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Comment by HL33tibCe7 | Hacker News Reader

Just thought I'd document my experience going onto this site:

* I load the page, everything looks normal

* suddenly a massive video advert appears at the top of the screen, taking up half the screen and shifting all the content down

* another video advert appears at the bottom of the screen, stealing another 10% of the screen

* I start scrolling: the top advert is sticky and covers up the article headline. I can now see nothing apart from a part of a reindeer's head

* I scroll some more

* Chrome pops up a box telling me that the website wants to know my location

* I scroll some more and encounter yet another inline advert. My screen is now almost entirely adverts

* I scroll some more and the inline advert becomes a mini-player in the bottom-right of the screen

* There are now 4 separate adverts on my screen, all videos

* I give up and leave the page

View on HN

Thanks for the warning. To spare the next reader, here’s a direct link to the primary source—

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)...

—and the key quote from the abstract:

We studied sleep using non-invasive EEG […] Surprisingly, slow-wave activity decreased not only during NREM sleep but also during rumination. […] Reindeer spent less time in NREM sleep the more they ruminated. These results suggest that they can sleep during rumination. The ability to reduce sleep need during rumination—undisturbed phases for both sleep recovery and digestion—might allow for near-constant feeding in the arctic summer.

Here's a static screenshot for you,

https://i.ibb.co/FxXj6qf/example-1.webp

(scripts disabled (uMatrix) + reader mode + custom CSS)

If you take a little bit of ownership over your browser, IMHO the web experience has never been better than in 2023!

I thought you were going to provide a screen shot of the horror show, not the clean version. It really boggles the mind that someone could look at a site and see it as the GP describes, and say "yeah, that's about right". They really have to work hard to get it to that point, so it's not like an accidental "we didn't know what it would do when we included that JS from the ad tech company". That's a sociopath/psychopath/masochist level of lack of concern for your viewers

None of that happens with Firefox and ublock on Android

>* Chrome

Ah, there it is.

Try the same page with Firefox and uBlock Origin. It's night and day.

Friends don't let friends use Chrome.

I run my FF in deny everything mode, and then run uBlock on top of that. With that, the site was totally usable. For the lulz, I disabled uBlock. With a refresh, I could now see all of the space left by all of the elements, but even FF's deny mode prevented the ads from showing. It just left gray boxes covering up the content. First time I actually did that to see what FF was doing natively.

With JS off everything looks normal and stays normal.

yeah this works, but it is wild to think that this is what some people experience of the web if they have no knowledge of ad blockers or js blocker.

I don't have this issue because I dump an extensive deny list of hosts into my /etc/hosts file from https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Give Brave browser a shot - it blocks ads out of the box and the experience is just as described in your first point.

It's just like Blade Runner, where there's thousand ads everywhere, all trying to compete for the consumers attention. Now all we need is holographic ads that project from the screen and dance around on your keyboard (while your trying to type).

My favorite is still Starship Troopers "would you like to know more?" everywhere you look, but Minority Report's personalized annoyances after identifying you. Then of course, there's the Black Mirror's version of ads. Black Mirror is obviously more recent, but even back when some of this older stuff was created, pervasive advertising was already being made fun of. I wonder what Robert Heinlein or Philip K Dick would have thought of what we really have today

I use the content blocker Ka-Block in Safari iOS and see no ads.

You can contact the website operators, but they will probably suggest you install an ad blocker so that the page loads correctly.

Welcome to the modern web. It sucks. See all the comments (well intended, but illustrative of how bad the default experience is): "Use this defensive technique to keep the hordes of hell from your experience".

Now you will never know how the reindeer can sleep and eat at the same time.

None of the happens with Javascript turned off on the page (and the article is fully available)

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