You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting
mastodon.technology
mastodon.technology
The worst part is that uBlock Origin's element picker doesn't work on Firefox for Android (or if it does, I haven't figured out how to use it), so on the one platform where it's maximally annoying I can't do anything to block it.
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And I don’t care what else Jimmy Wales has done, for profit or otherwise — Wikipedia is a goddamn gift and the world would be hurt tremendously if it ever shut down. It’s probably the only non-profit I donate to regularly.
Right now, fandom.com is basically unusable. Unfortunately, as some info that is there is nowhere else.
For me it is mjg59 and maybe Miguel de Icaza, also maybe Linus Torvalds
Even legendary names are just humans. TBL and his support for DRM. LT's notorious personality. Page & Schmidt and completely losing sight of the helpfulness they started from.
Worship / revere / appreciate no one. Filter their good, acknowledge their bad, find a path past them to something better, and know you'll probably be corrupted by something along the way unless you somehow transcend your own DNA.
It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.
For me - no problem. I have a few side projects and I shell out around 15 - 25 Euros each month.
But I know a lot of people who would love to do stuff like that and have no way of at least being easily reimbursed by the community for their efforts.
A community of 50 people could be financing this with 20 cents each per month.
But as privacy intrusive advertising became the norm no solution ever grew enough to become feasible for the masses.
I remember the flattr button. I used flattr for a while. But in the end I stopped.
tl;dr 10 bucks are not cheap to anybody. I wish easy micropayments were a thing.
I'm aware of this, but you need to keep in mind that we were one of the largest wikis on Wikia (in the top 30 iirc). That's the only reason it cost $10/month.
Most of the wikis on Wikia were tiny, got small traffic, and could have probably been hosted with mine on my VM without even affecting mine.
Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".
Is that actually a bad thing?
I have no idea about video playback controls, but in every other instance I've noticed where sites implement their own custom versions of browser controls, it's been absolutely terrible.
Custom scrollbars, or lack thereof. Custom drop-down lists, which never support keyboard input properly. And so on.
And even if I'm wrong, and custom video playback controls are somehow desirable, why should they be supported for any event except onclick?
obvious example would be articles with scrolling effects (eg. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-...), and need to autoplay videos when they scroll into view. That said, even if you restricted it to onclick, I don't imagine it's too hard for a page to receive a stray click (eg. if you're randomly selecting stuff) to trigger playback.
As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.
Forking the content itself is easy but good luck beating Fandom on a search page.
Although checking the AO3 wiki page, man I didn't expect them to have hosting costs that high.
Do you have a project site? I might be interested in contributing.
The site in question is https://www.poewiki.net
Still sucks to have to add "overwiki" or "uesp" to search terms all the time.
Basically, somebody was able to “prove” to Higher-Up Managers that $X number of these videos were “watched” or “engaged with” (or whatever today’s BS lingo is), and therefore the business “benefited” in some way by “reaching” more people. Profit?
In reality, at least in my case, what happens is: (1) I say “WTF!?!?”, (2) I make a mental note to never ever visit the site again, and (3) (sadly) I see it again and again at different sites.
When I worked at a rather large publisher they did a deal like this because someone promised a large truck of revenue by a company.
For a site that was badly monetized (because they it was over-weighed with ads and poorly engineered to begin with) this was seen as something they could not say no to.
Again, it is a slow race to the bottom.
I can assure you that often these deals are done by the business-side without consultation with product/engineering.
Admit defeat.
Get used to just making a barely livable income, like the rest of us.
Stop begging. Stop the obnoxious ads. Stop the shady subscription schemes. Enough with the .99 cent for six week promos. We obviously don't value you enough to give your access to our debit cards.
Newspapers you lost the war.
The sooner you realize it the better.
Follow the PBS model at this point.
(And I realize the importance of non-biased news. I wouldn't mind seeing tax money going to certain high quality organizations.)
