Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups | Hacker News Reader

Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups

smokingonabike.com

395 pointscoldpie470 comments

I'm often so flustered to be interrupted by yet-another-marketing-modal that I will just close the tab and abandon whatever task, or purchase, I was undertaking. They are actively harmful to my holistic state-of-mind and make me into a more agitated and cynical user of the web.

Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?

Clearly the market is always efficient and optimal. This is the solution it chose.

The market did choose it's most optimal. The real burning question is who's the customer.

The Market didn't create mandatory EU-banners.

EU law is not at fault here. At fault are the websites that feel the need to be so obnoxious in their behavior, that they are told to have those consent prompts for all the obnoxious shit they engage in. Basically, the EU is doing the Lord's work here, making these sites annoying, so that people might be persuaded to leave those websites. Unfortunately, the EU does not persecute harshly enough, so that all kinds of grifters do not follow the law and get away with it.

I am tired of people making excuses for the EU. The EU has had almost a decade to respond to the numerous complaints about those cookie banners and their answer has been "talk to the hand" -- and they wonder why they are being overrun by right wing populists.

It is the worst of German "incumbents über alles" and American legalism. "Respect DNT or go to jail" would have been fair and easier to administer but Big Tech lobbyists helped design the GDPR to stifle smaller competitors who couldn't laugh at the occasional fine for malicious compliance.

Can you refer to some examples or procedures, that you think fit the "talk to the hand" description? I would think that upholding the law is a matter of countries and only in big cases with EU-spanning big tech being the task of EU courts. Countries however, have failed to persecute tons of websites that don't adhere to the law. But that doesn't translate to "talk to the hand". It translates to tolerating crimes and not protecting citizen rights. Which actions or inaction specifically are what you are referring to?

> Big Tech lobbyists helped design the GDPR to stifle smaller competitors who couldn't laugh at the occasional fine for malicious compliance

It is actually trivial to comply with GDPR for smaller companies than for incumbents simply because smaller companies don't collect and sell copious amounts of user data.

What people are tired about is "technologists" completely absolving the tech (that they are a part of) of any wrongoping in this. "Oh, the EU made these mandatory" they cry and happily impöement dark patterns to collect and indefinitely store all your data.

The only blame you can lay on EU is not enough enforcement.

The only blame you can lay on EU is not enough enforcement.

That's a very big "only". Malicious compliance (and non-compliance) was an easily predictable consequence of the law, they've completely failed at responding to it, and the web is now worse as a result.

"The blame lies not with the companies blatantly flaunting the law and engaging in complicious compliance. The blame is on the law enforcement".

Note how you, too, absolve the companies of any responsibility because it was apparently "an obvious and expected response" to a law which only asks to not track without consent.

Because they literally can't do anything. They can't make shitheads not shitheads because there's nothing illegal about being a shithead.

It's trivial, truly trivial, to not need a cookie popup. I never put them on my website. We must then conclude that people are putting them on their website because they want to annoy users.

Ah yes. The Market only created "we care about your privacy by selling your precise geolocation data to be stored for 12 years" https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541

The market didn't create hazard warning signs - the government did. Therefore, hazard warning signs must be abolished.

I once dated a woman who had every store card, always signed up for the coupons, sign up here for free checkout, etc... and NO it did not bother her. She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery

> She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery

If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?

I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?

Because once they have your email and can link it to your identity via your purchase details they’re going to sell that list to some marketer sleazeball and you’ll get spam from other sources until the end of time?

“you’ll get spam from other sources until the end of time?”

So … ops normal?

Hah you got me there.

My email has been out there for 25+ years now. Filtering has been able to handle it for all but the first couple of years of that period.

This is true. I get arguments or indignation every time I say it, but spam is a solved problem, and has been for at least 20 years (thanks Paul!).

If you get more than "insignificantly little" spam in your inbox, you are using the wrong mail provider.

My email address is on every spam list under the sun. I get 600 spam messages per day[0], but only a few per week hit my inbox.

[0] It was 600/day before I made a small change to my mail configuration. Now it's only about 50/day which is few enough that, every month or so, I actually check for false positives. I occasionally see a low-value marketing list message that isn't technically spam in the sense of being entirely unsolicited, but content-wise it's not differentiable. Zero legitimate personal messages. I can live with this.

I've signed up for plenty of these lists with per-site emails, and it's very rare for me to end up getting email from anyone but the list I signed up for. Might be different when shopping on international sites (though I doubt it's worse in the EU), but in the US, sites generally don't sell your email. More likely they'll leak it accidentally.

This sort of person is a spend-a-holic. They use "sales" as an excuse to engage in unnecessary discretionary spending.

LOL yes I had a friend who would buy stuff because it was on sale and talk about how much money he "saved." I would always ask "do you have more or less money now?"

> If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?

Most discounts I run into seem to be based on incredibly inflated pricess to begin with. If a shop offers me a 20% discount on something it is often cheaper to buy it somewhere else.

When I subscribe to these I've usually already found that either they are the only shop to carry that product, or are already the cheapest. The 10% discount is just an extra at that point.

1. Pop up demanding I make a choice about their cookies.

2. Pop up telling me my adblocker is bad and I should feel bad.

3. Pop up suggesting I join their club/newsletter/whatever.

Every. fucking. site.

The newsletter one is especially obnoxious because it’s always got a delay so it shows up when I’m actually trying to read something or do something.

Edit: Oh, yeah. 4. Pop up to remind me I should really be using their app.

It’s because they care about your privacy, they want you to know just how much their care, so much so they’re ready to show you popups /s.

“We care about your privacy..”

Followed by something about 1800+ companies they want to sent my data to .. :|

No, it's "We value your privacy". That's different. That means they see your privacy as having value, and they want to extract as much of that value out of it as they possibly can.

> We and the 1600 third-parties care about your privacy.

You forgot to sub to push.

For a while I would put “f***yournewsletter@gmail.com” but then I realized no one would ever see it, and it probably just helps their click numbers.

I detest newsletter modals.

I used to go to the trouble of looking up the company's own sales contact or cxo or whatever and subscribing them to themselves, but now I just close the tab.

I remember in the early 2000s I started getting junk fax calls on my phone at least 4X a day. It got so annoying that I took time out of my day to get revenge. First, they made the mistake of sending it from the same number each time. So after some investigation, I identified the name of the company and even found the CEO's phone number. Unfortunately for them, I was an early VOIP adopter and it was relatively straightforward to set the PBX software to forward all calls from that number to the CEO's phone. The calls stopped happening within 48 hours.

I used to do that too, but now I go to my spam folder and grab the latest phishing email and use the reply-to address. I like the idea of some sales guy following up a lead with a Nigerian scammer, but sadly I’ll never see the email exchange.

Put such a sales person into the shoes of the Nigerian scammer, uh, I mean "prince" and they might just as well become the Nigerian scammer. It takes a specific kind of person to engage in the dark patterns stuff and be convinced of themselves doing nothing wrong.

In the days when running one’s own mailserver was the common case for small business websites, root@localhost was a fun one. “Why does this freaking thing keep filling its hard drive with our own newsletters?”

For the cookies you have the Consent-O-Matic plugin. For the rest Ublock Origin is pretty effective with the optional Annoyances lists switched on.

But Consent-O-Matic is a trap doing the wrong thing. It shouldn't be accepting everything automatically, leading to what businesses want, manufactured consent, but it should be rejecting everything. Of course that's a lot harder, because of websites engaging in illegal practices / dark patterns.

You can choose what you want it to accept. In my settings these toggles are available.

  Preferences and Functionality
  Performance and Analytics
  Information Storage and Access
  Content selection, delivery, and reporting
  Ad selection, delivery, and reporting
  Other Purposes

Of which I only allow the first

It offers that? I didn't know that, thanks for correcting me, TIL. I might consider using it then.

No this is not how it works. You can configure it how you want. In fact by default it denies everything because tracking is supposed to be opt-in.

The name consent-O-matic implies that you automatically give consent but this is not what it actually does. At least not unless you explicitly want to do that. Maybe not the best name for it.

I believe you’re thinking of “I don’t care about cookies”, which accepts everything. Consent-o-matic goes for maximum opt out by default unless you configure it otherwise (I doubt anyone does).

Unfortunately as the opt out flow is tweaked more often than the accept all flow (as cmp vendors work to minimise opt outs), this does mean it breaks more often on sites so sometimes it fails to remove the banner

Yes, that must be it. Thank you for the correction!

To be fair, the name isn't doing it any favors. "Consent-o-matic" sounds like it "automatically consents".

That's not even what I generally want either - I just want cookie dialogs suppressed, nothing accepted/rejected, and cookies all thrown out once I leave the site.

That's what I sometimes do when a consent banner/popup/whatever seems disingenious/dishonest/illegal. I use uBlock Origin element zapper, and I hope that the element doesn't have bullshit random id/class or that its position in the document doesn't change every time I load the page. However, if a website is so broken, that those things happen, maybe it is not worth for me to visit it, and if I am breaking something by trying to block their sleazy non-conforming "consent" dialog, then that's on them and I consider their site garbage and broken.

Your feedback is important, Take a survey about our site… after I just got there for the first time and haven’t even seen enough content to make any worthwhile observations about the site other than “leave me alone”

Bonus points if they never tested this in mobile so they don’t realize (don’t care?) that they completely broke the website because the ‘X’ to close the popup was rendered offscreen and they broke scrolling so you can’t get to it.

btw, if you use https://kagi.com/ , they have a workflow for this: if you are on a site, and they popup a modal asking for you to sign up for something, you click back to the kagi.com search results, click the shield icon, and then click block. Now you'll never see that site show up again in your search results.

I've found those sites that want you to sign up for stuff usually have poor content to begin with, so this is just helping you curate out all the bad content out there.

sadly sometimes it's e-commerce websites where you actually want to buy their product and they interrupt you three times with "sign up to our newsletter and get 5% off with the code" modals, like they're actively trying to frustrate me into not giving them my money

It's infuriating when you click on the search box, start typing, and the modal pops up disrupting your attempt to give them money.

Back in the ‘90s and early aughts, there was a well-known book called Web Pages That Suck.

One of their biggest refrains, was “Stop interfering with your user, when they are giving you money.”

They used to regularly hold up Amazon as the platonic ideal of an e-commerce site, but even Amazon has devolved into mis-click hell. Nowadays, I often click a button that takes me to some useless page, instead of the cart.

They usually succeed with me. Or if I really plan on purchasing I sign up to get the discount only to immediately opt out, so what’s the point? We’ve been furnishing a new house and so getting usually ~15% off a high ticket purchase I’m already decided on buying just for giving them my email which I also already will be giving them when I purchase is a good enough deal that I’ll do it temporarily. So much so, I can only think about how is this a good ROI for them.

That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.

It is an allusion of discount if they run those and opting out never works hr information is now stored on god knows how many servers.

They do it though because it works. Spin to win too is a total fabrication but gambling works. Just because something works doesnt mean there shouldnt be regulations against it.

> opting out never works hr information is now stored on god knows how many servers.

Just sign up for the newsletter with a disposable email to use the code. Or search for "<website name> promo codes" and the newsletter one will usually be the first result.

Burner emails work but they usually send it so you need to receive it. Assuming they use a generic code searching works but often they generate the code for single use at the time the email is sent. Promo code logic can get complex.

