It's even worse than that, first Google will bug you to use Chrome, then bug you to login, then after your search the browser will pop up "Google would like to use your current location". And then the first half-page of results are ads. And half of the actual results are AI slop and a helpful AI summary of the slop. And that's before you even get to the page.
LOL, I didn't know they ran newspaper ads for Google. I love old images of the Google search engine. When I was a kid, I taught other kids how to use the "cache" button next to links. Then Google buried the cache button three clicks under before completely removing it, and Googlers said, "Well, nobody was using it." MBA's doing user-driven development, "As a user (child), I don't know what a cache is." and the legal department being like, "Yup less shit to DMCA."
Google is the modern-day Yellow Pages; kill some trees and slam that rainwater-soaked stack of ads on my porch. I won't say no to free, but how many hoops did we go through to end up back here?
I forget if it was crypto or AI, but not too long ago I put in what I would consider a "normie" query and every single above-the-fold result was an ad. Every single one.
Don’t forget finally landing on the page and having the focus immediately stolen by some “LOG IN WITH GOOGLE” pop up that you didn’t ask for, and don’t want.
This is glorious, and made me think; is there a reverse-adblock addon that would “click” on all ads it finds on a page and would load them silently in the background..?
Fun effect: When finally confronted with the page-leave dialog, I automatically went for the non-default, grey option button – and was kind of surprised that this wasn't the option I wanted.
I've a minor criticism: The "No thanks" button should really be "Remind me later" and possibly greyed out, since any negative wording is allegedly bad UX and users must be protected from any blunt denials in any options. "Maybe later" is also acceptable and even empowering, since this places users on equal footing as they are now lying to the website just as this is lying to them.
- Click to play video overlay (one that isn't available in your country)
- Tab closing prompt
Thinking about this problem technically, most of these obscenities are vying for top level. In the early days, browsers could detect when a popup was trying to launch and block them. Could we do something similar but for top level DOM?
Alternately, could a browser have a quiet mode? No prompts, banners, overlays, etc.
Sadly, development of reader mode seems to be stagnant for both Firefox and Chrome. While it works for a substantial number of pages, I was hoping that more pages would work as years go by. Too bad that doesn't appear to have happened.
One interesting thing I noticed after updating to iOS 18 specifically, is the removal of reader mode as a "mode". It's now OFFERED to you in the new view menu based on some heuristic about the page that Apple has determined, but it's not a mode you can turn on regardless of if Apple thinks you're on a "readable" document or not.
Frustrating since their "remove distracting elements" feature was a great value-add, done in the same update.
Sadly the reality for 99% of blogs and news sites nowadays.
Makes me wonder whether this is part of the reason why social media sites, YouTube, etc have taken over as a source of information for many people now. Those sites are nightmarish in their own right, but they seem to be less heavy on the annoyances than the average news site now.
Maybe the quantity of the annoyances don't matter (see YouTube's recent anti-ad-blocking shenanigans), but the fact that the annoyances are mostly constant and known (at least, changing at a much slower rate than you view a new slop website) definitely reduces cognitive load.
I think we should take the time to recognize that this isn't bad design, it's a badly regulated market. This is exactly what antitrust exists for: to prevent a small number of firms dominating a market with thin margins, leading to a few decent experiences (namely Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok) and crushing economics for the rest.
What can you do as a publisher of web content other than compete with the big dogs on Display Ads (what this link is complaining about, that's why they request your data in the first place) or try to enforce paywalls (also what this link is complaining about, ironically)? Supposedly some parts of the internet work off of affiliate marketing, such as the few oddball companies that prop up the podcast space for the rest of us, but that seems A) terrible for consumers and B) incredibly hard to make a living with. For better or worse (worse!) we've trained ourselves to expect internet publishers to survive off of Display Ads alone, and act like we've been betrayed when someone links https://businessinsider.com, https://nytimes.com, or another paywalled site to Hacker News.
We're at a crossroads in history, my friends. We can, and must, change this. Substack is a beautiful step in the right direction, but real change must come with societal buy-in (AKA no more archive links on HN) and governmental intervention (AKA follow through on the US DOJ's recent threats to break up Google).
There's no way in hell that any of us would accept the business model of "we'll emotionally manipulate you into buying stuff you don't really want" if we didn't grow up with it -- for anything, but especially for something as vital as journalism. I sincerely doubt Paul Graham could defend it, yet here we are; any paywalled link is removed as a matter of policy, even the fancy new Substack ones that have a few paragraphs of pre-paywall content.
All of that is because the internet and more specifically the browser was made/evolved in a naive/idealist non-commercial mindset.
It was for university research work at first, where paying for the content was not a question because it was already paid for by others.
Then the companies who took over browser development didn't care about having a monetization/identification part to it because they didn't have content to monetize and didn't need to have their users pay for it either.
Then Google took over with their naive optimism around values of freedom and just went with ads as a "solution" to finance their whole operation in order to keep the ideal of free (ideals are always dangerous).
Now we are in a terrible situation where there is still no integrated (micro)payment nor identity system into the web browser and thus we have a seriously fucked up dichotomy: either you have content with gazillions of ads that are "free" or you have content that is only accessible with a monthly subscription, generally priced higher than what good press used to cost (which makes no sense).
This is really a problem because if you can't access everything "a la carte" web browsing is a bit pointless, being barely better than accessing media at the library or your local press stand (in fact when you count DRM issues and lack of lasting physical product, you could argue that its worse).
In my opinion the whole point of the web is that not all content is uniformly valuable in the same way to everyone. And you can't ask someone with varying interests and varying time for said interest to pay for multiple subscription to multiple sources.
And this is exactly why everything resort to ads: you can't have that many people pay subscriptions because it doesn't bring enough value to them but you also can't sell per unit because it's way too complicated/annoying for the customer to do; so, you use ads.