Sure, you might cross-check an article once in a blue moon, but most people consume news through a link that was sent to them by someone inside their bubble. And once they read the headline, there's 0 reason to click to another link with the same story ever again. So the links might as well be hosted in one place, say NY times or CNN. It doesn't really matter where.
The second part of the issue is that the barrier to entry into modern "journalism" evaporated with the advent of social media. You no longer need to own a printing press, or self-host a blogging platform even.
Have a twitter account? You're a journalist! Have a twitter bot that follows a bunch of local news sources? You're a newspaper! No longer do you need to own a printing press or an editorial staff. Want an "Opinion Section"? Tweet something that sparks outrage and watch angry replies pour in!
The only remaining barrier to entry is high-end investigative journalism-whistleblowing. And that's always been a tiny niche and hard to monetize.
- Keeps the 1st place winner on their toes
- Reports to the losing voters
- Can do local news
- Can talk to people
Otherwise, all those hopeful candidates go back to focusing on their living and leaving those "losing" voters without any representation (seriously, how can there be no representation for the leftover votes and assuming they're not rich).
Yes, tech is better than most other jobs, but most tech jobs just give you the middle class life many people had 20-30 years ago (aside from the tech gadgets that didn’t exist 20-30 years ago that even the poor have now). In terms of large expenses and free time rather than gadgets, we’re no better than the middle class of the last generation.
Which is and should be disappointing given that it’s one of the best jobs available.
I just don't waste my money on stupid things like paying other people to make my sandwiches and drinks, or gadgets that are priced as 10x what they cost to make.
However, I think there's still a bunch of niches that can be exploited, to both personal and societal benefit, if you explicitly give up on becoming a billionaire with a monopoly over locked in users.
Basically, find something that would be a Billion dollar global business, and then do it on a small local scale in a non-user hostile way.
Think about all the negative things you (or rather the self-directed corporation you create) would do once you've locked in your audience to get those billions (more intrusive ads, clickbait, adding gambling elements to your kid focused app etc.) Then actively prevent yourself from doing them via some kind of organisational structure, like a B corp or non-profit. In game theory terms, this is burning your boats to force yourself to go in a specific direction even if tempted to retreat.
This lets people buy into the idea without the feeling that they're going to get stabbed in the back later.
Do all the things a genuinely user focused company would do if they weren't afraid of going out of business.
You might not be able to employ thousands of marketers, salesmen etc. but can you make a decent software salary without slaving for an ad business? Being able to locate anywhere, work for yourself and possibly have tax benefits of running a charity may swing the decision.
If enough geeks do this, you could end up with some co-operative federation of small independent orgs, like a version of GNU, Linux, Unix for replacing the current web's Facebook's and Amazon's, just as they did to Solaris and Oracle.
I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him or small scale version of him.
At the moment most of that energy seems aimed at VC backed small companies that use the "changing the world" motivation and then later sell out.
Co-ops in a variety of industries, fair-trade, ethical makeup and others have developed similar models with reasonable success, someone just needs to perfect the formula for user facing web apps.
> I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him
LOL, yes, this represents the 1 in 1,000,000 extreme of programmer celebrity that is far more than anyone could reasonably hope for.
Also, why don't we tech people lead by example and build non-profits and cooperatives that provide better software/services? See for example the successes of framasoft, sourcehut...
It's maybe not the best, but it's also not evil. And by that standard "somebody had a good day". I won't blame them. That's what teams, managers, corporate cultures, capitalism, the system or whatever incentive for, and that's what they get.
A placement that has high first play rate but a terrible 5sec event firing will just be worth nothing. In a programmatic world it means you'll get little to no bids for it or a default placement with payment in the fraction of cents per thousands.
Its usually a deal with a 3rd-party that gives the guaranteed revenue based on views per week/month.
You might argue this is to do with advertisers and so on, but this also happens on the BBC News website too. I recently clicked on a video story and after the video was finished I didn't notice there was a 5 second timer and suddenly I got a totally different video play by itself.
WHY?!
No, screw that as well. If there's a text article with a video attached, I don't want to be interrupted by the autoplaying video while I'm reading the text.
