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Comment by fiatpandas | Hacker News Reader

This... was an unreadable experience. Gratuitous animations, football field sized paragraph widths, proportional/fluid CSS sizing (thought maximizing my browser on a 1080p screen would allow me to see more), bite sized paragraphs interspersed with information-thin graphic inserts, full width graphics that have a larger height than your browser viewport, text swooshing down the screen while you're scrolling because the above graphic is dynamically resizing.

I appreciate the desire to experiment with the medium, but it just does a disservice to the content.

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I agree. It was pretty annoying. So are the new top/bottom footers on Medium. I sometimes open up the inspector and delete those two divs just to read the page, but most of the time I don't bother, give up on the article, and just close the tab.

Content should just be content. You shouldn't need Javascript to simply view a page. Even if this was all just CSS tricks, it's still pretty annoying. I mean it's a neat idea. Scrolling animation can be kinda neat if done right, but this totally wasn't. It takes away from the content, which is pretty interesting.

> I sometimes open up the inspector and delete those two divs just to read the page

It's crazy how often I need to do this as well. I remember back in the old days hitting esc would stop all the animations on a page, now you need to inspect + delete those elements.

There needs to be some crowd sourced way of doing this, so if you delete an element and I visit the site, the element is gone.

> There needs to be some crowd sourced way of doing this, so if you delete an element and I visit the site, the element is gone.

This is how adblockers work (sort of).

We could probably leverage the same tech used for adblockers to make UI blockers, which maintain lists of "bad" UI and remove their tags and scripts.

Of course, I find it easier to just not use those websites.

In fact you can just right click an element and block it with most desktop ad-blockers.

Greasemonkey / Tampermonkey? I'm just too lazy to install them and write the little scripts.

The one time I tried, I saw that the scripts aren't loaded reliably. Was more aggravating than helpful. Was trying to disable links on the HN homepage that led to paywalled content so that I can avoid clicking on it.

But if it can't work reliably, it's not worth it at all. That's ultimately what makes technical solutions hard, not doing it at all, but rather doing it well enough to be worth the effort.

If you know the ids of those two divs, you could easily make a javascript bookmarklet to delete those two divs at click of a button. Or I will be happy to do that for you just for fun :)

Please call it "Large, a screen-friendly view for Medium".

Or: Larj. ;-)

You could try using a content blocker like uBlock Origin and subscribe to my annoyances filter list[1] - I attempt to block (without breaking site functionality) annoying web behavior like this automatically.

[1] https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances

I really like outline.com (they also have a chrome extension), which shows a stripped down version of the article. It works pretty reliable with medium and most other common sources.

Just have a look at https://outline.com/vznfxw

Thanks for that! It's unfortunate that sites like that (and this: http://deslide.clusterfake.net) are needed... but that's the world we live in.

Why not just use reader mode? It worked fine for me for this article.

I found this somewhere and use it to eliminate footers. Save it as a bookmark : javascript:(function()%7B(function () %7Bvar i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3Bfor (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7Bif (getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed') %7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()

Ohh good idea to save that sort of thing as a bookmark. Thanks!

I quite liked it but there was one annoying thing: occasionally, new sections would open in between the lines, after the part is was reading, stopping me from reading. That was actually quite painful and annoying.

There used to be a "Kill Button" in Opera browser that, once activated, would remove any clicked element.

It was so easy to get rid of unwanted divs. I would like something like that for the latest version of firefox, but I couldn't find anything similar.

Element hiding helper for adblock plus works well for me in Firefox. Even has shortcuts w and n for wider and narrower respectively. Then whatever you select gets blocked permanently for you.

I've mainly used it to block all the shit youtube puts on top of videos, block position fixed videos on news sites, and make a bunch of forums less painful to browse.

not as elegant as a single button, but this does the same job:

* Ctrl + Shift + C

* Select your div

* Press [Delete]

I totally agree. I used Firefox reader view to read it. It was much better that way!

uBlock Origin and uMatrix are your friends. Here's how it looks for me (zoomed way out): https://tmp.thekyel.com/month/2017.11.14.08.33.1510677203.pn...

It looks really great on mobile though.

I use printfriendly 70% of the time. Firefox reader mode too.

I really liked it!

yes too much work for a rather simple issue. Somewhere in the way i was so annoyed i stopped reading.

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