It's even worse than that, first Google will bug you to use Chrome, then bug you to login, then after your search the browser will pop up "Google would like to use your current location". And then the first half-page of results are ads. And half of the actual results are AI slop and a helpful AI summary of the slop. And that's before you even get to the page.
LOL, I didn't know they ran newspaper ads for Google. I love old images of the Google search engine. When I was a kid, I taught other kids how to use the "cache" button next to links. Then Google buried the cache button three clicks under before completely removing it, and Googlers said, "Well, nobody was using it." MBA's doing user-driven development, "As a user (child), I don't know what a cache is." and the legal department being like, "Yup less shit to DMCA."
Google is the modern-day Yellow Pages; kill some trees and slam that rainwater-soaked stack of ads on my porch. I won't say no to free, but how many hoops did we go through to end up back here?
I forget if it was crypto or AI, but not too long ago I put in what I would consider a "normie" query and every single above-the-fold result was an ad. Every single one.
Don’t forget finally landing on the page and having the focus immediately stolen by some “LOG IN WITH GOOGLE” pop up that you didn’t ask for, and don’t want.
This is glorious, and made me think; is there a reverse-adblock addon that would “click” on all ads it finds on a page and would load them silently in the background..?
Fun effect: When finally confronted with the page-leave dialog, I automatically went for the non-default, grey option button – and was kind of surprised that this wasn't the option I wanted.
I've a minor criticism: The "No thanks" button should really be "Remind me later" and possibly greyed out, since any negative wording is allegedly bad UX and users must be protected from any blunt denials in any options. "Maybe later" is also acceptable and even empowering, since this places users on equal footing as they are now lying to the website just as this is lying to them.
- Click to play video overlay (one that isn't available in your country)
- Tab closing prompt
Thinking about this problem technically, most of these obscenities are vying for top level. In the early days, browsers could detect when a popup was trying to launch and block them. Could we do something similar but for top level DOM?
Alternately, could a browser have a quiet mode? No prompts, banners, overlays, etc.
Sadly, development of reader mode seems to be stagnant for both Firefox and Chrome. While it works for a substantial number of pages, I was hoping that more pages would work as years go by. Too bad that doesn't appear to have happened.
One interesting thing I noticed after updating to iOS 18 specifically, is the removal of reader mode as a "mode". It's now OFFERED to you in the new view menu based on some heuristic about the page that Apple has determined, but it's not a mode you can turn on regardless of if Apple thinks you're on a "readable" document or not.
Frustrating since their "remove distracting elements" feature was a great value-add, done in the same update.
Sadly the reality for 99% of blogs and news sites nowadays.
Makes me wonder whether this is part of the reason why social media sites, YouTube, etc have taken over as a source of information for many people now. Those sites are nightmarish in their own right, but they seem to be less heavy on the annoyances than the average news site now.
Maybe the quantity of the annoyances don't matter (see YouTube's recent anti-ad-blocking shenanigans), but the fact that the annoyances are mostly constant and known (at least, changing at a much slower rate than you view a new slop website) definitely reduces cognitive load.
I think we should take the time to recognize that this isn't bad design, it's a badly regulated market. This is exactly what antitrust exists for: to prevent a small number of firms dominating a market with thin margins, leading to a few decent experiences (namely Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok) and crushing economics for the rest.
What can you do as a publisher of web content other than compete with the big dogs on Display Ads (what this link is complaining about, that's why they request your data in the first place) or try to enforce paywalls (also what this link is complaining about, ironically)? Supposedly some parts of the internet work off of affiliate marketing, such as the few oddball companies that prop up the podcast space for the rest of us, but that seems A) terrible for consumers and B) incredibly hard to make a living with. For better or worse (worse!) we've trained ourselves to expect internet publishers to survive off of Display Ads alone, and act like we've been betrayed when someone links https://businessinsider.com, https://nytimes.com, or another paywalled site to Hacker News.
We're at a crossroads in history, my friends. We can, and must, change this. Substack is a beautiful step in the right direction, but real change must come with societal buy-in (AKA no more archive links on HN) and governmental intervention (AKA follow through on the US DOJ's recent threats to break up Google).
There's no way in hell that any of us would accept the business model of "we'll emotionally manipulate you into buying stuff you don't really want" if we didn't grow up with it -- for anything, but especially for something as vital as journalism. I sincerely doubt Paul Graham could defend it, yet here we are; any paywalled link is removed as a matter of policy, even the fancy new Substack ones that have a few paragraphs of pre-paywall content.