Best way i found is to buy when there is some xyz site wide sale but even then they can be sketch and jack up prices. Philips does this with their hue lights every time. Hilarious in how obvious it is.

Burner email services like AnonAddy, iCloud "Hide my email", et al work well for actual receipt but also provide isolation.

The ROI is you’re more likely to buy thinking you get a discount, and especially after doing the work to get the discount code.

The trick is it’s priced assuming that discount will be taken off.

> That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.

I get the impression that that stupid wheel is some kind of feature of one or several large e-commerce platforms shops can enable. If the shop is genuinely stocking useful products in some niche I make it a point to e-mail them and tell them how scammy it makes their site look.

DuckDuckGo has that feature, too.

They have it hidden behind a … menu though which is unfortunate because it’s a great feature to have.

That is a decent feature.

Edit: if it influences their search ranking it may be able to be gamed though.

Many people forget — Google once used to penalise sites with some abusive behaviours, so webmasters had a vested interest in having decent web pages if they wanted good rankings.

Somewhere along the line (when Prabhakar Raghavan was running search maybe?) that seems to have changed. Part of it might be cookie popups (thanks EU*). Part of it might be giving networks using Google’s own ad networks a free pass. In any case, webmasters had no reason to stop abusive/dark UX any more.

*This is not an anti-EU jab. It’s a jab at an inadequate technical measure. Given how many sites people visit, cookie consent popups do not provide informed consent, and further legitimise popups.

Paywalls used to get you deranked, too. Serving different content to Googlebot than what a user would see was considered an attempt to game it, and the domain would be penalized.

the point of the EU law wasnt to get everyone to plaster banners saying they're selling or giving away your personal info, the point was to make websites stop doing it by shaming them with the banner if they chose to continue anti-privacy behaviors.

the problem isnt the EU, it's the websites

Well if the solution doesn't work in real world, it is EU's problem

Some have done it (repo includes links to main articles covering the process): https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-watchdog

Note: I work for sentry.

~Dont be evil~

During Sunday Pichai, google has become a S*t hole. He sucked up all goodwill

Similar people who used animated banners in '00s.

And as they don’t use Posthog or any other tool for monitoring users’ behaviour, they don’t see patterns.

Yes, websites popups, asynchronous ads or autoplay videos are such annoying that someone should come with a solution. I think that a lot of people would pay for it - e.g. collected money could be redistributed back to visited sites. (As micropayment projects weren’t successful due to transaction fees.)

I use Adblock, cookies consent autoclick, Facebook antitracker - but others must be mad as they see all popups and ads.

But I understand that sites have to have some revenue stream to pay authors…

There are other approaches than ads.

(1) Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.

(2) Have your small blog as a private person and shoulder the minimal cost of running a blog, if any.

(3) Have valuable content and ask people for donations, if you are not willing to shoulder it yourself.

(4) Have a community of people, who are interested in keeping things running and chipping in.

We would be better off following those approaches, than infesting everything with silly ads, which don't work anyway and are blocked by 60% or more, depending on viewership.

> Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.

And how do you suppose people find out about that product?

Like, I hate the modern ad ecosystem as much as the next person, but I also understand the abstract need for the existence of advertisements of some kind.

> Like, I hate the modern ad ecosystem as much as the next person, but I also understand the abstract need for the existence of advertisements of some kind. We used to have catalogs and yellow pages before ads were everywhere.

> And how do you suppose people find out about that product?

Probably by having a good website, that is easily searchable for search engines and found with the right keywords. If I have a need for something, I should be able to search in a search engine and their website should show up in the results. The results should also be specific enough to my query. If I search for some business or solution in my area, it should surface things in my area predominantly.

It's not just transaction fees, since Patreon succeeds while Flattr (2.0) failed.

Me too!

Being obnoxious works well. Obnoxious people get elected to power. Obnoxious companies (and CEOs) generate hype that increases stock prices. Obnoxious youtubers call themselves influencers and make a good living out of it.

Or more charitably it is difficult to be successful without annoying many people.

There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.

One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.

Someone made a funny video about this approach with a guy at Petsmart and you hear the lady say, "Ok, just follow the prompts." and gets worse/funnier from there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDUvykJVmMU

What I've seen lead to success:

* Arrogance

* Overconfidence

* Schmoozing with the right people

* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation

What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:

* Caring about teammates and your future self

* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want

* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems

It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.

Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.

This can applied to a lot of sectors, look at the arts and culture for example

No, you are right

No, the first one thrives because they know how to play politics, the second one fails because they don't know how to play politics.

You described word for word the archetypical engineer, competent technically, incompetent politically. A liability to his team and superiors in a cut-throat corporate environment. That's why they fail, they can't be trusted to not screw their team over to do the right thing.

There is also the type of person, who just wants to do a good job and has passion for what they do well, but does not want to engage in silly political games. Just saying, it doesn't have to be incompetence at that.

Complacency is complicity

https://tcpca.org/blog/2019/2/1/when-complacency-is-complici...

During the rise of the Third Reich, a German named Dietrich Bonhoeffer rejected the path of comfortable ignorance and valiantly chose instead to stand against the banality of evil in his land. May his words haunt the collective soul of our country:

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer

The 'con' in con-man is short for 'confidence'.

People mistake confidence for having good leadership skills.

Early on in my career I couldn't understand why it was always the worst and most incompetent people who got promoted.

Then I realized that it's not their incompetence that gets them promoted per se, it's that if they're employed while being utterly useless and incompetent they have SOMETHING else going on that keeps them employed.

And it's that something else (whether that is politics, brown nosing, nepotism, bullying) that also gets them promoted.

Someone I once knew put it in a slightly more charitable way.

"Having friends is a skill."

Yep that sounds about right.

If your definition of success includes - nay, depends on - arrogance, overconfidence, and style over substance, then it's fair to say that your definition of success differs greatly from many societies' norm.

Sure, capitalist, hyper-individualistic societies might say the most toxic, selfish companies are the most successful.

But in huge swathes of the world - I'm inclined to say most of the world - success is defined by quality, respect, the test of time, and how well one achieves one's stated objectives.

Even in UK, which is not exactly a socialist utopia, a business or company that is self-sustaining and well -regarded counts as way more successful than, say, Elon Musk or Dyson (since they sold out).

Your definition of success is like defining beauty as 'women with full lips and unlined' and wondering why so many of the most beautiful people you see have had surgery. And pushing for other definitions of beauty won't help, either. Most people define beauty as a spectrum or confluence of various factors which only tangentially relate to the 2 most obvious, currently fashionable factors like lips and wrinkles.

Or, more succinctly: if you define success as financial gain, you don't value moral factors. So of course your most esteemed companies won't either.

Quite true. Sundar Pichai got his start on the path to fame at Google by getting the Google Toolbar install injected into things like the Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Flash installers. Look at him now.

Oh man I totally forgot about that Toolbar scourge back in the day day! These trash piles were all over and everyone’s mom that I knew had like 3 or 4.

Every year, the post-Thanksgiving ritual of deleting all of them from a relative’s PC, at their request because “it’s running slow”, knowing darn well they’d re-install them within the week.

More like 12 or 15 and you were lucky to have an 800x600 screen and so they were looking through an 800x150 viewport.

> Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?

It's the same economic model as for spam: You'd need only to get a critical number of clicks for it to become profitable.

At a small company I used to work for, a couple of marketing adjacent people occasionally advocated for a modal newsletter sign-up pop-up on the homepage.

Each time it came up, I would argue against it, believing that it was not only a bad experience and that people would click away, but that few people would actually sign up.

Eventually, a more assertive marketing person came on board, made the case for the pop-up, and won the argument. We added the pop-up.

The result?

I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.

To this day, I still hate it, and I hate pop-ups in general, but I try to have some humility about it. I have no doubt that my previous intransigence cost the company some business.

>I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.

You were absolutely correct that it's a bad experience, and that probably a lot of people hated it and think less of your company for doing it. But since every site behaves this way it's not a deal-breaker for people anymore. People either find a way to get around it or just suffer with the crappiness of the modern web and your metrics just go brrrrr.

I think it’s caused my data asymmetry. It’s very easy to show that x users signed up for the newsletter and to show that newsletter subscribers have a better retention rate or whatever. However it’s much harder to quantify the negative impacts, so pop ups proliferate. At least this is my experience anyway time I tried to push back against this sort of pattern.

the vast majority of web users arent technical like HN readers. especially boomers, they actively solicit ad's to tell them what to buy.

If it takes an ad for someone to buy something, chances are they shouldn’t buy anything.

I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor.

I want my browser to protect me from ALL those things. Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.

I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google, but also by random web designers such as on the python homepage who consider it morally just to pester visitors when they do not want to be pestered. I don't accept ads; I don't accept pop-ups or slide-in effects (in 99.999% of the cases; notifications for some things can be ok, but this does not extend in my book to donation Robin Hood waylanders).

Note that ads like this have a negative effect on me, that is, if e. g. python resorts to pop-ups to pester people to donate, it will be permanently blocked by me and as a consequence never receive any donation ever. This is my policy for dealing with such malicious actors. This includes corporations, but as the example of python shows, also python-devs who think they can abuse users. I understand that some companies depend on ads, but this is not my problem; I could not care about their thinking that it were ok to waste people's time. This is why ublock origin was so important: it helped people waste less time with crappy ads and annoying UI. We need to take the web back from Evil such as Google. We should not allow them to hijack our computer systems and make excuses about it. The browser is too important to leave it in the hands of Google or anyone else who thinks pester-pop-ups are ok. Can someone fire the guy who made this decision for the python homepage and ban him for life please?

> I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor.

To see it on python.org I had to enable JS (using noscript) AND disable uBlock Origin.

> then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.

Use Firefox

Or use other chromium based browsers! Thorium still has working uBlock origin!

Helium likewise

And brave!

Screw Brave and their crypto bullshit.

Its opt-in unlike most of firefox data selling like Google search.

the catch is Widevine support if you still want to play videos from commercial sites

all other chromium browsers cannot have signed widevine support?

Firefox however solves both ublock and widevine

You could have also run Chrome just for the few sites you play videos from.

Firefox doesn't get 4k on netflix or other sites.

Just pirate the content, it's better user experience and respects you.

This is the way.

So the solution is to cripple your web experience by disabling interactivity and using a slower, more buggy browser? … how about stop making websites that are hostile to users?

Firefox has been far faster for me than chrome ever was (I have way too many tabs open that the same number would make chrome chug). It is also an interesting take to have while defending a browser that is actively hostile to the user.

I haven't used chrome in years.I can't even imagine the user experience you're describing. Just use FF.

Google own products have pop ups. Ad Sense automatic ads generates pop ups. I imagine this is hundreds on millions a month, there’s no way to justify shutting this down in their new “be evil profit at all cost” motto.

> I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google

You're using a web browser built by a company whose primary income is advertising. What did you think would happen instead?

A lot of people have this weird idea that companies are their friends and would defend their interests despite large financial incentives to betray that trust.

"That's just how they make their money," is a common and terrible excuse.

It's not making an excuse on the part of Google, it's pointing out the naivety of expecting otherwise from Google.

Firefox still allows uBlock origin, and even on mobile.

One's expectations aren't in any way relevant in considering wether something is an asshole move or not.

