Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load. Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user experience as frustrating as possible. And not once has the video had even a tangential relationship to the article being viewed.
The worst part is that uBlock Origin's element picker doesn't work on Firefox for Android (or if it does, I haven't figured out how to use it), so on the one platform where it's maximally annoying I can't do anything to block it.
Angela Beesley hasn’t been associated with Wikia since 2012. I don’t know when this happened to you but the site has gone through a lot of ownership changes over the years.
And I don’t care what else Jimmy Wales has done, for profit or otherwise — Wikipedia is a goddamn gift and the world would be hurt tremendously if it ever shut down. It’s probably the only non-profit I donate to regularly.
Wikia was never actually good, but they were never this bad, as when they sold out to some capital and start squeezing every penny from every pixel on the screen.
Right now, fandom.com is basically unusable. Unfortunately, as some info that is there is nowhere else.
Who in tech do you hold up as an ideal persona? I'm not defending what happened to you. It's surprising to me that even someone like Jimmy Wales, who pioneered the most impactful knowledge-sharing project in the world, is vilified by some people.
No one. Every name I can think of has had some great ideas, and some truly cockeyed are-you-kidding-me-seriously" moments.
Even legendary names are just humans. TBL and his support for DRM. LT's notorious personality. Page & Schmidt and completely losing sight of the helpfulness they started from.
Worship / revere / appreciate no one. Filter their good, acknowledge their bad, find a path past them to something better, and know you'll probably be corrupted by something along the way unless you somehow transcend your own DNA.
If you're using Firefox on Android then under settings > site permissions. Set block auto play to video and audio. For some unknown reason video is set to play by default. This seems to work at blocking the fandom crap for me. I also have ublock origin installed.
Hosted mediawiki isn't cheap, so I don't see another player coming into the market. The consolidation of gamepedia into "Fandom" is the worst in this respect.
Hosted mediawiki is plenty cheap. When wikicities became Wikia they added some ads. They eventually redesigned it to look like a monstrosity because the $. I moved my very large wiki, which eventually became dnd-wiki.org, off of it at this point and self hosted it for a $10/mo virtual machine. Then Wikia became fandom and somehow became even worse.
It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.
For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap.
For me - no problem. I have a few side projects and I shell out around 15 - 25 Euros each month.
But I know a lot of people who would love to do stuff like that and have no way of at least being easily reimbursed by the community for their efforts.
A community of 50 people could be financing this with 20 cents each per month.
But as privacy intrusive advertising became the norm no solution ever grew enough to become feasible for the masses.
I remember the flattr button. I used flattr for a while. But in the end I stopped.
tl;dr
10 bucks are not cheap to anybody. I wish easy micropayments were a thing.
> For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap.
I'm aware of this, but you need to keep in mind that we were one of the largest wikis on Wikia (in the top 30 iirc). That's the only reason it cost $10/month.
Most of the wikis on Wikia were tiny, got small traffic, and could have probably been hosted with mine on my VM without even affecting mine.
The last metric that I calculated to host a small wiki on Gamepedia was about $3 USD per month. It is probably a bit higher than that now. That included costs for hosting through AWS next to large wikis like Minecraft Wiki that would easily be a large majority of the monthly costs.(Game updates would vastly skew the monthly costs for each of the large wikis.)
Memory Alpha (primary Star Trek wiki) is another one that was self-hosted and as a user of it I mostly just accepted that sometimes it would be down due to Mediawiki upgrades or traffic reasons or otherwise. They also migrated to Wikia when shared hosting seemed like a better deal than hosting Mediawiki themselves, and now in the "Fandom" age it's just irritating that it is no longer just disconnected shared hosting (which Wikia had briefly promised to Memory Alpha that it would stay independent) and is now such a blatant advertising infested cash grab. I don't directly know who runs that wiki, but I do sometimes wonder (as a user) if they regret the consolidation (and if they have any escape plans).
I don't understand why there isn't a browser feature that would simply disable all and any support for <video> and <audio> elements, or ask you a permission before a website can create any. It's really that simple. No need to try, and fail, to figure out which videos are "safe" to autoplay and which aren't. Let the user decide.
I've seen sites that autoplay video by implementing a JS h264 decoder that renders to a <canvas> element. Developers will go to significant lengths to work around browser permissions.
That's... actually viable? You can decode h264 in real time in JS with a single thread that also runs the UI?!
Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".
Oh, there's worse. Some video chat apps encode in software. The magical browser APIs don't always give you enough control to do what you want with the video stream, so they just output the video stream into a hidden canvas, screenshot the canvas 20 times a second, and throw the frames at ffmpeg.js ...
Or make a dead-slow subset that doesn’t eat cpu cycles, but schedules 10-20 ops every 1ms. And then enable full-speed if the user asks. Ads guys would then resurrect a demoscene spirit out of it. Ah, dreams.
lol. This reminds me of IE's "Enhanced Security Mode" where they disabled pretty much everything in the browser. This was pre-configured on Windows Server (probably still is). The browser is pretty much useless in this state, so the only way to get what you needed from a browser was to make it "unsafe." Too unsafe for servers with experienced tech people using them, but just fine for the general public on a desktop.
I suspect that's because you can programmatically start video playback from within event handlers. That's necessary because otherwise any site that use custom playback controls will break. However, that also means malicious sites can implement "autoplay" by adding a onmousedown/onscroll/touchstart event handler and starting playback from there. Video playback will start the moment you try to interact with the page in any way.
> any site that use custom playback controls will break
Is that actually a bad thing?
I have no idea about video playback controls, but in every other instance I've noticed where sites implement their own custom versions of browser controls, it's been absolutely terrible.
Custom scrollbars, or lack thereof. Custom drop-down lists, which never support keyboard input properly. And so on.
And even if I'm wrong, and custom video playback controls are somehow desirable, why should they be supported for any event except onclick?
>why should they be supported for any event except onclick?
obvious example would be articles with scrolling effects (eg. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-...), and need to autoplay videos when they scroll into view. That said, even if you restricted it to onclick, I don't imagine it's too hard for a page to receive a stray click (eg. if you're randomly selecting stuff) to trigger playback.
In your opinion. Being someone who hates these autoplay videos on news sites I can also see that examples like OP's are a valid and when done well interesting new firm of story telling.
It is imho very valid to experiment with new forms of multimedia mixed stories.
