4 ms·

Cookie banners are just one more reason why it's so painful to use the web. They are nothing but required pop-ups! Making it painful to visit sites hurts the in

by pradn 2y ago

Cookie banners are just one more reason why it's so painful to use the web. They are nothing but required pop-ups! Making it painful to visit sites hurts the internet ecosystem. Might as well stay in walled-gardens, where ads are occasional, but less intrusive.

atq2119 2y ago
This is a common misunderstanding. Cookie banners are not required. It is your[0] active choice to invade your website visitor's privacy which leads to this degradation of usability. Stop with the cookie nonsense and you don't need a cookie banner. [0] Royal you, speaking to a significant fraction of the HN audience.
freehorse 2y ago
Cookie popups are not required, it is just how companies who were already on course of shitifying the internet decide to implement consent required by EU laws.
greatgib 2y ago
It's not the popup that is required, it is crappy websites that prefers to do the popups in the most annoying way to force you to accept you wouldn't want to. Somehow we can at thanks to Europe, so that sites and app that do things well have a clear competitive advantage. What we can be annoying is Europe not doing much to sanction abused. Like these assholes of trustarc and co that block in "processing" for 2 minutes when you refuse cookies. They pretend that it is the time to make a request to tell all the providers to not track you. But by definition if you don't want to be track there is no request they can do to tell to not keep info that they are not supposed to receive.
wongarsu 2y ago
> They are nothing but required pop-ups They aren't required at all, just don't use any tracking cookies. Cookies that are useful to the user generally don't require the banner, and many analytics tools now have the option to work without cookies (at the cost of not tracking repeat visitors). Annoying your users with cookie popups is the price sites pay for using invasive tracking. The only miscalculation is that apparently everyone is fine paying that price
- eastbound 2y ago
  That’s always been the argument, but in the end, everyone wants to know how many visitors they have. I know, there are trackless solutions, but you have to admit the reality: The audience of website administrators who want to use non-tracking analytics is a subset of the audience for recompilation of kernels on Arch Linux. Also I’m quite sure your website is not ranked as high on Google if you don’t use GA.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    You need 0 personal information to track visitors, and even if you needed it at collect time you wouldn't store any of it if your only purpose is to count visitors
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    HN seems pretty in love with plausible.io every time it's mentioned. It's pretty minimalist, but we never had an issue with it not tracking something we actually cared about. The real issue is ad tracking. If you either show ads or buy ads that lead to your website you are basically forced to add tracking cookies.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    > everyone wants to know how many visitors they have Actually we already know that if you want to know how many visitors you have, GA will strongly underestimate, especially with tech literate audience. You may want the log parsing instead. Even if you want the JS-based solution, you can do it first party, without the need for GA. > I’m quite sure your website is not ranked as high on Google if you don’t use GA. Sure enough to quote a source? There lots of high ranking pages, using non-GA solutions.
Sayrus 2y ago
> where ads are occasional, but less intrusive One out of three videos on Youtube short, several per video on Youtube, Facebook and X sponsored post are hidden within the timeline. That's not even talking about how much ads is outside those walled-gardens, for instance searching for something where SEO is heavily gamed like cooking recipes ends up returning websites where half the page is ads or sponsored content. I typed "buy pc" on Google and the first 4 results are paid ads labelled Sponsored, the first organic result is outside my screen. How are they not intrusive on walled-gardens? Those cookie banners are not mandatory, functional mandatory cookies do not require consent.
- eastbound 2y ago
  We’ve entirely lost the war and some people are still fighting the wording of the declaration. > the first organic result is outside my screen. And it’s only a referral blogpost. Is it even worth fighting? What have we won by attempting this fight? The Internet is unusable today.
  - Sayrus 2y ago
    > And it’s only a referral blogpost. Is it even worth fighting? What have we won by attempting this fight? The Internet is unusable today. Actually for me it offered ldlc.com which is a fairly good result. With an ad-blocker, it's the first result. Is it worth fighting? If the alternative is a web that is unusable today, yes. Will it prevent the enshittifiction of the web in the long term? Probably not.
brendoelfrendo 2y ago
They aren't required, though; they are a signal that the site you are visiting would rather utilize tracking cookies than provide a good UX. They could simply not use tracking cookies and then they wouldn't need to provide a pop-up!