Calling company strategy an "asshole move" is anthropomorphizing a lawnmower.

Company strategies are created by individual humans being assholes. Don't make excuses for them.

Being an asshole is incentivized by the system. If you don't want companies to behave like assholes, change the system to one that punishes that.

The first step in disincentivizing being an asshole is pointing out that someone is being an asshole.

This is a parallel argument to the whole "to big to fail" nonsense and not really in line with the famous comparison of a single person to a machine. Company strategies are typically created by small groups of people who - especially in this case - know exactly what the impact and longer-reach implications of their decisions will be. It is entirely reasonable to hold the people of any organization accountable for the policies they enact via that organization.

It's still people who make up a company

That strategy did not come into existence through some abstract entity

Firefox has had poor stewardship for quite a few years now with an uncertain future.

Even moreso - uBlock Origin doesn't block the modern equivalent of pop-up ads unless you manually block elements. Even then - half the time the block isn't even saved and needs to be redone every page visit.

> needs to be redone every page visit

Have you got an example of that?

Explanations are not excuses.

I’m sure they’d love to include a blocker in Chrome that blocks all the competitive ad networks.

If they'd ever allow such a thing to exist.

Why waste effort on something that's a rounding error at best?

It is because of such effort that they are rounding errors: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/04/google-loses-ad-...

But then they'd be one antitrust investigation away from losing it all.

What do you think uBlock Lite is for? They'll continue to cripple it until it is unable to block YouTube ads while still being able to block everything else.

Financial incentives, while a large motivator for companies, are frequently not the exclusive one.

Google for quite a few years was seen as a good steward of the free and open Internet.

To assert people shouldn't feel betrayed because "it's a company" fundamentally ignores why people had different expectations for Google to begin with.

When, 2001? By the time Chrome came out it had been clear that was not true for awhile.

Up until roughly 2010 Google was a pretty consistent advocate and activist for the open Internet.

Because it was in their financial interest to do so. Their business is dependent on the internet after all.

The problem is that people are quick to assume a company is being altruistic just because the financial incentives happen to align with their own incentives.

If you use a service, but never compensate the creators for it, how can you possibly reason they are immoral?

Not directly at OP, but just in general, the Internet needs to look at itself in the mirror and ask "are we actually the ones driving the problem?"

Free service with strings attached does sound like a "some day - and that day may never come - I will call upon you"[0] type of bargain.

[0] https://youtu.be/HTTxJRAs-uA?t=48

Except the terms aren't vague. They are spelled out. Usually the deal is to accept exposure to ads. While the terms may change in the future, the switching cost of a different browser or website are often quite low.

I didn't accept any deal by clicking a link that took me to a webpage. I don't think anyone using Python, which is GPL-compatible, expects it to come with a "and you'll see our popup advertising for donations if you visit our site".

If you (generic "you") make me accept that deal, guess what: I won't (and I actually don't, this happens routinely to me since I'm european -- I always close pages that ask me to "log in or accept our cookies").

Feel free to block me. I don't care that much about your content anyways. I won't see ads one way, or the other. And I will work hard to make this the default experience of my friends and family.

I'd gladly click a checkbox "tell the server I'm using adblock so they can block me". I don't care about your content that much. It's often crap and low value, that's why you do drive-by advertising with clickbait titles and low effort mass slop.

Most big YouTubers, especially tech adjacent, have about 40-50% of users ad-blocking their content. So they get no compensation.

Ok fine, but those users surely use patreon then? Well conversion rates for "viewer to paying subscriber" are <1%.

Again, I'm not pointing the finger at you individually, perhaps you always send tips and subscriptions, but overwhelmingly, the vibe of people with your feelings have a mindset of "I'm entitled to free stuff, they're bad if they want money, and I'm fighting a righteous crusade"

Meanwhile the Internet is going to shit catering only to people who cannot figure out ad block....

Surely the revenue from a patreon subscriber is also more than 100x that of a viewer, right?

Yes, let's endorse a system where 1 sucker pays and 100 others ride for free..

C'mon

It's literally a system of patronage, so yes. That's what the patrons sign up for.

also essentially how many large news organizations have pivoted. $520/year for WSJ, $400/year for Bloomberg (excluding terminal-only news and other extras, of course), $390/year for NYT, $120/year for WaPo (with exclusions). For only $2,500 or so a year, you can have a balanced stream of news and journalism. -But not your household; you need to pay extra for family plans.

(or you can do what most people do)

I do subscribe to Nebula, where most (albeit not “all”) of the YouTube creators I follow can be found. I donate to Patreon for folks like Benn Jordan, whom I feel does work that’s important and beneficial for society. For all the rest, including streaming/broadcast/cable stations owned by Paramount, Disney, and precious few others at this point? To hell with them. I take the money I saved from unsubscribing to their flawed and exploitative platforms, and I donate it to a handful of organizations like Wikipedia, EFF, and Archive.org. During the Hollywood writer’s strike, I donated $5/month to charitable orgs recommended by their union. I see live music several times a year. I purchase music from Bandcamp. There are lots of ways to support artists and creative professionals that don’t involve funding their exploitation, it’s just not as tidy or simple.

Good for you, these comments always get up votes, largely from the other 99% of people riding on the generosity of your contributions.

It feels good, but comments like yours need to be meaningless and repetitive, not celebrated because it gives freeloaders a sense of contributing.

> but those users surely use patreon then?

I personally don't watch talking heads on youtube, but let me tell you that no way I'm subscribing to every "influencer" that wants me to pay a silicon valley starbucks latte per month. Begging for subscriptions isn't the solution.

> I didn't accept any deal by clicking a link that took me to a webpage. I don't think anyone using Python, which is GPL-compatible, expects it to come with a "and you'll see our popup advertising for donations if you visit our site".

On the other hand, they didn't make any deal not to show you pop-ups. And they have no obligation to you as a user, nor does it seem they have incentive to change their approach.

In the physical world, common spaces can be regulated. Signs, billboards, radio waves, public right of way and similar goods are public property and often the government will lease common space in exchange for some benefit to the commons. This might be revenue (collecting some fee for the license to put billboards on the highway) or a more abstract benefits (the public benefit of information dissemination when leasing radio spectrum). This at least allows citizens to participate in the process and benefit from the outcomes, even indirectly. In exchange, private companies use various methods (including ads) to recoup their costs.

On the internet, though, it feels like the balance has been disturbed. The benefits the public get from the maintenance of the infrastructure that provides these services (cables running through public and private lands, radio spectrum for wireless services, maintenance of domain services, etc.) isn't really commensurate with the massive profit organizations get from using them. I'm not sure how we got to the point where Google can cash in so much on the commons and we get popup ads as a thank you. I don't know what regulatory framework will work, but I hope we find one.

> On the other hand, they didn't make any deal not to show you pop-ups.

Exactly my point! The only deals websites and I made are TCP, TLS and HTTP. That was in response to GPs mention of a deal where I somehow have to watch ads because I made an HTTP request.

you have a tracking "si=..." parameter in the youtube link

heh, qed. thanks, edited the comment to remove the tracking param.

I disagree with this idea. The current model (generally free content that is supported by advertisers) is not the only model that can exist. Yes the Internet would be vastly different if there were no ad revenue. But the Internet existed without ads before, and certainly could do so again. Services like Meta/X couldn't exist in that market, but would that be so bad?

The OP is not complaining about free with ads. They are complaining about a free software site that is asking for a donation.

Because they don't understand the rules of the game.

If you create something in a field that is so infinitely commoditized that there aren't even any paid options and thousands of competitors that would instantly jump at the chance to be a replacement just for popularity's sake, you are frankly deluded to expect anything in return for your work. Best you can expect is to have some influence over others through your direction of the project, which is something that you could actually sell and I'm sure they do. Just look at Zig.

Any donations they get are completely against any market common sense and just people's good will. Demanding anything is so hilariously out of touch with reality.

> If you use a service, but never compensate the creators for it, how can you possibly reason they are immoral?

A lot of times nowadays it's actually the users themselves creating the content which the platform uses to secure its network effect to have visits in the first place. Should those creator users then be paid as well or not?

I don't think this applies to Python. There is a core team and there are expenses, but people do contribute code and work. Not to mention corporate sponsors. Sure, donate if you want, but it's not the same as blocking ads on purely ad-funded content (which I do, but won't defend as much)

> Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin.

Advertising company's browser makes it hard to block ads. Film at 11.

I feel like the tech user community has completely lost the plot sometimes.

Remember when we had to listen to Windows users complaining about irritating OS behaviour (performance problems, BSOD, ribbons, clippies, Activation Keys, terrible networking protocols)? After we reached age 15 or so, we learned to politely hold back from saying "yeah we know, use a better OS"?

This feels very similar. I'll be polite. :)

> I feel like the tech user community has completely lost the plot sometimes.

You're mixing "badly implemented operating system", "UX patterns I disagree with", "dark patterns pushed by corporate greed", and "Turns out you need money in order to pay developer salaries even in an open source project".

I'll be polite as well and not elaborate further...

You make a fair point that my attempt at humor is a bit oversimplified.

But it's also the best-available solution. The problems described do not exist on the other side of the fence. Others have different criteria, but we are happy with ours and wonder if y'all might be too.

You think Python is being malicious for asking for donations when they give away so much for free?

Had you already paid for it ahead of time?

Personally I wouldn't mind the ask, it's the pop-up that covers content that I mind.

No, the issue is the intrusive way of asking.

It’s not Python asking for donations, it’s the Python Software Foundation. Which means donations won’t necessarily go to improving Python or running PyPI, but your money might end up funding a conference in Trumpistan, outreach for the world’s most popular programming language, or political activities.

You apparently can donate to PyPI more directly if you want (same popup, but redirects to a more specific donation site), though since that site is run by PSF, that money goes through PSF and it is unclear if it is earmarked along the way: https://psfmember.org/civicrm/contribute/transact/?reset=1&i...

Why would I want to donate to pypi? So that corporations can redownload the same files over and over millions of times in their ci/cd and be lazy about creating a local mirror?

Or to fund more integration with github, or remove more features?

This is very important. It's one thing to have your money improve CPython, it's another to have your money go towards an outreach program to help disadvantaged girls in Uganda write a Tetris clone in Python. It's similar to what happens with Mozilla. A way of choosing what exactly will be done with your money is fundamental to get donations.

Let's not forget funding pypi so that they may remove other features such as gpg signatures.

are the donations being distributed among the actual contributors, or do they largely go towards funding DEI initiatives? :)

Looks like you think you know the answer, so for all of us who don't, please enlighten us

I got a 2 weeks ban from the python discuss when I suggested that contributors that contribute on behalf of an employer should disclose the fact and who the employer is.

Genuine question, but have you seen the popup being described? It's absolutely huge, and has a fake x button pattern. The complaint is on how disruptive it is, not the ask for donations

> I understand that some companies depend on ads, but this is not my problem

It is their problem, though, and they have figured out that pop-ups work. It is not their problem, however, if you decide to never go to their website again. They likely do not want you to go anymore to their website if you are never going to contribute anything.

Short-term thinking is how hegemonies end.

Revenue is how businesses and even no-profits survive. You can be idealistic about it all you want, but if there is no cash flow, those websites will go away.

