make money, and they're not wrong, it works to make money? I don't think that actually comes as a shock to anyone!
My favorite scene in the movie Sorry To Bother You:
- See? It's all just a big misunderstanding.
- This ain't no fucking misunderstanding, man! So, you making half-human, half-horse fucking things so you can make more money?
- Yeah, basically. I just didn't want you to think I was crazy. That I was doing this for no reason. Because this isn't irrational.
- Oh. Cool. Alright. Cool. No, I understand. I just I just got to leave now, man. So, please get the fuck out of my way.
Well it isn't the only way to make money. So far, Apple is not (yet) big on all this stuff, yet they make quite a lot of money. Though even they are starting their descent to hellscape.
A/B testing seems very greedy in practice -- even in the purely economic sense (not in the user satisfaction sense).
For example, say you "A/B tested" product pricing naively. I would expect demand to have a momentum component. If you set your prices to a large value abruptly, you will probably keep getting a similar sales rate for a while, until demand starts dropping over long term (could be years for all I know -- enough time for most opinions around information sources to have shifted, for example). Compare this to a strategy like Optimal Pricing[1] based on more refined methods.
Overall, I can locate at least 3 large scale problems here:
(1) Short term behavior of websites (maximizing ads, poor experience)
(2) Poor industrial coordination: surely this practice brings the entire (web) industry down. If most of what you see is plagued by ads and infinite popups, you will seek alternatives.
(3) Regulation failure. Sometimes even industrial coordination is insufficient, because joint efforts are still limited to a single domain, and not all of society. In this case usually regulation is necessary.
Privacy is great and all, but clicking a cookie disclaimer for every website seems such unnecessary friction. Most inexperienced users I've met did not know what cookies meant and couldn't make the privacy-convenience decision effectively.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand#Opt...
I have not worked in any company doing ab tests like that, it is always base vs variant. Option 1 vs option 2/3 and then if the feature wins, you can try option 2 vs option 3, if not they would scrap it, or blame it on the implementation and keep retrying until they either get false positive, or survivor bias makes it positive.
I am not defending it as I also believe that ab tests ruin the web, but if anyone does option2/3 at start they are not doing AB test at all.
I agree. I've seen a lot of AB test abuse, but it's mostly not outright, the kind where you try to re-roll until you get a false positive or sample sizes are so small that you get an effect on the treatment group despite the control group being much larger. It's still all statistical garbage though.
This is why I cringe every time when I hear about "data-centric approaches". Data-centric gives you this.
Brilliant! Thank you for doing this! I wish I could send the link to almost every organization whose web sites I have had to endure. If you had offered me a rating pop-up, you would have been the first one I ever use (and gave 5 stars to).
Now do one for those horrible CRM messages "Thank you for XXXX. You are very important to us at YYY. Please click here to give us important feedback on your experience."
After I bought a new VW from a local dealer, I was getting so many of these "requests" that I called the dealer and told them that I would never buy another car from them again if I got one more of these emails. They stopped.
> If you had offered me a rating pop-up, you would have been the first one I ever use (and gave 5 stars to).
I've recently started to. For example, just last week, my telco's app (that I use because it's the least-hassle way to pay my phone/Internet bills) got 2 stars on Google Play Store, with a comment explaining that the app is fine, except slowish, and constantly nags about rating it on the Play Store.
I usually get the "Bad? Rate on our own feedback page" "Good? Rate on the store" scam.
One popular service took this to its logical extreme. They sent me an email with five different star options to click to rate them. Stars 1-4 took me to a private page to offer feedback about what I didn't like about the service. The 5th star took me to their TrustPilot page. I complained to TrustPilot since that's against their TOS. Not sure if anything came of it.
>Thank you for doing this! I wish I could send the link to almost every organization whose web sites I have had to endure.
Yeah I almost wonder how many of the people responsible for the final UX actually experienced it themselves. Not some debug or dev mode, but what the end user actually deals with. Would they tolerate it? Then how does this stuff persist?
An admirable attempt.
But nowhere near sufficient.
- Not NEARLY enough link-litter (social links).
- No Taboola Chumbox. SAD! PATHETIC!!!
- Needs a CTA interruption about 15--30s after landing on the payload page.