by pradn 2y ago

atq2119 2y ago

This is a common misunderstanding. Cookie banners are not required. It is your[0] active choice to invade your website visitor's privacy which leads to this degradation of usability. Stop with the cookie nonsense and you don't need a cookie banner. [0] Royal you, speaking to a significant fraction of the HN audience.

freehorse 2y ago

Cookie popups are not required, it is just how companies who were already on course of shitifying the internet decide to implement consent required by EU laws.

greatgib 2y ago

It's not the popup that is required, it is crappy websites that prefers to do the popups in the most annoying way to force you to accept you wouldn't want to. Somehow we can at thanks to Europe, so that sites and app that do things well have a clear competitive advantage. What we can be annoying is Europe not doing much to sanction abused. Like these assholes of trustarc and co that block in "processing" for 2 minutes when you refuse cookies. They pretend that it is the time to make a request to tell all the providers to not track you. But by definition if you don't want to be track there is no request they can do to tell to not keep info that they are not supposed to receive.

wongarsu 2y ago

> They are nothing but required pop-ups They aren't required at all, just don't use any tracking cookies. Cookies that are useful to the user generally don't require the banner, and many analytics tools now have the option to work without cookies (at the cost of not tracking repeat visitors). Annoying your users with cookie popups is the price sites pay for using invasive tracking. The only miscalculation is that apparently everyone is fine paying that price

eastbound 2y ago
That’s always been the argument, but in the end, everyone wants to know how many visitors they have. I know, there are trackless solutions, but you have to admit the reality: The audience of website administrators who want to use non-tracking analytics is a subset of the audience for recompilation of kernels on Arch Linux. Also I’m quite sure your website is not ranked as high on Google if you don’t use GA.
- lm28469 2y ago
  You need 0 personal information to track visitors, and even if you needed it at collect time you wouldn't store any of it if your only purpose is to count visitors
- wongarsu 2y ago
  HN seems pretty in love with plausible.io every time it's mentioned. It's pretty minimalist, but we never had an issue with it not tracking something we actually cared about. The real issue is ad tracking. If you either show ads or buy ads that lead to your website you are basically forced to add tracking cookies.
- viraptor 2y ago
  > everyone wants to know how many visitors they have Actually we already know that if you want to know how many visitors you have, GA will strongly underestimate, especially with tech literate audience. You may want the log parsing instead. Even if you want the JS-based solution, you can do it first party, without the need for GA. > I’m quite sure your website is not ranked as high on Google if you don’t use GA. Sure enough to quote a source? There lots of high ranking pages, using non-GA solutions.

Sayrus 2y ago

> where ads are occasional, but less intrusive One out of three videos on Youtube short, several per video on Youtube, Facebook and X sponsored post are hidden within the timeline. That's not even talking about how much ads is outside those walled-gardens, for instance searching for something where SEO is heavily gamed like cooking recipes ends up returning websites where half the page is ads or sponsored content. I typed "buy pc" on Google and the first 4 results are paid ads labelled Sponsored, the first organic result is outside my screen. How are they not intrusive on walled-gardens? Those cookie banners are not mandatory, functional mandatory cookies do not require consent.

eastbound 2y ago
We’ve entirely lost the war and some people are still fighting the wording of the declaration. > the first organic result is outside my screen. And it’s only a referral blogpost. Is it even worth fighting? What have we won by attempting this fight? The Internet is unusable today.
- Sayrus 2y ago
  > And it’s only a referral blogpost. Is it even worth fighting? What have we won by attempting this fight? The Internet is unusable today. Actually for me it offered ldlc.com which is a fairly good result. With an ad-blocker, it's the first result. Is it worth fighting? If the alternative is a web that is unusable today, yes. Will it prevent the enshittifiction of the web in the long term? Probably not.

brendoelfrendo 2y ago

They aren't required, though; they are a signal that the site you are visiting would rather utilize tracking cookies than provide a good UX. They could simply not use tracking cookies and then they wouldn't need to provide a pop-up!