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Comment by hatthew | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit of a tangent, but cookie consent dialogs have exhausted my will to navigate anything blocking the content I care about. If I go to a new website and encounter any sort of popup, modal, or large banner, I will reflexively feel an urge to close the page unless there is an obvious dismiss button. I often need to see the content on the page and resign myself to navigating the dialog, but just as often I decide the content wasn't important anyways and close the page in <1 second.

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Yeah, cookie banners, newsletter signups, “please disable your adblocker”, etc are the ultimate “hmm maybe I’ll just do something else” reality check for me.

Not only do I close the page but I typically lose interest in whatever I may have wanted to do on that page in the first place, and generally just put my phone down or close my laptop and do something else.

The web basically died several years ago for me. It was fun while it lasted.

> “please disable your adblocker”

"We noticed you're using an ad blocker"

Well I noticed you're running 10+ different trackers.

The leftmost icon on my browser toolbar is the "kill sticky" bookmarklet (https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky). I grew tired of sites hiding the dismiss buttons or omitting them entirely, so anytime something pops up on the page, I instinctively click that. Works on the vast majority of sites.

Are you in Europe? It's so prevalent here that would usually mean not using the web at all...?

I've also noticed blocking consent/informational banners of sorts when connected to a US VPN becoming more popular

It's worth noting that the "obvious dismiss button" that OP allows for is a legal requirement. By law rejecting cookies has to be just as easy as accepting them

Of course in reality enforcement of this is non-existent. Just yesterday I had an especially egregious popup where dismissing it required about 7 button presses (selecting "other options", then manually toggling on 5 categories of use before I was allowed to click "save settings")

> It's worth noting that the "obvious dismiss button" ... is a legal requirement

> Of course in reality enforcement of this is non-existent

Indeed that was of course worth noting

UBO zapper mode works well

That requires deciding which element to zap, which takes more brainpower than I'm willing to invest into a webpage that doesn't want to show me its content. Ctrl+W works every time.

I got around this by not using cookies.

cookies, newsletter popups, sign-in popups, product tours, soft paywalls, etc.

doesn't this affect auth on, like, every website you visit? (genuinely curious)

You don't need a cookie banner for auth cookies. You only need consent (aka the banner) for 3rd party cookies and tracking cookies.

Cookies that are strictly necessary for the functionality (auth, user preferences, shopping cart, etc...) of the site don't need user consent.

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