All of that is because the internet and more specifically the browser was made/evolved in a naive/idealist non-commercial mindset.
It was for university research work at first, where paying for the content was not a question because it was already paid for by others.
Then the companies who took over browser development didn't care about having a monetization/identification part to it because they didn't have content to monetize and didn't need to have their users pay for it either.
Then Google took over with their naive optimism around values of freedom and just went with ads as a "solution" to finance their whole operation in order to keep the ideal of free (ideals are always dangerous).
Now we are in a terrible situation where there is still no integrated (micro)payment nor identity system into the web browser and thus we have a seriously fucked up dichotomy: either you have content with gazillions of ads that are "free" or you have content that is only accessible with a monthly subscription, generally priced higher than what good press used to cost (which makes no sense).
This is really a problem because if you can't access everything "a la carte" web browsing is a bit pointless, being barely better than accessing media at the library or your local press stand (in fact when you count DRM issues and lack of lasting physical product, you could argue that its worse).
In my opinion the whole point of the web is that not all content is uniformly valuable in the same way to everyone. And you can't ask someone with varying interests and varying time for said interest to pay for multiple subscription to multiple sources.
And this is exactly why everything resort to ads: you can't have that many people pay subscriptions because it doesn't bring enough value to them but you also can't sell per unit because it's way too complicated/annoying for the customer to do; so, you use ads.
That being said, we should make some regulations around ad use because it's pretty obvious that some of the tech giants would not exist as they are if people really had to pay for their products. Ad use in those platforms is a pretty clear attempt at avoiding competition, you don't have to compete much if you are "free" after all (Google speciality).
People defend that business model all the time on HN, usually I’m the disguise of how regulating companies is evil, how smart people want freedom, or in the disguise of “I make a living from working at a big ad-tech company so it must be a force for good in the world”, or in the disguise of “you must be weak if you give in to advertising it doesn’t affect me”, but sometimes just plain “how will companies show you tasteful information about products and services you might be interested in?”.
This has been my mental shift as well. I also decide this when someone tells me the site only works in Chrome, so I should switch to Chrome. No, thanks.
The amount of client-side fetched third party tools fighting for the upper layer is so funny and accurate. Intercom + cookie settings + a newsletter popup + ads…
It is not how I experience the Web today, and I was initially confused by what the hype was about this site, because… Anytime I see a pattern like this, I just close the tab and move on to browsing sites that respect me. So that's what I did after clicking the first link.
It’s sort of like if an annoying or obnoxious person approaches me on the street… I just walk away! What could they possibly have to say to me that could be so important?
And I have noticed the same with Web sites… this type of low-quality behavior correlates strongly with low-quality content, which also adds nothing to my life. So by immediately leaving, I am not only saving myself from aggravation, I am also saving myself from wasting time on fluff pieces, useless studies, clickbait, etc.
I highly recommend this strategy, because it has transformed the Web for me into once again being usable and useful.
The only update this site needs is at the beginning: instead of a helpful result, it needs to be below 16 AI generated or SEO spam links, and an AI-generated answer needs to appear and start pushing them down the page as it slowly spawns into existence.
https://example.com
Then it shows me something
Example Domain. This domain is for use in illustrative examples in documents. You may use this domain in literature without prior coordination or asking for ...
===
And the rest of the page is blank white.
I’m not seeing anything else. What is everybody talking about?
When you click on the example.com link, it takes you to a page within the site that shows a bunch of blurred out content, a "Accept Cookie" footer. If you try to leave, it asks you if you really want to leave.
Ah. Thank you. I clicked, saw “text placeholder”, scrolled down, got that email pop up and that’s it. I guess my ad blocking/coockie/dns stuff is working.
I don’t get why more people don’t use Brave. It literally blocks all of these annoying things (not only ads) on mobile and desktop and it’s very easy to disable all the crap they add to make money (although I do feel bad and actually writing this made me think to donate if that is an option). Brave search is 80% as good as Google’s too.
Some have lost trust in Brave given various reports of them selling users data, which conflicts with their messaging as being the "privacy safe browser".
Mainly, I found Brave's settings page to feel very janky. Vivaldi's settings are much more polished and feature rich by comparison. It also has vertical tab support which I now use everywhere, and the E2EE synced sessions is something I use on a daily basis.
