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> 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 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 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.

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.

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)

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

> 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?

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'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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

> 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.

"did"? still does.

Just don't use chrome.

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.

> 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.