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Comment by tick_tock_tick | Hacker News Reader

Honestly the site is way too performant to be realistic. All those buttons worked nearly instantly. I'm assuming you're missing the awaited tracking networking calls.

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I am not seeing any autoplaying videos unrelated to the article that pop into a PIP window in the bottom of the screen as you scroll causing the amount that you've scrolled to jump so you lose your place

We will be paying the price for Facebook's 2017-era "Pivot to video" advice for years to come.

I didn't know Facebook _advised_ publishers to pivot to video? I thought that trend started with publishers themselves noticing that video had better engagement?

They overstated the average time that video was viewed in the newsfeed by only counting views of at least 3 seconds in the denominator of the average, but counting views of less than that in the numerator [0]:

> About a month ago, we found an error in the way we calculate one of the video metrics on our dashboard – average duration of video viewed. The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn’t – it reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of “views” of a video (that is, when the video was watched for three or more seconds). And so the miscalculation overstated this metric. While this is only one of the many metrics marketers look at, we take any mistake seriously.

So advertisers, who had believed that video content had high engagement due to the misleading statistics, and so made business decisions based on that (laying off writers in favor of video producers), saw video view times drop 60%-80% after the fix, because the view time was inflated by all the 0.5s-1s views initiated while users were scrolling past videos and not really watching them. This was corrected in 2016 though, but perhaps many news sites, and society in general, are still feeling the effects of writing being deemphasized in favor of video.

[0]: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metric...

I have no idea how anyone browses the web without NoScript.

They give up and browse facebook instead

I had used uBlock Origin for years and years but recently had it with paywalls. Installed NoScript and took a few days to manually OK the stuff I need. Now during a work day, I find I OK something here or there but it’s made everything so much faster and cleaner. I can’t go back.

You can disable / enable js in UBO on per-site basis. You can default disable js and enable when needed, or disable for certain sites only.

Cool, but I have no issues with UBO. My post was about also adding NoScript and much additionally better than has made things.

I used NoScript heavily for years. No ads on Youtube all that time. A couple of months ago something went wrong and I started seeing ads again (wow, that was literally a headache for me). No matter how I configured No Script, I still wasn't able to get rid of the ads. After trying uBlock - because a lot of people here recommended it - it works fine again.

I use ublock, and now somehow now have double the ads in Youtube (the ads auto play, but the actual video does not, and then clicking play on the video triggers a second cycle of ads).

I havent yet figured out what changed in my ublock to cause it.

YouTube Premium is $12/month. If we don't pay for content, the only stuff that will be left is crap.

After all the popups, it needs a last one saying "this site works best in our mobile app".

IMHO, it should be there as soon as you arrive on the site and then reappear on every page load.

And if you click past it to remain on the web version, you're presented with truncated lists ("Download App to read the rest!") or a slew of missing features.

I have an old Instagram account that I created over 10 years ago. At the time, I used it for the photo filters. Never cared about the social networking aspect. Just a month ago I logged into it for the first time in forever, and realized I wanted to delete those old posts. Guess what you can't do from the website? Yeah, delete posts. Need the app for that!

Not surprising. Facebook has very strict rate-limiting for deletion of posts, unfollowing of friends, leaving communities, and anything else that can potentially reduce your "engagement". Disabling it on some platforms was just the next step.

I think it was just never implemented. The web page is fairly basic compared to the app, and AFAIK always has been (although I never used it much and haven't had an account in quite a while). Quite a few products are actually app-only now, without even any sort of web or desktop version.

A few years ago I had trouble using the Dutch thuisbezorgd food service, I think it didn't allow me to change my address or something and just kept erroring out. I contacted support and they told me to use the app. I told them I don't have a smartphone. They said I was out of luck.

I really hate that about Reddit. I liked browsing discussions on my phone occasionally but the web page kept nagging me into using the app instead. So finally I installed it. But now when googling for information and finding Reddit boards about my topic of interest clicking on „use app“ does not open Reddit app but instead directs me to the stupid App store. Useless! But maybe it’s Apple‘s fault here?

Nope. Deep linking to apps is a solved area. Reddit completely drops the ball on this, and has for years. Their engineering is a complete shambles. The only reason they survive is their market share, not for any reason of 'good experience'

haha clone of my comment at the same time

Great minds think alike ;)

I'm almost tempted to apply for a job at Reddit to see why their engineering is such omnishambles. It's impressive in a way. The only good thing I have to say about it is that they're committed to keeping old.reddit.com alive indefinitely.

Because the team that built old.reddit.com has long since left? And now this is the only artifact they have from an era of decent engineering?

Nope. Decent programmers know how to deeplink into apps, it's completely possible.

That includes the vendor of my third-party Reddit app (Now for Reddit).

If I tap a Reddit link from a page of search results, the link opens in the app.

It's shocking that the devs of the official app don't even bother to do even this bare minimum.

Reddit is by far and away the most mismanaged site with hundreds of millions of users. I wonder what the internal politics are like. The leaks have consistently been pretty bad.

Twitch is a strong contender for this accolade too.

Found a tutorial about deep linking into web apps on iOS. Funny enough, they use the „Redd1t app“ as the prime example …

https://medium.com/wolox/ios-deep-linking-url-scheme-vs-univ...

I wonder about Reddit's redesign. Was it a case of malice - we want to force everyone to download our native apps so we can track the users better, so we made our website as unpleasant to use as humanly possible - or incompetence - we over-hired and had too many frontend engineers and UX people with nothing better to do?

There are popups? I didn't see any. Must be my malware blocker in action.

Especially the 'More options' on the cookie popup. Needs to take at least 20 seconds and reload the page

And ads should load later so if you try to click a link the whole page content jumps down when you click and you click the ad instead of the link.

Maybe you can make it so the ad always loads under the cursor?

And my Laptop fan wasn't spinning up with all those Ads. And web page scrolling started to jank.

I was about to say it needs about 7 or 8 additional ads inserted into the text of the article. Ideally they would load at random times and displace text out of the way as you're trying to read so you keep losing your place.

Also, the article itself is clickbaity garbage that you resent yourself for clicking into in the first place.

Needs more `await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, t));`

LGTM

*Merges "changes to apiPromiseFactory.js"

and the "no" button on the cookie prompt didn't open another page with 50 radio inputs, and an intentionally oddly placed reject all (or none at all)

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