But these companies have completely different goals than the BBC: they aim to abuse and exploit their users as much as possible.
Because that's how the web team is measured and rewarded. Management wants to see more view views, longer time on site, etc. Leadership doesn't understand nor care about a shite UX (so no one lower in the org is concerned).
It seems like they're desperately trying to believe they have a social network on their hands rather than a collection of disparate knowledge bases, and they're trying to sell this non-existent 'fandom' culture to visitors.
Now imagine that the cable can reach up into your car at the exact moment that you cross over it and pull down your person and your entire life's history.
The shady side of it, is on private property, like car parks, where those rules don't apply.
---
[1] Automatic NUMBER plate recognition.
You're being tracked by your car and phone bluetooth MAC addresses. That's how the "X minutes to exit Y" signboards work. They time how long it takes to see a particular MAC address appear at the next receiver.
What does this mean? Are they just measuring radio power levels in the 2.4GHz spectrum, and using that to determine whether a car is there or not? Or are they actually somehow capturing bluetooth signals, decoding them, and extracting identifiers (eg. MAC) from them?
I, as a nerd, get to bypass all the dark patterns, either by just being informed, using specialized tools or other workarounds that let me use the service (and so increase its reach) but let others take the hit in getting sucked into the adverts or rage-based communities.
It feels like there should be a social movement to use tools that don't employ these tactics on anyone. It might mean a short term reduction in quality of life, but it equally could be long term beneficial.
How many people struggled with a thousand different sub-par experiences for decades so that today Valve can launch a handheld Linux based gaming PC with Wine based emulation of basically their entire catalog.
It's an amazing collective achievement of society, but many people take the short term view because 5 or 10 or 15 years ago it seemed outlandish that X could ever be achieved with open code and shared data. How can we get more people to take the better long term view? "Would you want your kid to use this app?"
App idea: take the core code of an open source ad-blocker, make it slightly less harsh, but totally block any site that fails it's tests rather than block only the ads. Provide alternate news stories or whatever from sites that are better. Similar to Google punishing deceptive sites, but decentralised.
(I've noticed this recently with Google provided news stories. They let me say "I'm not interested in topic" and "not interested in this specific site" which I use whenever the clickbait annoys me, but there's no generic "no clickbait please" option, nor any way to help protect other users from it who may be unaware of the dangers)
You could add a whitelist feature to the extension for YouTube et al.
Sure, it would be nice if websites didn't do shitty UX, but as others have said, don't visit those sites.
The other extension idea I had was one which would reference a database of sites known to use dark UX, and warn you not to click thru.
I myself run a userscript on Google that removes results from websites that I'd prefer to avoid.
I usually just blacklist these websites in my Pihole.
...such as one of those "totally-GDPR-compliant" accept-cookies-please modals maybe? :) I am 100% certain this is how a large number of sites bypass autoplay restrictions.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...
Or even better, endless server stream for an animated gif.
No.
Short MP4 files should replace GIFs. MP4 files are more efficient than the terrible compression GIF files have. I've made a few video game pages where auto-playing MP4s were essential at giving the right message... discussion of tactics and "movement" of dynamic video game stuff is pretty common. (Any game requires the player to gain instincts that "predict the future", and short GIFs and/or MP4 files really help show off key moments).
Factorio thing I wrote a while back:
No. What you say is simply factually inaccurate. I've looked at the web page in your URL and it would be much better without distracting auto-playing video.
The video should play then the user wants it to play. Is that really so hard to understand?
But you won't. Because the clips are 5 to 20 seconds long. So its faster to just wait for the loop than even to move your hand to the mouse.
How are you scrolling? When I’m browsing and reading my hand lives on the mouse. On mobile it’s even easier to click to play. In either case, clicking on a video takes less than 1 second.
I do agree that extremely short loops can be a different story, but 20 seconds is by far over that time for me. 5 seconds is around the threshold.
I’m sure this preference varies by person.