- Needs a useless hero image.
- Needs more interstitial nags within the article itself. In bold and annoying context.
- Needs more social links after the byline.
Yes, today's web is an utter and complete clusterfuck.
- Needs a CTA interruption that triggers when you move your mouse upwards to navigate back or close the tab.
- Social Share buttons served by a third party script loaded with trackers. Bonus points if they include the usually pathetic number of likes and retweets.
There are two of those (or at least, representations), for Twitter and Facebook.
Could use another few dozen, just for luck.
(A few years ago I started collecting screenshots of link litter. I think the max was about a dozen links, though most sites seem to keep it to 3--5.)
There are old plugins (that are still on a lot of sites) with buttons for Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Digg(!) and other dead networks.
I hadn't seen a reference to StumbleUpon in a long time. That brings me back. In college, I could spend an unlimited amount of time clicking the "Stumble" button. I finally kicked my habit by giving it up for Lent.
I almost cried when the "Leave Site?" alert popped up
- CAPTCHA
- cloudflare redirections
- Affiliate links to Amazon
... to read a minimally informative article.
Excellent! I really should have come up w/ both CAPTCHA and Cloudflare, they're my banes.
- Carousel
- Pagination
- "Click for full article" link
- Autoplay video
- Separate autoplay background audio.
Did some digging and found the guy who made this. Looks like he was a frontend engineer at Baidu! Would be neat to have some good Chinese software engineers on here.
If you guys want to check out his content, maybe give him a review for this website, here's what I've found:
https://juejin.cn/user/254742427077869
https://www.producthunt.com/@evan_lee5/made
https://www.cnblogs.com/hh54188/
https://www.zhihu.com/people/li-yi-69
https://v2ex.com/member/hh54188
Great sleuthing!
They forgot to include the thing where you scroll down to fit as much of the article on one screen and then an ad loads in bumping the article off screen and then the ad disappears again if you scroll up.
I had to turn ublock off to keep going after the first click, which is in fact an accurate depiction of the web experience.
Indeed. We can only hope this is an intentional self-referential joke.
I allowed scripts from cdn.jsdeliver.net and that was enough to get it going. Way less painful than getting an embedded third party video widget working.
Very bitter and to the point. I regularly wonder, do the people who want features like these installed — feedback form, "support chat" windows of various degrees of fakeness, subscription offer popups jumping in your face, and other absolutely baffling obstacles — really use their own web sites? Have they ever had to?
As someone who used to work for one of those companies selling a « support chat » platform, no, they don’t.
The marketing and sales departments never targeted the editorial/dev team of a website/company but directly the sales department or an upper management department of the potential new customer.
Chances are that the developers of those websites have to suffer those bullshit integrations as much as you do. And they also are asked to integrate them.
Those things are often added using Google Tag Manager, so developers (and anyone else seeing non-production pages) normally don't see them.
Funny story: at my previous job the widgets were disabled "forever" from the site (via a cookie) once you logged with your company email. Marketing and marketing devs had emails in another domain to test their widgets.
I tried using one of those homepage chat features for a prospective vendor exactly once. I asked "Does your platform support <xyz system>?" Turns out the person on the other end of the chat had nothing to do with the company and all they could do was collect my email address/phone number and file a ticket for the company to answer. Um... no thanks.
As long as there is an actual live person who can help me behind that chat I actually appreciate it.
I used the chat solution of my broadband provider just a couple of weeks ago and it was a really good experience.
Also, as a former support technician I far prefer text from both sides of the table.
A website is a tool, a means to an end. The purpose of chat popups or feedback forms is to further a business goal, not to increase the website's usability.
Is the business goal to get you to click the back button?
No, the business goal is to lie, trick, cheat and steal, to fuck a potential customer over so they part with their money.
That the customer may not be satisfied afterwards doesn't matter - there are plenty of mitigation strategies, such as lock-in effects, playing off sunk cost fallacy, or drowning negative feedback on third-party sites with bought ratings, reviews and social media likes.
Seeing a site like this should light an immediate warning site in your head, telling you that you don't want to be on the business end of their business goals.
You clearly don't understand capitalism.
The business just provided the most value™ to the customer at that moment in time
Their customers being ad companies
It sure is a good thing that externalities don't exist.
