Hacker News Reader

Comment by wldlyinaccurate | Hacker News Reader

The breaking news banner is a source of much internal conflict, at least within the engineering teams. I think most people agree that it's too big, and most people also agree that it's over-used. Unfortunately it's one of those things that editorial will not back down on — they must be able to push their breaking news to people, and it must be prominent (and therefore quite intrusive).

There is a small improvement to the banner on the new front page (/news/0), which is that it's about 4 pixels shorter, and it's now grey instead of black which I think is much less abrasive.

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I just block it with Ublock Origin.

It's intensely irritating, since it's never breaking and these days with the way the world is it is also worrying.

For me Breaking News should be things like terroist attacks, massive flooding not "Back Off Contestant Falls Over".

I just realized that wasn't an ad; I've never read the text because the placement/intrusiveness triggered my ad blindness, I've blocked it with ublock as well.

Aye, I use Ublock Origin to block more than just ads.

It's also handy for the comment sections on newspapers, sections of news sites you are never gonna click/read (in my case sport) and comments on youtube.

I block the suggested videos sidebar on youtube, too.

I thought as much. My tweet that contained the screenshot: https://twitter.com/joewass/status/788071468131295234

Maybe you could resolve the conflict by including a "don't show any more breaking news" button and then taking the data back to Editorial.

Or analyzing the clickstream to see who is being shown breaking news that they already saw, or they're actually reading at the time.

> Maybe you could resolve the conflict by including a "don't show any more breaking news" button and then taking the data back to Editorial.

I suspect an optional button would not be very popular, so the data wouldn't achieve the aim you want.

Maybe include it in either [settings] or [Customise your Homepage]

Is there no way you can at least track that a user has already been exposed to the breaking news (banner or article etc) and stop re-showing it? I always see it after I've already hit the homepage, seen the 'breaking news' and then gone to somewhere else on the site and then 'breaking news' banner all over again.

It reminds me of the early 2000s when websites would initiate a pop-up ad and the first thing I would do is automatically close it without looking. Thankfully browser makers stepped in and blocked them automatically. That's my hope. That news outlets will spam the feature so much that web browsers will make it easy to switch them off.

Won't happen. Pop-ups were a specific browser API and could be easily turned off without affecting anything else, banners are just content and can't be singled out by the browsers (unless by an adblock-type arms race).

Machine learning will probably be used to learn the traits of pop-up content and block it with a given confidence value.

And as soon as that starts becoming common, programmers will implement workarounds that avoid AI detection.

Recently working on an embeddable shopping widget I noticed that if I animated it in certain ways chrome would block it as a popup.

Doesn't contradict what you said I just thought it was interesting that chrome doesn't just look for the most basic types of pop-ups.

Might users be given the option of disabling the breaking news feature? I don't expect that it's a straightforward yes/no.

...or maybe you could decide what you wanted as 'breaking news', so if you did not want to know the football results because you are watching the game later, then you could un-tick 'sports'.

This could be really useful for onboarding people, once onboard they could set up alerts for topics or tick 'follow this story' if for instance they read about someone being brought to trial and they wanted to know the sentencing or even what crimes get committed five years hence once the culprit is out of jail.

Things in the news and the weather could then be pushed/pulled from an app.

As well as topics for 'breaking news' there could also be a colour coded level so if you don't really care about some unknown unknowns getting droned out of existence in far-off-istan (in a 'yellow' terror threat incident) then you don't get an alert for it. Meanwhile, if you are British and some idiot kills people outside parliament then that one pops up as 'breaking news' with no hesitation.

Tsunami alerts are probably handy as 'breaking news', it would be annoying to die in some massive flood due to having turned off the 'breaking news' wholesale just because you had no interest in the French election or 'Frexit'.

I think that they need to just be a bit more imaginative with the feature so that it works for all stakeholders, the editorial department, the reads and everyone in between, up to and including No. 10.

Hey Joseph,

You're doing God's work and a national service that is IMHO worthy of a knighthood, the BBC front page is one of those rare places where a few little engineering cogs can really make a huge difference. Keep up the good fight! Thanks from all of us -- the UK, still missing the old news.bbc 5ish years later :)

And if I ever have the privilege of your CV gracing my inbox, I'd do everything to ensure we got to work together. Thanks again!

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