My hand lives either on the space bar, or the page-down button. Both of which are far more efficient at scrolling through pages of text.
Perhaps its "meme culture" or Tik-Tock culture. But there's a style of super-short 5-second to 20-second video where looping makes far more sense than clicking.
--------
In either case, I've solicited feedback of this style in a variety of gaming forums from different communities. They mostly have had positive-experiences with tutorials / short videos written in this manner. Awesomenauts, Factorio, and Puyo Puyo. Three very different communities, three times they seemed to like the content and video/writing style of merged text + video.
Call it "Tumblr style", or "Tik-tok" style.
On your website your videos don't auto play for me on mobile, by the way, which I found convenient because it's tap on tap off. It's x-overflowing the videos though, which is inconvenient.
Of course they didn't. If they did, the site wouldn't work the way it works now.
It's just another example of "I know better than my users" attitude.
Funny, everyone likes the autoplaying GIFs in this other context, but they hate it here.
I never want auto playing videos. Ever. It is my personal preference and i should be able to express that in my browser, overriding your preference, as the author of the web page.
Just like gif was in 90s.
The client has two important values: attention/time and battery. Your preference screws both.
There's a couple of solutions to that (such as only looping once or for X seconds or not showing it).
Either way, you think too much from content creator PoV, IMO.
The web was made in such a way that clients are able to (massively) modify the content or the way it is shown. If you don't fancy that then you don't fancy one of the core foundations of the web. I use all kind of extensions to modify my web experience. If your PoV would become dominant, I simply would not use WWW anymore.
Default experience matters because most people don't use extensions, or not the same ones (power users do) so you get your way anyway. And I don't get my way on Firefox Mobile because they decided to axe a lot of extensions, and I don't get my way on work Citrix because admins decided which extensions are worthwhile (they block all video stuff, btw).
Your post has no content explaining why you wrote "No."
This is a bad habit that makes your sentiment confusing.
One thing to note, however, is that it must be without sound. Auto playing sound of any sort is complete garbage.
Agreed. I don't think I've ever felt the need to have autoplaying sound, and I struggle to think of any benefit from it.
I'm willing to keep my mind open, if anyone knows of a good website that effectively creates an experience using autoplay sound, please give me it.
Because auto-playing motion is something I should be able to disable. It distracts me and I don’t want it. Ever.
I'm not going to change my writing / guide style just because some people outside of those gaming communities don't like the way they work. Its one thing if you were the target audience, its a totally different thing if you're just a meta-commentator talking about the internet in general.
The feedback I get is like "That's a confusing paragraph", or "That's a bad strategy. You should be writing about X instead".
No one actually cares about the auto-playing videos, unless they're not working. (On page X on Safari, that video doesn't seem to be working was one complaint I got... and then I had to transcode my MP4 settings to get it working there).
Safari didn't block no-sound-track video for this reason. It's a good reason.
Still, I agree. Despite worry, it may be a good thing its entering mainstream slowly.
Anyone can stand up a Mastodon instance. There are companies which specialise in fully-hosted turnkey services. And as noted, there are many instances which are free to join for the asking.
The system overall is in no way closed on this regard.
That said, individuals (or instances) which engage in antisocial behaviours or prove nuisances may find that they are blocked by numeous others.
In general, what exists is widely available but also subject to local rules. There are instances which run strongly counter to the mainstream culture on the Fediverse. They exist and can talk amongst themselves, but have limited (and often no) interaction with the mainstream of the rest of the network.
When posting a poll on HN, it of course has to reach the minimum number of upvotes to reach front page (which I believe for Polls and Ask HN is a bit higher than regular submissions).
Ping me: @dredmorbius@toot.cat
It ought to be trivially possible, going on from things like grease monkey and ad blocking scripts to add a bit of user intent guessing / content filtering / simplified view logic.
But there's always an arms race with stuff like this. Our robot butler would be able to figure out how to parse the web today, but the advertisers would completely change the structure of pages tomorrow.
