If they can trigger a "video fired" message in the analytics, that's one more "Person viewed our video" they can show to a potential advertiser. That's all it's about, not the end user's experience.
Often, they can also show the much more important "well-paid video ad played" event. Video ads pay much better than other ads, and I believe that those videos are often ad-ridden - we just don't notice because your ad blocker takes care of that. (I know I've seen it a couple of times, but I don't know how frequent it is because I rarely make the mistake of visiting a news site on a browser without an ad blocker.)
And the one publish ads gets absolutely no attention even though the numbers looks good. Who on the earth will watch a video stick at the corner of a news site page?
Having worked on video delivery, first play is not paid much attention. In most VPAID supported ads -one of the standards for video ad delivery- you have events fired at set intervals which are what is actually looked at when evaluating a placement value.
A placement that has high first play rate but a terrible 5sec event firing will just be worth nothing. In a programmatic world it means you'll get little to no bids for it or a default placement with payment in the fraction of cents per thousands.
Are there people out there that actually engage with the auto-playing videos, or the “articles you should also read” callouts forced between every other paragraph? There must be right?
I know no-one likes them, but there must be some increase in engagement somewhere that causes the marketing folks to keep pushing these things.
Personally I find it makes the articles very hard to read without reader mode. Sites owned by G/O Media (The Onion, Kotaku) are particularly egregious. On mobile you can typically only get about 20-30 words of the article on screen at any one time (that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one).
When it comes to chumboxes aka "articles you should also read" I could definitely see old people less experienced with the internet's scumminess falling for them at least the first few times.
I take a particularly dim view on websites that have these. I don't care if that's how they make their living - they are making money by scamming people.
Most of my browsing is done on my TV via my Mac Mini connected to it.
The resolution is jack up to the lowest so I can easily see from the couch.
This is a fringe case as most people arent enjoying the Internet on their TV via a web browser and wireless mouse. Nevertheless those nuisance videos are the worst in my view on the TV ... take up the screen and there's no X button. Always just have to hit the back button quickly and not bother reading the site.
I'm surprised there isn't an extension for some kind of white-list only video stream content.
I too find these sites despicable. But usually, by the time the video play you've already been fighting some popup about joining, dismissed a browser native window saying this site is asking to send you notifications in the future, and GRDP @#$%^$%^& "we care about your privacy so here is a booklet about our privacy policy, in your face" with select all-of-which cookies you'd like to not, maybe (one time) receive in a game of dark patterns.
I have an outline.com bookmarklet at that point, which I click as fast as possible to get out of this mess!
> I'm surprised there isn't an extension for some kind of white-list only video stream content.
the main problem is that it's impossible to distinguish between "autoplaying video that's annoying" and "animation that's part of the page". If you're willing to block both, firefox allows you to change the autoplay policy from "allow videos by default but block sound" to "block all videos".
Firefox has that built in; Chrome has the option to block audio. Both support a whitelist; Chrome supports a blacklist. There are extensions with more options.
A combination of the "I don't care about cookies" extension and an adblocker with a couple tracking blacklists should avoid both the cookie popups and the tracking cookies themselves.
You know the old joke about the prison where all the prisoners all knew the same jokes, so instead of bothering to tell them at dinnertime, they would just call out a number? Seems like the interweb is like that, except it's XKCD comics instead of joke numbers. There is one for every occasion. With that in mind: 624.
Not exactly the same thing but related: shout out to the excellent Vinegar extension for iOS Safari, which disables the abhorrent YouTube “play video on initial touch” behaviour that triggers play on every goddamn embedded YT video as you are simply trying to scroll down a page to read an article. Absolute lifesaver. Metaphorically speaking.
Have you ever driven across a bridge, or along a highway and run over one of those "hit counter" cables that the Department of Transportation lays out to know how many people are driving on that bridge, or that highway?
Now imagine that the cable can reach up into your car at the exact moment that you cross over it and pull down your person and your entire life's history.
That's E-ZPass, FasTrak, etc. Also those toll bridges where they take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill that includes a $6 "convenience fee"
They hide ALPR everywhere. All it takes is a camera. I've seen it on the backside of normal green highway signs, where you can't see it and would never suspect it. The idea is to create a dragnet.
Here in the UK, on public roads, they are legally required to sign post that ANPR[1] is in use in that area, and the cameras have to be easily seen, AND a bright yellow colour.
The shady side of it, is on private property, like car parks, where those rules don't apply.
They also pay gig workers to literally just drive drive around in vehicles with ALPR in them. Police cars have them, and they trickle down to parking enforcement. And I am sure the parking officer's gear is sending back more than just cars that have been parked over 30 minutes.
You're being tracked by your car and phone bluetooth MAC addresses. That's how the "X minutes to exit Y" signboards work. They time how long it takes to see a particular MAC address appear at the next receiver.
You got a cite for that? I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but that seems horribly overengineered for what has been traditionally accomplished with tracking the average speed of vehicles using radar or vehicle detectors - they have had these signs long before smart devices were common.
I interviewed at a place that managed traffic light behavior and they had a system to evaluate traffic efficiency by watching traffic flow through the whole area, tracked using ambient Bluetooth signals from phones.
>tracked using ambient Bluetooth signals from phones.
What does this mean? Are they just measuring radio power levels in the 2.4GHz spectrum, and using that to determine whether a car is there or not? Or are they actually somehow capturing bluetooth signals, decoding them, and extracting identifiers (eg. MAC) from them?
It was explained to me as if they track individual cars so I assumed they extract identifiers. I don't know much about BT so I had no reason to question if that was possible. I asked about TPMS as an alternative and they said bluetooth was more reliable since many cars didn't use in-wheel transponders.