I myself am blocking these annoyances with an adblocker so I'm in the same boat as you.
That being said, the value that these patterns are gaining the businesses that employ them, must outweigh the value lost from people who are so annoyed that they take their business elsewhere.
It is how it is, unfortunately.
I had a support chat on my business website for a long time; the "business goal" I wanted to further was to make it very easy for people to talk to me, ask questions, etc. I helped out a lot of people with very short turnaround times.
I removed it mostly because it takes a lot of effort to maintain a good level of responsiveness on these kind of things unless you have a dedicated support team.
Some of these support chat popups are a bit too in-your-face, but it sure beats hunting down some email address somewhere.
I like companies that have a "Support" button that leads to a page that offers live chat. Having a chat box on the home page feels gimmicky to me.
I visited a retailer's website recently and wanted to use what I thought was a text-chat popover thing to ask a question about stock availability. Once I clicked it, it asked for permission to access my microphone -- err, what? -- when I denied it, I got a chiding message telling me to enable microphone access so I could speak my question, so that some salesperson could listen to it and send me a reply email within the next business day answering my question.
Ridiculous.
Hmm, when I was working on one of these customer facing websites the support popup was quite literally directly connected to me (very small company) until we integrated it with the real support system (still just me and one or two other people).
Very often, they do not, especially if the site creators are not a part of their own target demographic
In the early 2000s there was a site usability movement centred around the work of Jakob Nielsen and http://useit.com. Fortune 500s were paying him huge sums to have extraneous crap removed from their home pages and just for a while sanity and minimalism ruled. Then Web 2.0 arrived.
Web 2.0 included cool stuff like Flash. The real culprit here is Google AdSense. A few sites made a ton of money, and then it became the entire business model for "new media" companies that in turn loaded up search results with SEO-optimized listicle garbage.
I'd argue the real culprit is the "maximize shareholder value" mantra. Nothing is off limits in the Excel-sheet optimization game and room for experimentation or creativity is often axed in favor of minimizing risk and extracting more pennies for the cash pile.
We'll break out of it eventually though. People are tiring of their walled technology gardens.
Since we're all commenting on what's missing, here's another missing thing: you scroll down to the end of the article and a totally unrelated article begins underneath it.
... immediately overwriting the URL in your address bar, so at the very moment you're most likely to share or bookmark the article you've just read, you can't.
On Bloomberg Opinion, this extra article used to always count as one of my 10 free ones, too.
Where's the auto-playing video that you can't get rid of, and which jumps into the sidebar and moves down along with you when you try to scroll past it?
The auto playing videos that are not related to the content of the article are, perhaps, the most baffling thing for me. I open an article and watch a video for a minute trying to understand the point - to only then realize that the video is unrelated. What’s the point of this? In most cases I close the website and add it to my blocklist.
The videos usually have unskippable ads.
Oh I see. My ad blocker seems to block all those video ads pretty effectively!
Even then, why would they not just run video ads in that spot? What is the point of trying to distract the user from the content of the article? Just feels weird to me.
I've mostly seen autoplaying ads on "blog" sites like Forbes and Huffington Post or news websites. These are known as 'content mills' because they either reprint Associated Press/Reuters coverage, or they publish articles from freelance contributors. It's a bottomless pit of generic content.
Front-load every article with an autoplaying video w/ ads, and that can make some decent revenue if your site has a lot of traffic.
> What is the point of trying to distract the user from the content of the article?
The article is merely bait to get you to look at the ads. Once you are on the page, they don't care whether or not you read the article.
And video ads carry much higher per-user prices then display ads. Especially if the whole ad finishes playing or you accidentally click on the ad when trying to close it.
They can play an ad before and after the video, and often the video itself is some sort of sponsored content.
Yup, and it has a close button that conveniently appears right beneath the scrollbar.
The close button is a convenient 10x10 square consisting of a light blue X on a light gray background. It moves when you zoom in on mobile to click it.
Needs to prefix the tab's title with a blinking "(1)" or "*" when the chat pops up. And have that paired with a loud chat notification sound. Edit: also should mention that this is both sad and awesome.
