Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hnrobert42 | Hacker News Reader

The site guilted me into turning off my adblocker. I’m sympathetic to local media outlets.

My god. That site is comically unusable. There is just no way to read an their article in peace.

So when they, too, inevitably have to fold, let it be known, I tried.

SFGate was originally the online version of the SF Chronicle, starting in the 90's. For whatever reason, they wanted a distinct online brand. Now the online version of the Chronicle is hosted at sfchronicle.com and SFGate continues on under the same ownership (Hearst) as its own clickbaity thing. Not much in the way of original reporting.

I know SFGate as the San Fransisco newspaper website that for some reason comes up when you google for questions about repairing old homes. Seems like they're spending their entire SEO budget on lath and plaster repair guides.

Yeah I renovated my home to SFGate code

I tried turning off Adblock and wow.... I didn't even mind the ads, but the loading just never stopped. Some of the article images wouldn't load because they were trying to load so many ads.

I believe Firefox/Mozilla use sfgate as a stress test.

It was sure a good stress test for my eyes.

SFGate has been a notorious test site for Chrome web performance folk too. Here's a perf audit from 8 years ago: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1viSX0vNYPeDB9iWLaOyAg6Fa...

NLtimes.NL can serve as a European contemporary for this stress test. Absolutely unusable without an adblocker.

Oh good gravy I just tried. It’s over 50% ads.

Everyone involved should feel bad and really if this is the only way for them to figure out how to survive, they should just go out of business.

Media used to exist based off of classified ad sales, then tech companies absorbed all that cash flow. After that, most local media died.

> It’s over 50% ads.

Like 1999…

European here. I clicked the privacy pop-up and did not accept the ad and tracking cookies. No ads..

Europe currently, no pop ups, no ads. And no place holders. Page loads fast.

No ads (adguard..), loads instantly, also in Europe

edit: it seems that the Americans get our ads too, ah sweet schadenfreude

You owe them nothing and the guilt you feel is an exploitation of your courtesy.

That's because you haven't tried Mercury News.

Try the EFF's Privacy Badger. I didn't see any ads there. Just click "Continue without Disabling".

I tried too. Awful. And the biggest chumbox I've ever seen in my damn life at the bottom.

”Show Reader” in iOS does a great job of showing you the actual content without having to interact with all that garbage — I presume the “reader” functionality in most other browsers does too.

Interesting. I turned off my adblocker out of curiosity but I'm not seeing anything special. Coming from the EU though, maybe that has something to do with it.

Funnily enough, I get the GDPR pop-up, agree to nothing and the site is readable

Man if y’all think this is bad try tom’s hardware. It usually crashes chrome on iOS for me after reloading on its own

Firefox mobile's reader mode was usable

I had no problems using 1Blocker for iOS in Safari and no guilt trip or ads.

If you have an Apple News/One subscription you can read it as this link. Much more readable, and the publisher still gets ad revenue:

https://apple.news/AlNrxUYEHQPGfrBna1YfVqQ

I had to delete Apple News because Apple was forcibly inserting its own channels that I could not remove or say “Not Interested”, which you can normally do for all other channels. I recall they were BLM and COVID19; sorry that I don’t want politics shoved in my face every day. Why can’t I choose what I want to see?

Because Apple, not you, owns your phone.

Google news is the same. At some point it decided that I must follow every sniff and fart coming from a certain electric car tycoon, and there was no negotiating.

You can. First you can just use it like Reader Mode. Safari -> share menu -> open in News for any HN link you click on that has too many popups.

Or, in the News following tab, click Edit, remove all “suggested by Siri” topics, and block low-quality channels. I blocked the National Review, WSJ, USA Today, and People Magazine and my feed got a lot better.

No, you can’t remove the “Special Coverage” section, which you can’t unsee in the macOS app.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251600920

Click on the special coverage section -> three dot menu -> block channel.

Or better yet, just don’t use their feed.

I did that for their World Cup coverage, and it did not block the channel. There was a World Cup banner with scores and stuff for a month. At that point I noped out and haven’t touched it since.

“I’m not interested in facts I don’t agree with”

Are they actual facts though? We know now several of the “facts” were wrong, bordering on lies.

Trust is hard to gain and very easy to lose.

They were the best information they had at the time based on a new disease in the case of Covid.

Are you also as dismissive of Newton because Einstein showed he wasn’t entirely correct?

And as far as BLM, I understand that people don’t want to tell their little Timmy that officer friendly, is less friendly to minorities and have always been.

Not so. We have centuries of experience with respiratory disease, and nothing turned out substantially different in the end. I made this statement when they closed our beaches.

Also the don’t-mask/mask thing was an outright lie. Huge mistake that gave nuts a foothold.

Did as many people die from the common cold as died from Covid? Are you also claiming that medical grade mask like those used by hospitals don’t work?

And yes I’m sure “centuries ago” when they didn’t even understand germ theory they knew about viruses and how to treat diseases using DNA sequencing and mRNA

I'm claiming the opposite. Lying about that made the year a disaster.

Ahh my bad. I think we are in “violent agreement” then.

My god that is so much better.

Reader mode every time.

This is functionally no different to using an adblocker for the site.

Its better because it gets rid of crap layout

I use it in conjunction with an adblocker.

For sites that I repeatedly visit, I pay for them. Substacks and local newspapers for example.

As a one-off if I can’t adblock or reader-mode, it ain’t worth my time.

> My god. That site is comically unusable. There is just no way to read an their article in peace.

Lurk more f.....

https://archive.is/JngjW

Uh, I have ublock origin and such...

Site is clean as a whistle for me:

(zoomed all the way out so you can see the whole page:

https://i.imgur.com/I4EaG3A.png -

Edit: I appear to have “wooshed” the point… Sorry fam.

So you didn't try at all.

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