And just because some people abuse features that enable this we should not try to stifle innovative ideas as a whole imho.
I just don't use sites that do this anymore. I mean the abusal part.
That seems solvable, for example by blocking programmatic control of playback until you allow it for a given video element. That way it only "breaks" when the user wants it to be "broken".
It is incredibly annoying. My other "favorite" is AMP reddit which will autoplay some video with sound completely unrelated to the link you clicked on somewhere down the page. How the hell autoplaying video leads to ACCELERATED mobile pages I have no clue.
A few months back I opened a link to a new article using an in-app browser (no ad-blockers). I kid you not, upon initial load the entireiy of the screen was ads or "annoyances". The one thing missing was the entire reason I clicked on the link.
Every time I use Fandom without logging in, I will be faced with similar experience. A pop-up video with ads about the content it tried to promote (sometimes related to the content of the Wiki I visited, but mostly not) will play automatically, and I have to stop it every time.
As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.
Isn't most (all?) of the content on fandom.com under a Creative Commons license? Is there anything stopping someone from scraping all the content and forking the projects, giving it a more humane and user-friendly interface?
The origin story for this is reminiscent of how AO3 got going. Maybe if you partner with them, make a "Wiki Of Our Own" sister project, it would get more traction and then move up the search rankings organically?
Although checking the AO3 wiki page, man I didn't expect them to have hosting costs that high.
Do you have a project site? I might be interested in contributing.
We’re not doing badly for ranking, because we’ve engaged with the wider community and got many of the larger sites to link to us instead of Fandom, but for folks that want to fork all this stuff it is worth thinking about.
Yeah that mobile experience is just about as bad as you can make it. Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing crypto mining in the browser...at least that's what my device temperatures are implying.
I feel like these are “somebody got a promotion” patterns.
Basically, somebody was able to “prove” to Higher-Up Managers that $X number of these videos were “watched” or “engaged with” (or whatever today’s BS lingo is), and therefore the business “benefited” in some way by “reaching” more people. Profit?
In reality, at least in my case, what happens is: (1) I say “WTF!?!?”, (2) I make a mental note to never ever visit the site again, and (3) (sadly) I see it again and again at different sites.
When I worked at a rather large publisher they did a deal like this because someone promised a large truck of revenue by a company.
For a site that was badly monetized (because they it was over-weighed with ads and poorly engineered to begin with) this was seen as something they could not say no to.
Again, it is a slow race to the bottom.
I can assure you that often these deals are done by the business-side without consultation with product/engineering.
This pattern is purely a representation of how financially hurt news institutions are. They are desperate to make revenue and the end user experience is sacrificed in the name of keeping the ship afloat (and sometimes profit).
I'm to the point I'd like to see them go 501c3 nonprofit.
Admit defeat.
Get used to just making a barely livable income, like the rest of us.
Stop begging. Stop the obnoxious ads. Stop the shady subscription schemes. Enough with the .99 cent for six week promos. We obviously don't value you enough to give your access to our debit cards.
Newspapers you lost the war.
The sooner you realize it the better.
Follow the PBS model at this point.
(And I realize the importance of non-biased news. I wouldn't mind seeing tax money going to certain high quality organizations.)
Right. The issue is twofold - in the internet era, the marginal utility of any additional news source is near zero.
Sure, you might cross-check an article once in a blue moon, but most people consume news through a link that was sent to them by someone inside their bubble. And once they read the headline, there's 0 reason to click to another link with the same story ever again. So the links might as well be hosted in one place, say NY times or CNN. It doesn't really matter where.
The second part of the issue is that the barrier to entry into modern "journalism" evaporated with the advent of social media. You no longer need to own a printing press, or self-host a blogging platform even.
Have a twitter account? You're a journalist! Have a twitter bot that follows a bunch of local news sources? You're a newspaper! No longer do you need to own a printing press or an editorial staff. Want an "Opinion Section"? Tweet something that sparks outrage and watch angry replies pour in!
The only remaining barrier to entry is high-end investigative journalism-whistleblowing. And that's always been a tiny niche and hard to monetize.
There needs to be a politician-journalist. Elected in second place who:
- Keeps the 1st place winner on their toes
- Reports to the losing voters
- Can do local news
- Can talk to people
Otherwise, all those hopeful candidates go back to focusing on their living and leaving those "losing" voters without any representation (seriously, how can there be no representation for the leftover votes and assuming they're not rich).
The New Yorker has always had high quality investigative journalism (albeit with varying levels of left leaning bias depending on the writer) in my opinion, and seems to be quite doing quite well.
Many of our parents had better lives overall despite less education, fewer hours worked, shorter commuting distance, etc.
Yes, tech is better than most other jobs, but most tech jobs just give you the middle class life many people had 20-30 years ago (aside from the tech gadgets that didn’t exist 20-30 years ago that even the poor have now). In terms of large expenses and free time rather than gadgets, we’re no better than the middle class of the last generation.
Which is and should be disappointing given that it’s one of the best jobs available.
I work in education, so not highly paid, bought a car and a house by myself, and easily manage to save £500/month.
I just don't waste my money on stupid things like paying other people to make my sandwiches and drinks, or gadgets that are priced as 10x what they cost to make.
My house is better than my parents where I grew up to start with, my car is electric, I have free electricity from the sun, a TV larger than anyone could imagine back then (with films for £1 with the same quality as a cinema), I can communicate with almost anyone on the planet, via video, for free (including free translation), I can buy a computer like on Star Trek that I can talk to for £20, life is magical.
Thanks for sharing! I'm happy it worked out for you.
At the same time, I wonder if this is a bit of survivorship bias? I'm sure there are many people who do manage to live better than their parents, but is that common or the exception?
I was raised by a single parent who was in the "working poor" class, who managed to own their own home. I am a bit disappointed that it would be far more difficult for me to own a home anywhere within even 1 hour driving (each way) from the job centers, than it was for them to own a home. Despite longer working hours, more education, and so on.
I think that comment was aimed at web publishers and legacy news corps.
However, I think there's still a bunch of niches that can be exploited, to both personal and societal benefit, if you explicitly give up on becoming a billionaire with a monopoly over locked in users.
Basically, find something that would be a Billion dollar global business, and then do it on a small local scale in a non-user hostile way.