In a completely different direction - I've been getting a bit into cooking lately, and found a website called https://based.cooking and aside of the silly name, the content is great - just recipes and nothing else! Wish there was a search engine that was able to give sites like that as result, and not the current SEO junk that is being made, although they have good recipes hidden in their walls of text
I feel like we're going full circle to having web rings again.
These non-clickable "ads" have some weird therapeutic effect on me. I tap on them, nothing happens, and I feel relief. Even share buttons don't work. This site genuinely makes me happy! Things you never knew you needed.
Missed the step where the search result takes you to the google hosted AMP version of the page and it takes forever to figure out how to escape that hell.
The very last thing that I saw on this site got me to laugh out loud. I'll leave it at that to not ruin it. Genius.
Go ahead and ruin it for me. I got as far as a fake article with two giant text boxes that couldn't be closed and had non-working send/submit buttons. If anything exists past this, it isn't loading for me.
Switch tabs and then switch back.
same :) came here to see if anyone else had commented on it
Same, literally laughed out loud.
DuckDuckGo should add an ad / popup score to every article so that in the search results you could preview just how much crap you're expecting to see if you click. If there are no ads it could be a gold result or something :)
This sounds more like Brave's shtick, but I agree. I'd love to have a couple of symbols that warned of paywalls, ad/content ratio, cookie consent, etc.
They missed the auto playing videos that follow the page as you scroll with sounds on and need to be manually stopped, and download 50 mb without my permission.
I agree with the idea. Miss a regular non intrusive web experience too much. The only place I usually find it is here on HN.
the worst is video players without separate audio control.
This pushes my buttons indeed.
But I also ran across some sites messing with the history, so they take you to a different site when you click "back".
I am especially worried about pushState and replaceState.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API...
Is it just me or has Youtube screwed something up here? About 1/3rd chance that the back button doesn't do anything on the last Youtube page in Safari.
Wait, can any webdevs explain a legitimate use for these features? Because my (admittedly uninformed) mind can only think of bad uses...
Routing in single-page applications relies heavily on the history API I think.
That's correct. When navigating around in a single page app, clicking on an in-app link won't trigger the browser to make a new HTTP GET to fetch an HTML response from the server. Instead, the routing system will use the pushState API to push a new entry into the history and update the DOM to match the new route. By using pushState, your client side JavaScript can replicate native browser behavior and preserve function of the back button to get to previous routes in the application.
Porn sites used to be the worst offenders with popups etc, ironically they are MUCH better than most newspapers now. No wonder people are watching more porn.
Web development and it's tools are often a top topic on HN. Better tools, new languages, new frameworks, improved frameworks etc. So now someone tell me why we get such sites? Why should I care about developers if they don't seem to care about me? And that's only the design and UX not to mention the whole tracking and spying.
> So now someone tell me why we get such sites?
People posting on HN usually work on web applications. Those don't need to serve ads because somebody is already paying for the service provided (e.g. Netflix, Salesforce, JIRA).
Similarly, they don't serve annoying email popups because every user is already logged in, and their email is already known. A random website you came across while searching for X, doesn't have that luxury.
So they can afford to talk about bad UX elsewhere, because their websites don't have to compromise on UX to make money.
Web developers get zero say in all this. I've been in the room when developers - and UX people - call out this crap. After all, regardless of the user experience, adding all the popups and analytics garbage and whatnot makes developers' jobs much harder.
And every single time, they are overruled.
It's the business that doesn't care about you, not the developers.
Considering that lots of developer blogs these days also employ some of those tricks, I wouldn't be so sure.
In real life every other website for the next week would have ads for "how-I-experience-web-today.com", Instagram and Facebook would have ads for other "experiences" as well
Little details - making it to the article and the click out gives you the browser "Are you sure you want to leave?" prompt.
Scary accurate. I hate the web.
This... I absolutely Abhor what the web has become. Somehow, we need a new web (maybe out of the blockchain related work/distributed internet endeavors?) The current state is sooo bad.
Check Gemini network. Far from being the network that will replace the web (and that’s not even a goal), it’s really… interesting.
Can you provide a link? A quick google just returned a bunch of links to what looked like an alt-coin. There's an app called "Gemini Network", but the screenshot looked like a crypto marketplace.
Of course :) There it is : https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
The current state exists because the web can't be monetized without it. How is Gemini different? Who will make content for free?
