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How I Experience the Web Today

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This has been reposted here 8 times before or so?

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=how-i-experience-web-...

Reposts after 12 months are permitted.

There was significant discussion 10 months ago, which would make this a dupe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28280051

That said, I do love the satire.

Nowadays I close a tab at the slightest inconvenience. Want me to subscribe to a newsletter? Close. Allow notification? Close. Privacy popup because you need to spy on me? Close. Close. Close.

There's a very small club of players that I can't afford to reject and you're website is probably not in it.

Same. I even close when YouTube tries to make me watch 2 15-second videos back to back, without the option to skip.

My naive belief is that if enough people leave, they’ll back off.

> My naive belief is that if enough people leave, they’ll back off.

Just like the TV channels did/are doing!

Oh wait ...

But with all the tracking, you'd expect Youtube to know that people are actually going away, while TV channels didn't have that luxury.

Then again, maybe they've seen that people mostly don't go away...

YouTube has enough users that they don't care if you go away. Because if it bothers you enough, you'll pay to stop it.

I subscribe to YouTube Premium and the only time I see an ad on YT is when I'm accidentally logged in as another user.

It’s kinda my point though. I’m sure TV didn’t have 5 minutes of ads every 5 minutes or whatever the ratio is. It slowly built up to that because that’s what people were willing to put up with.

Over time it’s going to be the same with YouTube. People will accept multi-minute ads eventually, so eventually YouTube will run them. It’s only a matter of time.

The only thing that could stop it is if people immediately leave the site when you feel the ads are too long. If that happens enough, it will force YouTube to back off. Naive to think that would happen, but I’m doing my part.

Television's chased off the discerning / discriminating viewers.

I'm well beyond the "I haven't owned one" territory to "I haven't watched in years".

Because of cross-contamination of practices and techniques between commercial and public broadcasting, that includes public broadcasting.

I'll watch an occasional segment on YouTube (with adblocking), but even then, I prefer simply listening to audio (mpv / command-line).

The abuse isn't cost-free, and more attractive demographics will leave. This also means, of course, that the poor or mentally susceptible are left with a far-worse product and more predatory advertising as well.

I’ll go one further. In addition to not watching, My kids have never in their life watched regular tv except visiting someone’s house who does. Those few times they just want to turn it off because it’s “broken and spamy.” “Why does the spam get louder.” “Do they think we care about [thing in ad]” etc.

I was worried they would be more susceptible to ads. Ut it’s the opposite.

Good to hear.

There's also a target market for this content, and you're probably not in it.

Same, though I try Reader Mode first. If that fails, close tab.

On desktop and mobile Android with Firefox, NoScript eliminates a lot of this bullshit. I switched to iPhone last year and I desperately miss Firefox for Android :(

> I switched to iPhone last year and I desperately miss Firefox for Android :(

Self-promotion: I wrote a JavaScript blocking extension for Mobile Safari https://underpassapp.com/StopTheScript/

Oh awesome! Are you aiming for NoScript-like experience? Being able to easily whitelist domains, permanently and temporarily, is crucial. It's not clear from the page you linked if it has a whitelist feature.

Not easily, unfortunately. The extension relies on Safari's built-in permissions model, for technical reasons. It's possible to whitelist domains permanently, but not temporarily. https://underpassapp.com/StopTheScript/advanced.html

Looks like that whitelist is also only per top-level domain. E.g. it will allow all on Youtube.com or allow none, instead of allowing to block per script origin domain.

That sucks :( I'm really looking forward to switching back to Android.

Safari content blockers can do fine-grained blocking of external .js file loads, so you might want to look into one of those.

My extension differs from Safari content blockers in that it can block inline JS.

This is my number one reason for not wanting to switch when people ask me why I don't have an iPhone.

Honestly, you're right to feel that way. I am planning to switch back to Android when this phone dies. Firefox is a major component of that, but iOS feels miles behind Android in many other aspects as well. I switched because of Apple's privacy stance (if you're making Facebook throw a temper tantrum, you're doing something right) and the fact that they are the only manufacturer to make a phone that fits in the human hand. But iOS is really not a great experience overall.

I use Trail of Bit's Algo to run a VPN with adblock; it works quite well to block ads and tracking on iPhone, though it's pretty crude so will miss a bunch of stuff.

thats one hell of a cathedral to perform the same as tiny browser plugin that can even manage to remove all youtube ads... but anything is better than non-filtered web of 2022 thats for sure

Firefox Focus has been a true revelation for me. I use it primarily as a content blocker in Firefox and Safari, but it's also a nifty way to have a quick private session with only one tab.