Think about all the negative things you (or rather the self-directed corporation you create) would do once you've locked in your audience to get those billions (more intrusive ads, clickbait, adding gambling elements to your kid focused app etc.) Then actively prevent yourself from doing them via some kind of organisational structure, like a B corp or non-profit. In game theory terms, this is burning your boats to force yourself to go in a specific direction even if tempted to retreat.
This lets people buy into the idea without the feeling that they're going to get stabbed in the back later.
Do all the things a genuinely user focused company would do if they weren't afraid of going out of business.
You might not be able to employ thousands of marketers, salesmen etc. but can you make a decent software salary without slaving for an ad business? Being able to locate anywhere, work for yourself and possibly have tax benefits of running a charity may swing the decision.
If enough geeks do this, you could end up with some co-operative federation of small independent orgs, like a version of GNU, Linux, Unix for replacing the current web's Facebook's and Amazon's, just as they did to Solaris and Oracle.
I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him or small scale version of him.
At the moment most of that energy seems aimed at VC backed small companies that use the "changing the world" motivation and then later sell out.
Co-ops in a variety of industries, fair-trade, ethical makeup and others have developed similar models with reasonable success, someone just needs to perfect the formula for user facing web apps.
Making it in free software is like making it as an author. You need to achieve some kind of fame to get paid. You need to be an internet celebrity. Then you can raise money.
> I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him
LOL, yes, this represents the 1 in 1,000,000 extreme of programmer celebrity that is far more than anyone could reasonably hope for.
How is becoming non-profit a "defeat"? I would argue society would fare much better if all work was for the profit of society and not (capitalist) profit.
Also, why don't we tech people lead by example and build non-profits and cooperatives that provide better software/services? See for example the successes of framasoft, sourcehut...
Most likely the leadership team is aware that these "viewers" just exist in theorey but they can fool advertisers into thinking their channel has a higher reach and collect more advertising revenue in return.
You know, if you paused it, you closed it, maybe even mis-clicked you interacted with it, that's engagement for way too many metrics. You are not gonna consider them to not be or even be negative, who wants their numbers go down? Destroys the nice hockey stick chart, promotion, etc.
It's maybe not the best, but it's also not evil. And by that standard "somebody had a good day". I won't blame them. That's what teams, managers, corporate cultures, capitalism, the system or whatever incentive for, and that's what they get.
The goal of these sites is normally to be as profitable as possible. If they achieve that goal at the cost of pissing off "a bunch of geeks", I don't think they'll care.
If they can trigger a "video fired" message in the analytics, that's one more "Person viewed our video" they can show to a potential advertiser. That's all it's about, not the end user's experience.
Often, they can also show the much more important "well-paid video ad played" event. Video ads pay much better than other ads, and I believe that those videos are often ad-ridden - we just don't notice because your ad blocker takes care of that. (I know I've seen it a couple of times, but I don't know how frequent it is because I rarely make the mistake of visiting a news site on a browser without an ad blocker.)
Having worked on video delivery, first play is not paid much attention. In most VPAID supported ads -one of the standards for video ad delivery- you have events fired at set intervals which are what is actually looked at when evaluating a placement value.
A placement that has high first play rate but a terrible 5sec event firing will just be worth nothing. In a programmatic world it means you'll get little to no bids for it or a default placement with payment in the fraction of cents per thousands.
And the one publish ads gets absolutely no attention even though the numbers looks good. Who on the earth will watch a video stick at the corner of a news site page?
It's not just autoplaying video that's the problem, it's the fact that these videos then go on to autoplay something else completely unconnected to what you were reading without asking you first.
You might argue this is to do with advertisers and so on, but this also happens on the BBC News website too. I recently clicked on a video story and after the video was finished I didn't notice there was a 5 second timer and suddenly I got a totally different video play by itself.
> It's not just autoplaying video that's the problem, it's the fact that these videos then go on to autoplay something else completely unconnected to what you were reading without asking you first.
No, screw that as well. If there's a text article with a video attached, I don't want to be interrupted by the autoplaying video while I'm reading the text.
This is a common theme with non-profits and open source projects. They see the for-profit incumbents doing something toxic and cargo cult it like not providing a similar experience would betray the users when it's really the opposite.
Because that's how the web team is measured and rewarded. Management wants to see more view views, longer time on site, etc. Leadership doesn't understand nor care about a shite UX (so no one lower in the org is concerned).
The worst offender for this, in my opinion, is Wikia (sorry, "Fandom™"). There is zero attempt to make the autoplaying content at all relevant to the wiki in question, and it generally isn't even advertising anything, it's just... crap.
It seems like they're desperately trying to believe they have a social network on their hands rather than a collection of disparate knowledge bases, and they're trying to sell this non-existent 'fandom' culture to visitors.
Have you ever driven across a bridge, or along a highway and run over one of those "hit counter" cables that the Department of Transportation lays out to know how many people are driving on that bridge, or that highway?
Now imagine that the cable can reach up into your car at the exact moment that you cross over it and pull down your person and your entire life's history.
That's E-ZPass, FasTrak, etc. Also those toll bridges where they take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill that includes a $6 "convenience fee"
They hide ALPR everywhere. All it takes is a camera. I've seen it on the backside of normal green highway signs, where you can't see it and would never suspect it. The idea is to create a dragnet.
They also pay gig workers to literally just drive drive around in vehicles with ALPR in them. Police cars have them, and they trickle down to parking enforcement. And I am sure the parking officer's gear is sending back more than just cars that have been parked over 30 minutes.
Here in the UK, on public roads, they are legally required to sign post that ANPR[1] is in use in that area, and the cameras have to be easily seen, AND a bright yellow colour.
The shady side of it, is on private property, like car parks, where those rules don't apply.
You're being tracked by your car and phone bluetooth MAC addresses. That's how the "X minutes to exit Y" signboards work. They time how long it takes to see a particular MAC address appear at the next receiver.
You got a cite for that? I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but that seems horribly overengineered for what has been traditionally accomplished with tracking the average speed of vehicles using radar or vehicle detectors - they have had these signs long before smart devices were common.
I interviewed at a place that managed traffic light behavior and they had a system to evaluate traffic efficiency by watching traffic flow through the whole area, tracked using ambient Bluetooth signals from phones.
>tracked using ambient Bluetooth signals from phones.
What does this mean? Are they just measuring radio power levels in the 2.4GHz spectrum, and using that to determine whether a car is there or not? Or are they actually somehow capturing bluetooth signals, decoding them, and extracting identifiers (eg. MAC) from them?