This is a pretty bad analogy, because there's very little that online advertisers track that license plate readers can't. In both cases, it rarely stretches beyond a dataset of "Which people have visited which (pages|businesses)" and whatever statistical inferences you can claim to make from that data. Businesses already use license plate readers for marketing and analytics purposes. (Although, of course, not as widely deployed or as well-known as advertising cookie tracking)
It's not just autoplaying video that's the problem, it's the fact that these videos then go on to autoplay something else completely unconnected to what you were reading without asking you first.
You might argue this is to do with advertisers and so on, but this also happens on the BBC News website too. I recently clicked on a video story and after the video was finished I didn't notice there was a 5 second timer and suddenly I got a totally different video play by itself.
> It's not just autoplaying video that's the problem, it's the fact that these videos then go on to autoplay something else completely unconnected to what you were reading without asking you first.
No, screw that as well. If there's a text article with a video attached, I don't want to be interrupted by the autoplaying video while I'm reading the text.
Because that's how the web team is measured and rewarded. Management wants to see more view views, longer time on site, etc. Leadership doesn't understand nor care about a shite UX (so no one lower in the org is concerned).
This is a common theme with non-profits and open source projects. They see the for-profit incumbents doing something toxic and cargo cult it like not providing a similar experience would betray the users when it's really the opposite.
How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potentially be anything (follow subscribe links, consuming traffic in the background, a simple DoS), but ideally something that reduces the offending servers ability to do what it's supposed to.
No need to burn it down. Just buy a bunch of gift cards for the bar and hand them out to people recently released from jail for drunk & disorderly conduct. If the bar is trying to optimize for maximum traffic at the expense of all other quality metrics, surely they won't mind.
I like this idea a LOT. However, the potential for abuse is, forgive me, too damn high. The extension owner can extort sites to not be attacked or attacked less. (a la AdBlock Plus, ghostery(?), etc).
How about if it merely followed links at a rate not high enough to impact the server itself, but enough to poison the analytics well as much as possible, and rather than opt sites in, it just randomly disrupts the 10,000 largest sites.
It's fairly obvious that sending traffic for the sake of generating traffic isn't "legitimate" by any means. Your excuse is flimsier as websites that sell ddos services as "stress testing" services.
Well, I have not noticed, because last time I wrote a Chrome extension, I just had the .js files in a directory and I could easily add it to Chrome with developer mode on. I imagine it would be possible with this extension as well.
Things may have changed since then, I have not checked.
Installing AdNausiam into Chrome is remarkably difficult. You need developer mode on, repackage the addon manually and then dismiss the dev mode popup every time you start the browser.
In other browsers you need your addons to be signed. Firefox implemented this because of the terrible malware that got installed with adware installers. With administrator access, they kept changing every setting Firefox added to get the addon to load, so they made the entire loading system dependent on signatures. Luckily, adware developers aren't smart enough to load code into the signed binaries to work around this limitation.
You could do it, but it's more of a hassle than you'd expect.
Care to implement the W3C or WATWG browser spec over the next week?
How many independent browser engine variants are viable today? Three?
Ramping the difficulty of that problem has specifically limited choice and options.
One class of devices (iOS) mandates a single browser engine (Webkit / Safari). Android has a slight pretense of greater openness, but bundles Chrome into most apps.
There's an argument to be made that the developers are the new crackers, the new enablers of abusive behaviour. Perhaps they should feel some burn for their actions.
So long as all the developers of DoS and assassination extensions "felt the burn" before they could complete their abusive-behavior-enabling technology, I would be fine with that.
Yeah, so I’ve been a host of things a few times, and got the hate mail, bomb threats and various lawsuits that were aimed at other people but landed with me.
The bomb threats and car bomb threats did get me talking to the sheriff about concealed carry permit, but I backed away.
The poor woman that answered the phone for a shared office space quit.
At Weebly, people bought DDOS but didn’t realize that every site had the backing of our entire infrastructure.
that is vigilante justice and it will end about as well as Reddit trying to catch the Boston bomber.
What actually to do when you find someone's website annoying: Don't go there, it's not your site. Same thing I do when I don't like a bar, I leave, I don't start clogging the drain with toilet paper
I think the default filter lists don't seek to block video content like this, but you can definitely accomplish this with custom filters. I have filters set up to block these videos on cnn.
Even if you assume the server operator is benevolent, that would be trivial to fork (and no one should run a closed-source version of that in the first place) bu someone just forking the extension and using it to trivially DDoS sites for other purposes. Or just break out that part of the code and use it in other malicious client code.
Consider also the sybil vector; I could just use a proxy network to vote millions of times for a site I'd like to see targeted. Or how do you ensure that 1 human = 1 vote? Throw in some PoW? No.
I'm not for building easily available tools for remotely and unilaterally coordinating DDoS attacks.
Legality aside(on both sides), you assume a media site will take an increase in ‘impressions’ on their site as negative on its own. A lot of these places just care about making it look like there’s eyeballs looking at their stuff so they can sell that ad space at a premium, not whether there actually is. Ie. The places that put these auto play videos.
Do advertisers actually believe these impressions metrics are valuable? It's strange that they put value in these metrics that everyone hates while completely shunning other forms of content like porn. I'm not suggesting that advertisers start showing their ads next to porn but rather questioning why they are showing their ads next to news websites based on what are essentially fake metrics.
Tempting as this is, it's a colossally bad idea: just as one point, how long do you think it would take for the usual operators of botnets (spammers, those attempting DDoS for other purposes, etc) to target the C&C for this botnet? Why go to the trouble of building a botnet when someone else has already done it for you!
Instead, how about we make a combination browser extension/hosted service which renders the page server-side, extracts the content, and serves it clean.
Users can leave bounties on sites and once the bounties pile up high enough somebody will come along, sanitize it for everybody, and collect the bounty. Sorry about your ad revenue, next time don't piss off the masses.
The bounties will be public, so site maintainers can see if they're on the list and address the issues. If the community decides that the redesign addresses the problem, the bounty goes back to its issuers.