It doesn't do all the things, but still helps immensely.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/mobile/focus/

Hm, thanks, I'll give it a look. I have "regular" Firefox, but it didn't seem to play nicely with the ad blocker Safari extension I have installed, so I stopped using it.

Likewise! It has fewer features and is less convenient to use than a regular browser due to constantly having to log in to sites, which is 100% also a feature to me. The extra steps to access Facebook have allowed me to kick my Facebook habit for good. I waste less time refreshing the same websites waiting for new clickbait, while productive use of the internet for reference is mostly unaffected.

The problem is that, while using NoScript, you're still giving the website traffic. The longer term solution is to stop visiting these sites.

Reader Mode is nice, but has two problems. Addons don't work with it and it is not possible to automatically enable Reader Mode without loading the website first.

Yup me too ! That includes medium.com articles or anyone of these big news/content sites that try to squeeze in an accept cookies thing with 2 static ads, one autoplay ad with a push notification request.

That's exactly me! +1

Yup, I even almost did it on instinct with this site.

That's you, me and tech people. When it happens to most of my friends, the click yes. The desktop notification is the new IE BHO. Any non tech person's desktop showers them in crap, often scammy in nature even with a closed browser. I'm amazed major browser vendors still allow it.

same

you best offer me something very concrete before you give me the slightest inconvenience

this is partly why the Euro cookie laws have made the web even more hostile for smaller players, if you had any good reason to track me with cookies by default, I'm sorry but I no longer have the time to be choosing options or reading motives for your cookies - which I delete every session in my sandboxed browser anyway

the annoyance that makes me click "close" with the most prejudice is when they're pushing some app on me (try for instance browsing Reddit without the old interface, it's unbearable)

keep closing those tabs

Agree. It's not like their opinion matters so much to me that i m dying to read it. If it's bad news, i will learn about it sooner than later anyway, if it's good news, the same. Maybe after years of pavlovian conditioning i ve desensitized to it.

switching to reader mode doubles your contribution to their "article viewed" metric - reinforcing their belief that what they're doing is working well.

The video "Sorry, this content not available in your country" and the back button / close action "Leave site" edit confirm are nice touches to highlight the madness of the modern content experience.

Also present all content in the dominant language of the country that my IP address is in, not the language my browser specifically asks for.

This could come from the presumption that most people won't have set that preference, so it would be correct more often to assume language based on IP? I mean I doubt it, since even the setting is automatic based on where you download your browser in most cases, but whatevs, let's be generous in _our_ assumptions.

It doesn't make it any less annoying though. What tips it over the edge into maddening, is not allowing me to correct the assumption, or overriding my choice when I do.

Using automatic machine translation I can't turn off.

Especially when it's from the BBC (paid already) or sky news (they used to have their youtube channel open). It doesnt cost anything, but they still do it

What if we create search engine that does not index such websites?

Great work, I love this.

> slide out hover menus where when you try to hover over a subitem the whole menu disappears

> trying to open an image in google images and the link doesn't have the image

> websites that wants to know my location pop up

> google how to format a USB drive and all the page are 100,000,00 words and subdivided into 60 chapters, including the entire wikipedia entry for what is USB

> login forms with copy/paste disabled

> clicking on a button/link and nothing happens

> apps without a home button, have to keep clicking back until you exit from the app completely by mistake

> autoplay videos that follow you down the page

> password fields without a way to reveal password

> an article, you scroll down and half the article is cut off/blurred out behind a pay/sign up wall.

there is so many more...

> google how to format a USB drive and all the page are 100,000,00 words and subdivided into 60 chapters, including the entire wikipedia entry for what is USB

This has leaked to virtually all content: "medium rare lamb temperature" will return an infinite number of 10k word essays, titled same as the search query, containing the history of cooking, lamb as food, physics of temperature, lamb recipes and may or may not have the actual information from the title.

And the information likely will be wrong.

Look at five different pages for the same cooking stuff, and all of them will present different cooking times, temperatures, etc...

Yup cooking pages/queries has been guilty of this for some time now and there are enough threads/post on hn to show its a repeating problem.

I cannot phantom that in the great brain/talent pool that is google, that google hasnt figured out that when ppl google lamb cooking temps they dont want a 10k essay !

