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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

I found a few bugs: It only has one JS file, and that isn't even 3KB. Needs to be at least 3MB. uBlock only blocks 2 items, not 30. It doesn't have infinite scroll, a sticky header, a fake chat window that pops up and says, "Shana from support is here to answer any questions"... Oh, and the back button still works.

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Publishers live and die by Google. They do everything they can to try and milk out ANY ROI from ANY visitor to try and sell/market/promote.

Users don't really visit websites anymore - they sit on facebook/google/Reddit/hacker news. So you have to REALLY market to those few people you get from Google search results... as Google really wants you to BUY those users from them - not write good content to get them (even though that's what they say to do..)

one day you can be doing well with google - making enough money a day to pay for your hosting and then next day, serps change and your traffic tanks and you then spend more money to try and correct it and you start copying what others say works - email lists, live chats, exit ads, moore mobile ads - you pray you start earning high CPMs and you start looking to arbitrate - find cheap traffic to hopefully pay less than what you earn to get more traffic and you start falling for fiverr deals that are fake an SEO tricks that penalyze you in the end and before you know it, you're 20k in debt running a website that most people leave within 30 seconds and even though you may have solved thousands of people problems my helping them fix something, learn something, do something or expereince something they choose to create a facebook post or tweet about it rather than comment or join your community - so those big giants earn a LOT more revenue on publisher backs.. for the average deal, facebook and google will earn 80 plus bucks a year on what you do, but us lowly publishers will spend more than that per user to try and ink out some successs

and in the end, the irony is that a website set up to show how bad the industry is will end up with more links, more traffic, more google juice, and higher link authority than a publisher with thousands of hours of work put in being creative, helpful and insightful..

and you wonder why the web is getting so painful :)

> penalyze

I'm not usually one to point out spelling errors, but this mistake is so serendipitous given your usage of it.

penalize + paralyze = penalyze? Somebody call up them Merriam-Webster folks!

Reading this I've never felt more British; those Z's hurt my eyes!

True.

Or put it another way: people get this awesome, always updating, huge library about anything.

And they can't even spend a few seconds of effort to get the content.

Can you expand (I know there was a lot here ) but I still don't "get" it.

How do you buy traffic from Google? Ads? Are you saying that "great content" does not work? That great content if i find it at the top of the results has also been paying for ads for those keywords?

but will better quality content without ads get ranked higher than worse quality with ads?

Google prioritizes paid content - people buying Google ads on search results to get top tier spots on search pages. That means for a lot of results only a handful of "natural" results/links are at the top - and how they're there is often being gamed by people to keep them there. The algorithm changes all the time and there is HUGE pressure/competition to get those coveted spots.

This algorithm approach to everything means its not just google controlling who gets to be "top" but facebook/twitter does the same - if you're not already at the top then the algorithm diminishes your reach - you don't show up on searches, you don't show up on followers of your page, you don't show up on your followers twitter streamline unless you're trending - and for the most part to trend you need status or to pay to play...

its tough... but what it really means is google/facebook/twitter don't create any content whatsoever but they monetize it by controlling it algorithmically and you have to generally pay to play to perform well - buy facebook ads, twitter ads, google ads.

more often then not, the higher the ranked content is in google - the more ads you will see because they're monetizing the crap out of that position.. ironically if you're a publisher and you do google Adsense (their ad network) and you choose to embrace their automatic ad platform they inject so many ads on your website that its almost saddening - and again, they control this algorithmically.

The sticky header is nowhere near as bad as the header that slides down over the lines you're reading every time you scroll. I don't understand who decided this feature needed to exist.

http://staticding.org/ helps with those, the only thing I don't like about it is the overlay it puts on the screen and fades out. I forked the github repo to remove it.

Yeah, the fade animation is a bit on the long side.

I'm trying to decide which is worse....

Interesting. I wrote a (much) simpler version of this a short while ago, which I also find terribly useful:

https://bookmarklets.arantius.com/unfix

Might need to add a "nuke" like option.

Pretty good, but I can just use uBlock Origin to remove elements that I don't like.

If you ever find that person, kick them in the shin for me.

They have a sliding shield against that which tracks the movement of your foot.

(flips table, charges toward floor-to-ceiling window, fails to even crack it)

Well, at least some engineers are good at what they do?

Sticky header plus using A-tag anchors

I've never seen a website handle that combo well. 100% of the time you'll click an anchor and have to scroll down slightly

> a fake chat window

Exactly, I hate the bait-and-switch of chat windows.

"Oh hey there, do you have any questions?" pops up after a couple minutes on the site, then you reply with a question and you get "We will respond to you within a couple hours, you are important to us".

I think it erodes your user's trust in you.

It's so obviously an automated bot that I'm not sure anyone would use one more than once.

People like to build and show off these "helpful" assistants as AI tech, but how much do they actually get used?

I run a website where we used to use one of these. People were constantly getting fooled by it. They would reply:

"Oh awesome, yeah I have a question about using XYZ"

and then the system would instantly reply, "Please enter your email here and we will get back to you. <Company Name> typically responds within 3 hours."

I've used them in the past, knowing that 99% of the time it'll be a "We'll get back to you" message. But for the most part, I find it helpful as a quick "contact us" option without having to wade through contact pages trying to find a contact email.

I'm opposed to the dishonest copy used, not the concept of having a contact button conveniently located in the bottom right corner.

The other day I was pleasantly surprised by my interaction with one of these website bots. By asking it a very natural question:

> What happens if I'm not home when the shipment arrives?

I received exactly the answer I was looking for.

FWIW, do you know what provider was being used? (Seeing the site the bot was on may also be interesting too)

It was lazada.com.my - an alibaba subsidiary.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I've used these things a handful of times and have always received an immediate response. I don't mean an automated response trying to "answer" my question either. It was an actual person responding to my specific questions.

I have also seen chat windows that display an "Away Message" showing that you won't receive a response right away before you type anything at all, which isn't deceptive.

I was kind of disappointed that it didn't ask me to share my location. And no like buttons, retweet, etc?

Also, you can actually select the text on the site. Would be much better clicking the mouse linked somewhere or triggered an event.

Or like LinkedIn, ask for microphone permissions when you touch the homepage.

Is that on mobile? Never seen it on desktop.

My recollection was both but certainly mobile.

Don't forget auto-playing video that requires 4 clicks to close when you find the semi-hidden close button, like a pesky roach... and restarts every time you navigate to another page or revisit the page

True. And honestly, when I open the console log I expect it to be all red.

When it's all red you know it's a good website.

Or that your /etc/hosts file is still in good condition.

I bet it isn't even deployed on a high availability Kubernetes cluster.

It also misses 3 web fonts with 4 weight variations each.

What it really needs is to slightly change the layout several times over the course of the first 30 seconds of page load, pushing and pulling links all over the place. I love playing whack-a-mole with your site's links.

The final item should require hitting a link to dismiss, but the link is in a footer that is forever out of reach by infinite scroll.

Wow, this is... I've never seen this scenario, but I almost want to see it. Just once though.

We can think of it as a scale model, 1:1000.

It also doesn't have a sticky footer, which appears after I close the "sign up for our newsletter" popup, asking if I would like to sign up for their newsletter.

I guess he could pad the JS file with some random nonsense...

Nah, just use a js file from a different "free template!" for every function on the page. Added benefit of stressing the templating engine depending on the back end.

It's alright. There's a 77 KB spinner.gif that can be reduced by half.

This made me laugh. Perfect. :)

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