Pop-ups working on (to pick a number out of thin air) 0.01% of viewers and alienating 5% to never visit the website again is still incentive to use pop-ups.

Pop-ups working to get money and pop-ups working to alienate users are not mutually exclusive.

Where did you pull those numbers out from?

But ok, if we want to play with made up numbers, pop-ups working with the 0.01% of viewers that are willing to spend money are worth alienating even 10% of people that will never spend a dime.

You are assuming every visitor is the same, when most are just a waste of resources.

They aren't poor. It's similar to what wikipedia does. They have loads of money but make banners making people think they're strapped for cash and about to go offline. It's a scam.

For that matter the GNOME desktop asked me for money the other day

KDE started doing a similar thing in 2024. They pop up a notification asking for donations once yearly. Whether you click "Donate" or "No Thanks" on the pop-up, it will go away until the next year. I don't mind them doing this, as it clearly works (see https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-n... and https://pointieststick.com/2025/12/28/highlights-from-2025/ ). Historically, contributions to KDE mainly came from companies/government agencies funding work on specific technologies/parts of the desktop, and volunteers working on their special interests. This meant there was a giant blind spot for work on areas that weren't relevant for corporations/governments and weren't fun to work on in someone's free time. All the small individual donations make it possible for KDE to act independently of these large companies/government bodies and hire its own developers to work on tasks that may not be commercially relevant or fun, but are important to the project.

IMO it's only fine as long as it respects the user's choice and doesn't keep on asking. If I choose to not donate, do not nag me about it the next year either. If I choose to donate, do not remind me to do it again. I will do it myself if I decide to.

Perhaps it's cultural - where I live repeatedly asking for money is highly frowned upon and only lowers the reputation of the non-profit doing it. The non-profits who only ask once are much more likely to receive multiple donations from the same person.

"did"? still does.

Just don't use chrome.

uBlock Origin it's very alive and working fine in Firefox and forks of it.

> I consider this abuse of the visitor.

Why can't anything simply be "disliked" anymore?

I get you don't like it.

But abused?

Because there's a slide-in?

On a site run by volunteers?

For open source software you get for free?

That you freely choose to visit?

Calling that abuse seems... off. I have no concerns with people saying the don't like something. But the current nature to be hyperbolic is off-putting to me.

How about "user-hostile"?

A thing that the user does not want, but is presented on top of content that they do want, is not serving user intent.

Of course, it's serving the needs of the project, theoretically. (Organizational capture of organizational perpetuation at the expense of organizational goals are a common problem, but I don't have any opinion or knowledge of this case.)

Adopting the user-hostile behaviours of advertising and perpetual fundraising are not a great way to make users happy. But they work, I guess. At some cost.

Don't ask me, I voted by disabling JavaScript and running Firefox. I don't have these problems.

There's a thread (now locked) on the Python discourse forum about the popup: https://discuss.python.org/t/accessibility-issues-in-the-pyp...

It's actually kind of embarassing seeing someone from the org chime in and say ~"this is our first time doing this, so we expected feedback" ... and separately infuriating ~"we will take this into account for next year".

  a) Any Internet-enabled human should have seen and avoided this problem from a million miles away.
  b) "We expected feedback" ?? this phrase is fucking insulting, sorry.
  c) Not next year. Take it down now and preserve some credibility. What is wrong with you people?

> What is wrong with you people?

Unmitigated arrogance combined with scathing contempt for their user base, perhaps?

I'd expect nothing less from the people that botched the Python 2.x to 3.x transition, burning billions of dollars of software value and countless hours of development effort in the process. Or the people who repeatedly failed to come up with a sane library and package system.

Python demonstrates that having a standards body and caring about backward compatibility are not bad things, and that a platform's most important job is to absorb pain, not multiply it across millions of users.

It comes as no surprise that even their web site would migrate to the latter camp.

On mobile it is actually worse than the (now locked) thread suggests where it is merely covering 5% of screen area. On mobile the popup takes up more than 50% of screen area for me as it's by default opened up all the way.

Thinking about making a new thread to ask it to be taken down for good.

I looked out of curiosity and on my 15 inch laptop screen it does take up probably about 40%. I'm surprised by how egregious it is. And it looks like they changed it (or there's an A/B test?) since the thread. It also now jokes about how banners are cringe, actually taking up more space!

The initial thread showed only the second "minimized" version of the 2 step process (Maximized -> Minimized -> Dismissed). Here's the banner code which looks heavily LLM coded to me: https://web.archive.org/web/20251211092050js_/https://donate...

> we expected feedback. That way we’d have something to ignore lol

It's abuse. Sugar coating it will only empower the perpetrators. Is it the most inhumane thing possible? No, obviously not. But these sites are taking advantage of the fact that you're there to do something, learn something, get something done, etc and they have your eyeballs. What they're doing is intentional, distracting and getting worse.

I don't care what the commercial status of the site is that I'm visiting, you will not hijack my attention.

Abuse has a meaning of misuse or use in an unintended way, as in “bringing a large bottle to take home is an abuse of the restaurant’s free refill policy”.

It doesn’t imply the strength of the word in “sexual abuse” or other law-related contexts.

It is abuse.

It's not a flavor of ice cream.

It's an intentional act performed by a party upon another party, in the full conscious deliberate knowing intent to do something other than be nice or even neutral to the other party, but to bother and annoy them, to consume attention and time that they did not willingly give.

It's not the worst crime of the century and so it is a small abuse, but abuse is still the correct word. And it's not a small abuse when performed on a million people instead of one.

If you don't think so then you must be ok with me stealing a single cent from you, and everyone else. Surely you merely dislike that and would defend my behavior against anyone trying to do something so dramatic and hyperbolic as to involve law enforcement over something so small.

Surely the abuse is caused by your browser showing you the slide in.

python.org might be asking your user agent to do it, or it might be asking a third party to do this; either way the interpretation of how to display that is down to the user agent. I don't see any popover/slidein but I'm running uBO which is probably blocking this. I do this because I don't want the 'abuse'.

That's an excellent example of victim blaming.

"Surely the abuse is caused by your browser showing you the slide in."

The only time that is true is when Edge throws up it's own popups when you go to a chrome or firefox download page.

Outside of that singularly outrageous example, the browser is doing everything it promised to do and everything the user asked it to do, which is to render the data coming from a server, as so no, the browser is not the abuser.

Unless you are still just a kid or something that has just never really thought about anything yet, then you understand this perfectly well, and so your attempt to think up some contrary argument is not merely in honest error but disingenuous.

   > I've also noticed this recently. Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor.

I had to disable uBlock Origin to test this and... wow, what a load of bullshit. If anything, this kind of stuff makes me want to _not_ donate to that project. All projects I've donated to in the past were the ones which didn't bother me with these things.

I wonder now how many of these I've been missing because of uBlock Origin + DNS Blocking + JS disabled. Last time I tried a normie browser (my mom's), I had to install uBlock Origin there, because I just couldn't use it that way. I feel sorry for the majority of web users, who don't have any protections against popups and invasive advertisements.

It's enshitification of the web. As time moves forward, the web becomes less usable and more about implementing dark patterns to squeeze a few bucks out of you. Anyone would have likely eventually made this decision. It's just a natural conclusion of capitalism.

> Note that ads like this have a negative effect on me, that is, if e. g. python resorts to pop-ups to pester people to donate, it will be permanently blocked by me and as a consequence never receive any donation ever.

How much were you donating to them before the pop-up?

> Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you"

Visited python.org and... you were not exaggerating! wth!

> Python has a slide-in "donate now or we mug you". I consider this abuse of the visitor.

They even locked the thread on discuss that was asking for its removal.

No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content. And yet here we are.

Today most commercial or news sites use those plus dark patterns to make it go away as hard as possible. I usually just close the tab and never come back. My choice is “no” not “ask again later”…

Same for those annoying chatbot buttons which just take away screen space.

The web experience, specially in the phone, reminds me of the 90, if not worst, because some of those cookies dialogs have “processing” time (just a 5 sec. Wait)

I have counted 20 clicks until I get a clean view of actual content with all possible distractions closed. And never EVER less than 5.

The thing is so awful, that I started trusting the sheitty Gemini extract, because at least pops up at once. If I open a site to check, I have to be prepared to about 10 annoying and slow, microscopic buttons to close all the sheit. Then you realize the site is LLM slope anyway… or just marketing BS… next site… rinse and repeat.

Specially EU and specially Germanay, the web is dead. (Was anytime alive?!)

That was the big aha moment last year with Noscript for me. For a long time I avoided it because of the occasional case where I have to whitelist a site, which costs a bit of time.

Now every site has so much forced garbage interaction that with Noscript on average I have way fewer clicks.

I've started to encounter news outlets / etc that use JavaScript to load most of the article. So if you don't have it enabled you get like one or two paragraphs and that's it. Usually I didn't care about the article that much anyway, but it's still annoying.

I've been using NoScript since 2016, and the number of things that get loaded in via Javascript has sextupled since then. This isn't an exaggeration, some websites like Wal-Mart's went from five extra domains to thirty. Going to Fossil's website to look at a watch for a Christmas gift this year, the domain whitelist panel for NoScript was so long I actually had to scroll down because there were just that many.

And there's no silver bullet to fix it, because there's three parts of it. The first is that these Javascript modules are literally drag and drop, so you can add new functionality in minutes. The second is that most of this stuff is being delivered offsite from a CDN anyways, so why bother doing anything like a static page? And the third is that it forces the users to enable Javascript so that trackers, fingerprinters, third party cookie loggers, and all sorts of other things get their filthy little digits into your window.

Javascript devs aren't going to change, because they don't want things to be harder and slower (putting side the mess that is the Javascript ecosystem). The hosts don't want things to revert, because then that's more money paid for bandwidth when that cost can instead be dropped in someone else's lap. And the little bastards doing the tracking definitely aren't going to change, because it's a source of money for doing nothing other than being a voyeur.

I still block Javascript everywhere just so that things will actually work and won't crash my browser by eating an entire gigabyte of RAM just loading fonts from some third party website. I still recommend other people to as well. Not because I think it will actually protect them, but instead to show them just how inefficient and predatory modern website design is. It spooks people when they see two dozen URLs that aren't the website they're currently on.

In theory with GDPR conforming websites it should be 1 click and that is "reject all" or "accept only essential" cookies and a website would truly only ever set essential cookies, and not something else that is non-essential to reading the content.

In practice lots of websites are developed by people going to huge lengths to make it more cumbersome and sneak in shit that's not essential, and the websites do not actually follow the law.

Mind, this is talking about the not rolled back version of GDPR, that I read they are planning to roll back somewhat and thereby destroy the good it was.

In Germany the web is dead, because of laws, that require most websites to have the author's friggin address on the website. Like, who wants every idiot on the web to know one's address? Might as well not have a blog or website. There are websites which don't require it and you can sort of gray zone get around it, but that's already too much effort that inhibits a freely developing web. Instead people flock to abusive social media presences. Germany has managed to basically kill its blogging and web culture through this idiocy and thereby got rid of a lot of educational potential and skilled workforce.

> In practice lots of websites are developed by people going to huge lengths to make it more cumbersome and sneak in shit that's not essential

I feel it was from the begging a way of screw people so people say “fuck me as you like, but let me surf the web!” And they are getting away with it, sadly.

