“Your frustration is the product”

righthand

This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article. > “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites. I don't entirely agree. I think these people entirely understand the web. This comes from publications trying to steer you towards their app so you can't block their tracking/profiling requests. The screens are cluttered because we've defined acceptable metrics as more clicks and views. The easiest way to generate more clicks to put a few popups on your site. Who cares what the clicks are actually for, no one is tracking user flows and user retention anymore, it's all "get them caught in the swamp" and maybe the slow page loading, janky ui, and increased clicks will land them on one of the advertisements. This stuff comes from "here is the latest pattern people are using to get people to click on stuff" then the team implements the pattern 100 more times as a bandaid/movement of the way to get people to click on things. Those people rotate out and it's only another 5 years before some dev says "hey can you clean up your Google Tag Manager script tags?" to whoever is in charge then. This also stems from the thousands and thousands of marketing companies/"startups" that do one thing. "Put our script on your page to track and improve customer retention". Of course whatever the marketing company is selling is perfectly quantifiable inside the analytics suite, but no one gets promoted for implementing a new analytics report. You get promoted for implementing "Click Tagger" or whatever. This mentality runs deep through modern American culture. Where it's more flashy and newsworthy to strike a deal with a sales rep of some AI startup than implement the tech yourself. Look at the US CENTCOM implementing Israeli tech or even the report yesterday about the committee approving Microslop garbage for federal use.[0] All of that comes out of some sales contract as our leadership teams only know how to copy script tags, not understand systems and flows. [0] https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...

donohoe

Here is the most frustrating part: Publishers could create efficient fast-loading web pages if they prioritized it (and a rare few do) but its just not a priority for most even though its in their best interest. You can have ads loading on a web page, even with header bidders, if you structure it correctly. In fact you can implement an ad solution that allows for fast loading pages and better optimize your ad revenue - whether you're doing pragmatic or direct. I know this because I've done this before. At a past employer we cleaned up their mobile version (they used the "m.example.com" format, so we could push this as a separate rogue experiment) and saw ad revenue grow by over 30% while giving readers a better, faster overall UX. I actively monitor top publisher article pages and you can see how bad (and good) it is: https://webperf.xyz/ TL;DR Keep using an ad blocker

mystraline

> No print publication on the planet does this. No, "No print publication on the planet can do this" But looking back on magazines, newspapers, etc; they have ALWAYS used a tremendous amount of advertisements. Newspapers sold classified space to sell stuff. It was always passive, and no way to have the newspaper or magazine to watch the user back to track eyeballs. Now with tech, we can do precisely this, or with close proxies. And with FB marketplace and Craigslist eating what was left of classifieds, yeah being in media is a very bad place. And thats not even discussing using LLMs to make slop. Even Are Technica was generating hallucinated articles, and the editor accepted it for months until being called out.

pembrook

> The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this. Yes because they don't give the print editions away for free. You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for. The only reason you're confronted with articles from these legacy publications in the first place is because they've lobbied governments to get google to force them into their carousels and recommendations.

rcarr

> The reader is not respected enough by the software. The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a product is digital then it should be free which is maybe fine if we are going to live in a world with Universal Basic Income but in our existing system is absolutely ludicrous. We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay. Outside of governments who have failed to take the necessary action against corporations and promote a power balance between investors, business and workers, the main cause of this is the lack of courage in middle management. The executive suite have not tolerated this degradation and their salaries have risen accordingly. In contrast, middle management attain a level of safety/comfort and then coast - they don't want the hassle of looking for another job so they don't risk pushing for a pay rise. They just accept whatever meagre rise is offered because they think "well at least I'm still better off than the guys lower down the chain". This then filters down as the ceiling for the lower ranks can never be higher than the management. Over time this becomes a gigantic issue, particularly in countries with a strong minimum wage that rises every year as the gap between the worker and management closes every year. Management then start blaming the government rather than actually looking at themselves and the fact that they are not pushing for bigger wages out of fear of rocking the boat. I literally saw this play out at a billion dollar revenue international non-tech company where I used to work a few years back. Directors were on £125k. Department heads on £75k. Tech leads on £55-65k. Seniors on £40-50k. Intermediates £27-35k. Juniors £25k. Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.

mhitza

I was surprised at the claim that The Guardian leaves very little room for the article. Sure enough, I loaded it up in a private window with adblocks disabled and the above the fold was very obnoxious. Which is very surprising to me. I only read The Guardian within the Tor browser, and when the website is loaded over their onion urls I do not see the same large obnoxious ads. A rare Tor win? Maybe adnetworks block Tor IP addresses and the reason why ads don't show up? The onion url https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3...

