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"Reader mode seems to only be available on pages that the browser thinks are articles" Someone will write a javascript workaround that stops "reader mode" from

"Reader mode seems to only be available on pages that the browser thinks are articles" Someone will write a javascript workaround that stops "reader mode" from triggering. If it's just a simple heuristic, it should be easy to defeat.

mechanical_fish 16y ago
On the other hand, if the heuristic is "pay a bunch of Mechanical Turkers five cents per website to classify typical pages from websites as 'articles' or 'not articles'" it's going to be pretty difficult to defeat. Why bother with artificial intelligence when the real thing is so inexpensive? Indeed, you might not even have to pay. Just build a system to report bugs. People may happily self-report when their adblocker fails to function on pages where they want it to function. I suppose there might be tricks, like chopping your page up into misarranged divs and then unshuffling them with CSS and/or JS, that make it really hard to scrape the content for Articles, even if you know that the page should be an article. That class of hacks will cost you in accessibility, though, and they can't be great for SEO.
- chaosmachine 16y ago
  You can avoid any major SEO problems by only serving the modified version to iPads (As long as it's providing proper user agent information, that's easy, but there are other ways to detect it as well). In fact, if you really want to go all out, you could just serve the entire website as a rendered image to iPad users.
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    You could even cut your site into tables or divs but with the table-boundaries not corresponding to the text/ad boundaries. The possibilities are endless. I think the reason folks don't it now is that add blockers are not ubiquitous. The only way web filtering works is if the display mechanism and the meaning of page displayed roughly correspond. If someone decides to start massively filtering the web in a way that doesn't serve the original site owner, the site owner can certainly start serving content that displays correctly but is hard to filter.
silvestrov 16y ago
Someone might even write a Safari 5 extension which implements the reader functionality, and which is automatically updated whenever sites try to block it. And Safari extensions loads automatically, so the user don't even have to hit the "reader" button.
dangrover 16y ago
I don't think you've actually used it. it doesn't just "trigger" and block just ads from appearing. You still see the ads and everything on e page. On certain pages, you can optionally, manually enter a mode that just brings the text into focus.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  This is a pretty important detail, because it means that only the most obnoxious site designs will suffer. There are still some ads. Indeed, the remaining ad space might even grow in value, partially compensating for the loss of the obnoxious follow-on pages. Of course, that assumes a more intelligent metric for ad value than just the raw number of page views. Which means that this whole thing could end up benefiting Google. Who has the analytics data to help put a value on ads that is more intelligent than just "cost per thousand downloads of the ad, even if those downloads are on page seven of a ten-'page' article"? I know who!

mechanical_fish 16y ago

On the other hand, if the heuristic is "pay a bunch of Mechanical Turkers five cents per website to classify typical pages from websites as 'articles' or 'not articles'" it's going to be pretty difficult to defeat. Why bother with artificial intelligence when the real thing is so inexpensive? Indeed, you might not even have to pay. Just build a system to report bugs. People may happily self-report when their adblocker fails to function on pages where they want it to function. I suppose there might be tricks, like chopping your page up into misarranged divs and then unshuffling them with CSS and/or JS, that make it really hard to scrape the content for Articles, even if you know that the page should be an article. That class of hacks will cost you in accessibility, though, and they can't be great for SEO.

chaosmachine 16y ago
You can avoid any major SEO problems by only serving the modified version to iPads (As long as it's providing proper user agent information, that's easy, but there are other ways to detect it as well). In fact, if you really want to go all out, you could just serve the entire website as a rendered image to iPad users.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  You could even cut your site into tables or divs but with the table-boundaries not corresponding to the text/ad boundaries. The possibilities are endless. I think the reason folks don't it now is that add blockers are not ubiquitous. The only way web filtering works is if the display mechanism and the meaning of page displayed roughly correspond. If someone decides to start massively filtering the web in a way that doesn't serve the original site owner, the site owner can certainly start serving content that displays correctly but is hard to filter.

silvestrov 16y ago

Someone might even write a Safari 5 extension which implements the reader functionality, and which is automatically updated whenever sites try to block it. And Safari extensions loads automatically, so the user don't even have to hit the "reader" button.

dangrover 16y ago

I don't think you've actually used it. it doesn't just "trigger" and block just ads from appearing. You still see the ads and everything on e page. On certain pages, you can optionally, manually enter a mode that just brings the text into focus.

mechanical_fish 16y ago
This is a pretty important detail, because it means that only the most obnoxious site designs will suffer. There are still some ads. Indeed, the remaining ad space might even grow in value, partially compensating for the loss of the obnoxious follow-on pages. Of course, that assumes a more intelligent metric for ad value than just the raw number of page views. Which means that this whole thing could end up benefiting Google. Who has the analytics data to help put a value on ads that is more intelligent than just "cost per thousand downloads of the ad, even if those downloads are on page seven of a ten-'page' article"? I know who!