I probably shouldn't divulge this since it risks this privilege disappearing, but Twitch is the one place I don't see ads, even though I don't use an ad-blocker.
I think some years ago, I may have had a flag set on my account which stops me getting ads. In the past I've given security@twitch a heads-up about some minor vulnerabilities, so perhaps it was a gesture of good will from twitch.
It may also have been a freak case of falling between the cracks when having "twitch prime" transitioned from ad-free viewing across all twitch to not doing so.
It took me years to realise that I don't see adverts on twitch when I "should", and I don't fully understand why not. I'm not sure who even at twitch I would report it to, as it doesn't feel like a security issue.
This is too real. Even to the point where it barely works at all with ad blockers on. Without ad blockers it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard, just like the web is.
At this point I have so many different content-blocking extensions running, trying to trim this crap off my screen, that they sometimes conflict and break things. And still crap gets through.
I suspect LLMs will lead to an increase in bullet-point lists from humans, simply because there's no point writing well when the audience assumes it was ghost-written for you.
A great example of why executive agencies need leeway in their power to make and refine policies. AFAIK the GDPR notifications were put into place by the "The European Parliament and The Council of the European Union" directly and haven't changed much since 2016, even though any vaguely-internet-aware child could identify this glaring loophole. I don't doubt their intentions, but the result is subpar at best.
IMO the best outcome of GDPR wasn't the blocking of any significant number of cookies, but rather raising public awareness that these sites are collecting "non-vital" information in the first place. Why do we allow that, ever, in any way? If I started paying to put up facial recognition cameras in every restaurant and store in town to build my own little omniscient tracker of my fellow citizens, I think I'd be run out with pitchforks and torches. But somehow it's okay when ~~it's on the internet~~ when Google insists that it's a necessary evil...
Cookie banners… the most silly idea made by non technical people mandated upon technical people. Does anyone remember P3P? If that was pushed and managed better it would have solved the entire problem.
I can't laugh because this is too close for comfort... The only thing that's missing is the page scrolling back to the top and zooming behaving erratically on mobile due to ads popping in and out.
Remember a ~year ago there was a swath of articles popping up everywhere, including this site, about how "search is fine actually." I'm glad people are noticing how bad it is now, I promise it has been this way longer than you realize. It's so user hostile it seems comical at times. I completely stopped using search and feel like I live in the dark ages now and have just accepted that's going to be the foreseeable future until I get a new library card.
It’s this type of foolishness that has turned me so trigger-happy with that “X” button. I close tabs so quickly nowadays that I sometimes forget why I even visited a website in the first place, and I usually end up having to right-click and click “Reopen closed tab” to go back once I remember why.
The cookie pop-ups are especially annoying—no, I don’t want your cookies!
It's funny because working with DNS-level blocking + cookie consent + ad blocker the sequence is perfectly fine, I had to go back to comments to understand what I was supposed to see.
Of course, that is besides the point, but I am surprised not everyone here has a setup like this.
It's ironic that the domain name is one of those that my mental "classifier" would instantly put into the "SEO spam / ads" category and subconsciously skip over when scrolling through search results.
Great. The only thing missing is the infinite scrolling that surreptitiously loads another article to keep you reading, thinking you're still with the original article.
I'm a little disappointed that the email sign up doesn't seem to work. It would be hilarious if it did work and then sent you obnoxious email copy haha
What I always don't understand is: So you don't want to pay for online content, but you also want to use an ad blocker. In summary, you don't want the author or creator to get paid?
Personally, I hate ads, so I pay. I have digital subscriptions to the newspapers I read. I have YouTube Premium (because I spend an ungodly amount of time on that site).
But for people who want to do neither... what's your idea?
There is a whole lot more to this than just whether content creators or publishes should get paid, and whether there should be ad blockers (and whether they get paid).
There's this "legend" that, I assume, has some truth to it, that only about 1% of Reddit users post, and only about 10% comment. The other 90% lurk.
On the internet as a whole, I do mostly lurk, but I have my own website where I try to post meaningful, useful content. To me, that's enough to have paid my dues. If you never, ever post anything. Yeah, paying is fair, but so long as you contribute back, you've paid, IMHO.
This gets tricky only because the web isn't small anymore. Youtube, for hosting, should probably get a cut, yeah. But the majority? no. The ability to monetize something someone else made and wants to distribute for free? Also no. They, IMHO, abused their way to near monopoly on video distribution, so they shouldn't have that right.