Idea: What if we had a search engine that would search only web sites without ads...
It could have some type of "readability / usability / user friendliness rating" (score 0-10) ...
I did something along those lines as a proof of concept, seeded with links harvested from this site.
http://kakapo.susa.net:8080/cfs/
A similar (and in my opinion more viable) approach is Marginalia Search. This down-scores pages with a large number of scripts, among other heuristics.
I like your proof of concept. I guess, next step would be to take google result, and crawl all their result and convert it into scores, rejecting in the process those that are going outside defined limits. Additionally, a weekly list of most infamous sites would be interesting to see, in the sense what people visit the most (probably social ad driven) but has bad UX...
wiby.me is an interesting one.
it seems that manual submission is necessary.
I love the concept here (nice implementation too)
Removing the 'content' and just showing the structure of these annoying web elements in isolation has an interesting effect:
our minds typically do the exact opposite (to a certain extent)—the showcased elements are repeated so often they get partly filtered from experience: our minds know there's nothing interesting to them; a stored and practiced routine can be put on autoplay without conscious attention.
So the page serves to exactly invert that filter and highlight these elements that increasingly vanish[1] from our experience in response to repeated exposure.
[1] aside from a persistent low intensity feeling of annoyance/frustration of course
Needs more 100%-viewport-height ad blocks between the content paragraphs.
I thought the popup with Changes you made may not be saved. when hitting the back button was a nice tough. All of this is 100% true. I rarely make it all the way through the soft content barriers sites that really do this. I agree with others, this works too well and isn't nearly as bad as the real thing.
How did we get here? Does any and everything ultimately get absorbed by the marketing department?
Because maintaining web sites and services cost money. And making money on the web is still non-trivial. That’s because the only way to make money is either by the subscription model or by the add revenue model. Since nobody likes to pay for many subscriptions in parallel, the add revenue model is the dominating one.
If there was an easy micro-payment solution on the web this could make it more accessible and enjoyable again. This what the web3 movement is all about: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-web3.
With in-browser cryptographic wallets like Metamask, Ethereum‘s proposed token economy and the current generation of „Dapps“ we got quite a bit closer to that vision. Web3 has the added benefit to eradicate the need for password managers because your public key becomes your identity.
Money.
The web was great until someone said "I love this, but how do we make money with it?"
Not really imo.
It may make sense in the short term, but in the long term these websites are losing customers, ie money. Online advertising is a failed business model. All those companies that started like this and succeeded quickly realized this and are constantly trying to pivot or have done so already.
I'd say the main reason for the crap web we have nowadays is: lazy people trying to get rich quick. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make money online, like people selling books, educational courses, retail in general.
What pisses me off are people who want it quick and with no work. There are literally millions of people who think that they can just throw together a website (read shopify account), enable drop-shipping through some magic shitty plugin they neither know or care anything about, and suddenly bags of money will descend upon them while they're drinking coffee, eating poached eggs at some hipster coffee shop, and posting trash on any of the grams. This fails of course and some give up while others resort to scams. This is where scummy marketing people shine. They "run the numbers" and decide to buy some bullshit fivver SEO service that litters the shit out of some keywords or engage in some other so dark of patterns that make those million-and-one cookie consent boxes seem innocent. Now take this and multiply it by hundreds of thousands of people over the last decade and a half (probably even more) who are stuck in a loop of seeing some bullshit "success story" on facebook of some random dude who's now a millionaire from selling wallets from china, wanting to do the same but are lazy and know nothing about any of the fields involved, try to scam, mostly failing, and repeat.
Nothing on the internet is free and has never been. If it appears free that's because somebody pays for it with time, money, hardware, or lost opportunities.
Okay, but that's true of everything. The spirit of the question is, why is the web especially egregious?
Probably, because several factors have conflated and reinforce each other:
1) Historically, everything on the web used to be "free" and this is still an implicit assumption for internet users.
2) Payments are not part of the HTTP protocol; micropayments never materialized
3) The web is too good for advertisers - targeting, reach, scalability are unmatched compared to off-line advertisement. This supports p.1 above and hinders p.2.
