Dickbars and Other Readability Excrement (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Dickbars and Other Readability Excrement (2017)

shindoisshin.net

73 pointsdredmorbius49 comments

By the title, I though this would be a discussion about the MacOS System 7 Penis Bar: that weird resizable control strip that stuck out from the edge of the the screen with control panel pop-up menus and a grinning spotted dick head at the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7....

You could drag the dick head left and right to make it shorter or longer, or drag it around to different parts of the screen, but it was always horizontal and stuck out from the left or right edge of the screen, never vertical sticking out from the top or bottom.

You could click the head and it would retract so only the head stuck out, and then click again and it would sproing back out to reveal the shaft at its original length that you'd set.

I would have loved to see the focus groups they ran on that. I wonder if there are any video tapes of Steve Jobs demonstrating it at MacWorld?

Eventually somebody at Apple must have realized that it looked like a penis, and then it quietly disappeared from a later version of MacOS. The spots on the head did not look healthy.

Jobs wasn't there when they added this in 1991. And it was pretty convenient to use, by the way. I admire your adolescent spirit that manages to see penises in such things. The "spotted" pattern is called "affordance" and it's meant to indicate this thing is to be dragged. The similar pattern was used on windows title bar where it looked like stripes in larger areas and dots in smaller. Later generations forgot what it was for and lost the subtle art of good user interface.

The dots are a "signifier" that the end of the bar "affords" being dragged by the cursor. Signifiers are the part of an interface that show the user an affordance exists, whereas affordances are the things that can be done. A button affords being pressed, its shape and colour signify that it is a button.

Yes, "signifier" is the right term, thank you.

Did you really just post a comment trying to tell Don Hopkins what an “affordance” is—incorrectly, I might add? There has to be some kind of Dunning–Kruger prize for comments like that.

From a baby's perspective, nipples are the ultimate user friendly affordance.

That was why Ted Selker's Thinkpad with two red Joy Buttons on the keyboard was so engaging. Mammals are hard-wired to interact with them from birth. Too bad OS/2 or any software since Douglass Engelbart's NLS/Augment in 1968 couldn't deal with multiple cursors like God intended.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21757797

>Vis-à-vis mamelons, Ted actually build a prototype Thinkpad keyboard with TWO trackpoints, which he loved to show at his New Paradigms for Using Computers workshop at IBM Almaden Research Lab. [...]

From the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21757139

>TrackPoint is basically a joystick.

I think Squeak Nebraska can handle multiple Hands. I admit BubbleOS's Yeso doesn't have any provision for multiple pointers either.

The esteemed user interface designers at Apple should have had enough common sense, adolescent spirit, and focused vision to manage to see they were designing something that looked like a grinning penis with a rash on the tip. This is why we have focus groups and #MeToo. Otherwise you end up with things like the Gavin Belson Signature Box III, Slack Penis Swastikas, and Trump-Pence Logos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KbRA2RjhgQ

https://technabob.com/blog/2018/12/01/gavin-belson-signature...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-...

https://www.wired.com/2016/07/ins-outs-new-trump-pence-logo/

I can understand why Jobs cut the Control Strip, despite its dominating but sexy name, and prior art in international interface design (Kontrollstreifen), when he returned to focus on saying no, and put bullets into OpenDoc's and the Control Strip's heads.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-s...

More info from Wikipedia on Apple's Control Strip and its earlier use in widely deployed international interface control systems, aka Kontrollstreifen (Control Strip), Todesstreifen (Death Strip), Handlungsstreifen (Action Strip), and Pieck-Allee (Pieck Avenue):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip

>The Control Strip was initially released in 1994 with the PowerBook 500 series of notebook computers and the PowerBook Duo 280 subnotebook computers, at that point shipping with System 7.1. Later on it was made available to desktop and portable Macintosh computers, beginning with System 7.5.3.

>Apple removed Control Strip in 2001 as a consequence of its move to Mac OS X. Apple initially attempted to integrate the Control Strip’s features into the Dock. After this was found to be too clumsy, most of its features were again duplicated in the menu extras of 10.1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_the_inner_Ge...

>In the West, the control strip became known as the "death strip" (Todesstreifen) because of the shoot-to-kill orders given to the border guards. The East Germans preferred to call it by the more euphemistic name of the "action strip" (Handlungsstreifen). It was also nicknamed the Pieck-Allee ("Pieck Avenue") after East Germany's president Wilhelm Pieck (1949–60).