> In Germany the web is dead, because of laws, that require most websites to have the author's friggin address on the website.

Amen! That is was one of the dumbest things. I would be ok to have it registered somehow. But just for everyone to know my private address because I want to share some stupid thing online?! Pretty strange, when we talk about privacy!

Another one was making the owner of a wifi spot 100% responsible for crimes committed by that connection. That made free wifi absolutely disappear.

That leaves us with sites than only try to make money. Which is ok, I guess. But the web could be much richer than just a virtual shop window.

Maybe if the US leaves the EU we can make those cookie banners go away. ;-)

But really I am so sick of Germans making excuses for their delinquent government, if I was elected the first thing I would do is unplug them from the global internet.

Unplug the government or Germans?

Yes.

> My choice is “no” not “ask again later”…

My choice is uBlock Origin and enabling the Cookie Notices filter lists and other Annoyances filter lists (which block the Mobile app banners and such). Works pretty well.

Obviously using Firefox, since Chrome doesn't let me filter content my own computer renders locally these days...

Couldn’t agree more. Also FF user and Ublock Origin works great. On mobile (iOS in my case) it’s not that easy though. I’m using safari with AdGuard which works for some annoyances, but by far not all.

I have been having some success with wipr 2. The developer is respectful of privacy, so the blocking is split into regular content blockers (Apple claims cannot send data) and one extra (could send data). I enabled only the regular content blockers.

Ublock light is pretty good on Safari

Not compared to the uBlock Origin. You can't even import a filter list. Main reason I use Firefox.

Something that [1] AdGuard Browser Extension can do, it make you wonder why uBOL can't include such a feature.

[1] https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-browser-extension-v5-2.h...

Firefox on iOS has 0 support for Adblocking, making it hell to use.

That's not Firefox, that's Safari wearing a fake mustache

Brave on iOS seems to work well. Ideally I would use Firefox on iOS but last time it didn’t seem to be as good.

I’ve gotten good results from BlockBear, fwiw.

On iOS, Adguard does a decent job. It's the only way I would ever use the internet.

I've enjoyed https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic/ it fills out cookie banner automatically according to your preferences.

Obviously alongside ublock origin for the rest of the minefields

I also supplement it with the "Web Archives" extension to access paywalled and login-walled articles.

> No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content.

Ads are content too, you know?

Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.

Ads do not absolutely have to be delivered via pop ups or modals.

> Ads are content too, you know?

Yes, and I’m not against ads in general.

It’s about the balance of actual content (the user wants to read and cares about) and ads/popups the site owner needs to run the site or generate some kind of income. If the user has to click away numerous things to be able to see any “real” content, then something’s clearly wrong. We’ve gone from showing ads to support the site to generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads.

Sad times.

Agreed that there are many sites that seem to have no other purpose than to get ads displayed.

Unfortunately, it's also getting harder and harder to tell them apart from the sites that have legitimate content supported by ads because the quality of the latter is nosediving.

The reason you can't tell them apart is there's no meaningful distinction. Whether content is sufficiently "legitimate" to be worth the ads depends entirely on the particular user.

I don't entirely agree. Yes, there's subjectivity, but there's more to it, IMO.

There are sites (eg along the lines of legacy print or established in the "early" internet days) that still try to generate news content for reading, but are seeking more revenue.

And then there are sites that are just modern click/impression factories that never tried to actually produce real content.

I don't agree that whether the content is "real" is anything more than subjective.

If content you see laden with ads was not "real" enough to earn from sufficient readers, you would not be seeing it.

If that were really the case, then nobody would be employed to try and understand SEO, ranking algorithms, virality, etc.

Edit: what I mean by that is: I think your comment implies there's some sort of meritocracy to content people see online that isn't easily gamed. My various feeds, search results, etc, convince me otherwise.

I did not say content was never gamed. But gaming doesn't make content unreal.

From the viewpoint of Hirschman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

you don't have any "voice" about ads so your choice is to "exit" by running an ad blocker. Obnoxious advertising tactics, scam ads, and other problems in the advertising system lower people's responsiveness to advertising. We need to restore the responsiveness to weak signals (bidirectionally) that Vaughn talks about in The Challenger Launch Decision and her book about her divorce Uncoupling.

wrt GP: "generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads" is how publishing has always worked, even way back when it all came on dead trees. My library had a book in the reference section that had, for various types of demographic, the maximal percentage of ads to run (ie, how much content you needed to pay for having sold a given volume of ads), but it would probably have been almost as quick, just as cheap, and likely more accurate, to empirically determine that percentage by visiting a local newsstand and sampling the ad density from your target section of the rack.

wrt Exit vs Voice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376098

If people are willing to consume content but not willing to pay for it, then you have a very strong indicator it has no value at all and therefore no actual need to be produced in the first place.

Or at least, not enough subjective value for that person to outweigh the cost. Paywalls are a great screening filter that actually tests if people want to spend any money or time on an article, or merely clicked through from force of habit.

So? Ads are a screening filter that tests if people want to spend time consuming ads to consume content.

What's odd is when people here complain of screening by ads because they'd think screening should instead be by money. It is proper that the choce for the publisher's site is made by the publisher and for the reader's visits is made by the reader.

People willing to pay by consuming ads are indicating the content is worth that price - to them. The fact such people exist is proved by the fact such sites exist.

This is not how it works. Ad-subsidized content is functionally equivalent to price-dumping. The more ad-subsidized content is out there, the less incentive there is to focus on quality and quantity of eyeballs become the only metric that matters.

On the contrary, content quality is a major driver of ad revenue.

Then you'd have to explain why every reputable newspaper is putting up paywalls and all the quality sites that used to cover specific niches went out of business in the last 20 years.

Saying "revenue goes up with content quality" only makes sense if you compare one poor site with another, but when you put in terms of ROI, you will see it is a lot easier to set up hundreds of different content farms than to keep a sustainable source of well written, reputably sourced reports.

I would care if they were at all capable of respecting people who allow ads.

> Ads are content too, you know?

I agree. Why there isn’t this technology implemented on film streaming, movie theaters, even games? I think ebooks should stop you reading every five minutes just to show ads. I’m sure it could be implemented in to PDF pretty easily.

Internet and all medias point is to make money for jesus christ, what are we, a charity? Why don’t book publishers put ads into printed books, they are goving away content for free!

> Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.

I'm fine with that. An ad-laden site with ads I cannot block won't have me as a visitor anyway, so I'm not really going to notice if they are gone.

Can you really not conceive of some content sufficiently valuable to make it worth you consuming those ads?

To me this sounds like “can you not conceive of some content sufficiently valuable that you’d let someone get you addicted to their brand of cigarettes so you could get it for free”

If it’s that valuable, just let me pay a fair price to see it.

In general, I’d like to see personally targeted ads banned entirely and a legal requirement for a fairly priced (i.e. same order of magnitude as the lost ad revenue) ad free option.

Ads are addictive?? News to me.

> Can you really not conceive of some content sufficiently valuable to make it worth you consuming those ads?

Honestly, no.

Perhaps I am just lacking imagination; can you think of any content compelling enough that a) I am not prepared to pay to get it and b) I am still prepared to view ads to get it?

I can't imagine any type of content that I both don't want to pay for and feel it is worth sitting through the ads.

I expect the ratios matter as well; the average webpage/site has more ads than content that I specifically want. If I had to sit through a 10s ad to see a 90m movie, I might do it. As it stands, right now on youtube, there is a 30s-60s ad shown between 5-minute videos.

So, when I am not using Firefox, I simply don't go to youtube.

I don't know how much you can afford to pay. But I do know many users can afford to consume ads more than pay money.

> I don't know how much you can afford to pay.

I didn't say anything about content I can afford to pay for. I am talking specifically about content that I am unwilling to pay for, yet am willing to put up with ads for.

Like I said in my previous post, the ratio matters a lot, here.

I'd be fine with a whole web free of revenue.

There would be much less stuff around, but what would stay is the things people created for fun, not for profit. SEO spam, AI slop - these are all solved by removing money from the web.

I doubt you'd say tha same about films and music. Why should the web be different?

Web ads exist because they are one option that serves the needs of content providers and consumers alike.

I was fine with ads when they were a text AdSense banner.

Now a lot of sites have scammy full page js-popups of the kind that were only found on dodgy websites in the 90s.

As a life-long hater of ads (before the Internet, I would mute the TV during ad breaks), I must agree. Before AdSense, animated GIFs for advertising were obnoxious. When the “Don’t be evil” Google started doing advertising, I was so impressed with them. Even their advertising is tasteful - and relevant! They really seemed to have the Midas touch.

But I feel that their choice of advertising revenue as their predominant income stream set them on a trajectory that gradually and inexorably led them further away from their original principles.

If the content is so worthless that people will not voluntarily pay for it, then this outcome would be no great tragedy.

But what would humanity do without garbage LLM content slop? How would we survive?

People voluntarily pay by consuming the ads.

The content was better when it was posted by hobbyists for free than it is now posted by people trying to make money off of it. So... fuck 'em.

It's so lazy and dumb. The wildest thing about it, is that they could mostly delay required cookies to the second contact, first interaction or at the time it's actually required. Raw first contact engagement can be tracked cookieless.

Brave made this more bearable for me, by blocking cookie banners by default.

Ad delivery services don't care about the user experience because it's not their site, so anything goes. The host justifies their decision because hey, look, money. That money is quantifiable while user experience is less so.

Speaking for myself only, but I find it easier to click ‘back’ than waste time on my ‘consent’.

Lately, I’m asking some llm to fetch it and summarize, so the one sentence content that was expanded into a full page article goes back to its original form.

I’ve noticed some LLMs lately aren’t pulling the page and try guessing the content from URL SEO.

I feel like the worst offenders of this are pretty much every mainstream news website.

A little while back I visited one of the bigger ones without my ad blocker on and it was completely unusable. Autoplay videos, banners, ads between every paragraph of the article, sponsored links, popups, and the list goes on.

If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.

Oh hi, I noticed you closed the live video window I opened up, let me open that up again for you.

Oh, looks like you closed that live video window again, let me get that back up for you again.

Ooops, looks like your clumsy fingers accidentally closed that live video again, let me just get that opened back up for you.

Also: Oh, you scrolled past that live video and even clicked it away. Let’s make it sticky on the top of the page and auto start again with audio on full volume. And hide the stop button.

Seriously, I've seen videos that cannot be closed without zapper mode as far as I can tell

You’re missing the asinine part of the initial popups: oh hi, I noticed you blocked video autoplay, let me force you to click on something (anything, any page interaction) so the browser will let me play the video.

This generalizes to "Oh, I see you're running JavaScript. Let me harass you in all the ways I can think of until you relent and act according to my will instead of your own".

... and should be treated with exactly the amount of respect or deference it would be in real life -- avoid (don't follow links to sketchy sites), de-escalate or ignore (close the tab and walk away), or defend (block JavaScript).

> If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.

It definitely isn’t but I think it’s all they have left. Subscriptions just don’t work any more. And less tech savvy users just battle through it, presumably through gritted teeth.

Declining industries can get into a death spiral where they can’t find a way to stop bleeding customers, so they focus on extracting more money from the customers who remain. Which then drives away even more of them. It’s not a good strategy, but there may not be a good strategy.