>No home button

>Crazy menus

This is why on my sites I refuse to use a CMS and just write everything in vim with a single link back to index.html at the top. It's the only way.

> login forms with copy/paste disabled

The post should have a trigger warning.

> recipe sites with select/copy disabled, or worse, sites that modify the copied snippet

> password fields which are not appropriately marked so that autofill / generate secure password does not work

> no sign in button on the homepage, only a sign up button

> you have used up your 5 free articles for the month, please subscribe

> scrolljacking

> with each UI update comes an additional 0.5em of padding / line height

> huge margins / useless sidebars which make it impossible to read the page with the browser window at half-width

> need to use a VPN to access sites in my home country when traveling

> need to use a VPN to get English subtitles on Netflix when traveling

> discord or facebook not letting you paste just because you run firefox with strict tracking protection

I can get most of these. Greed. Fear. Mistake.

What I don't get is this one:

> autoplay videos that follow you down the page

It is not possible to concentrate on the text if you keep playing a video, possibly with audio track as well, in my field of view.

Why would you ever choose to do that?

And there are even sites that play the same in-house video, on every page, from the top.

> password fields without a way to reveal password

As somebody who has fallen victim to being spied on over an invisible vnc daemon, I hate all password boxes that let you reveal password to be visible. Its like the entire web has forgotten that hackers can easily just sit and watch your screen remotely until you enter a password then BOOM as soon as you reveal the password to check its correct you're compromised.

If someone's managed to install an invisible VNC client, a keylogger isn't much further of a stretch.

Fair point, but IMO passwords are meant to be secret and never revealed. Its a shame revealable password fields became the norm instead of using password managers, which still seems to be quite niche among the non techie world.

A friend asked me to help him set up some software. He shared the screen for me to watch. He Googled the software, clicked on the first link - an ad to some blog with Top 10 software for X. Then, in under 3 seconds, he accepted all cookies and tracking, allowed notifications and started typing his email address to subscribe to their newsletter, and only stopped because I told him. It was like he wasn‘t even thinking about this anymore, just automatically click on the brightest button to reach content faster.

Anecdote, but I think a lot of people act like this which is why these websites think it’s successful.

Don’t think “IT people” are immune.

My favourite one is VMware vSphere: it shows several in-your-face pop ups the first time you run it with a checkbox to “never show again”.

I consider it a funny kind of anti-shibboleth seeing VMware admins that use that console daily clicking through that dialog without ticking the checkbox.

Every day, for years.

Hey, this is great! It's like you have all the functionalities of the new project I'm making all implemented, only without the content. Can I just take the code and slot my own content in!

I guess I have to specify that was sarcasm, otherwise I might end up experiencing some other parts of the web today. :(

Content looks fine to me. Maybe you meant to say, “take the code and slot my own ads in”?

>“take the code and slot my own ads in”?

Hey, you say Potato I say Ore-Ida brand Potatoes, when it's Ore-Ida it's Alrighta!

Man I get that this is supposed to be funny but it just makes me sad, because it's so true. The constant fucking assault on our minds as we browse the web is enough to drive you insane nowadays. It should be illegal to employ dark patterns like these. Frankly it's malware presented plainly at a url disguised as commerical intrest. Don't reply to me about how "you can't legislate something like that", I know it's hard. But we have to do it somehow.

I don't think it needs to be illegal, because the "market pressure" is still there:

- users don't like it and go away without actually reading the content

- Google detects click-away from these sites as a bad search result and begins downranking them (ask yourself: "Am I getting to most of these sites via search results, or via mindless social media browsing?" Social media isn't optimized for search-efficiency signal like a search engine is).

So there's a negative-feedback loop on the thing, but the transition from accessing the web via search to social has disrupted the old feedback loop enough that some people think it's short-term profitable to be like this. It will be until either Facebook catches up to the game and starts down-sampling bad actors too or users get tired of it and stop clicking through off of social to those sites, but I expect that negative feedback loop is kicking in.

> I don't think it needs to be illegal, because the "market pressure" is still there

Also, I see people complaining about all kinds of stuff that doesn't bother me at all. Just because something annoys you personally, that doesn't necessarily mean it should be forbidden.

Very nice work, the design and the dark patterns are spot on.

Darkpatterns.org used to collect websites who seriously did stuff like this. They have since rebranded to deceptive design, also an apt name. The hall of shame is well worth checking out.

https://www.deceptive.design/

Very clever, and very good.

