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Comment by tfgg | Hacker News Reader

Things that make me just close tabs straight away:

1) Autoplaying videos, especially ads.

2) Pop-ups / overlays.

3) Loading lots of extra elements causing text to jump around.

Especially true if I'm just browsing around and click on something that looks interesting, the above will take that thing from "this might be worth 30 seconds" to "not worth it".

Why kill that little dopamine boost someone just got from clicking on a link to your site? If you're wondering why your bounce rate is so high... though maybe these dark patterns bring in enough ad revenue that it's worth it. I don't see how 3 helps that, though, just lazy coding. Or maybe other people are more tolerant and it doesn't really affect the bounce rate.

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Re 2): Pinterest.

It's the cancer of Google image search. I don't get how Google's search ranking doesn't massively penalize that behaviour.

I'd rather stomach an advertisement than the "plz register" BS.

Yeah, isn't it against google's policy to present different content to bots and to fleshy users?

Pretty sure it is.

Not anymore apparently, at least for the big players. I believe it is still the stated policy and you won't get away with it if you are small.

That is their policy, but they don't appear to punish people who violate the "spirit" of it and many of these sites don't literally violate the rule.

In the case of pinterest (and quora), for example, the whole page you are looking for is there, it just gets obscured by an obnoxious overlay that makes it impossible for you to see/interact with it all from a browser unless you register.

I'm sure what the googlebot gets at the html/css/js level is the same thing the user gets. The difference being the bot doesn't care about the semi-transparent blocking overlay because the bot is just parsing text/images/links individually and not trying to interact with the page the way a human does.

Reminds me of the amusingly named 'expertsexchange' site, and the stackoverflow copies. Google shoved them down the ranking pretty quickly. Shame they don't do that to pinterest.

I always read that "expert sex change" instead of "experts exchange" for some reason;

Favoring first match vs. longest match.

I never saw it that way, but you have now set me up to chuckle randomly at the memory all day. Thanks!

For the 'please register' overlays, you need an 'extension' called Kill sticky. It removes all html elements that are styled with 'position: fixed'

Here's the link: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

At my company we created an auto loading video that all the devs agreed was terrible. It was compared, statistically, to one that didn't auto play. Sure, 10% of users left immediately, killing traffic, but revenue increased more than the traffic dipped. It's still auto playing on that page.

I agree that browser makers should fix this. It should probably behave like the location API and be remembered by domain or something.

Your know there are HN readers who write this crap. I wonder if they'll chime in on why they do.

Mortgage payments

While I can't speak from first hand experience, I have an open ear sometimes.

There are these developers who just made an awesome webapp or something. It's really great but there is a problem. Noone knows about it. But they have a solution for that problem. They buy some "promotion". It's articles in newsletters or outright spam directed at their target audience. I cannot tell you exactly who their target audience is but I can tell you who it is not. It's not you, me or most readers on hackernews. It's less tech savyy people with more decision power. Old people. Their site is made for old people. And they don't care about you and me or any other passer-by who won't pay a dime. They care about conversion rates and that is what they monitor all day long.

It's a bit like in those scam-emails. They are so obvious that anybody with half a brain will click delete. But those who do reply, oh boy, they are so ready to be milked off by that nigerian prince.

"There are these developers who just made an awesome web app or something. It's really great but there is a problem. Noone knows about it. But they have a solution for that problem. They buy some 'promotion'."

Buying recognition is nothing new in tech.

"Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it."

Read this article, "The Submarine" ~ http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

  So the other day I met the guy who makes all that crap on-line
  I told him you can have my cash
  But first you know I've got to ask
  What made you want to live this kind of life?

  He said there ain't no rest for the wicked, money don't grow on trees
  I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed; ain't nothing in this world for free
  I know I can't slow down
  I can't hold back though you know I wish I could
  Oh no there ain't no rest for the wicked
  Until we close the shop for good...

Formatting text this way makes it hard to read on mobile and in text browsers. I couldn't even reply just now, my text wouldn't show up as I typed it, I had to click "edit" so I could view and edit my post by itself.

[edit] dang, can something be done about this? Flagging for format? Maybe a little drastic, but try reading HN in elinks, you'll see that a long line breaks the whole page. How about line wrap? Desktop users would be unaffected, and it would be a better compromise for mobile.

Wouldn't it be easier to just fix the CSS?

No, since the text used code semantics. A better solution would be to introduce a few more formatting options, such as attributed and unattributed quote blocks.

Or get a browser that works?

The web would be a lot more accessible if so many designers didn't think like you.

I've already fixed the CSS for hacker news several times; they always reject my suggestions though. It's like they want to keep it shitty

Flagging a post for the shortcomings of the commenting platform seems a bit harsh.

I definitely downvote Reddit comments that are all <h1> text.