That sounds like the Blue Frog model from 10-15 years ago where IIRC each spam email would trigger one “please opt me out” request from everyone on the user base. Then the spammers started trying to DDOS them back.
The replies to this are so funny :D "It's illegal! Immoral! Assassination! Theft! Murder! Felony! To the gallows!"
Yeah, no.
So it's legal, moral, and acceptable that software and websites are made, by you folk reading this here website no less, to consume orders of magnitude more resources than they need to, just so that web companies---you folk, remember---can make some stats go up and turn them into money. It's okay to make the web less accessible to poor people, disabled people, people in places with bad internet connection, perfectly functional devices which have only become unusable because of this whole bullshit &c, it's okay to mine shitcoins in people's browsers, to sell their life for profits, it's okay to literally get into their private life and play loud videos in there if they don't know how to make that stop, but it's immoral, illegal, unacceptable to retaliate? Immoral and triggering for you lot for folk to just jokingly entertain such idea?
This whole business is basically turning wasted money and energy into dollars, not really different than blockchain bullshit essentially.
Imagine the resources wasted to produce and consume this nonsense went to making computers user friendly, programmable and accessible. Like, why should my browser occupy ~6G of memory for ~50 pages which could all be just pure HTML and a couple PDFs? Why should I need 6G of memory when 1 or 2GB must do? Why tf a computer with 1GHz or 666MHz CPU can't handle the web, ie a bunch of text documents? This whole bubble is creating immense amount of waste, and it's nonsensical to just limit your thinking to "oh, some annoying websites, just run uBlock". IMHO comes from the same place with "if car-dominated cities bother you and you feel unsafe, just get a car, or better, an SUV". What about fixing the city? What about climate and pollution?.
It is sad that most of the web is like this, but no, there's nothing illegal, immoral, or unacceptable about people offering to you (for free) shitty services which are a hassle (cost you resources) to use. You're free to not use them if you don't like them.
Your argument is like saying if a barbershop always has 2 hour wait times and has crappy music playing on an excessively loud radio, it's ok to retaliate against them.
If every barbershop is like this, that's sad and should be fixed, but it still doesn't make it ok to retaliate against them.
This is literally the same nonsense your average HNer type says in reply to anything, so I won't bother explaining you shit, but if markets worked to fix things the world wouldn't have turned into shit after neo-liberalism.
So yeah if my barbershop is playing loud music I ask them to turn it down please, and if barber queues are too long, maybe it's time for barbers to be nationalised because the private sector is failing to keep up, no?
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how bad someone's idea is or you feel it is. This comment is a noticeable step downward into hell.
Also, please don't post supercilious putdowns of the rest of the community. You have no idea who you're talking to here (none of us does). That sort of rhetoric is not only flamebait, it's reliably a marker of extremely low comment quality. We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, not users acting like they're better than others.
Is the point of the video to make users stay longer? How long do they need the user to stay in order to improve their ad profit. Here is an idea, obnoxious webmasters: add an interstitial timer, "your article will be ready in ...". It's less intrusive and i might even tolerate that if it's less than ... 9 seconds. I m sorry that google and FB are sucking up all your revenue, i d like to help
The only reason users are staying longer is because the embedded video slows down the whole page loading, especially on mobile. News sites that have these are cancer and I actively avoid opening links to them when I'm on my phone. I can see my battery life lose whole percentage points when I open these pages. Can't see the content though; between the cookie consent toast, the video embedded in the lower right corner, the "allow us to send notifications" and "allow this site to see your location" popups.
It is a tragic situation. These sites obviously provide some value (or else you wouldn't be reading them) yet they cannot get paid for that value because google&FB have coopted the entire ad market for themselves. As technologists this is a problem that we should solve, not simply something to complain about
my mom still has msn has her home page because she's always had msn as he home page. many computers later she still sets it as her homepage. She went from there to their games pages, their chatroom pages, who knows that else.
So they exist. They're just not very tech savvy, and they like the way its been since thats the way its always been, even if they have to change it to make it so.
I recommended a blank page, or her most used site (email).
But the reason news sites have autoplaying videos isn't for the power users on hackernews, its for people like my mom, who will click those links AND watch the videos.
Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load. Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user experience as frustrating as possible. And not once has the video had even a tangential relationship to the article being viewed.
The worst part is that uBlock Origin's element picker doesn't work on Firefox for Android (or if it does, I haven't figured out how to use it), so on the one platform where it's maximally annoying I can't do anything to block it.
I suspect that's because you can programmatically start video playback from within event handlers. That's necessary because otherwise any site that use custom playback controls will break. However, that also means malicious sites can implement "autoplay" by adding a onmousedown/onscroll/touchstart event handler and starting playback from there. Video playback will start the moment you try to interact with the page in any way.
> any site that use custom playback controls will break
Is that actually a bad thing?
I have no idea about video playback controls, but in every other instance I've noticed where sites implement their own custom versions of browser controls, it's been absolutely terrible.
Custom scrollbars, or lack thereof. Custom drop-down lists, which never support keyboard input properly. And so on.
And even if I'm wrong, and custom video playback controls are somehow desirable, why should they be supported for any event except onclick?
>why should they be supported for any event except onclick?
obvious example would be articles with scrolling effects (eg. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-...), and need to autoplay videos when they scroll into view. That said, even if you restricted it to onclick, I don't imagine it's too hard for a page to receive a stray click (eg. if you're randomly selecting stuff) to trigger playback.
In your opinion. Being someone who hates these autoplay videos on news sites I can also see that examples like OP's are a valid and when done well interesting new firm of story telling.
It is imho very valid to experiment with new forms of multimedia mixed stories.
And just because some people abuse features that enable this we should not try to stifle innovative ideas as a whole imho.
I just don't use sites that do this anymore. I mean the abusal part.
That seems solvable, for example by blocking programmatic control of playback until you allow it for a given video element. That way it only "breaks" when the user wants it to be "broken".