It was explained to me as if they track individual cars so I assumed they extract identifiers. I don't know much about BT so I had no reason to question if that was possible. I asked about TPMS as an alternative and they said bluetooth was more reliable since many cars didn't use in-wheel transponders.
This is a pretty bad analogy, because there's very little that online advertisers track that license plate readers can't. In both cases, it rarely stretches beyond a dataset of "Which people have visited which (pages|businesses)" and whatever statistical inferences you can claim to make from that data. Businesses already use license plate readers for marketing and analytics purposes. (Although, of course, not as widely deployed or as well-known as advertising cookie tracking)
I worry that ad-blockers and similar contribute to this.
I, as a nerd, get to bypass all the dark patterns, either by just being informed, using specialized tools or other workarounds that let me use the service (and so increase its reach) but let others take the hit in getting sucked into the adverts or rage-based communities.
It feels like there should be a social movement to use tools that don't employ these tactics on anyone. It might mean a short term reduction in quality of life, but it equally could be long term beneficial.
How many people struggled with a thousand different sub-par experiences for decades so that today Valve can launch a handheld Linux based gaming PC with Wine based emulation of basically their entire catalog.
It's an amazing collective achievement of society, but many people take the short term view because 5 or 10 or 15 years ago it seemed outlandish that X could ever be achieved with open code and shared data. How can we get more people to take the better long term view? "Would you want your kid to use this app?"
App idea: take the core code of an open source ad-blocker, make it slightly less harsh, but totally block any site that fails it's tests rather than block only the ads. Provide alternate news stories or whatever from sites that are better. Similar to Google punishing deceptive sites, but decentralised.
(I've noticed this recently with Google provided news stories. They let me say "I'm not interested in topic" and "not interested in this specific site" which I use whenever the clickbait annoys me, but there's no generic "no clickbait please" option, nor any way to help protect other users from it who may be unaware of the dangers)
How about an extension that disables video elements until you click on them ... Like how Internet Explorer treated Java applets towards the end on their days.
You could add a whitelist feature to the extension for YouTube et al.
Sure, it would be nice if websites didn't do shitty UX, but as others have said, don't visit those sites.
The other extension idea I had was one which would reference a database of sites known to use dark UX, and warn you not to click thru.
I myself run a userscript on Google that removes results from websites that I'd prefer to avoid.
Websites still find their way around this setting. I think they put an overlay on the page and intercept the first mouse event they can, and use that to start playing the video.
I usually just blacklist these websites in my Pihole.
> I think they put an overlay on the page and intercept the first mouse event they can,
...such as one of those "totally-GDPR-compliant" accept-cookies-please modals maybe? :) I am 100% certain this is how a large number of sites bypass autoplay restrictions.
I swear Safari used to block autoplay-with-audio, and it recently stopped blocking it. I remember this because I specifically needed to set audio to disabled to get a video clip to autoplay on my blog (basically just a more efficient GIF).
> How about an extension that disables video elements until you click on them ... Like how Internet Explorer treated Java applets towards the end on their days.
No.
Short MP4 files should replace GIFs. MP4 files are more efficient than the terrible compression GIF files have. I've made a few video game pages where auto-playing MP4s were essential at giving the right message... discussion of tactics and "movement" of dynamic video game stuff is pretty common. (Any game requires the player to gain instincts that "predict the future", and short GIFs and/or MP4 files really help show off key moments).
> I've made a few video game pages where auto-playing MP4s were essential at giving the right message
No. What you say is simply factually inaccurate. I've looked at the web page in your URL and it would be much better without distracting auto-playing video.
The video should play then the user wants it to play. Is that really so hard to understand?
I agree completely. When there's a looping video below the fold, I'd rather start it with a click, instead of having to watch it up to twice just to see the clip from beginning to end.
I will seek when the option is presented. It’s either tiny or nonexistent though (e.g. for gifs, or if the author didn’t enable the video controls, which default to disabled in many browsers). I’m happiest when a video loads paused, and has a giant play button on it.
How are you scrolling? When I’m browsing and reading my hand lives on the mouse. On mobile it’s even easier to click to play. In either case, clicking on a video takes less than 1 second.
I do agree that extremely short loops can be a different story, but 20 seconds is by far over that time for me. 5 seconds is around the threshold.
If the video is short, such as anything 20-seconds or shorter (even 5-second videos), the click is too much in my experience.
Perhaps its "meme culture" or Tik-Tock culture. But there's a style of super-short 5-second to 20-second video where looping makes far more sense than clicking.
--------
In either case, I've solicited feedback of this style in a variety of gaming forums from different communities. They mostly have had positive-experiences with tutorials / short videos written in this manner. Awesomenauts, Factorio, and Puyo Puyo. Three very different communities, three times they seemed to like the content and video/writing style of merged text + video.
Did you solicit feedback on auto playing or videos in general? Your comment seems to say 2 while advocating for 1.
On your website your videos don't auto play for me on mobile, by the way, which I found convenient because it's tap on tap off. It's x-overflowing the videos though, which is inconvenient.
I never want auto playing videos. Ever. It is my personal preference and i should be able to express that in my browser, overriding your preference, as the author of the web page.
Do you have the same preference for auto-playing GIFs? If so then yes, we agree—users should be able to customize their user agent to serve their needs. If you don't, then I'd be interested to hear why. I don't believe any browser should treat GIFs and muted videos differently, and that was the crux of the GP's claim.
Animated GIFs are videos. They may not require a video tag, but they are videos by definition of using multi-frame images that change to simulate motion.
The client has two important values: attention/time and battery. Your preference screws both.
There's a couple of solutions to that (such as only looping once or for X seconds or not showing it).
Either way, you think too much from content creator PoV, IMO.
The web was made in such a way that clients are able to (massively) modify the content or the way it is shown. If you don't fancy that then you don't fancy one of the core foundations of the web. I use all kind of extensions to modify my web experience. If your PoV would become dominant, I simply would not use WWW anymore.
Default experience matters because most people don't use extensions, or not the same ones (power users do) so you get your way anyway. And I don't get my way on Firefox Mobile because they decided to axe a lot of extensions, and I don't get my way on work Citrix because admins decided which extensions are worthwhile (they block all video stuff, btw).
All but demanding that the internet's users bend to the will of a single person's pet project is not likely to garner a positive response, if you must know.