I kinda see the opposite, all sites seem to be going to subscription models. Obviously it doesn't work because I'm not going to subscribe to every news site I see a link from on HN.

So I tend to use archive.ph . I wish there was a plugin to open a page in that more easily though. Luckily most HN posts have a reader contributing a link in the comments.

I've always wondered why I can't pay some small fee (20 cents? $1?) to read an article. Why it have to be an entire subscription? If I put $20 / month into an account and then spend that bit by bit on high quality articles from different sites I'd gladly do that.

because payment processors hate small payments and punish accordingly (with flat fee +%)

That shouldn't really be a problem if there's an intermediary that takes the payment and distributes it.

We had a service that did this in the Netherlands (Blendle). They had a lot of the big Dutch media titles on-board. It failed and they pivoted to a crappy subscription service.

The model just doesn't work at this point.

Inkl, on the other hand, is still alive and kicking. If you're ok with their selection of sources it's 9.99 per month o 99.99 per year. I still have a pay-per-read subscription, which I prefer to the subscription model, but I'm afraid they don't offer that anymore.

Yes I know blendle but this was decades ago. In a market that was completely different, where paywalls weren't yet a thing and they would just display ads. It was "ads vs paying a bit". Not really a big incentive.

I think in this day and age where most news outlets simply give you a paywall I think this will work just fine. Because now the alternative is just not reading the content (or paying a sub which is ridiculous for a site you view a couple times a month)

Their hope with subscriptions is that there's value to you visiting more than a couple times per month.

Anecdotally, this works for me - I pay for a handful of subs, and I don't use any news aggregators or feeds - the sites with subs I pay for cover everything of interest to me.

It would be cheaper for you but not very profitable for them.

It really depends, there are so many peoole who just don't want more than a couple subscriptions.

The subscriptiin model only favor the giants like netflix, spotify and NYTimes but not necessarily the smaller players.

It's only extra money for them because I'm never ever going to subscribe a monthly sub to a site I read one or two articles a month from. So they're not losing anything from me, only gaining. It's basically free money.

Right now I use archive.ph because I can but if I couldn't (if they make it a hard block) I would just ignore links to said outlet.

I sub to a few outlets which I read daily. But I couldn't possibly sub to every single outlet I see a link from. And I wouldn't anyway.

However if I could click '€0.50 to read this article' then yeah I would if it seemed interesting. Especially real journalism, not reuters copy/paste.

And for a regular reader who reads said site daily, it still makes sense to take out a 10-20 bucks a month sub. Still cheaper than paying per read.

1. You can be sure that most people still won't pay to read the article, so it might not be worth doing at all

2. "Number of subscribers" is a real, meaningful metric used across the industry for various purposes, including informing advertisers and calculating recurring revenue. Your proposal, on the other hand, is somewhat odd and questionable that people probably don't know how to make use of.

The math doesn’t work out:

https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...

Throwing up hands and saying: internalizing the externalized cost is "ridiculously expensive" is not proof it doesn't work.

The examples of the a la carte exercise brands referenced (SoulCycle, etc) are quite ineffective arguments -- those are successful businesses with loyal, high retention users because they provide specific, high value products to the users.

If you’re looking for concrete examples of why it doesn’t work why not study the various companies that have tried this and failed?

Wish granted.

https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall

Thanks!!

They don't care about return visitors or "loyal viewers."

It's a shotgun strategy. Every once in a while a story will hit. So they maximize value for the rarest event.

Recently, I helped a family member getting set up with e-newspaper of a local newspaper. The deal is to get paper newspaper at the weekend and e-newspaper on working days.

When the time of the switch came, the newspaper maker/agency, whatever one calls that, fumbled hard. (1) We hadn't gotten a login or token or anything we needed to log in. (2) After calling them and getting access to the account, the subscription for the digital newspaper had not been properly set up, and we didn't have access to any newspaper online. (3) After calling again and after a while finally having access, they still hadn't managed to send us a bill for the subscription, so in their system we were non-paying customers, who wanted access... (4) The person delivering the paper newspaper still hasn't got the memo, that we should only receive the paper newspaper at the weekends.

So, with this kind of utter incompetence and disorganization, I am not surprised they are struggling to do anything in the digital realms correctly, let alone doing it well.

Local newspapers are all running on skeleton staff and that stuff is outsourced to some white-label newspaper platform provider, or imposed by their corporate owner, they don't have the resources to run their own platforms.

In the early 2000’s there was a porn site that completely covered you screen with porn pop-ups when you visited it. The funny joke back then was to opened it on school computer so that the poor teachers had to close them one by one (boot the PC if they were more savvy).

Today you can just open any major news site without ad blockers and effect is almost the same. There’s no porn, but it’s almost worst with the crap they open on your browser without asking. No wonder people rather get their news from social media.

GNAA Last Measure? It did a little bit more than just opening a bunch of windows and yelling "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porn" :)

I wasn’t the one opening up those sites and besides, we were teenagers. Somebody had had the great idea of placing a PC in the hallway for kids to use during breaks, so of course it was positively toxic the whole machine - I refused to go go one metre closer to it. I remember the site, or one of them, having nude women on it, so I doubt it was that one.

> Pop-ups are back, and they’re worse than ever

The article opens with a screenshot of genuine pop-ups, and they are clearly so much worse than the (still annoying) modals presented later in the article. In the past, sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from. Now if you don't like what the page is doing, you can at least just navigate away.

>sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from

I feel like that was mostly porn sites. I find modals far more intrusive on mainstream sites.

Porn and privacy sites. Especially the latter still do it a LOT and they will just block you if you block the popups.

Sorry I meant piracy sites. Not privacy. Autocorrect...

Yes, true! I forgot about ROM sites, they were the worst offenders

On the contrary. Popups you could leave for later and/or close with the browser chrome, as bad as they are, are less annoying than today's modals that block the site you were reading until you find the magic pixel.

They were so much worse. They’d basically “corrupt” your system state. They were often self replicating and so you’d have to quit the whole browser to make it stop. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Sometimes it would grind your PC to a halt and you’d have to reboot.

Isn’t this mostly because browsers in that era didn’t have process isolation (and if you were on a classic Mac, there wasn’t even preemptive multitasking)?

You shouldn’t blame it on the browsers that certain websites are malicious.

I expect the software I use to properly sanitise untrusted inputs, yes

Sure, but still, why blame (only) the browser?

I was also blaming the OS for not having preemptive multi-tasking? And once we've blamed the OS and the browser... not sure who else is in this equation.

The web developer is not in this equation, because I have no way to know their server hasn't been hacked, and hence even if I trust them personally, anything they send me is explicitly untrusted

> Sometimes it would grind your PC to a halt and you’d have to reboot.

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Measure

One aspect of popups that survived, was the ability of a website to spawn a new tab on click. I DETEST this behaviour. Not only because it breaks the back button, but tabs/windows are something I control, not you. I will decide when to leave your website for good, instead of opening a new tab.

Whoever invented target=_blank should be guillotined.

Even assuming that we lose that particular battle, I can't understand why the browsers won't make their right-click menus orthogonal and offer an "open in this tab" option.

Browsers were able to block pop-ups because websites used to open another browser window to display ads. Modern websites use modals using CSS and JavaScript within their page canvas.

It's hard to block them deterministically by the browser. Though uBlock Origin and NoScript can block almost all these annoyances.

In other words: browsers should just implement uBlock Origin by default.

Firefox does already have some tracker blocking built in, though it would be fantastic to import arbitrary filter lists.

Chrome & Safari are operated by advertising/surveillance companies, so no dice there.

Safari (desktop and mobile) also has tracker blocking built in. "Prevent cross-site tracking" and "Hide IP address from trackers" are two settings it has; I think the first is checked by default, I don't remember about the other.

In the DevTools network pane, it shows requests to known trackers, like Google Tag Manager, being blocked.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602

Try using Amazon in Safari sometime (in Lockdown Mode, no less): non-stop ads (some which flash), sponsored results dominating the first page of search, random Dufus pop-ups forcing AI. You can hide "distracting" elements but they just appear again later. Safari is not a user-friendly browser.

Safari is my default browser. I don't know what "Dufus" means, I don't recall any A.I. references. On Amazon, it's all first-party stuff, what browser blocks that natively? It seems like you're comparing using Safari without an ad blocker to a different browser with an ad blocker.

I know the most popular ad blocking extensions don't make a Safari version but there are ad blockers for Safari.

Dufus = Rufus, the obnoxious AI "helper" that takes up 20% of the screen when I search for something on Amazon, which no one asked for.

I don't get any of that in Safari or any other browser. "Rufus" is just a button in the main navigation, between "All" and "Same-day delivery" that I ignore. On individual product pages, there's "Ask Rufus" stuff in a couple of pages but it's no worse than other content I scroll past and seems just like previous features that didn't have a named AI identity.

So, Brave.

This is the equivalent of

"Lawmakers should legally set rents to $0, so we can all live for free"

Only if you assume ads are the only way anybody could run a website.

You're not totally wrong. Some European countries impose limits on short-term rents in order to limit services like Airbnb.

This is what brave does. It's implement without needing an extension, so Manifest V2/V3 etc doesn't matter one bit.

The old-style popup windows have a specific API window.open() that can be blocked. What the author calls popups are mostly just HTML <div> elements, perhaps using CSS properties such as position and/or z-index, so there's no generic way to block them. It's extremely difficult to block the "bad" ones while allowing the "good" ones. If this were a problem that could be solved generically, then browser extensions would have solved it long ago. Instead, the browser extensions are forced to keep extremely long lists of mostly site-specific elements to block. I'm not sure how the web browser vendors themselves could it it any differently, without completely redesigning HTML.

Only allow dom/css changes in response to user action.

Like... scrolling down the page?

Anyway, forbidding pages from loading secondary content would break millions of sites, including the most visited sites in the world. That would be equivalent to completely redesigning HTML/JS.

Have a nice small notification that a "pop-up" was blocked. Wouldn't you like to see it now wouldn't you?

"Click here to prove you're human"

Coincidentally, the most devious way I've seen to make users enable notifications from a site.

You can do that when the page loads. Scroll or timer events could require a non intrusive permission dialog.

"Only allow play of audio in response to user action."

Okay, cool, so there's a giant 'click' event handler on top of the whole page. When you click it I'm going to play a 250ms long sample of silence embedded as a data:// URL into the audio or video element.

Now I control the player and can do whatever I want.

You've inconvenienced me for 15 minutes.

15 minutes you will never get back.

Right on the money. This should be the top comment IMO, and the fact that it isn't says a lot about modern HN...

Firefox and uBlock Origin with a couple of user filters and haven't seen a window or modal popup in ages. It's not hard to deal with nonsense on the web with a decent browser like Firefox and content blocker like UBO.

The solution may just have to be technological literacy.

It really does not need any literacy to install FF and then ublock origin. Nothing else is needed, the default settings work just fine. Do I miss something?

It requires literacy to know that that’s an option and to know why it’s a good idea.

I’ve met plenty of tech illiterate but otherwise smart people who just use edge, or a mobile phone and whatever browser it has as a default.

GP mentioned a couple of user filters. If that's not technological literacy I have an SAP migration to sell you.

You need to be savvy enough to know how to deal with the inevitable "broken" site you run across (ideally by leaving and never returning, but sometimes that isn't an option).