I don't understand why there isn't a browser feature that would simply disable all and any support for <video> and <audio> elements, or ask you a permission before a website can create any. It's really that simple. No need to try, and fail, to figure out which videos are "safe" to autoplay and which aren't. Let the user decide.
I've seen sites that autoplay video by implementing a JS h264 decoder that renders to a <canvas> element. Developers will go to significant lengths to work around browser permissions.
That's... actually viable? You can decode h264 in real time in JS with a single thread that also runs the UI?!
Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".
Or make a dead-slow subset that doesn’t eat cpu cycles, but schedules 10-20 ops every 1ms. And then enable full-speed if the user asks. Ads guys would then resurrect a demoscene spirit out of it. Ah, dreams.
lol. This reminds me of IE's "Enhanced Security Mode" where they disabled pretty much everything in the browser. This was pre-configured on Windows Server (probably still is). The browser is pretty much useless in this state, so the only way to get what you needed from a browser was to make it "unsafe." Too unsafe for servers with experienced tech people using them, but just fine for the general public on a desktop.
Oh, there's worse. Some video chat apps encode in software. The magical browser APIs don't always give you enough control to do what you want with the video stream, so they just output the video stream into a hidden canvas, screenshot the canvas 20 times a second, and throw the frames at ffmpeg.js ...
Hosted mediawiki isn't cheap, so I don't see another player coming into the market. The consolidation of gamepedia into "Fandom" is the worst in this respect.
Hosted mediawiki is plenty cheap. When wikicities became Wikia they added some ads. They eventually redesigned it to look like a monstrosity because the $. I moved my very large wiki, which eventually became dnd-wiki.org, off of it at this point and self hosted it for a $10/mo virtual machine. Then Wikia became fandom and somehow became even worse.
It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.
For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap.
For me - no problem. I have a few side projects and I shell out around 15 - 25 Euros each month.
But I know a lot of people who would love to do stuff like that and have no way of at least being easily reimbursed by the community for their efforts.
A community of 50 people could be financing this with 20 cents each per month.
But as privacy intrusive advertising became the norm no solution ever grew enough to become feasible for the masses.
I remember the flattr button. I used flattr for a while. But in the end I stopped.
tl;dr
10 bucks are not cheap to anybody. I wish easy micropayments were a thing.
> For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap.
I'm aware of this, but you need to keep in mind that we were one of the largest wikis on Wikia (in the top 30 iirc). That's the only reason it cost $10/month.
Most of the wikis on Wikia were tiny, got small traffic, and could have probably been hosted with mine on my VM without even affecting mine.
The last metric that I calculated to host a small wiki on Gamepedia was about $3 USD per month. It is probably a bit higher than that now. That included costs for hosting through AWS next to large wikis like Minecraft Wiki that would easily be a large majority of the monthly costs.(Game updates would vastly skew the monthly costs for each of the large wikis.)
Memory Alpha (primary Star Trek wiki) is another one that was self-hosted and as a user of it I mostly just accepted that sometimes it would be down due to Mediawiki upgrades or traffic reasons or otherwise. They also migrated to Wikia when shared hosting seemed like a better deal than hosting Mediawiki themselves, and now in the "Fandom" age it's just irritating that it is no longer just disconnected shared hosting (which Wikia had briefly promised to Memory Alpha that it would stay independent) and is now such a blatant advertising infested cash grab. I don't directly know who runs that wiki, but I do sometimes wonder (as a user) if they regret the consolidation (and if they have any escape plans).
Who in tech do you hold up as an ideal persona? I'm not defending what happened to you. It's surprising to me that even someone like Jimmy Wales, who pioneered the most impactful knowledge-sharing project in the world, is vilified by some people.
No one. Every name I can think of has had some great ideas, and some truly cockeyed are-you-kidding-me-seriously" moments.
Even legendary names are just humans. TBL and his support for DRM. LT's notorious personality. Page & Schmidt and completely losing sight of the helpfulness they started from.
Worship / revere / appreciate no one. Filter their good, acknowledge their bad, find a path past them to something better, and know you'll probably be corrupted by something along the way unless you somehow transcend your own DNA.
Wikia was never actually good, but they were never this bad, as when they sold out to some capital and start squeezing every penny from every pixel on the screen.
Right now, fandom.com is basically unusable. Unfortunately, as some info that is there is nowhere else.
Angela Beesley hasn’t been associated with Wikia since 2012. I don’t know when this happened to you but the site has gone through a lot of ownership changes over the years.
And I don’t care what else Jimmy Wales has done, for profit or otherwise — Wikipedia is a goddamn gift and the world would be hurt tremendously if it ever shut down. It’s probably the only non-profit I donate to regularly.
If you're using Firefox on Android then under settings > site permissions. Set block auto play to video and audio. For some unknown reason video is set to play by default. This seems to work at blocking the fandom crap for me. I also have ublock origin installed.
A few months back I opened a link to a new article using an in-app browser (no ad-blockers). I kid you not, upon initial load the entireiy of the screen was ads or "annoyances". The one thing missing was the entire reason I clicked on the link.
Isn't most (all?) of the content on fandom.com under a Creative Commons license? Is there anything stopping someone from scraping all the content and forking the projects, giving it a more humane and user-friendly interface?
The origin story for this is reminiscent of how AO3 got going. Maybe if you partner with them, make a "Wiki Of Our Own" sister project, it would get more traction and then move up the search rankings organically?
Although checking the AO3 wiki page, man I didn't expect them to have hosting costs that high.
Do you have a project site? I might be interested in contributing.
We’re not doing badly for ranking, because we’ve engaged with the wider community and got many of the larger sites to link to us instead of Fandom, but for folks that want to fork all this stuff it is worth thinking about.