HN needs (maybe has???) markup to break lines without double spacing as distinct paragraphs.

We never lost control

You're face to face

With the man who sold the world

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_DFrVkfy2Os

Cage the elephant- ain't no rest for the wicked

In case anyone is wondering

Ha ha, only serious, as they say.

Because their PM/CEO tells them to do and it's their job? Most developers have little say in this.

At my last job at a web agency, I was told to make a newsletter popup that opened on first page load. I said to my project manager (he was a web developer before) that it was bad design and everyone finds it annoying. He said that the client wanted it, and I should just do it.

I asked him, what if the client wanted a pink unicorn gif in the corner, should we just do that as well? Without telling the client that it doesn't fit the site? He said yes...

I wouldn't speak so definitivly regarding something you don't know for sure. Everyone doesn't find them annoying enough to make them ineffective.

The website probably won't cry over your bounce if it means they'll collect an email optin from someone else.

Auto play video is bad for reasons beyond a pop in modal and reasons beyond annoying video ads.

Don't tell them yes or tell them no. Test, monitor, and promote the path that leads to the best success rates, acknowledging that user growth may drive success in the longer term. Take the long view, basically.

Individual sites can't measure how much their combined spam costs them due to the ever more aggressive use of ad blockers. In the short term, a newsletter popup probably does increase revenue, but acquiring new users in the future will be more expensive as a result because the cheap and simple ads will fail to reach most of the market. Unfortunately, nobody has incentive to stop, as they'll just give up the short-term revenue and still suffer the future consquences from all of the other bad actors.

need also to look beyond a month or quarter.

my wife has quit going to several sites altogether, and in other cases can not buy on a website, because of pop-up stuff.

So... if they're measuring for "email signups" then - w00t! - sweet! - numbers are so high! What about actual sales? Or repeat sales? Lifetime value of a customer?

I don't think I was very clear but yes, that's what I meant. You can't just look at the short-term gains of the promotion; if it suppresses repeat visits then that's a cost. And yes, it's hard to do, and is an art as much as a science.

He said that the client wanted it, and I should just do it.

Ask him to ask the client if that's the behaviour the client would find annoying if every other site also did that.

Why they do it? Easy. You are not the customer, the advertiser is. So as long as it is tolerable for a sufficient % of the audience, it is worth it.

Case in point, circumventing ad blockers. Audience explicitly doesn't want the ad experience, but Facebook wants to make more $. Facebook just announced a record quarter on desktop advertising fueled by successfully circumventing ad blockers.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/02/add-cash-plus/

I wonder which adblockers they are successfully circumventing because with Ublock Origin out the box I've not seen any adverts for I forget how long.

AdBlock has commented on this and seems that there have been intermittent periods of no blocking: https://adblockplus.org/blog/ping-pong-with-facebook

"While Facebook appears to have had the last word for now, this, friends, is a long game. That being said, a few other ad blockers have apparently found workarounds to Facebook’s latest circumvention."

That makes sense then.

Pretty sure the answer is: "pay check".

Not everybody gets to choose their job.

They don't live in a tech center and the local spam shop / crappy web property is one of the few local places who are hiring.

I'm the same way. If there is an overlay or autoplaying video I just leave. However apparently most people aren't like us otherwise no sites would do it.

And you can see that these sites get posted to HN, so at least someone is reading it. Personally though I prefer more pleasant sites.

I think that maybe the submitters are running a variety of ad-etc-blocking software, and so they're not seeing it.

Looking at Google Analytics for a website we were about to launch, I was surprised to see hits from others in the development team, tracked by Google.

I block Google Analytics (and many other things), and was surprised that none of my colleagues do the same.

you mean you block collection of Google analytics as an end-user? how does one go about that?

Virtually any adblocker has tracking script blocker lists as well, which includes Google Analytics.

> Looking at Google Analytics for a website we were about to launch, I was surprised to see hits from others in the development team, tracked by Google

So you are OK with making Google track your users but you don't want to be tracked yourself?

More likely than not, their employer is ok with making google track their users. I doubt it's the decision of this particular developer.

Indeed, it's not my decision.

I'd like to use something we host, then we probably wouldn't need to have the EU cookie warning.

They might say they're using a vanilla browser to ensure everything works, but it's worth mentioning it's possible to filter IP addresses in Google Analtyics to stop those hits from being counted.

I would probably leave, unless I needed the site and couldn't get what they offer anywhere else. (Eg online shopping.)

But it's all hypothetical, since my ublock takes care of it. Of course, that also means that I am no longer much exerting any selection pressure on the market in that regard.

It actually triggers anger in me when I've started to read and something pops up over it. It's the least likely way to get me to click your thing.