Facebook used to have their ads wrapped in `<div class='advertisement'>`. Now, they're buried a thousand divs deeps, and the ads and content both have nonsensical, non-semantic class names.
People in the know have the right extensions to block stuff and get past paywalls using the right snapshot services etc. Firefox can't officially offer this, but they can let people do whatever they want if they run their own extensions.
If this was common place or convenient for the masses then it would be actively discouraged or outlawed, similar to what happened with Napster and MP3s.
Sorry but Firefox is mostly on the dark side these days. That shouldn't be too surprising since most of its money comes from google.
It does have a setting to stop embedded video from playing sound unless you send an event, but it is too easy for obnoxious pages to evade and play sound against your wishes.
> I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
- Tim Berners Lee
So you'd need a team, and as somebody with a tech and a library background, good luck getting those two groups to communicate and work together. Doing it without the information seeking background just recreates the issues with the modern web where your 'robot butler' comes back with a ton of irrelevant information, and doing it without the tech background just gets you a bunch of librarians high-fiving themselves over 'solving' a problem using outdated tech and is used by 20 people because it doesn't scale well.
Unfortunately we aren't very good at making robot butlers yet, and copyright severely limits what they can do (provided they are running as a third party service) in the first place.
That's what an RSS reader does.
If that's your norm on TV, sure, why wouldn't a web page work like that? It baffles me just like OP, but no more than it does on television programmes.
I may well have missed thier introduction.
I too find these sites despicable. But usually, by the time the video play you've already been fighting some popup about joining, dismissed a browser native window saying this site is asking to send you notifications in the future, and GRDP @#$%^$%^& "we care about your privacy so here is a booklet about our privacy policy, in your face" with select all-of-which cookies you'd like to not, maybe (one time) receive in a game of dark patterns.
I have an outline.com bookmarklet at that point, which I click as fast as possible to get out of this mess!
javascript:window.location='https://outline.com/'%20+%20window.locationthe main problem is that it's impossible to distinguish between "autoplaying video that's annoying" and "animation that's part of the page". If you're willing to block both, firefox allows you to change the autoplay policy from "allow videos by default but block sound" to "block all videos".
A combination of the "I don't care about cookies" extension and an adblocker with a couple tracking blacklists should avoid both the cookie popups and the tracking cookies themselves.
These days I just click Reader Mode for almost any news site. I wish I could somehow set domains to always open in Reader Mode.
That's more effort than I put in; I just don't bother reading the articles when the site makes it too hard.
I know no-one likes them, but there must be some increase in engagement somewhere that causes the marketing folks to keep pushing these things.
Personally I find it makes the articles very hard to read without reader mode. Sites owned by G/O Media (The Onion, Kotaku) are particularly egregious. On mobile you can typically only get about 20-30 words of the article on screen at any one time (that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one).
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/a-merger-of-chumbox-monger...
Users can leave bounties on sites and once the bounties pile up high enough somebody will come along, sanitize it for everybody, and collect the bounty. Sorry about your ad revenue, next time don't piss off the masses.
The bounties will be public, so site maintainers can see if they're on the list and address the issues. If the community decides that the redesign addresses the problem, the bounty goes back to its issuers.
Consider also the sybil vector; I could just use a proxy network to vote millions of times for a site I'd like to see targeted. Or how do you ensure that 1 human = 1 vote? Throw in some PoW? No.
I'm not for building easily available tools for remotely and unilaterally coordinating DDoS attacks.
browser vendors can blacklist it.
>How do you consider legitimate traffic illegal?
It's fairly obvious that sending traffic for the sake of generating traffic isn't "legitimate" by any means. Your excuse is flimsier as websites that sell ddos services as "stress testing" services.
How would they do that? They can remove them from their list of extensions, but I can just download it from elsewhere and add it manually, right?
In other browsers you need your addons to be signed. Firefox implemented this because of the terrible malware that got installed with adware installers. With administrator access, they kept changing every setting Firefox added to get the addon to load, so they made the entire loading system dependent on signatures. Luckily, adware developers aren't smart enough to load code into the signed binaries to work around this limitation.