Every time I use Fandom without logging in, I will be faced with similar experience. A pop-up video with ads about the content it tried to promote (sometimes related to the content of the Wiki I visited, but mostly not) will play automatically, and I have to stop it every time.
As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.
It is incredibly annoying. My other "favorite" is AMP reddit which will autoplay some video with sound completely unrelated to the link you clicked on somewhere down the page. How the hell autoplaying video leads to ACCELERATED mobile pages I have no clue.
Yeah that mobile experience is just about as bad as you can make it. Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing crypto mining in the browser...at least that's what my device temperatures are implying.
You're welcome to go through the New submissions list, or my submissions, or any other user's, and upvote the more substantial content.
Trust me, I do try to steer discussion in directions I think would prove more valuable for HN and its readers. There's some help in this through the 2nd Chance and invited submissions queues. See:
That said, the hivemind has certain rather predictably-popular themes. I wish myself it would steer more substantive, but site mechanics make that challenging.
That said, the unanimity of the response, given the ubiquity of the practice, shines a light on, oh, say, the "consumer value" arguemnt usually put forth. And that's possibly worth noting.
I feel browsing the web is long overdue having a robot butler to do it for us and come back with the things we wanted, leaving the "People in Norwich are using this genius trick"-style nonsense on the cutting room floor.
It ought to be trivially possible, going on from things like grease monkey and ad blocking scripts to add a bit of user intent guessing / content filtering / simplified view logic.
If it was trivially possible, Firefox would already be doing it.
But there's always an arms race with stuff like this. Our robot butler would be able to figure out how to parse the web today, but the advertisers would completely change the structure of pages tomorrow.
Facebook used to have their ads wrapped in `<div class='advertisement'>`. Now, they're buried a thousand divs deeps, and the ads and content both have nonsensical, non-semantic class names.
It's technologically possible, but not legally possible and not convenient.
People in the know have the right extensions to block stuff and get past paywalls using the right snapshot services etc. Firefox can't officially offer this, but they can let people do whatever they want if they run their own extensions.
If this was common place or convenient for the masses then it would be actively discouraged or outlawed, similar to what happened with Napster and MP3s.
If it was trivially possible, Firefox would already be doing it.
I am thoroughly unconvinced of this, as a Firefox user for two decades. There are so many simple power-user features that Firefox has chosen to ignore.
> If it was trivially possible, Firefox would already be doing it.
Sorry but Firefox is mostly on the dark side these days. That shouldn't be too surprising since most of its money comes from google.
It does have a setting to stop embedded video from playing sound unless you send an event, but it is too easy for obnoxious pages to evade and play sound against your wishes.
I also noticed super deep div structure, and weird random class names. I assume it's to prevent automation and scraping. They're really hard to run querySelector against.
Isn't this what Web 3.0 was supposed to be before crypto-fans stole the term?
> I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
This is what Google has been trying to figure out forever isn't it? Things like the automagic answers block at the top of the search results, google assistant, etc.
Unfortunately we aren't very good at making robot butlers yet, and copyright severely limits what they can do (provided they are running as a third party service) in the first place.
It's technologically possible, but the 'user intent guessing' makes this messy. The Venn diagram of people who understand information seeking behavior and science well enough to design this and people who have a deep enough understanding of development to design it in a way that it doesn't break every 3 seconds is two circles.
So you'd need a team, and as somebody with a tech and a library background, good luck getting those two groups to communicate and work together. Doing it without the information seeking background just recreates the issues with the modern web where your 'robot butler' comes back with a ton of irrelevant information, and doing it without the tech background just gets you a bunch of librarians high-fiving themselves over 'solving' a problem using outdated tech and is used by 20 people because it doesn't scale well.
The worst offender for this, in my opinion, is Wikia (sorry, "Fandom™"). There is zero attempt to make the autoplaying content at all relevant to the wiki in question, and it generally isn't even advertising anything, it's just... crap.
It seems like they're desperately trying to believe they have a social network on their hands rather than a collection of disparate knowledge bases, and they're trying to sell this non-existent 'fandom' culture to visitors.
why are news/blogspam-news sites so eager to play videos? (Even if the video is just some intern reading the article with static pictures being shown) Is there extra ad revenue from this somehow? Is it an attempt to keep people on the page longer?
Would be interesting to know how it compares in user base and exposure. The fediverse poll lasted 1 day and gained 268 votes and with only 31 boosts (i.e. "retweets" in fediverse terminology). How many people saw the poll is hard to tell and depends too on the social graph from author and boosters, as well as the network of federated instances involved.
When posting a poll on HN, it of course has to reach the minimum number of upvotes to reach front page (which I believe for Polls and Ask HN is a bit higher than regular submissions).
I'm seeing the Fediverse linked to more and more often, in the wild. Not the first time I've seen it linked here, either. It's heartening to see that there's a little light at the end of the tunnel.
For better or worse, Trump saga helped as a search for alternatives began. In a sense, I am not complaining, but it is odd to see people, who were arguing for Patriot Act surprised it is being used against them.
Still, I agree. Despite worry, it may be a good thing its entering mainstream slowly.
There is no such concept on Mastodon. People add it for fun, just like they do any kind of emoji, but it carries zero extra 'gravitas' as it does on Twitter.
I don't mean the checkmarks, i mean the user's domain. Twitter's Blue Checkmarks were added for a reason, and similarly a mastodon user's home server is an implicit vote of confidence by <some groupthink>. Or else i don't understand why this apparently busy mastodon server would have to approve all signups.
Individual Fediverse servers are typically run by individuals or groups for their own interests, on their own dime. Some of those are generally open (e.g., mastodon.social and mastodon.cloud), some are invite-only or serve specific communities. Many are individual's own instances and serve a single user or a very small set.
Anyone can stand up a Mastodon instance. There are companies which specialise in fully-hosted turnkey services. And as noted, there are many instances which are free to join for the asking.
The system overall is in no way closed on this regard.
