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.
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.
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.
[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.
> [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".
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
325 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadlacks 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
[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.
Yup. I think the author forgot to color the main article text, and to label it "also an ad".
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.
[1]:https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
https://trimread.org/
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.
The web was great until someone said "I love this, but how do we make money with it?"
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The business just provided the most value™ to the customer at that moment in time
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Ridiculous.
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.
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.
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?
Otherwise, I just go on Twitter, HN or Reddit to read an article and open it with a viewer like archive.is
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'.
*Merges "changes to apiPromiseFactory.js"
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!
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.
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.
https://medium.com/wolox/ios-deep-linking-url-scheme-vs-univ...
> 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 havent yet figured out what changed in my ublock to cause it.
Also, the article itself is clickbaity garbage that you resent yourself for clicking into in the first place.