It's a vicious circle.
idk, back in the day ISPs offered FTP servers so that customers could launch and run their own sites. The internet was marketed as a consumption + creation tool. It's now slanted almost entirely to the former.
VC-backed companies like Buzzfeed have made serious ad money peddling the lowest-brow "content" possible (excl. Buzzfeed News, which came later). They in turn attracted numerous entrants like Vox, Mic.com and a bunch of others. Together they've compiled quite the SEO landfill.
At most companies? No. The vast majority of data siphoned isn't being actioned upon by most systems. The more mature data driven organizations will have multiple teams between data and marketing to ensure it is business ready which is code for getting rid of the shit data.
Bravo thanks for this.
It's a slippery slope tragedy of the commons that small actors can do nothing about really.
If Google were to start rating on this basis, or some 3rd party were able to (and then get enough noise and traction) it might help.
But it rather seems like there are a bunch of things that need to be done, not just one, including the controversial 'cookie issue' which I don't believe actually resolves the intended issue and creates a 'mini headache'.
The fact is that any web site that gets a majority of their traffic via search traffic tends to be trash: These sites don't care if they abuse their users as they know they're not coming back, so they play the numbers game and load the pages with any possible revenue generating feature possible, regardless of how user hostile it might be. Sadly, this represents most of the web.
My personal pet peeves are recipe sites. They are the absolute worst!! The other day I went to look up the right proportions for lemonade - which has all of three ingredients, and a one word instruction: stir. You should try it yourself to really see how bad it is.
(For future reference, 1 part sugar and lemon juice to 4 parts water. You can get fancy and make a simple syrup first, but if you stir well enough, it doesn't matter much in my opinion.)
You know who has enough influence to fix this issue? Google. When they said they were giving mobile websites a ranking boost, the web changed relatively over night to mobile-friendly pages. If Google announces they will penalize websites that over monetize? Poof, we'd all have a readable web again.
Almost. It needs an ad that fills entirely the upper half of the screen, and stays with you while you scroll.
The content should be just the title repeated a few times, but phrased differently.
Actual content was above the fold, it's already better than many websites.
One part is missing: the IM window will make sound and show a respectable or attractive person in avatar.
It's just missing the auto-playing video that turns into an sticky overlay that follows you down the page and obscures content as you try to read
Could not proceed after the article, which is somehow actually really dang realistic.
Do you have uBlock Origin enabled by any chance?
I opened the link, saw the article, and was trying to figure out what point was trying to be made.
Then I opened it in incognito mode and it was making a point about the commoditization of the web.
Just use browser extensions, folks.
Would you care to share some useful extensions for these problems?
A nice one is the "I Don't Care About Cookies" extension.
The ads are too small, the design is too clean and the usability is better than on most sites and there are 'No Thanks' buttons. Often these option are hidden behind some crap. And still the site shows very nicely what is wrong with the current state of the web -> Kudos
The creators might want to mix in some https://userinyerface.com sauce to increase realism ;-)
This is what SEO has become. Free audience comes from Google as long as you make "free," targeted content. The authors are trying to extract every ounce of value they can from making that free content. I'm hesitant to suggest Google interfere even more with publishers' autonomy but they're the only ones who can incentivize them en masse to change how they collect information after the clickthrough.
This is what happens when you use an application framework (HTML+CSS+JS) as a document format.
All those dynamic moving fancy interactive elements are great for actual applications. But as a solution for transmitting plain old information, web technology is now a raging garbage fire. I’ve stopped publishing my site in HTML at all.
The web needs to rediscover document formats.
I'm relatively new here, but this post really caught my attention because I have faced the same problems most of you are mentioning.
After reading the comments in this post I can see some of you want curated content, others just want to explore random websites that work perfectly on all types of devices and popped into a search engine.
I've created a site that some of you may like (I'm sure it isn't what all of you are looking for) but it might be what some of you are looking for? It by no means has all the bells and whistles of a search engine but it does offer cool lesser known websites that Google fails to show us.
If you visit https://boredhoard.com/ you can give it a go and please fell free to provide feedback so that maybe I can morph it into something you guys like/want.