That said, individuals (or instances) which engage in antisocial behaviours or prove nuisances may find that they are blocked by numeous others.
In general, what exists is widely available but also subject to local rules. There are instances which run strongly counter to the mainstream culture on the Fediverse. They exist and can talk amongst themselves, but have limited (and often no) interaction with the mainstream of the rest of the network.
You don't need to use any particular server to publish to this ecosystem. You don't even need to use the Mastodon software. Just hook up the AP plugin to your WordPress (or insert necessary logic into your CMS of choice) and you're a participant.
Something about the post itself: while I'm firmly in the "it's annoying" camp, as is the author, the poll is a textbook example of how to make a heavily biased poll.
Maybe there is a person or two who actually like it, but the dripping sarcasm of the poll's response is saying "whoever you are, you're cretins", and is not quite inviting for a discussion.
I'd love to hear from someone who actually liked this pattern (and many others) as a consumer. It's so alien. Maybe I'd learn something.
Then again, I'm probably going to write that crawling bot that would frequent the sites I read, snip the actual content and deliver it to me via email or my Kindle. Call RMS what you will, but that bit of his digital life is quite clever.
All the same, for such a widely-used dark pattern, the visceral hostile response is absolutely overwhelming.
Think of all the weasly, greasy, contemptuous justifications that have been offerred for this practice. Clearly, someone's lying, and not at all convincingly.
I've heard plenty from content managers, website owners, management, that is, the side of barricade making this shit.
I suspect the overwhelming response from those who sorta tolerate is going to be: well, I want my dose of news, and everyone is doing that anyway, so I suppose that's how things are done today? But maybe there is someone who actually enjoys this. I'd like to hear from them.
The video can start playing when you "permit" it to by giving it a suitable input event. Apparently a mouse motion is enough. It doesn't have to be a click. There is a bugzilla item about this somewhere, where the FF devs think that is a good interface. Upton Sinclair anyone?
"what will the ad-haters use in this future world of 2022? Some amalgamated FlashBlock equivalent that can easily just turn off all the annoying stuff? This line will be blurred and it won't be possible."
317 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadIts usually a deal with a 3rd-party that gives the guaranteed revenue based on views per week/month.
A placement that has high first play rate but a terrible 5sec event firing will just be worth nothing. In a programmatic world it means you'll get little to no bids for it or a default placement with payment in the fraction of cents per thousands.
I know no-one likes them, but there must be some increase in engagement somewhere that causes the marketing folks to keep pushing these things.
Personally I find it makes the articles very hard to read without reader mode. Sites owned by G/O Media (The Onion, Kotaku) are particularly egregious. On mobile you can typically only get about 20-30 words of the article on screen at any one time (that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one).
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/a-merger-of-chumbox-monger...
The resolution is jack up to the lowest so I can easily see from the couch.
This is a fringe case as most people arent enjoying the Internet on their TV via a web browser and wireless mouse. Nevertheless those nuisance videos are the worst in my view on the TV ... take up the screen and there's no X button. Always just have to hit the back button quickly and not bother reading the site.
I too find these sites despicable. But usually, by the time the video play you've already been fighting some popup about joining, dismissed a browser native window saying this site is asking to send you notifications in the future, and GRDP @#$%^$%^& "we care about your privacy so here is a booklet about our privacy policy, in your face" with select all-of-which cookies you'd like to not, maybe (one time) receive in a game of dark patterns.
I have an outline.com bookmarklet at that point, which I click as fast as possible to get out of this mess!
the main problem is that it's impossible to distinguish between "autoplaying video that's annoying" and "animation that's part of the page". If you're willing to block both, firefox allows you to change the autoplay policy from "allow videos by default but block sound" to "block all videos".
A combination of the "I don't care about cookies" extension and an adblocker with a couple tracking blacklists should avoid both the cookie popups and the tracking cookies themselves.
Now imagine that the cable can reach up into your car at the exact moment that you cross over it and pull down your person and your entire life's history.
The shady side of it, is on private property, like car parks, where those rules don't apply.
---
[1] Automatic NUMBER plate recognition.
You're being tracked by your car and phone bluetooth MAC addresses. That's how the "X minutes to exit Y" signboards work. They time how long it takes to see a particular MAC address appear at the next receiver.
What does this mean? Are they just measuring radio power levels in the 2.4GHz spectrum, and using that to determine whether a car is there or not? Or are they actually somehow capturing bluetooth signals, decoding them, and extracting identifiers (eg. MAC) from them?
You might argue this is to do with advertisers and so on, but this also happens on the BBC News website too. I recently clicked on a video story and after the video was finished I didn't notice there was a 5 second timer and suddenly I got a totally different video play by itself.
WHY?!
No, screw that as well. If there's a text article with a video attached, I don't want to be interrupted by the autoplaying video while I'm reading the text.
Because that's how the web team is measured and rewarded. Management wants to see more view views, longer time on site, etc. Leadership doesn't understand nor care about a shite UX (so no one lower in the org is concerned).
But these companies have completely different goals than the BBC: they aim to abuse and exploit their users as much as possible.
browser vendors can blacklist it.
>How do you consider legitimate traffic illegal?
It's fairly obvious that sending traffic for the sake of generating traffic isn't "legitimate" by any means. Your excuse is flimsier as websites that sell ddos services as "stress testing" services.
How would they do that? They can remove them from their list of extensions, but I can just download it from elsewhere and add it manually, right?
A few people who re-compile their Firefox or Chromium to get rid of that requirement will not make a great DDoS botnet.
Things may have changed since then, I have not checked.
In other browsers you need your addons to be signed. Firefox implemented this because of the terrible malware that got installed with adware installers. With administrator access, they kept changing every setting Firefox added to get the addon to load, so they made the entire loading system dependent on signatures. Luckily, adware developers aren't smart enough to load code into the signed binaries to work around this limitation.