There's the option of simply not visiting the webpages that offend you.
I'm not going to change my writing / guide style just because some people outside of those gaming communities don't like the way they work. Its one thing if you were the target audience, its a totally different thing if you're just a meta-commentator talking about the internet in general.
I ask on the community forums or on the Discords. These websites have no direct feedback mechanism.
The feedback I get is like "That's a confusing paragraph", or "That's a bad strategy. You should be writing about X instead".
No one actually cares about the auto-playing videos, unless they're not working. (On page X on Safari, that video doesn't seem to be working was one complaint I got... and then I had to transcode my MP4 settings to get it working there).
I'm seeing the Fediverse linked to more and more often, in the wild. Not the first time I've seen it linked here, either. It's heartening to see that there's a little light at the end of the tunnel.
For better or worse, Trump saga helped as a search for alternatives began. In a sense, I am not complaining, but it is odd to see people, who were arguing for Patriot Act surprised it is being used against them.
Still, I agree. Despite worry, it may be a good thing its entering mainstream slowly.
Individual Fediverse servers are typically run by individuals or groups for their own interests, on their own dime. Some of those are generally open (e.g., mastodon.social and mastodon.cloud), some are invite-only or serve specific communities. Many are individual's own instances and serve a single user or a very small set.
Anyone can stand up a Mastodon instance. There are companies which specialise in fully-hosted turnkey services. And as noted, there are many instances which are free to join for the asking.
The system overall is in no way closed on this regard.
That said, individuals (or instances) which engage in antisocial behaviours or prove nuisances may find that they are blocked by numeous others.
In general, what exists is widely available but also subject to local rules. There are instances which run strongly counter to the mainstream culture on the Fediverse. They exist and can talk amongst themselves, but have limited (and often no) interaction with the mainstream of the rest of the network.
You don't need to use any particular server to publish to this ecosystem. You don't even need to use the Mastodon software. Just hook up the AP plugin to your WordPress (or insert necessary logic into your CMS of choice) and you're a participant.
There is no such concept on Mastodon. People add it for fun, just like they do any kind of emoji, but it carries zero extra 'gravitas' as it does on Twitter.
I don't mean the checkmarks, i mean the user's domain. Twitter's Blue Checkmarks were added for a reason, and similarly a mastodon user's home server is an implicit vote of confidence by <some groupthink>. Or else i don't understand why this apparently busy mastodon server would have to approve all signups.
Would be interesting to know how it compares in user base and exposure. The fediverse poll lasted 1 day and gained 268 votes and with only 31 boosts (i.e. "retweets" in fediverse terminology). How many people saw the poll is hard to tell and depends too on the social graph from author and boosters, as well as the network of federated instances involved.
When posting a poll on HN, it of course has to reach the minimum number of upvotes to reach front page (which I believe for Polls and Ask HN is a bit higher than regular submissions).
I feel browsing the web is long overdue having a robot butler to do it for us and come back with the things we wanted, leaving the "People in Norwich are using this genius trick"-style nonsense on the cutting room floor.
It ought to be trivially possible, going on from things like grease monkey and ad blocking scripts to add a bit of user intent guessing / content filtering / simplified view logic.
If it was trivially possible, Firefox would already be doing it.
But there's always an arms race with stuff like this. Our robot butler would be able to figure out how to parse the web today, but the advertisers would completely change the structure of pages tomorrow.
Facebook used to have their ads wrapped in `<div class='advertisement'>`. Now, they're buried a thousand divs deeps, and the ads and content both have nonsensical, non-semantic class names.
I also noticed super deep div structure, and weird random class names. I assume it's to prevent automation and scraping. They're really hard to run querySelector against.
It's technologically possible, but not legally possible and not convenient.
People in the know have the right extensions to block stuff and get past paywalls using the right snapshot services etc. Firefox can't officially offer this, but they can let people do whatever they want if they run their own extensions.
If this was common place or convenient for the masses then it would be actively discouraged or outlawed, similar to what happened with Napster and MP3s.
> If it was trivially possible, Firefox would already be doing it.
Sorry but Firefox is mostly on the dark side these days. That shouldn't be too surprising since most of its money comes from google.
It does have a setting to stop embedded video from playing sound unless you send an event, but it is too easy for obnoxious pages to evade and play sound against your wishes.
Isn't this what Web 3.0 was supposed to be before crypto-fans stole the term?
> I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
It's technologically possible, but the 'user intent guessing' makes this messy. The Venn diagram of people who understand information seeking behavior and science well enough to design this and people who have a deep enough understanding of development to design it in a way that it doesn't break every 3 seconds is two circles.
So you'd need a team, and as somebody with a tech and a library background, good luck getting those two groups to communicate and work together. Doing it without the information seeking background just recreates the issues with the modern web where your 'robot butler' comes back with a ton of irrelevant information, and doing it without the tech background just gets you a bunch of librarians high-fiving themselves over 'solving' a problem using outdated tech and is used by 20 people because it doesn't scale well.
This is what Google has been trying to figure out forever isn't it? Things like the automagic answers block at the top of the search results, google assistant, etc.
Unfortunately we aren't very good at making robot butlers yet, and copyright severely limits what they can do (provided they are running as a third party service) in the first place.
(Seriously) I wonder to what extent a cause is that the internet is US-dominated - because US (& Canadian) television is just like this too. Opaque and colourful channel logo that spins and barely fades, and advertising that pops up over the programme while it's playing!
If that's your norm on TV, sure, why wouldn't a web page work like that? It baffles me just like OP, but no more than it does on television programmes.
I'm old enough to remember a time before every TV station had a logo/watermark at the bottom right. In my mind, the logos coincided with the early 80s when VCRs became more commonplace. I suppose stations that licensed shows/movies, didn't enjoy the fact that people could record that content and reuse it. So... logos.
Not that I watch much TV, but persistent logos ... and animated promos for upcoming features during the current programme, which still seems mind-blowingly bad ... were something I didn't notice until the mid-2000s.
I'm surprised there isn't an extension for some kind of white-list only video stream content.
I too find these sites despicable. But usually, by the time the video play you've already been fighting some popup about joining, dismissed a browser native window saying this site is asking to send you notifications in the future, and GRDP @#$%^$%^& "we care about your privacy so here is a booklet about our privacy policy, in your face" with select all-of-which cookies you'd like to not, maybe (one time) receive in a game of dark patterns.