You could do it, but it's more of a hassle than you'd expect.
A few people who re-compile their Firefox or Chromium to get rid of that requirement will not make a great DDoS botnet.
Or just share the site's reputation with other extension users.
What actually to do when you find someone's website annoying: Don't go there, it's not your site. Same thing I do when I don't like a bar, I leave, I don't start clogging the drain with toilet paper
How many independent browser engine variants are viable today? Three?
Ramping the difficulty of that problem has specifically limited choice and options.
One class of devices (iOS) mandates a single browser engine (Webkit / Safari). Android has a slight pretense of greater openness, but bundles Chrome into most apps.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
The bomb threats and car bomb threats did get me talking to the sheriff about concealed carry permit, but I backed away.
The poor woman that answered the phone for a shared office space quit.
At Weebly, people bought DDOS but didn’t realize that every site had the backing of our entire infrastructure.
Yeah, no.
So it's legal, moral, and acceptable that software and websites are made, by you folk reading this here website no less, to consume orders of magnitude more resources than they need to, just so that web companies---you folk, remember---can make some stats go up and turn them into money. It's okay to make the web less accessible to poor people, disabled people, people in places with bad internet connection, perfectly functional devices which have only become unusable because of this whole bullshit &c, it's okay to mine shitcoins in people's browsers, to sell their life for profits, it's okay to literally get into their private life and play loud videos in there if they don't know how to make that stop, but it's immoral, illegal, unacceptable to retaliate? Immoral and triggering for you lot for folk to just jokingly entertain such idea?
This whole business is basically turning wasted money and energy into dollars, not really different than blockchain bullshit essentially.
Imagine the resources wasted to produce and consume this nonsense went to making computers user friendly, programmable and accessible. Like, why should my browser occupy ~6G of memory for ~50 pages which could all be just pure HTML and a couple PDFs? Why should I need 6G of memory when 1 or 2GB must do? Why tf a computer with 1GHz or 666MHz CPU can't handle the web, ie a bunch of text documents? This whole bubble is creating immense amount of waste, and it's nonsensical to just limit your thinking to "oh, some annoying websites, just run uBlock". IMHO comes from the same place with "if car-dominated cities bother you and you feel unsafe, just get a car, or better, an SUV". What about fixing the city? What about climate and pollution?.
Your argument is like saying if a barbershop always has 2 hour wait times and has crappy music playing on an excessively loud radio, it's ok to retaliate against them.
If every barbershop is like this, that's sad and should be fixed, but it still doesn't make it ok to retaliate against them.
So yeah if my barbershop is playing loud music I ask them to turn it down please, and if barber queues are too long, maybe it's time for barbers to be nationalised because the private sector is failing to keep up, no?
Also, please don't post supercilious putdowns of the rest of the community. You have no idea who you're talking to here (none of us does). That sort of rhetoric is not only flamebait, it's reliably a marker of extremely low comment quality. We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, not users acting like they're better than others.
Edit: you did it even worse here too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29456018, and worse yet at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28688315. Would you please review the site guidelines and stick to them? They explicitly ask you not to post like this, and we ban accounts that keep doing it.
But then I remember I often implement those features as a developer. And sometimes, when I ask the marketing people or product manager, even they look to think it's a terrible idea. They are also forced to release something BS but can increase some KPI.
Nah, they find sticking to the 90's punch the monkey style ads and blaming FB and Google for "coopting" the market to be a better strategy.
So they exist. They're just not very tech savvy, and they like the way its been since thats the way its always been, even if they have to change it to make it so.
But the reason news sites have autoplaying videos isn't for the power users on hackernews, its for people like my mom, who will click those links AND watch the videos.
The resolution is jack up to the lowest so I can easily see from the couch.
This is a fringe case as most people arent enjoying the Internet on their TV via a web browser and wireless mouse. Nevertheless those nuisance videos are the worst in my view on the TV ... take up the screen and there's no X button. Always just have to hit the back button quickly and not bother reading the site.