You could do it, but it's more of a hassle than you'd expect.
How many independent browser engine variants are viable today? Three?
Ramping the difficulty of that problem has specifically limited choice and options.
One class of devices (iOS) mandates a single browser engine (Webkit / Safari). Android has a slight pretense of greater openness, but bundles Chrome into most apps.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
The bomb threats and car bomb threats did get me talking to the sheriff about concealed carry permit, but I backed away.
The poor woman that answered the phone for a shared office space quit.
At Weebly, people bought DDOS but didn’t realize that every site had the backing of our entire infrastructure.
What actually to do when you find someone's website annoying: Don't go there, it's not your site. Same thing I do when I don't like a bar, I leave, I don't start clogging the drain with toilet paper
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog
Consider also the sybil vector; I could just use a proxy network to vote millions of times for a site I'd like to see targeted. Or how do you ensure that 1 human = 1 vote? Throw in some PoW? No.
I'm not for building easily available tools for remotely and unilaterally coordinating DDoS attacks.
Or just share the site's reputation with other extension users.
Users can leave bounties on sites and once the bounties pile up high enough somebody will come along, sanitize it for everybody, and collect the bounty. Sorry about your ad revenue, next time don't piss off the masses.
The bounties will be public, so site maintainers can see if they're on the list and address the issues. If the community decides that the redesign addresses the problem, the bounty goes back to its issuers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog
Yeah, no.
So it's legal, moral, and acceptable that software and websites are made, by you folk reading this here website no less, to consume orders of magnitude more resources than they need to, just so that web companies---you folk, remember---can make some stats go up and turn them into money. It's okay to make the web less accessible to poor people, disabled people, people in places with bad internet connection, perfectly functional devices which have only become unusable because of this whole bullshit &c, it's okay to mine shitcoins in people's browsers, to sell their life for profits, it's okay to literally get into their private life and play loud videos in there if they don't know how to make that stop, but it's immoral, illegal, unacceptable to retaliate? Immoral and triggering for you lot for folk to just jokingly entertain such idea?
This whole business is basically turning wasted money and energy into dollars, not really different than blockchain bullshit essentially.
Imagine the resources wasted to produce and consume this nonsense went to making computers user friendly, programmable and accessible. Like, why should my browser occupy ~6G of memory for ~50 pages which could all be just pure HTML and a couple PDFs? Why should I need 6G of memory when 1 or 2GB must do? Why tf a computer with 1GHz or 666MHz CPU can't handle the web, ie a bunch of text documents? This whole bubble is creating immense amount of waste, and it's nonsensical to just limit your thinking to "oh, some annoying websites, just run uBlock". IMHO comes from the same place with "if car-dominated cities bother you and you feel unsafe, just get a car, or better, an SUV". What about fixing the city? What about climate and pollution?.
Your argument is like saying if a barbershop always has 2 hour wait times and has crappy music playing on an excessively loud radio, it's ok to retaliate against them.
If every barbershop is like this, that's sad and should be fixed, but it still doesn't make it ok to retaliate against them.
So yeah if my barbershop is playing loud music I ask them to turn it down please, and if barber queues are too long, maybe it's time for barbers to be nationalised because the private sector is failing to keep up, no?
Also, please don't post supercilious putdowns of the rest of the community. You have no idea who you're talking to here (none of us does). That sort of rhetoric is not only flamebait, it's reliably a marker of extremely low comment quality. We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, not users acting like they're better than others.
Edit: you did it even worse here too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29456018, and worse yet at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28688315. Would you please review the site guidelines and stick to them? They explicitly ask you not to post like this, and we ban accounts that keep doing it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nah, they find sticking to the 90's punch the monkey style ads and blaming FB and Google for "coopting" the market to be a better strategy.
So they exist. They're just not very tech savvy, and they like the way its been since thats the way its always been, even if they have to change it to make it so.
But the reason news sites have autoplaying videos isn't for the power users on hackernews, its for people like my mom, who will click those links AND watch the videos.
The worst part is that uBlock Origin's element picker doesn't work on Firefox for Android (or if it does, I haven't figured out how to use it), so on the one platform where it's maximally annoying I can't do anything to block it.
Is that actually a bad thing?
I have no idea about video playback controls, but in every other instance I've noticed where sites implement their own custom versions of browser controls, it's been absolutely terrible.
Custom scrollbars, or lack thereof. Custom drop-down lists, which never support keyboard input properly. And so on.
And even if I'm wrong, and custom video playback controls are somehow desirable, why should they be supported for any event except onclick?
obvious example would be articles with scrolling effects (eg. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-...), and need to autoplay videos when they scroll into view. That said, even if you restricted it to onclick, I don't imagine it's too hard for a page to receive a stray click (eg. if you're randomly selecting stuff) to trigger playback.
That is not a legitimate example of a good thing. That's a legitimate example of something that shouldn't be a thing
It is imho very valid to experiment with new forms of multimedia mixed stories.
And just because some people abuse features that enable this we should not try to stifle innovative ideas as a whole imho.
I just don't use sites that do this anymore. I mean the abusal part.
Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".
90+% of web pages shouldn't need it for anything.
https://therecord.media/microsoft-silently-enables-super-dup...
Although I guess this isn't the answer you're looking for.
Developers who do things like that probably aren't checking whether their code works well on any machines besides their own.
It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.
For me - no problem. I have a few side projects and I shell out around 15 - 25 Euros each month.
But I know a lot of people who would love to do stuff like that and have no way of at least being easily reimbursed by the community for their efforts.
A community of 50 people could be financing this with 20 cents each per month.
But as privacy intrusive advertising became the norm no solution ever grew enough to become feasible for the masses.
I remember the flattr button. I used flattr for a while. But in the end I stopped.
tl;dr 10 bucks are not cheap to anybody. I wish easy micropayments were a thing.