> Apple initially attempted to integrate the Control Strip’s features into the Dock. After this was found to be too clumsy, most of its features were again duplicated in the menu extras of 10.1.

Ha. The Control Strip is back today, it just lives in the Touchbar now. You can search in System Preferences for "Control Strip" and you'll be taken to a pane where you can modify the items in it. Notably less phallic, though.

In all my years I have never thought about calling the Control Strip that but all the vocabulary fits.

I do miss the control strip a little

I don't often go to bad sites, but when I do… it's usually SourceForge. It's not as bad as it used to be, and it's not nearly as bad as Mainstream News Type Stuff, but still.

Literally no one wants to "Get latest updates about Open Source Projects, Conferences and News", thank you very much. Why is there a giant banner dickbar (that got blocked by my DNS resolver so it's a USELESS STICKY GIANT WHITE STRIPE with a tiny gray "Advertisement" label) below the navigation bar? Why does the navigation lead to nested categories of "Business Software"? Why is the sidebar (which is 100% junk anyway) impossible to scroll fully as it sticks to the top all the way and then gets obscured by the footer? Who decided to make the breadcrumbs in 12px font next to a gigantic 3.42857rem (comes out to 48px!!) current thing title?

It feels like the Internet is back to where it was in the 90s where you had malicious popup windows all over the place. I remember when browsers started adding popup blocking as a core feature, and also adblockers became a thing thanks to Firefox's extensions.

Now the difference is that the popups are within the page, rather than opening a new browser window. Since the browser has slowly become the window through which we do everything on computers, moving the popups inside the window pane makes sense.

The adblockers will catch up (I hope), but in the meantime I just avoid websites that are known to suck (which is nearly all mainstream sites these days).

It finally hit me that the whole point of that crap is to cause you to accidentally click on ads that you're completely uninterested in.

On mobile in particular there are sites that move the content around in such a way that when you click on a link in the content it will move an ad to the place you want to click -- KA-CHING!

They must use machine learning or A.I. to make it work just "right".

I wonder what percentage of Google's ad clicks come from people clicking an ad for something they would have ended up at anyway, because it's exactly what they were searching for. Especially with their deceptive bullshit ad placement on mobile results.

See: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

Its conclusions are overdrawn (for example ignoring businesses that don't already have a brand presence). But it makes intuitive sense for the scenario you mention.

I posted this a while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105484

DonHopkins on May 18, 2018 [-]

Reminds me of one of Microsoft's first Dynamic HTML demos: There were two buttons, one labeled "Our Web Site", the other labeled "Our Competitor's Web Site".

When you moved the mouse over the "Our Competitor's Web Site" button, it would quickly slide out from under your cursor before you could click it!

Then when you stopped moving your mouse, the "Our Web Site" button would slyly slide right underneath your mouse!

Dammit Microsoft!!! ;)

I've noticed a similar pattern on news sites that embed screen-height ads into articles: if you attempt to scroll by swiping up on the ad (or sometimes, within a perimeter of the ad), the swipe gesture is ignored and you're sent to the advertiser. Ever after, I never see another ad on that site because I immediately go to reader mode upon loading an article.

Eventually, advertisers will get wise to this. Ideally, that would take the form of embedded ad copy. Realistically, they'll convince sites to break reader mode.

If you linger over a link the ad won’t suddenly appear. Most likely it’s mousedown, move ad under cursor, change href before onclick fires, follow new link.

It’s just too perfectly timed for it not to be some event handling trickery.

I just avoid those sites - if your site is unusable or the blocking I use makes your site unusable then I'm just gonna move on. Create a bad user experience at your own peril.

Is it common for site developers to test with ad blocking and other usability tools?

I find this most with sites that use a 3rd party for something. Sometimes the 3rd party analytics won't load and that breaks the entire site.

There are plenty of sites that detect ad blockers and block content until you allow ads or pay.

Publishers like to make it all about ads and revenue while ignoring the train-wreck that is tracking for personalized ads. I'll look at first-party ads that don't track. Don't share my use and browsing history with others. Respect is a two way street, to get respect you have to give respect.

I'm not even sure it's common for a lot of these website ls to test with a phone on its side. Sometimes between bars at the bottom and top there is no room for the actual site.

i would bet no, because their bosses are pushing more and more ads down people's throats because their businesses are dying and they DEFINITELY don't want to hear how functional it is or isn't with ad blockers. In fact, hey why haven't you implemented ad-blocking detectors yet?! Get on that!

I was reading an article from FastCompany the other day on my iPhone, until a circle requesting my email address covered half the screen.