everdrive

"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data." Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not truly relevant to the story) News sites are almost like lyric sites or recipe sites in this regard. The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.

huitzitziltzin

Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever! No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech. Is that so hard to understand? Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the comments to a paywall-evading site! The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality, highly focused on costs and with no attention at all paid to benefits.

tacostakohashi

I've had a thought bubbling away lately, informed by AI hype, some job market research, the "enshittification" book/topic doing the rounds, and I guess lived experience too. Computers were invented, and initially used for calculations, punch cards, databases, spreadsheets, automating warehouses and running airlines and stuff. Computers are really good for that stuff, like many orders of magnitude better than analog alternatives. Later, computers became a mass market consumer product, and we had the web and internet, and moving everything online became a fad, much like AI is a fad now. This pushed computers into some fairly marginal use cases, like "social media", publishing, messaging, e-commerce, and CRUD apps to manage workflows like JIRA and friends. Computers are kind of ok for this stuff... but, frankly, not that much better than the original thing. Like, a telephone, fax, etc. already allowed instant communication, email is maybe a bit better than fax, but it's not 1000x better. JIRA is a bit better than a whiteboard and post-it notes, but, also probably not 1000x better. It's these recent, marginal-ish use cases that are getting destroyed by enshittification, AI, etc... because they were just never that good an application for computers and UIs in the first place. I think, if one wants to work on, or use an application that doesn't get filled with ads or have a copilot gratuitously inserted or whatever, it's probably more likely to happen in software for fluid dynamics or some natural fit for using a computer. Conversely, anything like facebook or jira or whatever that never really needed to be a computer app apart from because it was fashionable... is now unfashionable.

rivetfasten

"... the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions ... Almost no one would watch such a channel." QVC exists. That channel is ONLY ads. Not to detract from the point, which seems to be "yes what this other guy said."

s1mn

I've used an ad blocker for so long, I'd forgotten the web has got so terrible.

red_admiral

Apart from adblock (technically ublock), I can encourage reading mode. Even F9 on Edge is pretty good at figuring out what you really want to see/read. It sometimes also bypasses paywalls by accident.

m0llusk

Why bother with ad blockers? These organizations don't want you reading their articles, so take the hint.

renegat0x0

Reminds me of "Website obesity crisis" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U - https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Some say that you should not use ad blocker, because that kills ad revenue, but I did not forced anybody to rely with their lives on ad revenue. Many of things were 'free' because we were all just using ad blocks, and then it all became commodified, simplified, so simpletons without ad blocks became a thing. Now they shame people for using ad blocks, even though it stops spreading malware and viruses. I plan to use ad block, and use as many extensions that protect me. If there is some form of goods, be it streaming movies, audio, books I will happily pay for it. I will not accept a web with ads. I prefer touch grass. There is a clear line for me. Also there is no line ad publisher will not cross. The goal posts are shifted, so you will never satisfy shareholder greed. The only pushback is trough ads and probably sometimes piracy. Not that I advocate it, but in reality if companies push too hard, there are consequences.

52-6F-62

Let's not forget who developed the tooling, platforms, frameworks, libraries and packages and so on that these news companies use. Nor the development practices that are hoisted as "the way to do things now" that people frantically race to adopt so they are not pushed out of the industry and a fruitful career as "obsolete". Nor the technology companies that thought they served as a suitable replacement for news and advertising and community boards and used their massive investments to undercut the ability of traditional news outlets to survive, nevermind upstarts to have any hope of competing. And the haranguing continues as if it was the design of these organizations in the first place. There's no love lost for the media companies owned by billionaires, but maybe it should be more clear in these discussions exactly who started this particular mess.

ppnpm

This made me create a simple reading website for myself that blunts all the models, adverts and newsletter/subscription popups. https://readwd.vercel.app I also built an extension to redirect the article to this website, so that before these actions annoy me, I could read the article in peace.

ChrisArchitect

Discussion on source, which this is just a comment on: The 49MB web page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945

sailorganymede

News sites are going irrelevant anyways. I'd imagine they are pushing hard for this because traffic has died cause AI overviews have hit direct traffic to websites and independent writing platforms like Substack / Medium mean I can read a quality opinion on a matter I care about.

HexPhantom

At some point, either subscriptions have to carry more of the load or the web experience just keeps degrading

Xenoamorphous

> No print publication on the planet does this. Because you have to pay for the print version. They have plenty of ads, too, but they're not the sole revenue stream.