I have an outline.com bookmarklet at that point, which I click as fast as possible to get out of this mess!
> I'm surprised there isn't an extension for some kind of white-list only video stream content.
the main problem is that it's impossible to distinguish between "autoplaying video that's annoying" and "animation that's part of the page". If you're willing to block both, firefox allows you to change the autoplay policy from "allow videos by default but block sound" to "block all videos".
Firefox has that built in; Chrome has the option to block audio. Both support a whitelist; Chrome supports a blacklist. There are extensions with more options.
A combination of the "I don't care about cookies" extension and an adblocker with a couple tracking blacklists should avoid both the cookie popups and the tracking cookies themselves.
You know the old joke about the prison where all the prisoners all knew the same jokes, so instead of bothering to tell them at dinnertime, they would just call out a number? Seems like the interweb is like that, except it's XKCD comics instead of joke numbers. There is one for every occasion. With that in mind: 624.
Some cooking recipe sites do this but I recently found it's actually helpful. While the video is playing, my phone screen stays on and the OS doesn't lock itself. Since it's always some unrelated video, I just turn the volume off and let it play while I cook, occasionally glancing over at my recipe.
On Firefox on macOS, almost always, the close button for these monstrosities is positioned flush right and sized exactly such that it extends merely 1 pixel left of the scroll bar. So, to close them, you must either aim precisely for this 1 pixel sliver, or move slowly enough that the scroll bar does not appear.
These days I just click Reader Mode for almost any news site. I wish I could somehow set domains to always open in Reader Mode.
Are there people out there that actually engage with the auto-playing videos, or the “articles you should also read” callouts forced between every other paragraph? There must be right?
I know no-one likes them, but there must be some increase in engagement somewhere that causes the marketing folks to keep pushing these things.
Personally I find it makes the articles very hard to read without reader mode. Sites owned by G/O Media (The Onion, Kotaku) are particularly egregious. On mobile you can typically only get about 20-30 words of the article on screen at any one time (that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one).
When it comes to chumboxes aka "articles you should also read" I could definitely see old people less experienced with the internet's scumminess falling for them at least the first few times.
I take a particularly dim view on websites that have these. I don't care if that's how they make their living - they are making money by scamming people.
How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potentially be anything (follow subscribe links, consuming traffic in the background, a simple DoS), but ideally something that reduces the offending servers ability to do what it's supposed to.
Instead, how about we make a combination browser extension/hosted service which renders the page server-side, extracts the content, and serves it clean.
Users can leave bounties on sites and once the bounties pile up high enough somebody will come along, sanitize it for everybody, and collect the bounty. Sorry about your ad revenue, next time don't piss off the masses.
The bounties will be public, so site maintainers can see if they're on the list and address the issues. If the community decides that the redesign addresses the problem, the bounty goes back to its issuers.
Legality aside(on both sides), you assume a media site will take an increase in ‘impressions’ on their site as negative on its own. A lot of these places just care about making it look like there’s eyeballs looking at their stuff so they can sell that ad space at a premium, not whether there actually is. Ie. The places that put these auto play videos.
Do advertisers actually believe these impressions metrics are valuable? It's strange that they put value in these metrics that everyone hates while completely shunning other forms of content like porn. I'm not suggesting that advertisers start showing their ads next to porn but rather questioning why they are showing their ads next to news websites based on what are essentially fake metrics.
Even if you assume the server operator is benevolent, that would be trivial to fork (and no one should run a closed-source version of that in the first place) bu someone just forking the extension and using it to trivially DDoS sites for other purposes. Or just break out that part of the code and use it in other malicious client code.
Consider also the sybil vector; I could just use a proxy network to vote millions of times for a site I'd like to see targeted. Or how do you ensure that 1 human = 1 vote? Throw in some PoW? No.
I'm not for building easily available tools for remotely and unilaterally coordinating DDoS attacks.
No need to burn it down. Just buy a bunch of gift cards for the bar and hand them out to people recently released from jail for drunk & disorderly conduct. If the bar is trying to optimize for maximum traffic at the expense of all other quality metrics, surely they won't mind.
I like this idea a LOT. However, the potential for abuse is, forgive me, too damn high. The extension owner can extort sites to not be attacked or attacked less. (a la AdBlock Plus, ghostery(?), etc).
How about if it merely followed links at a rate not high enough to impact the server itself, but enough to poison the analytics well as much as possible, and rather than opt sites in, it just randomly disrupts the 10,000 largest sites.
That sounds like the Blue Frog model from 10-15 years ago where IIRC each spam email would trigger one “please opt me out” request from everyone on the user base. Then the spammers started trying to DDOS them back.
It's fairly obvious that sending traffic for the sake of generating traffic isn't "legitimate" by any means. Your excuse is flimsier as websites that sell ddos services as "stress testing" services.
Installing AdNausiam into Chrome is remarkably difficult. You need developer mode on, repackage the addon manually and then dismiss the dev mode popup every time you start the browser.
In other browsers you need your addons to be signed. Firefox implemented this because of the terrible malware that got installed with adware installers. With administrator access, they kept changing every setting Firefox added to get the addon to load, so they made the entire loading system dependent on signatures. Luckily, adware developers aren't smart enough to load code into the signed binaries to work around this limitation.
You could do it, but it's more of a hassle than you'd expect.
Well, I have not noticed, because last time I wrote a Chrome extension, I just had the .js files in a directory and I could easily add it to Chrome with developer mode on. I imagine it would be possible with this extension as well.
Things may have changed since then, I have not checked.
that is vigilante justice and it will end about as well as Reddit trying to catch the Boston bomber.
What actually to do when you find someone's website annoying: Don't go there, it's not your site. Same thing I do when I don't like a bar, I leave, I don't start clogging the drain with toilet paper
Tempting as this is, it's a colossally bad idea: just as one point, how long do you think it would take for the usual operators of botnets (spammers, those attempting DDoS for other purposes, etc) to target the C&C for this botnet? Why go to the trouble of building a botnet when someone else has already done it for you!
Care to implement the W3C or WATWG browser spec over the next week?
How many independent browser engine variants are viable today? Three?
Ramping the difficulty of that problem has specifically limited choice and options.
One class of devices (iOS) mandates a single browser engine (Webkit / Safari). Android has a slight pretense of greater openness, but bundles Chrome into most apps.