I'm aware of this, but you need to keep in mind that we were one of the largest wikis on Wikia (in the top 30 iirc). That's the only reason it cost $10/month.
Most of the wikis on Wikia were tiny, got small traffic, and could have probably been hosted with mine on my VM without even affecting mine.
For me it is mjg59 and maybe Miguel de Icaza, also maybe Linus Torvalds
Even legendary names are just humans. TBL and his support for DRM. LT's notorious personality. Page & Schmidt and completely losing sight of the helpfulness they started from.
Worship / revere / appreciate no one. Filter their good, acknowledge their bad, find a path past them to something better, and know you'll probably be corrupted by something along the way unless you somehow transcend your own DNA.
Right now, fandom.com is basically unusable. Unfortunately, as some info that is there is nowhere else.
And I don’t care what else Jimmy Wales has done, for profit or otherwise — Wikipedia is a goddamn gift and the world would be hurt tremendously if it ever shut down. It’s probably the only non-profit I donate to regularly.
That might say more about you than about Wikipedia.
Forking the content itself is easy but good luck beating Fandom on a search page.
Still sucks to have to add "overwiki" or "uesp" to search terms all the time.
Although checking the AO3 wiki page, man I didn't expect them to have hosting costs that high.
Do you have a project site? I might be interested in contributing.
The site in question is https://www.poewiki.net
As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.
You can argue that those full screen "before you leave" popups are annoying, and who in their right mind will abuse users like that?
Then they'll show you the results of A/B testing, prooving 15% more users subscribed thanks to that banner.
We're screwing ourselves over statistics...
Trust me, I do try to steer discussion in directions I think would prove more valuable for HN and its readers. There's some help in this through the 2nd Chance and invited submissions queues. See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
https://news.ycombinator.com/invited
That said, the hivemind has certain rather predictably-popular themes. I wish myself it would steer more substantive, but site mechanics make that challenging.
That said, the unanimity of the response, given the ubiquity of the practice, shines a light on, oh, say, the "consumer value" arguemnt usually put forth. And that's possibly worth noting.
It ought to be trivially possible, going on from things like grease monkey and ad blocking scripts to add a bit of user intent guessing / content filtering / simplified view logic.
But there's always an arms race with stuff like this. Our robot butler would be able to figure out how to parse the web today, but the advertisers would completely change the structure of pages tomorrow.
Facebook used to have their ads wrapped in `<div class='advertisement'>`. Now, they're buried a thousand divs deeps, and the ads and content both have nonsensical, non-semantic class names.
People in the know have the right extensions to block stuff and get past paywalls using the right snapshot services etc. Firefox can't officially offer this, but they can let people do whatever they want if they run their own extensions.
If this was common place or convenient for the masses then it would be actively discouraged or outlawed, similar to what happened with Napster and MP3s.
I am thoroughly unconvinced of this, as a Firefox user for two decades. There are so many simple power-user features that Firefox has chosen to ignore.
Sorry but Firefox is mostly on the dark side these days. That shouldn't be too surprising since most of its money comes from google.
It does have a setting to stop embedded video from playing sound unless you send an event, but it is too easy for obnoxious pages to evade and play sound against your wishes.
> I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
- Tim Berners Lee
Unfortunately we aren't very good at making robot butlers yet, and copyright severely limits what they can do (provided they are running as a third party service) in the first place.
That's what an RSS reader does.
So you'd need a team, and as somebody with a tech and a library background, good luck getting those two groups to communicate and work together. Doing it without the information seeking background just recreates the issues with the modern web where your 'robot butler' comes back with a ton of irrelevant information, and doing it without the tech background just gets you a bunch of librarians high-fiving themselves over 'solving' a problem using outdated tech and is used by 20 people because it doesn't scale well.
It seems like they're desperately trying to believe they have a social network on their hands rather than a collection of disparate knowledge bases, and they're trying to sell this non-existent 'fandom' culture to visitors.
don't get it
https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
When posting a poll on HN, it of course has to reach the minimum number of upvotes to reach front page (which I believe for Polls and Ask HN is a bit higher than regular submissions).
Ping me: @dredmorbius@toot.cat
Still, I agree. Despite worry, it may be a good thing its entering mainstream slowly.
Anyone can stand up a Mastodon instance. There are companies which specialise in fully-hosted turnkey services. And as noted, there are many instances which are free to join for the asking.
The system overall is in no way closed on this regard.
That said, individuals (or instances) which engage in antisocial behaviours or prove nuisances may find that they are blocked by numeous others.
In general, what exists is widely available but also subject to local rules. There are instances which run strongly counter to the mainstream culture on the Fediverse. They exist and can talk amongst themselves, but have limited (and often no) interaction with the mainstream of the rest of the network.
Maybe there is a person or two who actually like it, but the dripping sarcasm of the poll's response is saying "whoever you are, you're cretins", and is not quite inviting for a discussion.
I'd love to hear from someone who actually liked this pattern (and many others) as a consumer. It's so alien. Maybe I'd learn something.
Then again, I'm probably going to write that crawling bot that would frequent the sites I read, snip the actual content and deliver it to me via email or my Kindle. Call RMS what you will, but that bit of his digital life is quite clever.
All the same, for such a widely-used dark pattern, the visceral hostile response is absolutely overwhelming.
Think of all the weasly, greasy, contemptuous justifications that have been offerred for this practice. Clearly, someone's lying, and not at all convincingly.
I suspect the overwhelming response from those who sorta tolerate is going to be: well, I want my dose of news, and everyone is doing that anyway, so I suppose that's how things are done today? But maybe there is someone who actually enjoys this. I'd like to hear from them.
"what will the ad-haters use in this future world of 2022? Some amalgamated FlashBlock equivalent that can easily just turn off all the annoying stuff? This line will be blurred and it won't be possible."
I wish I was wrong on these types of things.
http://kristopolous.blogspot.com/2011/12/flash-sucks.html