That being said, we should make some regulations around ad use because it's pretty obvious that some of the tech giants would not exist as they are if people really had to pay for their products. Ad use in those platforms is a pretty clear attempt at avoiding competition, you don't have to compete much if you are "free" after all (Google speciality).
People defend that business model all the time on HN, usually I’m the disguise of how regulating companies is evil, how smart people want freedom, or in the disguise of “I make a living from working at a big ad-tech company so it must be a force for good in the world”, or in the disguise of “you must be weak if you give in to advertising it doesn’t affect me”, but sometimes just plain “how will companies show you tasteful information about products and services you might be interested in?”.
This has been my mental shift as well. I also decide this when someone tells me the site only works in Chrome, so I should switch to Chrome. No, thanks.
The amount of client-side fetched third party tools fighting for the upper layer is so funny and accurate. Intercom + cookie settings + a newsletter popup + ads…
Readit News
https://files.catbox.moe/bvrd6u.jpg
> Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine — no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter.
> Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit.
Google is the modern-day Yellow Pages; kill some trees and slam that rainwater-soaked stack of ads on my porch. I won't say no to free, but how many hoops did we go through to end up back here?
Enables you to become exactly what you got successful for NOT being. Must be great.
/s
I forget if it was crypto or AI, but not too long ago I put in what I would consider a "normie" query and every single above-the-fold result was an ad. Every single one.
Deleted Comment
I've a minor criticism: The "No thanks" button should really be "Remind me later" and possibly greyed out, since any negative wording is allegedly bad UX and users must be protected from any blunt denials in any options. "Maybe later" is also acceptable and even empowering, since this places users on equal footing as they are now lying to the website just as this is lying to them.
You've got a fulfilling career in product management ahead of you!
- Cookie acceptance overlay
- Email prompt when switching away from tab
- Push notification custom UI prompt
- Push notification browser prompt
- Subscribe to our newsletter prompt
- Ad blocker detected modal
- Please subscribe overlay
- Continue reading overlay
- Ratings prompt
- Floating feedback button
- "How can I help you?" chat popup
- Email prompt when scrolling
- Create an account footer
- Interstitial ads
- Social media share buttons
- Click to play video overlay (one that isn't available in your country)
- Tab closing prompt
Thinking about this problem technically, most of these obscenities are vying for top level. In the early days, browsers could detect when a popup was trying to launch and block them. Could we do something similar but for top level DOM?
Alternately, could a browser have a quiet mode? No prompts, banners, overlays, etc.
Just thinking out loud.
IIRC, this `about:config` setting is how I disable Firefox Reader Mode: `reader.parse-on-load.enabled` = false
Frustrating since their "remove distracting elements" feature was a great value-add, done in the same update.
Seems to me reader mode is a great idea but needs some dynamic behavior so sites can't break it.
Makes me wonder whether this is part of the reason why social media sites, YouTube, etc have taken over as a source of information for many people now. Those sites are nightmarish in their own right, but they seem to be less heavy on the annoyances than the average news site now.
or less heavy on the annoyances than the average news site for now
What can you do as a publisher of web content other than compete with the big dogs on Display Ads (what this link is complaining about, that's why they request your data in the first place) or try to enforce paywalls (also what this link is complaining about, ironically)? Supposedly some parts of the internet work off of affiliate marketing, such as the few oddball companies that prop up the podcast space for the rest of us, but that seems A) terrible for consumers and B) incredibly hard to make a living with. For better or worse (worse!) we've trained ourselves to expect internet publishers to survive off of Display Ads alone, and act like we've been betrayed when someone links https://businessinsider.com, https://nytimes.com, or another paywalled site to Hacker News.
We're at a crossroads in history, my friends. We can, and must, change this. Substack is a beautiful step in the right direction, but real change must come with societal buy-in (AKA no more archive links on HN) and governmental intervention (AKA follow through on the US DOJ's recent threats to break up Google).
There's no way in hell that any of us would accept the business model of "we'll emotionally manipulate you into buying stuff you don't really want" if we didn't grow up with it -- for anything, but especially for something as vital as journalism. I sincerely doubt Paul Graham could defend it, yet here we are; any paywalled link is removed as a matter of policy, even the fancy new Substack ones that have a few paragraphs of pre-paywall content.
Then the companies who took over browser development didn't care about having a monetization/identification part to it because they didn't have content to monetize and didn't need to have their users pay for it either.
Then Google took over with their naive optimism around values of freedom and just went with ads as a "solution" to finance their whole operation in order to keep the ideal of free (ideals are always dangerous).
Now we are in a terrible situation where there is still no integrated (micro)payment nor identity system into the web browser and thus we have a seriously fucked up dichotomy: either you have content with gazillions of ads that are "free" or you have content that is only accessible with a monthly subscription, generally priced higher than what good press used to cost (which makes no sense).
This is really a problem because if you can't access everything "a la carte" web browsing is a bit pointless, being barely better than accessing media at the library or your local press stand (in fact when you count DRM issues and lack of lasting physical product, you could argue that its worse).
In my opinion the whole point of the web is that not all content is uniformly valuable in the same way to everyone. And you can't ask someone with varying interests and varying time for said interest to pay for multiple subscription to multiple sources. And this is exactly why everything resort to ads: you can't have that many people pay subscriptions because it doesn't bring enough value to them but you also can't sell per unit because it's way too complicated/annoying for the customer to do; so, you use ads.
That being said, we should make some regulations around ad use because it's pretty obvious that some of the tech giants would not exist as they are if people really had to pay for their products. Ad use in those platforms is a pretty clear attempt at avoiding competition, you don't have to compete much if you are "free" after all (Google speciality).
When I get a page like that now I’ve learned that there probably isn’t anything worth reading.