Even worse for me is on mobile, scrolling down a news article, and suddenly this full page ad starts sneaking up from the bottom, with tiny text that says "keep scrolling to read the rest of the article". No thanks, apparently they didn't write that article to be read but rather to be a hook to get you to see that ad which takes over the screen. It's infuriating, bait and switch bullshit.

Oh god this is so awful. I just recently switched to an iPhone for work reasons. I used Adblock on my Rooted Nexus 6p, and never experienced this before. Now... all the frikkin time, to the point I rarely read news articles on my phone anymore.

I think iOS supports AdBlock there days so you could try one of those.

I find the safari reader view to be super useful for almost all sites like this.

Well, the most likely scenario is that you will click their thing. Why? Because you're thrashing around on your mobile screen trying to get rid of the pop-up or overlay.

Whether you succeed or not is immaterial: the ad got clicked on, and hey, even if 99.9% of those clicks are accidental ones that will never convert, they still look like "organic" clicks and the ad revenue still gets booked. Expensive consultants like this person ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12944902 ) will chalk it up in the "users engaged" column. Everybody gets what they came for... except you and me.

Never understood how autoplaying video, especially ads, became an acceptable UX for so many sites. And, it seems that the advent of ad blockers has made this worse. Like, some sites are abusing people as much possible to offset revenue losses.

I was also surprised at how difficult it is to get a modern browser to consistently disable the feature.

When it's ads served over an ad network, the site honestly doesn't have a lot of control over what content goes in the ad boxes. Advertisers don't really care, either - it's not their user experience they're garbaging up.

So use an adblocker to give them lesson.

Yep, that's what I tend to do. Particularly on my mobile device, where I've settled into a scorched earth policy on ads.

Sucks, though. I like having access to high-quality content, and I believe journalists deserve to get paid for their work. Unfortunately, the Internet at large has long since decided that just paying people for their product over the table is not what the norm should be.

It doesn't have to be that way, flattr & the like do provide a viable path to monetary gain for the news industry outside of advertisers. What this means is just like you may have paid for a paper in the past, you should set a budget for flattr and add who you want to support so they are compensated and disincentivized from advertising to you.

Alternatively, if a site does non-aggressive advertising like Dslreports.com, that is quite tolerable. More niche sites are now doing delayed access paywalls too.

Try using a script/media blocker, such as uMatrix, rather than an Ad-Blocker.

The disadvantage will be that sites which require scripts will break on first-access.

The advantages are better overall privacy + security, and that simple static ads won't be blocked and hence those authors will be compensated.

(Edited to better match parent's concerns)

Or direct action. The gray hats among us might rent or subvert a botnet and use it to click those ads like crazy. Click, click, click. Generate overtly fraudulent clicks by the billions, all day and all night.

That's the only way to shut them down for good -- make it hurt to abuse your visitors.

The overlays. My god man. It's like every time these days. You're starting to read this link you clicked through to. It's interesting. And then the screen goes dark.

If you're lucky it loads fast and the x to close is somewhere visible. You're rarely lucky though.

In Firefox, mouse over the offending overlay, and right click to get "Inspect Element". Mouse around the DOM inspector window until you've reached the top element of the overlay. Right click on "Delete Node". No more overlay.

Have you ever tried to read a story, on those sites where it just shows you one picture at a time, and you have to click next to get to the next picture? Most of them are just ad machines, and it lags your browser so bad.

4) Forbes "Quote of the day". Seriously Forbes, that is irritating as hell.

Still, my number 1 is loading the extra content and making elements jump around. A lot of times I: 1) see a link that interests me; 2) hover my finger over a link, ready to tap; 3) wait 1-2 secs, to be sure it's done loading; 4) Ok, it's ready; 5) tap the liContent jumps and I click somewhere else.

Both Facebook's and Twitter's search act like this. It displays recent search for enough time for you to move your finger/mouse to click it, then loads general results, like trending and suggestions. Waiting for the AJAX response to come back before displaying anything should be the norm.

Number 3 Drives me absolutely crazy. Bloomberg and The Verge do this as an example. I'm fine with ads, as long as they don't break the page.

One of the biggest violators of all of these is Mashable. Their site is so frustrating to visit I have it blocked completely now.

Regarding 1 media.autoplay.enabled=false does the trick in Firefox about:config.

Or just disable mp4, webm, flash altogether in about:config. I typically view media in specially sanctioned browsers, just for viewing rich media.

E.G Chrome on windows 10 hooked up to a 4K Acer monitor via HDMI

You can harden FF also and remove a few other annoyances like the default PDF reader, etc:

https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/

Once I become aware of the sites that create a hell with 1, 2, and 3, I make sure I never visit them again.

amen

> Loading lots of extra elements causing text to jump around.

My computer is a little older, and this one is a dealbreaker. Sometimes a page is so heavy that it brings my whole computer to its knees. If I can tell a page is starting to load more than a reasonable amount of elements, I punch out as soon as possible.

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