As a visually impaired user with larger fonts, websites can be impossible to use. In my experience you are even missing a sticky header which blocks at least 25% of the page. And perhaps a Clippy like assistant, trying to get your attention in the bottom right corner. Other than that this is pretty accurate.

Just a quick reminder to keep this in your bookmarks: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

A life safer especially on the rare occassions where I am using my old thinkpad with 1386x720 resolution.

Thanks for this. Although I have the most issues with sticky headers on mobile. Currently I mostly bail out of those websites.

There's a Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky I use it often. It also worked great on the presented site.

That bookmarklet was a brilliant idea.

I've made a slightly more invasive variation targeting more (potential) annoyances, and I cannot imagine not having it in the bookmarks toolbar now.

http://myfonj.github.io/utils/bookmarklets/sweep-stickies.ht...

For about five years i hit this bookmarklet when visiting almost any site. in most cases it gets rid of the cookie banners, bulky headers, and sidebars so this is the true fix for me. If the page doesn't work under all the fixed position junk, then i bounce.

Looks like something you could do with just a uBO rule now.

Those clippy things are less popular now.

Many of them had an option to upload a file. I would upload something truly reprehensible.

Back navigation capture is another one. You click back and the site has somehow created about 40 pages.

You forgot the popup that is shown after 30 seconds of inactivity that there is new content available. Some news sites seem to have that now...

And on top of it, they make it look like there's an unread notification in the tab.

This has really started to annoy me on the Apple News app. Hover over a section of headlines without touching the phone for too long and suddenly it claims there are new stories up top, but if you click on that, they're just lying. Gotta make sure there is nonstop "engagement" with the touchscreen. None of that pesky reading, thinking, and introspecting when consuming information. Better not talk to the person sitting next to you about what you're reading, either, unless they're also using an app that can find a way to measure their interest in what you're talking about.

The site did not work for me.. due to "I don't Care About Cookies" [1]. I had to open it in a bare Firefox to see the 'story'.

I realize this extension is a good big filter that helps me to avoid the part of the web described by the author.

[1]: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

Doesn't work for me either. I just have an adblocker.

The whole site does absolutely nothing and doesn't have any text either. I wish that was the web i experience

I wonder if this is on purpose though, given the name of the site. You see it how you would experience most sites?

Yeah, exactly, it's like browsing regular news sites.. I cannot see anything (or I turn off all adblockers, I don't care about cookies etc. and then I still cannot read the article due to all the popups).

Ha. Great. Also needs a giant ginormous sticky header and menu structure at the top of the page, so that together with the sticky footer it covers up pretty much any remaining article content.

An unrelated video should start playing in the background after first click. Article content should end after first paragraph and ask you to create an account. After leaving tab the page title should be constantly changing (text in browser tab) and demanding your attention.

In all seriousness, it would be great if you added an example of how website could look without all this mess, and how it would have better performance (literally and figuratively - as in returning visitors).

I just clicked a link to read an article on The Economist [1] and it made me appreciate that, even though I can't read the article, it's SO much nicer to have a message inline with the subscription offer instead of as a popup.

[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/07/14/europes-winter-...

It is frightening to see that most of the gestures are already in my muscle memory.

Without even reading the advertising popups, I intuitively scan the site and click the relevant closing button. Because the basic patterns are similar on many pages, my brain seems to have developed muscle memory for most of the common anti patterns.

On the final page, I don't even notice most of the banner ads anymore. Here, too, my brain skillfully blanks out the noise.

Unsurprisingly accurate to most of the sites I visit. One extra thing is, the page load times and the slowness in loding the page or added content which will displace the buttons/header links I'd want to click resulting in a misplaced click :)

"better" yet: ads download immediately but the content you are looking for takes forever - bonus points if they automatically play some loud audio

Ha ha glad someone did this to show all the bad patterns. In some ways it is not as bad as many sites. It didn’t auto play for me, and it didn’t bring my browser to a crawl.

Suggestions: ask me to use “the app” and request video and mic access.

I once spoofed my buddies with a pop-up that asked: "Are you an idiot?" Then they are prompted to answer "Yes" or "No." Whenever the mouse pointer hovers over "No," it immediately switched to "Yes." I've also seen variations on this where the mouse pointer will push the "No" away like a magnet, making it impossible to click. Great fun.

