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Comment by katsume3 | Hacker News Reader

I find it ironic that this article talks about the user losing out to aggressive (and intrusive) advertising on the web, but presents me with an un-closeable modal window[0] asking me to subscribe to their blog. Note: I have JS disabled by default, and had to temporarily enable JS to view the article, but it's still intrusive and annoying for users.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/SQSHh0i

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Curious to why you had to turn on JS to view the article. The article is contained, in its entirety, in the initial page load. I use a modified version of links that doesn't even have javascript to turn on and the page popped open, as most do, without distractions.

Erase the /tnamp/ at the end of the URL and try without https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages ?

I got the popup message, but could delete it with the element inspector. But I still dislike the large font size and narrow margins, so I also disabled CSS and that fixed it.

I find it ironic that Firefox can not render the content at that link. Or maybe the opposite of ironic, ie ironic.

Interesting, I'm not getting that modal. Have you recently read some other articles by The Nation?

Is it an advertisement when it’s the same property that you are in? That’s like HBO advertising the next episode of a show you are watching.

Yes. And I find it annoying when HBO plays ads for their shows before starting what I have selected to watch. They started doing this a year or two ago.

Yes, though it does become a fuzzy line.

I believe it would not be advertising to display the next episode of a series, or even auto play it. But it would be advertising to display a different series or film.

For a fuzzier one, how about a newspaper providing links to their other stories at the bottom of an article that you have read? Typically I gain nothing by ingesting more of a particular publication's writing, so that could be an ad rather than useful functionality. Perhaps not in a special circumstance such as if I am trying to catch up on news local to that publication.

I don't really mind links to other articles at the bottom of the article that I'm reading. I mean, yes, it's a kind of advertising, but it's not intrinsically intrusive. If a site brings up a modal popup while I'm scrolling an article saying "OMG ENTER YOUR EMAIL HERE TO GET NOTIFIED WHENEVER WE WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING [or click this tiny text that says "no" in the most passive-aggressive phrasing we could think of]", that's a different issue.

(I kind of wonder if internet advertising would be a lot less hated if it had developed with a culture of restraint rather than maximum in-your-faceness, although to be fair, I'm not sure how that could ever have happened.)

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