You can argue that those full screen "before you leave" popups are annoying, and who in their right mind will abuse users like that?
Then they'll show you the results of A/B testing, prooving 15% more users subscribed thanks to that banner.
We're screwing ourselves over statistics...
Here is the javascript. To use this, you need to create a button on your bookmarks toolbar, and add this as the URL:
javascript:var x = document.querySelectorAll("video");var i;for (i = 0; i < x.length; i++) {x[i].parentNode.removeChild(x[i]);}undefined;
One way to use this bookmarklet is to make a new button by dragging (say) this page's URL to your toolbar, then editing it to set the url to above, and renaming it to FixVid.
Maybe there is a person or two who actually like it, but the dripping sarcasm of the poll's response is saying "whoever you are, you're cretins", and is not quite inviting for a discussion.
I'd love to hear from someone who actually liked this pattern (and many others) as a consumer. It's so alien. Maybe I'd learn something.
Then again, I'm probably going to write that crawling bot that would frequent the sites I read, snip the actual content and deliver it to me via email or my Kindle. Call RMS what you will, but that bit of his digital life is quite clever.
All the same, for such a widely-used dark pattern, the visceral hostile response is absolutely overwhelming.
Think of all the weasly, greasy, contemptuous justifications that have been offerred for this practice. Clearly, someone's lying, and not at all convincingly.
I suspect the overwhelming response from those who sorta tolerate is going to be: well, I want my dose of news, and everyone is doing that anyway, so I suppose that's how things are done today? But maybe there is someone who actually enjoys this. I'd like to hear from them.
Just no. Seriously. That gets me to block your entire video player.
This obv comes at a long term branding cost - but only large brands like New York Times can really afford to care about the long term. Most news sites are commoditized and barely surviving these days =/
I don't agree with the practice, but I also kind of understand why it's there.
"what will the ad-haters use in this future world of 2022? Some amalgamated FlashBlock equivalent that can easily just turn off all the annoying stuff? This line will be blurred and it won't be possible."
I wish I was wrong on these types of things.
This is the real problem. Why wasn't it blocked? We must fix that!
Without many more meanderings, the idea is this: as long as we accept that journalistic organization can be operated as showbusiness entities, and as long as we accept that journalism can (or should) generate profits, we won’t be able to either fix these annoying elements (the embedded autoplay video, and 1000s of others) nor the generalized and growing lack of trust in journalism itself.
It might be useful to point out that I say this as a journalist.
Have you ever used skimfeed.com?
don't get it
We can have a web of apps, we just should've kept it separate from our web of documents so that I could only go there when what I wanted was an app.
No wonder why normal people like walled gardens, the UI is more streamlined and (mostly) more respectful.
Oh wow that's actually a good point, never thought about it that way. You are spot on I think, besides some heavy attempts by services to get people to use their apps (especially pronounced on mobile).
Note though that the web has always been annoying users, or at least many website have. I remember how in the 2000s, Firefox was advertised as being able to block pop ups, to give an example.
I don't miss the days of Verizon attempting to hawk songs and ringtones on a janky, zero-upside store for $5 a pop.
Have you seen someone use Facebook as of recent? Respectful?
Regular reddit users forget how bad the default experience is when linking to it.
(You can restore the old, more hn-like appearance by replacing the "www" with "old" in any reddit permalink)
Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. all do have very clean UIs for such big game. But they are pretty hostile for advanced usage (on purpose).
They do this stuff.
I hope I never meet him.
Trust me, I do try to steer discussion in directions I think would prove more valuable for HN and its readers. There's some help in this through the 2nd Chance and invited submissions queues. See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
https://news.ycombinator.com/invited
That said, the hivemind has certain rather predictably-popular themes. I wish myself it would steer more substantive, but site mechanics make that challenging.
That said, the unanimity of the response, given the ubiquity of the practice, shines a light on, oh, say, the "consumer value" arguemnt usually put forth. And that's possibly worth noting.