It's fantastic and so real! One thing missing is the pop-up when user moves mouse over the top edge of the page to bother them with "Please don't leave" thing.

I also love infinite scroll. Sarcasm

Nice touch that this website is broken on Firefox, had to open Chromium

it works for me on Firefox

Probably all those privacy extensions I have are messing with it

I had to disable uBlock Origin for it to work.

Firefox tracking protection + uBlock Origin + uMatrix + Privacy Badger + I Don't Care About Cookies.

With those enabled I got the article, but with the dark-gray overlay. Clicked on "Kill Sticky" addon to remove it, and the article became readable. The only one that sqeueezed through was the "You scrolled!" notification.

I love it. I would add a user avatar on the top right with a red "unread notification (1)" overlay icon. Why would I have a personal notification for a site I have just entered?

Also, a "login to continue scrolling" like desktop Twitter.

And... a hamburger menu somewhere.

I'm surprised that nothing happened when I reached the bottom of the article. Could definitely have got more engagement by having a "you've reached the bottom!" pop-up offering more content or to subscribe.

Or allowing infinite scroll, automatically navigating the entire page to the next article, including changing the URL

Lovely.

Missing the "advert or other cruft so big in the middle of the text that you genuinely wonder if you've reached an abrupt end of the article, but scroll down enough and it continues."

I hate that one too.

Some of them do recognize that this might be a problem and add "article continues below" before that thing

Forgot to disable pinch-zoom on mobile.

Absolutely enraging. Why do browsers even have absurd "features" like disabling a crucial accessibility gesture????

Exactly why I have RSS feeds setup, even for Twitter and Youtube.

We built Smort.io [1] to solve this problem!

Here is the Show HN post from March https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30673502

Just add smort.io/ before any URL to read it better. You can also annotate, share and save articles.

[1] https://smort.io

The hijacked back button gave me a good laugh.

You neglected to remember the popup that appears after thirty seconds of inactivity to inform you that new content is available. It appears that certain news websites now have that...

That's because of service workers informing you of new content. You don't care, I don't care, but someone just had to nerd out and notify you of the realtime capabilities of this site. It's usually found on news sites and in that context it does make sense but then again you would've seen it if browsing to another link on the site.

The real cherry on top that’s missing would have been hijacking the back button to show a “Hey! Before you go…” popup.

Funny how uBlock blocks a request to https://dc.services.visualstudio.com/v2/track when i visit this site (look in your network tab)

This is a wonderful work of art.

Very clever and nicely done but you're missing something, please add a notification/message saying something in the lines of:

"There are 5 other users viewing this page. There is only 1 offer left. Hurry up and book it!!!"

E-commerce dark patterns deserve a separate page or two.

The missing step is to finally show the text in a system font for a 1/2 second and then blank the page and then take 6 seconds to load a remote font that renders exactly the same to anyone but a font designer.

This is not evil. Evil is a font that's so different metrics-wise that it makes the page jump away from where you've been reading it.

And then a large ad loads, and makes it all jump away again.

It should also not allow you to leave the page using the back button on the browser, it should intercept that and redirect you to the homepage and as you scroll it adds more to your browser history.

You forgot the ads that pop in randomly while you're trying to read, pushing the text all over the place. I swear, nobody making these websites actually uses them.

This is hillarious, brilliant, genious!

And reflecting reality rather well...

I appreciate the prompt initiated when I tried leaving

Though a bit extreme, the individual components are definitely there across various webpages. Certainly it is annoying. The fact that we can control whether or not we see them is somewhat remarkable, considering conditions under the dominance of TV: mandatory commercials and high cost subscriptions.

Today, the internet is in the process of wrestling that control back from us, driven by the lucrativeness of ad revenue. Ideally, the revenue user subscriptions would obviate the need for ad revenue, but sadly, this is not the case.

> Ideally, the revenue user subscriptions would obviate the need for ad revenue, but sadly, this is not the case.

That model will never work, because the ad-based business model still provides an incentive for others to steal the content and slap ads on it. The only way to fix this is to make ad-based business models not viable.

And like many problems facing humanity, while we are perfectly capable of recognizing the problem, we will do nothing to fix it.

The back button at the end, holy cow. Good job.

Funnily enough the web would have looked better if we'd stick to pay-per-minute phone lines as a business model.

Is there an SDK for this? I need to create a professional website like that and all these cool widgets are hard to make!