Yeah, so I’ve been a host of things a few times, and got the hate mail, bomb threats and various lawsuits that were aimed at other people but landed with me.
The bomb threats and car bomb threats did get me talking to the sheriff about concealed carry permit, but I backed away.
The poor woman that answered the phone for a shared office space quit.
At Weebly, people bought DDOS but didn’t realize that every site had the backing of our entire infrastructure.
So long as all the developers of DoS and assassination extensions "felt the burn" before they could complete their abusive-behavior-enabling technology, I would be fine with that.
I think the default filter lists don't seek to block video content like this, but you can definitely accomplish this with custom filters. I have filters set up to block these videos on cnn.
The replies to this are so funny :D "It's illegal! Immoral! Assassination! Theft! Murder! Felony! To the gallows!"
Yeah, no.
So it's legal, moral, and acceptable that software and websites are made, by you folk reading this here website no less, to consume orders of magnitude more resources than they need to, just so that web companies---you folk, remember---can make some stats go up and turn them into money. It's okay to make the web less accessible to poor people, disabled people, people in places with bad internet connection, perfectly functional devices which have only become unusable because of this whole bullshit &c, it's okay to mine shitcoins in people's browsers, to sell their life for profits, it's okay to literally get into their private life and play loud videos in there if they don't know how to make that stop, but it's immoral, illegal, unacceptable to retaliate? Immoral and triggering for you lot for folk to just jokingly entertain such idea?
This whole business is basically turning wasted money and energy into dollars, not really different than blockchain bullshit essentially.
Imagine the resources wasted to produce and consume this nonsense went to making computers user friendly, programmable and accessible. Like, why should my browser occupy ~6G of memory for ~50 pages which could all be just pure HTML and a couple PDFs? Why should I need 6G of memory when 1 or 2GB must do? Why tf a computer with 1GHz or 666MHz CPU can't handle the web, ie a bunch of text documents? This whole bubble is creating immense amount of waste, and it's nonsensical to just limit your thinking to "oh, some annoying websites, just run uBlock". IMHO comes from the same place with "if car-dominated cities bother you and you feel unsafe, just get a car, or better, an SUV". What about fixing the city? What about climate and pollution?.
It is sad that most of the web is like this, but no, there's nothing illegal, immoral, or unacceptable about people offering to you (for free) shitty services which are a hassle (cost you resources) to use. You're free to not use them if you don't like them.
Your argument is like saying if a barbershop always has 2 hour wait times and has crappy music playing on an excessively loud radio, it's ok to retaliate against them.
If every barbershop is like this, that's sad and should be fixed, but it still doesn't make it ok to retaliate against them.
This is literally the same nonsense your average HNer type says in reply to anything, so I won't bother explaining you shit, but if markets worked to fix things the world wouldn't have turned into shit after neo-liberalism.
So yeah if my barbershop is playing loud music I ask them to turn it down please, and if barber queues are too long, maybe it's time for barbers to be nationalised because the private sector is failing to keep up, no?
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how bad someone's idea is or you feel it is. This comment is a noticeable step downward into hell.
Also, please don't post supercilious putdowns of the rest of the community. You have no idea who you're talking to here (none of us does). That sort of rhetoric is not only flamebait, it's reliably a marker of extremely low comment quality. We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, not users acting like they're better than others.
Somehow, I too see a lot of features that exists solely to increase the company's profit and only annoy customers.
I always wonder why they think this is a good idea.
But then I remember I often implement those features as a developer.
And sometimes, when I ask the marketing people or product manager, even they look to think it's a terrible idea.
They are also forced to release something BS but can increase some KPI.
Is the point of the video to make users stay longer? How long do they need the user to stay in order to improve their ad profit. Here is an idea, obnoxious webmasters: add an interstitial timer, "your article will be ready in ...". It's less intrusive and i might even tolerate that if it's less than ... 9 seconds. I m sorry that google and FB are sucking up all your revenue, i d like to help
The only reason users are staying longer is because the embedded video slows down the whole page loading, especially on mobile. News sites that have these are cancer and I actively avoid opening links to them when I'm on my phone. I can see my battery life lose whole percentage points when I open these pages. Can't see the content though; between the cookie consent toast, the video embedded in the lower right corner, the "allow us to send notifications" and "allow this site to see your location" popups.
It is a tragic situation. These sites obviously provide some value (or else you wouldn't be reading them) yet they cannot get paid for that value because google&FB have coopted the entire ad market for themselves. As technologists this is a problem that we should solve, not simply something to complain about
my mom still has msn has her home page because she's always had msn as he home page. many computers later she still sets it as her homepage. She went from there to their games pages, their chatroom pages, who knows that else.
So they exist. They're just not very tech savvy, and they like the way its been since thats the way its always been, even if they have to change it to make it so.
I recommended a blank page, or her most used site (email).
But the reason news sites have autoplaying videos isn't for the power users on hackernews, its for people like my mom, who will click those links AND watch the videos.
Channel News Asia has developed a habit of putting 2 (two) auto-playing videos on some articles and having them both play simultaneously at full volume.
That's actually made me laugh out loud. It's like you'd be constantly subjected to a cacophony of a senseless din for no reason at all whilst browsing the site. Insanity.
Most of my browsing is done on my TV via my Mac Mini connected to it.
The resolution is jack up to the lowest so I can easily see from the couch.
This is a fringe case as most people arent enjoying the Internet on their TV via a web browser and wireless mouse. Nevertheless those nuisance videos are the worst in my view on the TV ... take up the screen and there's no X button. Always just have to hit the back button quickly and not bother reading the site.
Here is a partial fix.
I have Firefox set to block autoplay vids, and I also created a bookmarklet (look it up) that removes video elements from the web page.
If you see a video playing, you can click on the button in your bookmark toolbar to execute javascript to kill the video. It leaves the video player visible, but it is now empty: it does not use bandwidth and it does not distract you.
Here is the javascript. To use this, you need to create a button on your bookmarks toolbar, and add this as the URL:
javascript:var x = document.querySelectorAll("video");var i;for (i = 0; i < x.length; i++) {x[i].parentNode.removeChild(x[i]);}undefined;
One way to use this bookmarklet is to make a new button by dragging (say) this page's URL to your toolbar, then editing it to set the url to above, and renaming it to FixVid.
