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Comment by Pigo | Hacker News Reader

It's so aggravating going to these news sites. It's almost as bad as the days of search bars installed in your browser. I'm not on the biggest screen in the world, but I can't even see the title of the article. https://i.imgur.com/UYT7qpN.png

I've been to plenty of other sites just as bad too. It instantly kills my desire find the article and read it.

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The fact that we're seriously talking about having to install plugins and manually munge the HTML of an everyday corporate site just to make it minimally navigable is, in my mind, absolute madness.

It really is a return to the bad old days of the late 90's web where one wrong click would kill your browser with 20 new popups. Except this time these corporations are willingly doing it to themselves. I wouldn't have believed it even a few years ago. Surely this must be killing engagement on their sites?

The solution is to pay for journalism.

I don't think that's all there is to it. For the first part of last year I started paying for a subscription to several news sites of various scopes. I still got some annoying ads, albeit fewer, but annoying emails and other messages increased because they needed my engagement (because they were STILL selling ads), and my daily reading was still overwhelmingly flooded with click-bait style journalism (again, they need my engagement and that's what they think will engage me).

I agree: I think the dirty little secret about advertising supported journalism (or really most websites producing new "content" with some regular frequency) is that much of the "content" is absolutely vapid fast food.

I don't know what an internet without all of the worthless ad-supported "content" looks like, but however it looks, suspect it is the steady-state equilibrium that will exist in the future. Because the ad-supported business model -- bad UX by definition -- is so obviously a house of cards.

Crowdfunding could do it, but it comes with its own fairly large transaction costs. Most crowdfunding platforms are also far from politically neutral, which is a problem if this is supposed to be the future of journalism.

I can imagine a vision of the future where the internet has become more akin to a public utility, like electricity, and the novelty of websites has worn off.

In this world, I can imagine a patronage model working: wealthy individuals support particular journalists, perhaps privately, and the infrastructure of the internet is used to get the word out in a way that is analogous to the chat or messaging of the present.

Yes, the transaction costs of sending money over the internet (even BTC has a pretty high energy-cost per transaction, that's ultimately paid by BTC hodlers) mean that the relatively-wealthy are far more likely to provide this kind of support. It's a lot cheaper for one person to fund a journalist, blogger etc. with $10,000 than for 10,000 people to fund her with $1 each.

I wonder what the breakeven cost would be of a monthly subscription to ad-free journalism on the quality level of the New York Times (or your preferred equivalent). Something like $200-300 maybe? If it were actually ad-free and zero-clickbait, 100% high quality journalism, I'd be willing to pay about that much.

I wouldn't be willing to pay that much, maybe 10% of that. But the actual cost to the newspaper would be far higher. What you pay could be as low as that cost / # subscribers, or higher if there's no competition.

Ironically because you’re the type of person willing to pay for journalism, you’re in the most valuable demographic for advertisers.

The advertising supported web has created perverse incentives, which doesn’t serve web users.

I paid for Strava and they still showed inane ads on my feed. Paying for something is no guarantee to remove ads in our revenue obsessed world.

Journalism had almost always been predominantly funded by advertising and rich people looking to influence public opinion.

I don't see how paying for journalism solves anything on itself. You have to pay for specific kinds of journalism and create tools to allow discovery and differentiation of that journalism.

It's pretty simple: paying for journalism means the difference between having journalism and not having journalism.

The value-for-value model is the only solution preventing advertiser influence in journalism.

This is the natural outcome of an ad-supported web, which was always a bad idea. It was only our technoutopianism that let us think that computers were somehow exempt from the forces that operate in other media. If only we had devoted as much time in the 1990s to fixing our business models and our online social dynamics as we did to fixing bugs, the world would be in much better shape today.

It's unfortunate that advertising became a kinda, sorta, but not really barely good enough (and increasingly less so) monetization mechanism for the web generally--largely because it worked pretty well, albeit with tradeoffs, in other media. Perhaps if it had been an obvious non-starter from the beginning, micropayments or other mechanisms would have been made to work because there was simply no other choice. (And we'd simply have less of the marginal content that people would be unwilling to pay for.)

Of course, that may have meant that sites like YouTube and a lot of other content simply wouldn't exist.