IAB usually heavily recommends those to news sites that have to/think they have to partner with them.

I never get that adblock one. Easiest way to avoid it is stop running adblock.

The cookie one though, I see all the time.

My experience:

Google something

The result is linked to a Medium article, which's guarded by a Paywall or Firewall.

Give up on googling.

Find another solution for the problem.

Basically, i have about 80% probability of wasting my time on the internet.

Knowing alternative-interface sites to get around paywalls / regwalls helps.

For Medium: https://scribe.rip/ (replace the host/domain part of the URL).

Twitter -> Nitter (e.g., https://nitter.net/ ... there are numerous others)

YouTube -> Invidious or Piped (e.g., https://yewtu.be/ or https://piped.kavin.rocks/)

Instagram -> Bibliogram (https://bibliogram.art)

Reddit -> Teddit (https://teddit.net/)

I don't understand Piped. It's marketed as a faster frontend for YouTube, but more often than not, for me it's actually a lot slower (buffering-wise) than normal YouTube, gives me lower video quality and I end up switching from it[1] to normal YouTube to make the experience bearable.

[1]: Nitter replaces YouTube links with Piped links, so I end up on Piped partly involuntarily.

I find Piped seems to work more reliably than Invidious (or at least my usual Invidious instance). Particularly on newer or music videos.

I consider the two largely exchangeable, though Invidious is my first choice. Piped seems to offer finer-grained control.

Most often I simply listen (usually to lectures / podcasts) via mpv (accessing through yt-dlp).

The real MVP is always in the comments. Thanks! What has our "open" web become...

Rating should require login.

Its funny how it hits so close while being parody depiction.

At least we got away from "download our mobile app" step

This can be solved very easily at the search engine level.

Should have override the scroll behavior and space bar.

New one I’ve seen is the inclusive language modal

loved it; great experience.

Felt almost for a second like being at a theme park (computer game theme park, not the IRL theme park).

So irritating

That's the whole point.

This got me good. 10/10.

Yes, that's why I prefer apps where possible.

The problem with websites is that they need to be "installed" and they need to get something out of you for their services without the abilities of a proper app.

This cookie->email->adblock->subscribe flow is essentially an installers next->next->next flow.

The cookie dialog is there because they want to track you and EU wants it to be optional for the user and the user is aware of being tracked.

The first notification banner is a HTML one and it is there to make sure that the user doesn't waste the only chance(if the user rejects the browser on, you can't fire it up again) to subscribe to push notifications.

The second notification banner(if you accept the first one) is the actual batter by the browser to make sure that you actually want to subscribe.

The subscribe to the newsletter modal is there because as soon as you close the tab you will forget about that site and they want a way to remind you of their existence.

The adblock detected modal is there because they made that content and that website in hopes to show you an ad and make money of it.

The paywall is there because they want alternative revenue stream since ads are not ideal and they don't want to leave money on the table.

The ad banners everywhere is the money shot and the reason you have have an adblocker.

The modal that appears after scrolling is actually one with good intentions and bad implementation. The idea is that since you consumed the content maybe you would like more from it but most of the time the implementation is bad and its supper annoying. They wanted to show it to you once you finish your thing and you are happy.

The modal that appears when you switch tabs is there in another attempt to establish a way to connect with you. Since you switch a tab, maybe you are done with the site and it's a good time to ask you for your e-mail. If you are annoyed, who cares you are about to close the tab anyway.

The chat popup is there to engage with you if you are super interested in the website.

Rate your experience is there probably because the people who designed this horror show want to read back from you as another signal for their KPI.

The %50 off banner on top is a call for action, they still have a chance to sell you something.

The share buttons are there to remind you that you can share this horror show with your worst enemies.

And the alert you get when you try to close the tab is a last ditch effort to keep you interested. Usually contains %99 off first 10 years free kind of offer.

All this delivered to you through carefully studying the analytics data and doing A/B tests.

The apps have the advantage of sticking around the users sight, thus they don't have to achieve something the first time the user interacts with the app and as a result they can design the app around user satisfaction so that the user opens the app by itself.

Another advantage of the apps is that you get to see the app before going through the installation. You see the screenshots and user reviews on a clean screen before committing.

They’ve captured you once the app is installed.

A website covered in this mess (at this point it is no longer content+shit, it is shit with a little bit of content) does so because you’re still in charge.

Captured? What this is supposed to mean?

It means you can't block their antics outside of the web browser, so you are captured.