Try asking random people on NYC street if they have heard of Firefox and uBlock Origin.

A large portion of users (a majority, imo) think "web browser" is a specific app they open, rather than a type of app, and don't even understand that there are multiple different ones to choose from.

On uBlock Origin settings > Filter lists > Annoyances

Check all the items [1] and it may improve your experience with modern pop-ups.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/2jkf6YA

Yup this works really well.

Only issue I've seen is that sometimes it blocks a poorly implemented cookie popup. This means it can't be handled by Consent-O-Matic either and then the site becomes unresponsive because it's waiting for a cookie choice.

This is easily solved by closing the tab and never returning

Well I don't always have that choice, sometimes I need to buy something etc

I thought the problem was me not keeping my software up-to-date. Looks like web browsing was fun while it lasted.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mostly use ad-blockers and content filters and when I go to a commercial page without that stuff I'm shocked how terrible the experience is. That shock should have told me too many people were losing too much money and the usable web gravy train was about to come to an end.

Discourse is the place to build civilized communities that bake in a flag to tell the end user’s browser to not render CSS or javascript if the browser is “too out of date.”

I'm totally on the side of the author. Major browser developers (including Firefox) do not care themselves for many many years.

The only "browser developer" which cares is Brave with its native built-in adblock engine (written in Rust). It gives you on desktop and especially on mobile the best out of the box experience in blocking all these intrusive ads. I don't understand people who browse the mobile web without adblocker.

Pop-ups aren't the problem and they never were. Ads are. The solution is not to block pop-ups, it's to use adblock, and for that we have uBlock Origin. Don't try to browse the web without it.

Adblock won't block the "subscribe for 2 free articles" popups.

Nor will pop-up blocking I'm afraid.

the whole point of the article is that browsers should try to block popups that don't literally open a new window too. Although I doubt it's really feasible without doing it on a one-by-one basis like ad blockers

Of course, I don't disagree with you. But OP tried to refute the fact in their parent comment that using adblock is generally better than relying on browser's pop-up blocking. However, adblock does no worse than pop-up blocking in the specific case of non-window pop-ups, making it irrelevant in the context.

And I agree that these types of ads remain a hard to solve problem today.

Of course it will. At least the second time, after you tell it that '.popup-subscribe-modal' should never be seen again.

It's not '.popup-subscribe-modal', it's often a random string spit out at build time that changes with every deployment.

True, but then you can search for specific strings in the div, etc. Maybe not worth it for something you visit occasionally, but well worth it for a website you see often.

Or even with every page reload.

For me it is not so bad as it is natural selection for websites.

When I encounter invasive popups like that preventing me to get the content, it turns me down directly for this website and I will just avoid the site completely after. Some media website are like that and you learn to just skip them.

What confuse me the most is kind of individual blogs, with not bad content, that welcome you with a popup to register your email in they newsletter. I'm surprised that it is so common despite so stupid, it makes the experience worse of browsing the website of the author, worse you get that before even having looked at the content and so be able to know if it worth it. And so it will instantly give a negative feeling about a website that could be good otherwise.

This newsletter pest is puzzling me. Why would I want more crap in my email? If I'm on your website, why not just put the content there, instead of sending it out-of-band via email?

Maybe it's some fingerprinting/tracking nonsense? I notice nearly all links in any email I get, actually links to some Sendgrid/Mailchip/etc. bullshit with a page of base64 looking noise in the URL. I'm never clicking any of that, and if the unsubscribe link is obfuscated like that, I'm feeding the email to spamcop.

It's all so tiresome.

If there's going to be an LLM in my browser whether or not I ask for it, this is probably what it should be handling for me.

"Find the main content, and write an adblock rule hide anything covering it up" is the sort of thing they're actually kinda decent at, and in a flexible enough way that it might be hard to block.

NoScript mostly solves this, except for sites that open up with the pop-ups already visible and require JavaScript to be enabled to be able to close them. My reaction then is usually to just click the back-button.

It would be great if every major browser would add some kind of content policy settings in the preferences. Such as how do I like my cookies.

Then web site developers could ask these preferences with API and act accordingly. Developers who wouldn’t respect these settings would get bad karma somehow.

Maybe then we could get rid of those annoying boxes that disrupt the browsing flow?

We have that (first DoNotTrack, now Global Privacy Control). Turns out bad karma doesn't really affect website behaviour.

(GPC has some legal teeth though, and might get more, so perhaps that will help.)

i remember in the early 2000s browers would refuse to store cookies unless you clicked accept on a dialog for every single one. Until they started making it auto accept by default.

Hagezi's ultimate DNS blacklist for Unbound + uBlock Origin on Firefox (with all "annoyance" filters turned on) -> I haven't seen an ad or a pop-up in years.

Ironically, they do still block the actual pop-up window my bank tries to spawn during 2fac sign-in

All while failing to block any of the in-page pop ups covering any news article I might click on

_continue without supporting_ is a button i like to press

As is disabling javascript on a site to get past this FE non-sense.

Otherwise, i'll just get the information / content elsewhere.

Either Firefox + Ublock Origin or Brave Browser.

Case solved.

I would absolutely love for this proposed blocker to happen, but I have zero faith in it actually happening given the user-centred nature of this feature and the user-hostile origin of Mozilla's funding situation…

It's also pretty challenging since they're not OS-level windows any more.

It's the same problem as video ad blockers and YouTube: the ads/sponsorships have just become embedded in the main stream so they're much more difficult to obviously delineate from the actual video.

SponsorBlock. Granted, doesn’t do much for my iPhone but on computers it’s a solved problem.

It works on Firefox on Android as well, as do many other FF extensions. It won't work on a fruit phone [1], the Firefox version you can get there is lobotomised because the fruit factory is afraid a full-feature browser not under their control will eat into their app store margins.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1486487

Yeah I hope Mozilla will make a full version for the EU which is possible now. But Apple is making it as hard as possible for them, there was an article about that only recently.

SponsorBlock is available on just about every type of device these days -- works perfectly on Android with YouTube ReVanced. The options on iOS are naturally a bit more limited, but apparently it's possible on a jailbroken device (or through some other slightly-janky methods on non-jailbroken devices): https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/wiki/iOS

Although to be fair YouTube itself has started to defeat those - they put a little white dot in the timeline when the ad finishes.

I'm not sure how they do it but I think AI could pretty easily detect current ad transitions. Especially when combined with data about which bits of the video most people skip.

I think it'll lead to sponsorships being much more integrated into videos rather than a sponsorship segment. Or possibly people will switch to much shorter segments like LTT does.

I never really understood why they want long segments anyway. Shorter ones mean I'm much more likely to actually see it.

Really, YouTube should just auto skip sponsor segments for premium users. As it is Premium isn't worth it. Because you still get bombarded with ads despite paying to stop them.

Of course it will hurt the content creators but they are already getting paid much more per view by premium customers! So showing sponsor segments as well is double dipping.

Yeah I agree, but it's understandable that YouTube are treading lightly here. It's really in their interests to auto-skip sponsor segments full stop, but that wouldn't go down well with content creators!

>It's really in their interests to auto-skip sponsor segments

But is it? Sponsor segments is view time, same as anything else.

Yeah definitely. YouTube doesn't get a cut from sponsor segments. They would much rather that the only way to make money for creators was through them.

I would not be entirely surprised if in future they launch an "official" sponsorship system where the sponsored section appears like an ad (you can't skip it without adblock/premium), they take a cut and require all videos to use it.

I bet the only reason they haven't (other than the open revolt it would cause) is that it would just push creators to blend their sponsorship into the entire video instead of having a nicely separated segment that you can easily skip.

Yeah I wish they would do that.

Another thing about the current sponsor fragments is that it obviously prompts a lot of people to install sponsorblock and that will kinda make them think: "why not go the whole way and just block ads altogether?". I do think more people would subscribe if sponsors would be blocked on premium.

Also this effect would be beneficial for both YT itself and the creators, they don't get paid anything for views from adblockers.

It would be great to see less sponsors too because there's too many youtubers selling their soul. Like LTT with their Honey app promotion, knowingly promoting malware. Or all the glossy reviewers that really are not all that impartial.

> it obviously prompts a lot of people to install sponsorblock

I would be very surprised if more than 1% of YouTube viewers use sponsorblock.

> I do think more people would subscribe if sponsors would be blocked on premium.

Definitely agree there!

> It would be great to see less sponsors

You wouldn't see that though. It's pretty clear sponsors pay waaay more than advertising. Creators would just integrate them more into the video so there's nothing to skip. Like instead of "this segue to our sponsor ComfyPants", it would be that their username in the game review is ComfyPants, and they get a skin only wearing pants, and they do the review wearing ComfyPants... you get the idea. Much worse.

I doubt sponsors pay more than advertising. After all it is advertising.

And what you describe is hidden advertising. It can also be forbidden. In many countries in Europe it is on public TV, and they have to avoid naming brands, if they show any the label has to be taped off etc.

It's just nihilism, we can put the urls on dht when we are ready.

If I’m using the AdGuard safari extension on my iPhone, I noticed the Etsy website didn’t work at all (there’s some fantastic costume sellers there, and I was looking at what it’d take to dress like a Viking). Anyway, on load the screen becomes grayed out with no way for me to fix it or interact with any underlying elements.

If I disable the content blockers temporarily, it’s because it’s trying to direct me toward the Etsy iOS app, which I would never in a million years install.

It does this at least daily, I tried it just now and it’ll go away for maybe 24h before the invisible pop up comes back.

Fyi, ublock is on iOS now

But not the full version we get on Firefox android I assume? Because the iOS adblock API doesn't give the full feature set needed to do that. At least last time I checked.

I really hope Mozilla will make a full iOS version for the EU so I can use my iPad more. My phone is android so I just use Firefox there.

Install the dns4eu configuration profile with adblocking:

https://github.com/whalebone/DNS4EU-Public/tree/main/iOS/DoH

... and block all of it on a system level beneath Safari.

You can use Firefox or a Chromium browser that does not have as many of these issues.

I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days but when I wanted Chromium, I chose Brave. It has better blocks for this sort of thing built into it, and uBlock Origin works fine.

It's only the Google Chrome browser that requires the Lite version of that extension. Not Chromium derivatives.

I use Brave + uBlock Origin - problem (for the most part) solved.

> It is definitely a hard problem to distinguish between “legitimate” pop-ups and advertising pop-ups.

I note the article itself does not attempt to. Telling.

They have solved the popup problem. It's called AI. If I ask Claude to browse the web for me and report back what it finds, then there's no popups, no ads, no newsletters. I'm insulated from all the awful things people do. That's what I love about technology. It always comes along at just the right time to solve the greatest problem people have ever had, which is other people.

These models will start serving ads inline with results soon. All of the major players in this technology are still ad companies

Or worse, be [secretly] biased towards sponsored answers/solutions. There's a reason "they" don't want AI to be regulated.

I hate to continue this tangent, but I have to point out that the reason "they" don't want AI to be regulated is because Russia/China having a monopoly on AI is bad. Had we restricted nuclear weapons development, we would not be able to have this conversation.

Regulating publicly consumed/available AI doesn't need to restrict private/non-public trained/consumed AI.