Will be very happy to listen
Way to much written content implied, needs more twitter embeds
Inaccurate, loads far too fast.
props to whoever made that page. at times, I feel massive second hand guilt and shame by being associated through profession by those who make the crappy web experience we go through daily. one major benefit, is I seek books more now and relevant documentation or papers. I also like forums. and tend to try avoid sites with images. we as in industry should pushback on these practices so we can gain the trust of people utilizing stuff we build.
Had to turn javascript on to read an article, very realistic.
And I looked in the console messages, expecting to see a lil' easter egg or something, but instead I see `Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-S8P17EH...”.`. Extra realism!
I think the "Leave site????!" Popup at the end is such a beautiful, excellent, delightful little touch! This is indeed how we experience the Web now :D
Advertising crams itself into every nook and cranny unless some external factor keeps it out. if you're old enough, you remember the inserts (usually advertising cigarettes) in pulp paperbacks:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/Collins-t.ht...
A static ad wouldn't be nearly as bad as a "audience-targeted" ad that's dynamically served several seconds after the page loads, reflowing the entire layout and causing page jank.
For example, I know that every issue of the Economist is going to have an ad for a luxury watch I will never buy on the inside cover. I have full-on banner blindness to that. That's impossible on display ads that are dynamically placed right in the middle of the article body.
> reflowing the entire layout and causing page jank.
I'm starting to suspect that page jank that causes spurious clicks is actually being optimized for, by which I mean that changes that cause less jank will also lower CTR,and so fail to pass A/B testing.
I had to load it in safari because chrome + ublock was blocking all the crap and just showing a greyed out version of the article.
Surprisingly fitting!
This lacks a pop-up that suggests to go to a local site (".de") instead of the global one (".com").
I literally laughed out loud when I heard my Thinkpad's fan start spinning up! This is just too accurate :(
https://trimread.org/ helps with this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=4e530344963049 take a break.
Out of curiosity I took a look at his links, there actually pretty good. Strips out all the crud from articles and gives you some stats on how much smaller it made them.
I don't know how you would shrink this article in particular, but for your standard news site, seems to work quite well.
As an example I fed the mosquito article from earlier into it and got this back. https://trimread.org/articles/437/info
Size went from 3.49 MB to 124 kB, the requests went from 210 to 6 and the load time went from 4.67 sec to 0.26 sec. Pretty good.
I love how it also asks the "Are you sure you want to leave?" Everything about this experience is so true.
I'm sympathetic to the point being made, but amused that a script and cookie blocker snarled things up early on. And also impressed that they used the actual notification APIs and cookie banner standards with enough fidelity that my extensions hooked it.
Nice touch that you need to disable the ad blocker to get the cookie privacy thing to show up.
"I don't care about cookies" [1] on Firefox breaks the website (ie nothing happens).
Ah, I was wondering If I was supposed to see something else there… Really though, that extension (coupled with Privacy Badger) has made it so much less frustrating to browse the net.
Regarding partially paywalled articles, I just use one of several tricks:
1. Firefox reader mode. Sometimes that is enough. Switch to reader mode, reload.
2. Stopping the incomplete page load. May require several attempts.
3. Some combination of 1 and 2.
try watching TV, I propose something like a law of technology: 'every technology that can be used to squeeze profit out of people is getting unusable in a very short amount of time'
Hats off to the author, when I've made it through the end and wanted to come back to Hacker News, that window close prompt was like the cherry on top. This is terribly accurate.
Lol a few years ago I did a full-page capture of a web article. 60% of space is just ads, with actual content sprinkled among the minefield. The rate has only worsened since then.
That's about the traditional ratio of the adverts-to-newshole in newspapers.
In the past few years, the (very much suffering) principle local daily began falling far below this level. During the first wave of COVID-19, there were days with virtually no advertising at all.
On the one hand, that made for less distraction. But knowing that ad revenue is the mainstay of newspaper revenues, it was terrifying. The bleeding has continued, and the household eventually cancelled its subscription (something I'd long advocated for).
As per new trend even the content is advertisement
Couldn't see anything annoying on Brave browser except the overlay on article page.
I have much more appreciation for Brave today and how it molds my daily browsing experience.
I'm using Brave and the whole website is annoying.
I don't recall 'Alow notifications' ever been as widespread as it is now. What happened? It's on the vast majority of websites I visit.
