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Comment by WirelessGigabit | Hacker News Reader

And as I scroll down and read the article you present me with a popup to subscribe, alienating and enraging me.

My latest MASSIVE pet peeve is headers and footers that appear or disappear as I scroll on my phone.

So when I go to scroll up, all of a sudden the header appears and moves everything I was looking at so I lose my position. Then when I go to scroll down they all disappear and everything moves yet again.

Yeah, those are awful. Can't wait for mobile browsers to finally get ublock origin extension so you could delete those elements Though that'd still be tedious :(

Firefox on mobile has ublock origin, and yes, it is quite tedious given how the UI ends up working on mobile.

Firefox on Android has had this for years. Personally I prefer AdNauseam so I can be combative instead of passively blocking.

You might enjoy this benchmark:

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/zebad6/a_few_andr...

Some highlights: - Vivaldi is suprisingly fast and has good ad blocking - Kiwi plus the Ublock Origin extension (UBO) might be /even faster/ - Firefox also allows UBO, but sadly it is relatively slow

Well the other option appears to be having them always visible so my 6.1” phone feels like the original 3.5” iPhone with the keyboard up.

As we all know, it is completely impossible to have the header and footer just scroll with the content the way it used to in the 90s.

They also break space-to-scroll-one-page on laptop/desktop.

Fortunately there’s the anti-dickbar plugin to kill them on safari.

https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky works on most of them.

Agreed. I have never and will never enter my email into one of those popups. Just let me read the content in peace! I also hate that there isn't an X. While I now know that I can just click outside the box, my first time I had to read the entire box to figure out to click the "Continue Reading" link. Enraging to say the least.

Apparently they get a 10% conversion rate, which marketers think is worth being the worst people in the world.

A 10% conversion rate would be incredible. If that were the case, it would be hard to be angry at people for exploiting this factor.

However, I would be very surprised if the conversion rate of a popup signup sheet is even 2%.

And there is a similar negative conversion effect: If any article asks me to sign up for anything, I stop reading that article immediately, and move on to an article that respects my attention.

Yes, I am in a small minority. But I also share many links with my peeps, and I never share links with popups. I hope that puts pressure on authors to share things freely.

> I also hate that there isn't an X.

I have a keyboard shortcut assigned to uBlock Origin's element zapper and now everything has an X. No permanent rules made, and when overdone just reload page to try again.

I'm the author of the article. This was added by Substack without my knowledge (it doesn't show up to me since I'm already subscribed) and I think I've disabled it now. Please check to confirm that it is disabled.

Thanks for looking in to this.

This is not disabled. I loaded the page a few minutes ago and it gave me the fullscreen popover. It appears about halfway down the page. I just re-loaded to check and there was no popover. When I load the page in a private browser session I still get the popover. So there appears to be a cookie that remembers the dismissal.

e: I cleared the substack cookies and my main browser session still doesn't get the popover but private sessions do.

Right, I'd love to read the post but some BS I didn't read popped up and covered the entire page with some ~80%-opacity overlay and I closed the page. It's 2023, I don't look at sites that do this shit anymore. (before you say "lol I guess you don't browse the web", you're right. I look at Mastodon, my email, a couple forums and HN/Lobsters. the web is ruined.)

To be fair, that's just substack, it's not the author's fault.

Substack let's you turn that off (as the author).

According to the comments, the author has only just today learned that Substack added this new popup without asking him, after he got them to disable the previous popup. So hopefully you're right that it's possible for him to turn off.

Link to that thread since it is pretty far down: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-flashing-element...

But they disclaim that :-)

> Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine.

Disabling JavaScript on substack.com solves that problem.

Also use some CSS to hide #nojs-banner

But that also disables comments there.

...which you can trivially dismiss with a single click. And critically, when you do this, it doesn't come back - that's the difference between the substack modal and what the author is talking about.

It comes back on every substack that I read. If I find it interesting I will subscribe to it via RSS. They don't need to have my email address which initially they'll only use for this stubstack, and then for recommendations, and later on they'll sell it to the highest bidder.

Yeah so you put in the address of the author or site owner or something, standard procedure.

I am lucky enough to get another one for cookies

Came here looking for this comment.

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