The target size on the 'close' icon was unbearably small, to the point where I tried tapping it three times only to have this giant circle covering the content jump around the screen like it was having a seizure, only to end up larger than it was before - it had somehow zoomed in while the rest of the content didn't zoom.

Worse are the sites that include a large header bar along with an ad bar at the bottom, along with interstitial ads in the article. I've had several of these pages where I would close the ad at the bottom only for it to re-appear several seconds later as I scrolled down the screen.

I resort to manually removing <div>'s that contain ad-related content from the page if I really need the content - in the cases that Reader Mode doesn't exist.

I have enable Reader Mode by default set up on my iPhone. It's immensely useful.

UBlock origin is really the only effective ad blocking platform these days, it seems - I consistently get requests to disable AdBlock Plus when I'm using it.

> The target size on the 'close' icon was unbearably small, to the point where I tried tapping it three times only to have this giant circle ...

I just close the whole page when this stuff happens. It's not worth it, and some small part of my mind hopes that it shows up in the site usage telemetry.

How do you get the iPhone to go into reader mode by default?

It's under Settings > Safari > Reader.

Thank you!

A lot of sites become free of all this crap when you have JS disabled; especially news ones, which often still have good static content you can read. I recommend giving it a try --- and whitelisting those sites you use regularly which really do require it.

I always think of sites like these when someone on HN claims that the web will disappear unless I turn off my ad blocker.

If CNET, Forbes, and these other sites disappeared absolutely nothing of value would be lost.

If they provide absolutely nothing of value why do you read them?

SEO. Try to search for anything anymore without being trapped in an endless sea of infuriatingly-designed ad-encrusted bullshit. I often end up going through multiple results only to find they were a trap to generate page views or ad clicks.

I've recently started experimenting with adding "-site:.com" to web searches.

This ... is frequently an improvement.

I don't read them.

Out of habit probably.

(Re)posted as I'd just run across an issue with Yet Another Online Book Reader that wastes 25-50% or more of screen space with unnecessary screen elements.

I'd reported the issue to the institution in question. In this case, the default viewer is embedded in a web page with no "maximise" functionality. There's a partial workaround of going directly to the viewer page, but that has a persistent header which, when added to the browser and Android elements that are then persisted (status bar, tabs, nav bar) chew up fully 25% of the vertical real estate of the screen.

Which is only just usable (9" Android tablet) for viewing scanned-in books when those are fully maximised, though in portrait mode that works pretty well.

The point being that even a very small persistent element can result in a large reduction in useful screen space, and in many cases makes the difference between a useful/usable and entirely useless interface.

The crap being rendered on most websites is ... just plain bad.

Reader mode, where that's available, is great. I'm a frequent user of https://outline.com/ There are others (one recently linked heavily in HN comments).

I’ve found the following list to help with “dickbars” and other modern nonsense.

https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances

I sometimes browse with Dillo and there's what you might call the "Dillo-compatible" web, which is often IMO nicer than the "full" fancy web. I think they're working on adding JS, so it will probably all end in tears.

https://www.dillo.org/

FWIW, I think a web reboot with some sort of deliberately-constrained client and protocol(s) would be fun. (In the spirit of e.g. https://tildeverse.org/ )

Just bring back Gopher. I think there are a hundred or two sites operational even today.

I was just on Smithsonian Magazine and it's a disgrace. See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/20-best-small-towns-vi...

Is this not the magazine for the US's main national museums?

Here is the bookmarklet I use for dickbar removal, it works a lot of the time. Use at your own risk; urldecode and read thoroughly before use:

https://pastebin.com/raw/41WxsFY3

Google News on mobile has reached a new low with their un-dismissable "There is a new version of Google News available" dickbar when reading. Even worse, it pops up even when you're reading a story.

blocking Google "YOLO" sign-in prompts: https://superuser.com/q/1414410/122042

Oh, those ones are horrible on Medium. They pop up exactly where the close button for a different banner shows up!

OP's website isn't much more readable either, in my opinion. The color scheme is horrible, and the main text isn't much wider than that in the Fortune screenshot.

I'm getting 12-15 words per line vs 3-4 on fortune.

the color scheme is debatable but anything other than black on white has people who don't like it. I find it rather nice, myself, but it may fail basic contrast checking for accessibility purposes.

Fair points. https://outline.com (or Reader Mode in sane browsers such as Firefox / Safari) helps markedly.

I see zero ads and content that covers most of the page. If you don't like it, Reader mode works perfectly well.

Its super readable on ios.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com