Something about the post itself: while I'm firmly in the "it's annoying" camp, as is the author, the poll is a textbook example of how to make a heavily biased poll.
Maybe there is a person or two who actually like it, but the dripping sarcasm of the poll's response is saying "whoever you are, you're cretins", and is not quite inviting for a discussion.
I'd love to hear from someone who actually liked this pattern (and many others) as a consumer. It's so alien. Maybe I'd learn something.
Then again, I'm probably going to write that crawling bot that would frequent the sites I read, snip the actual content and deliver it to me via email or my Kindle. Call RMS what you will, but that bit of his digital life is quite clever.
All the same, for such a widely-used dark pattern, the visceral hostile response is absolutely overwhelming.
Think of all the weasly, greasy, contemptuous justifications that have been offerred for this practice. Clearly, someone's lying, and not at all convincingly.
I've heard plenty from content managers, website owners, management, that is, the side of barricade making this shit.
I suspect the overwhelming response from those who sorta tolerate is going to be: well, I want my dose of news, and everyone is doing that anyway, so I suppose that's how things are done today? But maybe there is someone who actually enjoys this. I'd like to hear from them.
Second kind of fuckery of this sort: you watch a video about A, and it auto plays a video about a completely unrelated B. There is no option to switch this off (hello, Independent news online).
Just no. Seriously. That gets me to block your entire video player.
I've noticed a variation on this which is a video that is related to the news story however since I am reading the article I press stop on the autoplaying video. However as soon as I scroll down to continue reading the page the video also moves to the lower left corner so that it is still visible even though I have paused this. This seems quite hostile as one has signaled their preference to read the article since they stopped the video. Can anyone say what the thinking is here? Is this just another technique to game some engagement metric?
News sites don't view people as "users" but as "pageviews". Clickbait and SEO drives pageviews, and you monetize pageviews by getting the highest payment per impression.
This obv comes at a long term branding cost - but only large brands like New York Times can really afford to care about the long term. Most news sites are commoditized and barely surviving these days =/
I don't agree with the practice, but I also kind of understand why it's there.
You know I hate this. The fact that they will autoplay videos with the sound off with the hope I'll turn it on is non-consensual data use. I get 0 benefit from watching some talking head with no sound, so why do you need to start loading and playing the video before I've consented to watch it? I live in an area where data is often slow, metered/throttled/capped. Please stop WASTING users data. It's not a free and never-ending resource.
"what will the ad-haters use in this future world of 2022? Some amalgamated FlashBlock equivalent that can easily just turn off all the annoying stuff? This line will be blurred and it won't be possible."
I think because technically, it's not an ad. But you can surely block the zone. Or, more simply, just disable javascript for the whole site. If it breaks the site, you know you don't want to come back.
Facebook is pretty bad too... I was just watching a video, lowered the volume and scrolled down... then it popped up an always-on-screen video player... I close it and it reverts back to playing the one that is offscreen, and the volume gets reset to maximum level.
Why would anyone expect that a news site would put users first, if we’re all ok with the notion that news organization are regular businesses?
For news organizations, the idiosyncrasies of corporate capitalism are more evident, because we keep on accepting the contradictory double bind that journalism has a deeply rooted social role, and that it can be managed as a regular business at the same time.
That is, per se, a disqualification of what journalism can be, because business mechanics are directly negating many core tenets of journalism in itself.
Without many more meanderings, the idea is this: as long as we accept that journalistic organization can be operated as showbusiness entities, and as long as we accept that journalism can (or should) generate profits, we won’t be able to either fix these annoying elements (the embedded autoplay video, and 1000s of others) nor the generalized and growing lack of trust in journalism itself.
It might be useful to point out that I say this as a journalist.
The video can start playing when you "permit" it to by giving it a suitable input event. Apparently a mouse motion is enough. It doesn't have to be a click. There is a bugzilla item about this somewhere, where the FF devs think that is a good interface. Upton Sinclair anyone?
why are news/blogspam-news sites so eager to play videos? (Even if the video is just some intern reading the article with static pictures being shown) Is there extra ad revenue from this somehow? Is it an attempt to keep people on the page longer?
Let's face it : the modern web is a nightmare without an adblocker and annoyance blocklists.
And most web creators aren't even aware because they use these tools themselves.
No wonder why normal people like walled gardens, the UI is more streamlined and (mostly) more respectful.
> No wonder why normal people like walled gardens, the UI is more streamlined and (mostly) more respectful.
Oh wow that's actually a good point, never thought about it that way. You are spot on I think, besides some heavy attempts by services to get people to use their apps (especially pronounced on mobile).
Note though that the web has always been annoying users, or at least many website have. I remember how in the 2000s, Firefox was advertised as being able to block pop ups, to give an example.
It’s not a great experience in a lot of ways, but it’s 10x better than every time I give in to curiosity and follow a Reddit link (all from here, this bastion of good web).
That's because the default for not-logged-in users is "new" reddit, an anti-pattern-filled mobile-first abomination. Everyone that actually uses the site hates it too.
Regular reddit users forget how bad the default experience is when linking to it.
(You can restore the old, more hn-like appearance by replacing the "www" with "old" in any reddit permalink)
I don’t know that I’d call it “mobile first”. I only ever visit HN, and by extension Reddit, on my phone. As far as I can tell I can’t access any content on Reddit on my phone anymore at all other than whatever weird unrelated comments they show below the content I was trying to access.
Not exactly the same thing but related: shout out to the excellent Vinegar extension for iOS Safari, which disables the abhorrent YouTube “play video on initial touch” behaviour that triggers play on every goddamn embedded YT video as you are simply trying to scroll down a page to read an article. Absolute lifesaver. Metaphorically speaking.
You're welcome to go through the New submissions list, or my submissions, or any other user's, and upvote the more substantial content.
Trust me, I do try to steer discussion in directions I think would prove more valuable for HN and its readers. There's some help in this through the 2nd Chance and invited submissions queues. See:
That said, the hivemind has certain rather predictably-popular themes. I wish myself it would steer more substantive, but site mechanics make that challenging.
That said, the unanimity of the response, given the ubiquity of the practice, shines a light on, oh, say, the "consumer value" arguemnt usually put forth. And that's possibly worth noting.
The worst part is that uBlock Origin's element picker doesn't work on Firefox for Android (or if it does, I haven't figured out how to use it), so on the one platform where it's maximally annoying I can't do anything to block it.