I'm not sure it does work any better in traditional media. When I flip the page in a magazine, and I get a full page about how I'd better buy Johnnie Walker, that's a popup ad as far as I'm concerned. We've just learned to have higher standards on the web.

By "work any better," I was referring to supporting a viable business model. On the web, advertising is increasing intrusive (and data mining) and it still basically doesn't bring in enough money on its own in many cases.

An immediate solution is to enable NoScript on all news sites. Disabling JS speeds up load times to instant and hides most of the cruft. It's working great so far for me (using Firefox on Android).

Use ublock origin and invest time in zapping the offending divs for the sites you frequent. Within a few weeks you'll find the internet a much more pleasant place.

I will check that out, don't believe I've heard of it.

I can utilize tools like these to make things easier for myself. But this view is what the average new reader experiences, it's surprising that they don't care more about that.

true. also firefox has a "reader mode" that strips everything away... but you have to click to activate.

for reference, this[0] is what the above page looked like when I landed on it

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/LyeybN2

What's the right way to use UBO to zap divs that have some sort of random identifier appended to prevent zapping? Is there a regex match mode?

Maybe try a CSS selector based off of the next parent element that does have a permanent identifier? first-child/nth-child and friends can get you a long way.

no good fix here (other than the "nth" approach). Fortunately, most news sites use sensible divs (for now).

are there any community div id lists for common annoying elements? I already have all the defaults in UBO enabled.

If more people paid for journalism, sites like The Guardian’s wouldn’t have to have those banners.

To turn it around: what journalism have you paid for recently?

I do not agree that it is my responsibility to help fix The Guardian's business model.

Maybe the presence of these banners says something important about the value of the content (in this context) and the respect that the organization has for its readers.

I feel like many people are ok with ad supported media, but when you can no longer see the content from all the ads, it gets a bit much.

I actually am willing to pay for journalism, but it becomes a constant research project to find out what source isn't on a biased agenda crusade. Any recommendations on pure journalism source I should check out?

There has never been such a thing as "bias-free" journalism. We all have biases, and so do journalists and their editors.

If you're willing to pay for journalism, find a newspaper – any newspaper – and buy a subscription. I assume from your posts that you're in America, and politically right-of-centre. What about the Wall Street Journal? It broke the Theranos story and many others, and employs a raft of very good journalists doing important work.

The wsj does seem to not cater as much to opinion pieces or clickbait titles. I guess that's what I was asking. I get plenty of opinions and editorials for free these days, I don't want to pay for that even if I agree with them. I miss the outlets that seemed to focus on straight up news.

We had a local paper in my area, The Western Star, that ran for 206 years. It was the last source that I was really dedicated to, because I cared a lot more about local.

RIP Western Star https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p16007coll84

Remember that for a paper like the WSJ or New York Times, opinions/editorials consume a tiny fraction of the budget: an editorial on Theranos might cost the newspaper $500, but the series of articles that eventually led to the downfall of the Theranos might easily cost 100 times that.

Yet we can't all be buying subscriptions for every single online newspaper and magazine(on top of all the streaming services) just to read the occasional article. That just encourages quantity over consistent quality.

There was a day where, if we wanted to read an edition of a newspaper or a magazine, we would pay a dime or a quarter to receive a copy. We could do essentially the same thing on the internet, but for some reason everyone huffs and puffs and insists that it wouldn't work. Yet it hasn't truly been tried. I would certainly "insert" a quarter to receive a day-pass in order to read something I'm interested in. Just give me the option. For the people who don't want to pay, they can choose to view ads and annoying modals.

As far as I can tell all this shows is they didn't expect people to use the site in landscape on an 18.5:9 phone while spoofing a desktop user agent. Which is fair enough since pretty much no one does that.

I've run into honestly much more bizarre stuff without ever venturing outside portrait...

But I assume I'm missing something really obvious.

Haha that screenshot is amazing, its the perfect reflection of what's bad with modern news sites.

Thanks, I truly didn't know if people really understood how bad it can be for new users. If you go to these sites with blockers and extensions, I'm sure it's fine, so they would think I'm exaggerating. I'm on a new machine from work, so I'm seeing some things from an average user's perspective.

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