What Is a Dickover?

JKCalhoun

Wow, yeah, fuck off with the dickovers. My own blog has none of that crap. No Google analytics, no tracking. If someone visits my site, I have no idea. And I don't care.

echelon

Gruber's usually too much of a walking Apple ad for my taste, but I love this. We need to define the things we hate. Give them words. Use the words as weapons. I've been thinking about this a lot recently with "watermarks" of the statistical and non-visible kind used to track image creators. (Google embedding "this image is AI but also here's the user ID".) I've been thinking that practice needs a new word too. It's not watermarking, it's signals-math based tracking, so maybe sigtracked. That might not sound gross enough though.

hootz

DO YOU CONSENT WITH OUR TRACKING COOKIES POLICY? [YES, I DO, THE IMPORTANT TRACKING ONES] [YES, I DO, ALL OF THEM] ⁿᵒ ᵃⁿᵈ ᶜˡᵒˢᵉ ᵈᶦᶜᵏᵒᵛᵉʳ

cocacola1

Never thought to call them dickovers before, but it’s apt. At a certain point, I noticed my finger reflexively hitting the ESC key because that usually dismisses a lot of them.

freetime2

Thank you, I got a good laugh out of that. My experience was probably exactly as intended. Click on the "What is a dickover?" link trying to come up with things that it might be. And a brief moment after the page loaded (this little pause is crucial) I am hit in the face with a big annoying popup saying "This is a Dickover" followed by immediate understanding. Now at least I know what to call it the next time I visit Substack.

avaer

I don't get why people feel entitled to _not_ get dickovers. Are you paying for what you're using, to a sufficient degree that the ecosystem can work without the dickover being presented to you? This shouldn't be the user's problem, but this is the market working. The dickovers are there because someone somewhere is making money because the dickovers are there. Saying you want the content without the spam is more or less saying you want other people to do the work and you don't want to pay for it. If you don't like ads/dickovers, you don't have to use the site/app. The provider has decided you're not worth it. To be fair, you probably aren't making them money. There are exceptions, but you shouldn't feel entitled to use the thing without paying the "dickover price" that the provider has decided to charge.

chrsw

Yeah this is really bad. Firefox + uBlock Origin + Filters cleans a lot of these dickovers. Some seem to slip through the cracks. There's a never ending fight between bad websites and the warriors trying to protect our attention.

analogpixel

Maybe if people don't like dickovers, paywalls, and all the other bad patterns , they should stop submitting and voting them up.

michaelt

I have a theory that about 97% of developers and managers completed the cookie consent (or whatever) on their own product 5 years ago and hence never see it again, and they have no idea how bad the experience for new customers actually is. So the developers and bosses all think they're doing a great job and they've got a carefully curated homepage, even though the regular users get a cloudflare captcha, then a cookie modal, then a newsletter modal, then an install-our-app modal, all blocking their access to the 'buy product' button.

rvz

I'm sorry but this is such a stupid name. Where did the author get this name from? Why would I say that in front of any female colleage or any non-technical layman? We already have a name for this and it is a "popup". Which sounds better? "Remove this popup" or "Remove this dickover" Be honest.

abrowne

Any site I visit regularly gets a user stylesheet via Stylus that I use to hide anything like this.

userbinator

Did anyone else think this was a clever keming pun? Fortunately, for those sites where either JS is required for the content or to remove the dickover, browsers still have an Inspect Element tool that makes deleting this and other annoyances not too difficult and rather cathartic.

bayesnet

The only surprising thing about the Tom’s Hardware example was that John Gruber evidently does not use an adblocker

pooploop64

Fanboys Annoyances List for Ublock. Install it on your family's computers when they aren't looking. It aims to filter ALL this crap.

skybrian

Did you know that a Substack's author can turn the annoying popup off? Go to dashboard -> settings, and then it's "Enable subscribe prompts on post page" under "Growth." It's the first thing I did. Recommended.

JoshTriplett

> They’re popovers, but dickheaded. So they're popovers. Seriously. I've never seen a popover used for any legitimate purpose. If it was the content the user wanted, you can put it in the page where it goes.

freediver

One of criteria for inclusion into Kagi Small Web [1] is no dickovers. Thanks for naming it properly John. [1] https://kagi.com/smallweb

andai

I explicitly disable these on Substack but it adds them to my posts anyway. I'm not sure if that's a bug or the thing working as intended, but it was enough to make me stop using it. I don't want to do that to my readers.

-warren

Dickovers are annoying -- tell me, what's your solution? For me, a combination of a) not patronizing these sites, but when I have to b) some ad blockers help. Nothing seems to work well though.

LeoPanthera

Does big tech understand consent? [ ] Yes [ ] Maybe later