Similarly, I won't pay for content when I'm creating my own and distributing it for free (Actually, to some cost to me) and without ads.
Saying "Well, then only consume other's free content" is a fair rebuttal, but there's a larger social/societal problem that incentives making paid content or using platforms like YouTube which will monetize content made by anyone even if the creator never sees a Penny: The dominance of those platforms has stifled innovation to the point of depriving them of a real choice. (Again, opinion. Don't sue me Google <3)
By using adblock, I'm willfully, intentionally hurting that perverse incentive system.
It's a similar vibe to the idea that piracy may be moral, if it disenticives overbearing DRM. I pay for things when the DRM is non-existant or non-invasive. I've chosen not to when it is. I've let companines know on their forums before that I'd love to buy their product, if only they didn't use iLok, or Denuvo, etc. I usually don't pirate though, I just find an alternative, even if I think they have the better product and would otherwise be willing to pay.
however - I'm not sure if Serafinowicz would think that some guy on the internet writing articles is actually contributing back in the same way he might feel if you were distributing your own short comedic videos.
You may be contributing in a distribution channel, but are you contributing in a media?
The same goes for authors etc. They may think other authors should get a free pass on buying their books, because they're contributing, but not think that someone writing fan fiction on the web should get a pass.
The same with musicians, I'm sure you get the point. An artist in some field might think you are contributing if you are producing work in their field and should be given a pass on paying (I certainly would) but posting some meaningful to you on the web might not pass the bar of what they consider a contribution.
I get that, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people whose job content is, and who may have had the same job in the 90s, e.g. newspaper journalists.
So I'm asking those who don't want to pay for a subscription, but want to use an ad blocker: How does it work?
As said, I opted for paying the creator directly, because I hate the ad ecosystem. Seems like a lot of people want to do neither, but still expect their content to magically exist.
uBlock Origin everywhere. Steven Black host list on everything that can use /etc/hosts. Subscriptions to the things I value (but not to all the things I read).
I run an open source project called Ardour. One of our mottos is "It doesn't matter if everybody pays, it only matters than enough people pay". I wish more people could make some effort try to follow this idea in some way.
Many of my favourite blogs are ad-free. The people behindert it just do it with passion and don't expect anything in return. This is in contrast to nrwspapets and magazines, which just pump out clickbait shit while bring full of ads and tracking. Another option is the patreon/twitch model, where people Sonate money to creators.
At some point, you stop selling content, and you start selling an audience with a known demographic to advertisers.
In such a market, the business is disincentivized to produce thoughtful content, and need to churn the bait the draw in the audience. So it isn't as if creators are being compensated for creating, and instead content producers are compensated for producing words that will lure in readers.
The point is that "people whose job content is" should just get a regular job, where they actually contribute something valuable to society. All these "news" websites that are 90% ads can just die, to make room for valuable sites in the search results.
Lots of us don’t want to pay a dime because it’s like negotiating with terrorists. Do you really expect the people that ruined the web to act nice after the first round of extortion goes well for them? Many paid services still have ads and dark patterns. Those that don’t are waiting for a position of strength (whether that is a market monopoly or just user sunk-cost fallacy to kick in) and then the enshittification will start.
My heart goes out to journalists, etc, but I can’t really help them by paying their bosses because the bosses are not interested in journalism. If you think that paying into rent-seeking protection rackets is any kind of permanent solution you’re probably going to be disappointed.
> Lots of us don’t want to pay a dime because it’s like negotiating with terrorists.
For a concrete example of the implacable amorality of advertising, consider how cable-TV once offered the promise of subscribing to end the ads, but still ended up showing you ads and demanding a subscription fee anyway. Then the same pattern happened again with online streaming services and Youtube: Every would-be savior keeps getting corrupted by the same darkness.
Or consider the commuter that is obliged to pay hundreds a week for gas, and is assaulted by ads at obnoxious volumes while they fill up. Or the jet passenger that endures ads on what should be the PA that is reserved for emergency communications, after they’ve been gouged on ticket prices, because hey, why not monetize a captive audience for all they are worth? Does a first class ticket buy the right to avoid harassment? Everything points to “not for long”..
The only folks expecting the content to "magically continue to exist" are folks who lack information. But folks who do have information may also be totally fine with neither paying for content nor seeing ads; for a lot of us, the content that we watch is pretty transitive and if it went away tomorrow because no one watched any ads, we'd go do something else.