You often need to verify it though. I've been using Perplexity due to the way it sources the results and presents the sources it generated the answer from, which means that I often still have to make the jump out to the web.

You’re missing the /s right?

What about what Claude or any LLM bot does with info it randomly finds online? Run local commands you didn’t ask for, visit sites you didn’t expect it to visit? Upload data and files you don’t ask it to upload?

If you don’t know what I mean, here is a cool talk for you to watch https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-ai-agent-ai-spy

I mean, don’t give your “search the web and tell me what it says” bot access to local files or commands.

Everything you say and do with the robot is uploaded into the cloud for someone else's benefit. You'd have to be getting something really good out of using the robot for that to be worth it, and I think that's been the case with me so far, mostly because I'm someone who doesn't really have much in the way of confidential information. The advantage of having a bunch of claudes and geminis running around doing things for me is too much fun to turn down. The best benefit though is just being less lonely, since it's never been easy for me to find other people who care about the set of weird things I'm interested in, which is constantly changing, and even harder to find someone who not only knows but is willing to collaborate too, during all the oddball times of any given day or night I happen to be both productive and awake.

Seriously?

When I asked Claude "AI" for today's news, it gave me only news from days ago.

Asking an AI for news is like asking your friend to eat junk food for you.

The bigest anoyance nowadays (in the EU at least) is rather the cookie policy agreement. "View the list of our 258 partners", etc.

I find the Consent-O-Matic extension pretty good in dealing with that.

I refuse to engage with EU cookie banners, even programmatically.

Use private mode browsing, click the easy option of allow all, and rejoice that cookies are cleared when you close the tab.

The cookies will still be correlated with each other, and your behavior will still be sent offsite for aggregation by ad identity companies, then linked back to your non-private browser behavior via IP, or browser fingerprinting, or any site you log into, etc.

Turning off JS goes a long way towards avoiding most of the ad/popup problem. I just turn it off for bad sites, keep it on for most.

There is no way to reliably block pop-ups in the general case.

The working way is to block ad networks entirely, because online ads have become unreasonably obnoxious. A web site that critically depends on ads may state so, and refuse to run with ads blocked. (When a site I need says that, I disable my ad blocker. If a site I don't need does that, I close the tab.)

I do believe that good web sites deserve support; I may offer a donation if there is an easy way to do so. I don't mind the donation pop-up on python.org, and even in Wikipedia.

If a site only exists for the purpose of making money off ads, not because the owners care about the content, and the visitors don't care enough either to tolerate ads, then I don't see the shutdown of such a site a big loss.

> There is no way to reliably block pop-ups in the general case.

Not sure if I'm misunderstanding the intent of this sentence, but I have not seen a popup in my web browsers for ... so long I can't remember the last time it happened? Years certainly, maybe double-digit years.

It is trivial to block "window.open". It is not trivial to block a pop-up div that obscures content, as shown multiple times in the article.

WFM?

Adblockers are the right kind of tool to solve this problem, but it's hard to do so generically like the pop-ups of yore (which were, to be fair, even more aggravating, since they could come from a website in the background and even try to overwhelm you with more windows than you could close).

easyist annoyances filter should take care of a lot of these.

I now have a Raspberry PI + Pi-hole running on my home network so none of my family see ads any more and nobody has to install any software themselves. You can also add your children’s devices to specific groups with extra block lists, to keep them a bit safer in the internet.

I got the Pi 5 to future-proof myself a bit and the entire kit cost about $160 and assembling and installing + configuring the network took 30 minutes.

I honestly don’t know why I waited so long to do it. I highly advise. I know it’s not perfect, and you have to do some tweaks around DNS-over-HTTPS but quite honestly it feels like it was the best money I spent last year by far.

A very 2026 solution: spam the web with incitations to close the tab of offending sites. Not as an appeal to fellow humans (that hasn't worked in the past) but to the AI scrapers and agents that now make up the majority of everyone's traffic...

I think all open-source projects should actively and openly protest dark patterns, like they do with various social/political issues. Yet I haven't noticed any of them ever doing that.

Many of them are guilty of the dark patterns themselves. You will have to look towards people with more ideology behind, to see consistency in that area.

Soemtimes I dream of an LLM infused browser, which will first pull the HTML for a given URL, then filter out all the BS and just give you a clean readable version, without you ever seeing the original page.

This is the only thing I want in an "AI" browser. It's even something I'd pay for.

I was disappointed to learn that even after subscribing to the Atlantic (print and digital, aka the premium tier) that popups don’t stop. They now nag me on every visit to spend even more money to buy a subscription as a gift for someone else. Pretty sure when my subscription lapses next year I’ll just go back to reading their site via archive.is. These companies can’t help but make piracy a better experience than even the most expensive subscription they offer.

Reader view works pretty nicely against most modal annoyances.

Pop-ups these days are implemented with position:fixed. If my browser could be set to ignore (i.e., to refuse to render) all elements with the position:fixed property (indiscriminately) I would set it to do that.

Yes, a few web site would become unusable under that setting, but the trade-off would be worth it to me. (Better would be if position:fixed had never been introduced.)

UBlock origin is pretty good at blocking those in-page popups though. You do have to add the optional Annoyances blocklists for that though.

maybe the intro etc of absurd.org could somehow happen again. a very artsy artefact of a website that utilised popups (and Java) at certain points

https://web.archive.org/web/20090820110717/http://www.absurd...

Ublock origin helps a lot. (While lite version fails). It's such a shame Google rolled out Manifest v3, but understandable they hate it as dangerous for their ads business.

We are doomed to start happily use a browser from the major ads company (chrome & -based ones) and think it's fine.

It's not. This Manifest V3 issue is probably just the beginning of enshittification of web user experience. It's easy to imagine a bunch of much worse scenarious.

Most people on the Internet already use that browser and think it is fine. Most people are unaware of alternatives or too much of computer illiterates to try and install another browser. We are already in that dystopian hellscape of the web.

Lite's really not that bad. I agree you'd rather ff and the full ublock but it's still a vastly better experience

Popup Blocker Strict is the best popup blocker I've found. It still misses a tiny fraction but is much better than a browser's own setting or ublock origin alone.

https://github.com/schomery/popup-blocker

As much as I dislike popups: I really doubt that there would be a significant user gain for Firefox. I think most users simply do not care about it, especially non-tech-savvy users. Especially since so many people stay on Chrome, despite its efforts to drown ad-blockers.

I noticed the same on a site I have been reading for over 30 years. I am about to abandon that site.

Hope this issue is solved.

Try disabling JS for that site.

I use noscript, if I disable the site itself, it is unreadable :)

Please consider donating some of your disposable income to the Ladybird project, at ladybird dot org, while using one of mozilla's browser fork.

Complaining about ads appearing on adwares will only lead you so far.

After 30 years I’m convinced that the web is nothing more than Nordstroms.

Sure there are communities like this but 98% of the internet is a fucking mall. Complete with those pagoda kiosks that have advertisements all over them. It’s disgusting.

Where I play games (Steam), it’s a mall. Where I talk online (Discord), it’s a mall. Legitimate shopping, malls all over the place. Want to do some research? Stop by the kiosk and pay your credits. Want to be able to code and have intellisense work? Pay your credits. Want to invest your money? Pay your subscriptions.

I’m over it. I’m all for e-commerce but it seems like that is all that it’s focused for. To drive ads to sell shit to ignorance.

We invent the best communication technology yet it’s mostly used for communicating who owes whom. It’s sad. Once AGI is here (or something that resembles intelligence) the web will be our prison and your entire lives will be ledger’ed.

This is one future scenario if we keep going down this path.

Nordstroms has famously good customer service, though.

More like K-Mart, but unfortunately, not dead yet.

My method when such a pop-up occurs: I'll vote with my feet and immediately close the sites windows to reward them (at lest 95% of the time)

Anything so heavily abused deserves to default to off. But good luck convincing Firefox to do that, let alone the others.

Blocking modal overlays, cookie banners, sticky elements & scroll stealing - by default - would be a killer feature for Ladybird.

Devs if you’re listening I’d switch to Ladybird in a heartbeat if it did this.

Popups and Cloudflare stepping in.

The author seems to be confusing third party ad pop-ups with promotional modals from websites.

The author seems to think there's no practical difference to the user.

The iron laws of web encrapification:

1. Every new feature will be used to abuse the user, usually to push advertisements.

2. When browser features are added to protect the user, web designers will do their best to subvert them to abuse the user, usually to push advertisements.

3. When an advertising company controls your web browser, the game has been lost.

I guess this hit home for someone.

That's because the biggest ad selling companies make or fund the web browsers.

i even have popup blocker extension in ff and it's not working well at all.

How much time until websites start rendering everything to <canvas>?

Ummmm… they have? I use Safari with the Wipr ad blocker and don’t remember the last time I saw one. The opposite is more annoying for me. When I try to download my bank statement, their website tries to open it in a popup. It doesn’t work until I remember to tap the little “open the blocked popup” icon.

I don’t think Safari is magical or anything. I just didn’t know this was a problem anymore.

Isn't there extension's that block this?

Just use GrayScaleAdz www.grayscaleadz.com

Another post about how bad the web experience has become, discussing a negative experience that I don't notice at all because I use Brave. I can't believe it's not the dominant browser. It solves so many problems with no user intervention.

Isn't the problem that if everybody started using it most Web sites couldn't keep existing?

Their problem, not mine.

Most web sites are crap, honestly.

Recent experience: trying to search for websites that review products that I'm not familiar with. It was pretty obvious that most of those review sites had never actually touched the products they were reviewing, they all just copied each other.

There was a time in the mid 90’s where we could have gone down one of two paths. “Free” ad-supported-you-are-the-product”, or digital micropayments. The latter was hard, and didn’t mature until 20 years later. Instead we got the shitfest internet we see today.

What would the internet look like today if every visitor could drop micro-donations on content creators by simply clicking a donate button in their browser or on the website to support the content creators they appreciated?

Webrings led to DoubleClick. DoubleClick led to Google Ads. That led us to Facebook and the hyper-invasive internet we have today where everyone worldwide is profiled for their ad-worth. Fuck this timeline.

Firefox + ublock origin o7

YouTube is doing this.

Other things that I would like the web to "fix" without knowing the solution:

- replace email for notifications: email is the default notification channel for most websites, but because it is inherently insecure and lacks privacy, messages are often reduced to generic alerts that omit the actual content (statements, bills, secure messages, etc.). Anything of value instead requires navigating to the site, logging in, and locating the relevant item. Ideally, the content itself would be delivered directly through a secure, private notification system without email as a proxy.

- eliminate account creation/login: browsers should be able to authenticate to sites cryptographically using locally held keys, allowing APIs to securely identify and associate a user with an account without explicit registration or login flows shifting credential management from centralized servers to the user’s device, simultaneously reducing exposure from credential storage and leaks.

- automatic selection of gdpr "only necessary cookies" (or whatever your preference) without prompts/ui and similar

Not just annoying, these kinds of behaviors seem to feed scam companies.

The ads I get on Youtube ...

Facebook doesn't care about scam companies as long as they get paid.

Big tech and scams are becoming a hand in hand thing.

People read such garbage content. Imagine going and installing all sorts of extensions and having some specialized flow just to read total rubbish. A disease of the mind to be so addicted to this rot that you will perform great rituals to consume it.

Be better.

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