The competition on apps is for quality and stickiness, they have much better user experience so I don't need to fix it in first place.

I make it a point to avoid apps as much as possible so I thought you were being sarcastic, but it is hard to tell.

I know the meme in the tech circles but I disagree. Apps are fast and pleasant to use, unlike websites. On the web you never know what you are getting into when you click on the link, you go through all that installation process and if you still remember why you clicked the link most of the time it's a disappointment because the content is usually quite low quality created to generate eyeballs.

Sometimes I wonder if techies are so detached that don't notice the horrible state of web. My guess is that in the tech communities apps are hated ideologically due to the narrative of walled gardens. Also probably the devs with investment into HTML+JS world might feel like outsiders. I am speculating of course but I don't see why a person would like to load 5 to 20MB of data per click to see an image or a text once completes the accept the cookies, deny notifications, dismiss the mailing list popups ritual.

The web has become complete BS, some people say that Google no longer returns good results but I've come to the realisation that there are no good website for Google to return any longer.

I'm also puzzled why would you think that I'm being sarcastic, isn't the point of the Website in question to illustrate the horrible state of the Web today? My comment is just an explanation about why we have what we have.

You never know which domains an app connects to. They could collect even more info about you and send it to thousands of websites. In a browser, it is easy to see for somewhat technical people. To detect app tracking, you need more sophisticated setups. A proxy with an MITM certificate or a router which logs all domains or something like that.

> but I've come to the realisation that there are no good website for Google to return any longer

I guess this is just you. There are still plenty of good websites, depending on what you’re looking for.

It's unimportant to know to which domain an app or website connects because once your data has left your device you can't know what it happens. It's technically trivial to send the data to 3rd parties over the same server that processes legitimate requests. In fact, that's how 3rd parties match and aggregate user data through cookies(one of the ways).

Besides, I'm not even talking about privacy but the overall user experience.

I think most people here are actually aware of something called 'desktop applications' which were generally nicer experiences than Html+JS web apps. And apparently predated everything else, too. Possibly some people here have even written them, but maybe they were just a myth. Saying 'apps are better' is probably still too general though, I've used a lot of truly terrible native apps that I'd just as happily condemn just as harshly as a bad website. Even worse, in mobile apps you're much less able to block ads (they were always less common in desktop ones).

Technically, the browser is an App that happens to run Apps written in HTML+JS+CSS. There can be good and bad apps of each kind, for example Figma has very good UX despite being a web app.

However that's not the point, what we call Apps and what we call websites or Web apps are programs with different discovery and retention mechanisms and that is exactly the reason why Apps are better than Websites or Web Apps.

A Website has one chance to establish a relationship to you and to monetise you. That's why we see all those tracking, mailing list, notification and ad banners. The moment you finish "installing" the website you will get your content and you probably wont come back unless once again you are not redirected from reddit or something. You also don't get to see what this website is all about before actually going through the trouble of installing it.

On the other hand, Apps need to sell themselves to you. They need to be good towards their users so that they receive stars and positive reviews. They need to have a presentation explaining what this app is all about and even provide you with screenshots. Once you install an app, you are giving it a proper chance to impress you so that you keep coming back.

And that difference between Apps and Websites is the prime reason for the quality difference. Websites need to be clickbitey and they need extract the value out of you right away. The competition is firece as the entry barrier is low. Apps on the other hand need to be good and make their users happy so that they can convince others to install the app too. Since they are going to be within the site of their user, they don't need to extract the value right away, they can build healthy relationship.

And that's why the apps are much better.

The point of the website is that everyone has seen it before.

So describing it is a waste of time. Plus, we all know of the pathetic excuses for doing stuff like this, so no need to list that out either.

Your post is considered autistic because of all this unnecessary explanation.

> Your post is considered autistic because of all this unnecessary explanation.

But then again, so is yours.

> Yes, that's why I prefer apps where possible

Would you prefer to install a .exe (or any other form of binary) from Aliexpress, Yandex or your preferred pr0n site in your PC instead of browsing their websites?

If you don't, well, I don't want strange binaries in my phone either.

If you do, I don't know what to tell you...

I already have the Amazon app. I don't use Aliexpress but I do use Yandex Navi.

On PC (or whatever desktop)?

In any case, you didn't truly answer.

Wherever makes sense. i.e. I have the Amazon Prime video as an app on both but Yandex Navi only on mobile.

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