The thing here is that many of us aren’t interested in paid content, but we keep getting shuttled to paid content due to googles goggles. There is so much free content on the web but we don’t get directed there because we are stuck in an advertising loop. Google intentionally directs us to a site with “paid content writers” to propagate their ruin the internet with advertising scheme, thereby “ruining the internet.”
- static banners (non blinking, no transitions, esp. no vertical transitions that are designed to force you to lose focus – I've come for the content, not the ads)
- no tracking that exceeds maybe, if you have seen the campaign already. Preferably hosted by the website (who is responsible?).
- also, no targeting. Ads once were supposed to be consumer information. Public information is meant to be public, so I would enjoy leaning about what is out there (in the big world). Not just being reminded of what I bought last month, over and over again. Consumer products are part of (ephemeral) culture and I'd like to be part of it. (Reminder: you can always select/target by content and context, not just per user profile. This is technically feasible, as demonstrated by earlier versions of the Web.)
(This is also valid for recommendation and content presentation algorithms of all kind: I generally feel like desperately gasping for air, while being strangled by algorithms that only allow for an ever narrower bandwidth of the ever same. – E.g., is it really true that there are just three videos uploaded to YouTube per week? How do they make a profit? So you say, there are millions? How I'm not going to see them? Even a text search is littered by out of context reminders of the ever same…)
– moreover, ads should be more expensive for the advertising party. There should be less in total and the revenue for content providers should be greater (remember the thriving blog scene, we once had, when bloggers could make a living?)
(In other words, role it back to the early 2000s and I'm fine with that. Essentially, before Google ads went on steroids.)
> ads should be more expensive for the advertising party.
Sorry, my reading comprehension is failing me. If Bob pays Google to put an ad on Alice's website, is Bob the advertising party? Because if so, that would disadvantage small companies and harm the market by making it harder for newcomers to be competitive. If in our hypothetical situation Google is the advertising party that's good and well, though I don't know how we'd get that done.
It's about the price of placing an advertisement. Ads becoming that cheap has eradicated significant portions of the Web, which is now flocking to the few big content platforms. I'd call this an anticompetitive development. Ad networks, like Google, are setting these prices. And they have turned the tables: you can't negotiate the worth of the service, as you the product is the ad tag, not the content, it's embedded in.
(Also, we – as a society – don't entertain second thoughts on housing prices or general cost of living, while this is a common and basic need. Why is this different? Is there a privilege? Also, who's interest is this about, the content creators, including news sites, or advertisers, who rely on this kind of contextual content provided by the creators? Quite obviously, the current arrangement isn't working out for creators, and news, including active journalism and research, are in a steep decline, after having peaked in revenue around 2008.)
Your business model is not my responsibility; you're giving away content for free by your own choice. It's cool that you've found "one cool hack" to earn some money while giving away your content for free, but the people who accept your free content do not owe you the author anything. The author is free to require upfront payment for access, and the audience is free to pay or leave. But the audience of free content doesn't owe you the author anything, as the author has no contract relationship with the audience. When we visit a blog post we do not sign some contract and never have (some sites have tried to move the goalposts with banners like "by clicking this link you owe us your souls and thus your eyeballs" but that's pretty transparently hogwash).
Saying "you want to use an adblocker, thus you're just a thief!" can validly be escalated with the exact same logic by saying "why don't you click on every ad you see, that's the only way the benevolent authors get paid you know, if you're not doing that then you're just a thief!" It's all nonsense fundamentally because the audience consuming your content for free doesn't owe the author anything (as much as authors in this scenario will wish otherwise).
To be clear, making content explicitly for-pay I think is amazing and is the clear future. As ads race to be as annoying as possible, users are going to run out of patience and seek alternative sources of information/entertainment, and some number of users will opt for sources that require payment. That's GREAT for the industry as it means users stop expecting everything for free and become selective with their dollar, allowing niche content much more money. This is happening with many small-time independent video publishing platforms (Dropout.tv, Nebula, Floatplane, CorridorDigital, countless creators on Patreon, independent movies published via VHX.tv, etc) to fantastic effect.
I'm personally fine with ad blocker blockers. They let me make an informed choice as to whether I want to accept ads with all the bad thing they entail (tracking, potential malware ad/or phishing) in exchange for getting whatever information the website offers. When YouTube Light was still a thing I did subscribe sometimes, but I don't feel as though I get my money's worth out of it with the current pricing so I don't really go there any more.