You forgot the broken AMP page that only loads ads! Needs another step to click the top left, then click the page url, then wait for another page load.
It's like the front end industry has been working tirelessly for decades to serve the most beautiful fuck-you possible to each and every user.
This is perfect! I laughed harder the further I progressed. Not even sure if I experienced everything. The attention to detail in this is superb!
not realistic
lacks of giant pop-up on google search page about cookies, privacy or something that appears whenever you open google in new instance of porno mode
Please put some open graph data so it's more enticing to click on when shared in social networks. (which I just did on linkedin)
Does it git?
Based on the comments here this website badly needs contributions from people who are eager to reflect the real UX of the modern web.
The website is not drunk enough. By drunk I mean the effect that elements, often several beams and images, scroll with a delay.
You forgot the one where you get a popup for moving your mouse out of the window. For some reason I hate that one the most.
Love it, that basically sums it up.
I especially love that my browser asked if I really wanted to leave the page, got me with my own setup.
This is why I only browse, both on desktop and mobile, with a bunch of extensions to make the nonsense (mostly) stop.
Tag Manager, Analytics, jQuery, Slick Slider and 20 network requests for a minimal parody site. Life imitating art?
They forgot to only show one paragraph of the article with an inexplicable “read more” that unveils the rest.
Awesome, but not complete. It's missing the GDPR popup and the "better experience in app" one.
That is not at all how I experience the web today.
I also get annoyingly loud and flashy autoplaying videos...
The last part was a very nice touch
uBlock Origin blocks all of this. Everyone should install it. Everyone.
it really doesn't
Now I'm enjoying to disable the cookies and tracking options.
You should also add blank text until the pointless web font loads.
It really is so freaking frustrating, browsing the web these days
Kudos for the last part!
love it. one complaint, after I click on the "Then it show me something", it should start popping all the stuff pretty much at once, not one after another
Fantastic.
The only thing it’s missing is a broken Reader View easter egg.
Did not even break the back button. What a joke joke.
Lovely and accurate
And this is why I do much of my browsing in lynx...
Had to turn off ublock origin to experience it.
_Every day we stray further from the light_
Problem: over-engineering and monetization
I miss stumbleupon too my friend.
Required JS, didn't load.
They forgot search ads!
my experience is exactly like this, but wayyyyy slower
another google honeypot. So ironic. haha.
Full of alerts.
Many such cases
at the paywall, I disable Javascript with uBlock Origin. Maybe you could play around that as well? By that I mean, make it possible to work without Javascript and be annoying
is there a way to block those GDPR popups?
It's been terrible in the last year.
uBlock is not detecting Youtube ads,
Twitter is blocking anonymous navigation
And the examples of OP are all too accurate (Business Insider, Bloomberg, Forbes, Medium, virtually any platform).
I'm honestly liking it.
When Youtube started showing ads for me I just stopped binge-watching videos on the site, and started using YouTube-dl and watching everything offline.
I added those paywall sites to my hosts file block, I just don't care anymore. I already block everything from Facebook/Instagram, and I'm about to do the same with Twitter. My whole family and friend circle only really use WhatsApp/Telegram anyway, so it doesn't matter.
Those things reduced my screen time a lot and I honestly find it healthy.
Some websites go past the point of no return (for me Twitter, Reddit, I don't bother anymore)
But some websites were usable and now I am frustrated (in Bloomberg, newspapers the reader mode used to work but not anymore). Medium, Towardsdatascience have nice ML articles now often behind registration wall.
uBO and sponsorblock work for me. Have you updated your lists? On my phone I use NewPipe+SB. I use privacy redirect to go to nitter.
I think he means the ad thumbnails, not the in-video ads themselves. Ublock hasn't been able to hide them for a while now.
what ad thumbnails? I haven't been getting any ads of any kind, I don't think
I find the in-video ads annoying and now they circumvent uBlock.
Current strategy is to turn down the volume and scroll down to the comments / look away for 10 seconds.
Ads are very irritating
check out sponsorblock, it's a crowdfunded database of in-video ad timestamps to skip over them:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
reddit req
You would be amazed how much improved things are with Javascript switched off (which Chrome allows you to easily do, with exceptions). Give it a try.
Agreed, I'm especially fond of uMatrix lately for firefox.