10 ms·

Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile: * Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent * I

Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile: * Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent * If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking * There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. Upon pressing the tiny X in the corner it takes 1-2 seconds to close or multiple presses as I am either missing the x or because there is a network roundtrip * I scroll down a screen and get a popup overlay asking me to signup for their service or newsleter, again messing with the x to close * video or other flashy adds in the content keep bugging me This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me (often it is not). If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.

AlecSchueler 1y ago
> This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me And to find that out you have to hit Page Down about twenty times, scanning as you, because the content is padded out to increase ad coverage.
jonplackett 1y ago
I made this game inspired by all the dark patterns from darkpatterns.org - every pop up is based on a real dark pattern https://www.termsandconditions.game/ https://www.termsandconditions.game/
- jama211 1y ago
  Haha, this is great, nice work
- bokkies 1y ago
  Application error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command heroku logs --tail
  - seszett 1y ago
    I also get that.
    - jonplackett 1y ago
      Weird only some people getting an error. Works ok for me. It’s on a very old Heroku hosting plan. I should probably update that one day.
      - seszett 1y ago
        Just for the record, I get the same result with Firefox or Chromium and with IPs in different EU countries.
      - Barbing 1y ago
        LMK, reporting in as well: broken when trying multiple ways on my end and wanna play! Great idea!
      - esskay 1y ago
        Dead here in the UK too
    - andruby 1y ago
      me too. Are we all in the EU? (I am)
      - gorbypark 1y ago
        When you posted this, it would have been 1-3AM in North America (and probably large parts of South America), so yeah, probably mostly Europeans!
        bokkies 1y ago
        And the many keen HN readers down in South Africa! (also CET)
  - 1y ago
- DaanDL 1y ago
  Oh this is good, I like it!
- Barbing 1y ago
  working now - ahaha nice!
ssss11 1y ago
And don’t try to exit or you’ll get another pop up “why are you leaving? Please don’t go”
- visarga 1y ago
  Sometimes they hack the back navigation function and present their own clone of Google Discover feed. If you are not careful you might end up in a different feed.
  - Barbing 1y ago
    Anyone know the largest site that does this reliably? I've seen e.g. Meta's FB mess with the back button but not the cloning grift.
  - federiconafria 1y ago
    Or sending you back to their home page...
tmountain 1y ago
AI is following the drug dealer model. “The first dose is free!” Given the cost incurred, lots of dark patterns will be coming for sure.
- littlecranky67 1y ago
  I fail to see how that will work out. Just I have an adblocker now, I could have a very simple local llm in my browser that modifies the search-AIs answer and strips obvious ads.
  - svachalek 1y ago
    They won't be obvious. They'll be highly customized brain worms influencing your votes and purchases to the highest bidder.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
      Yep. Right now, even with cookies inferences about individual humans are minimal, but exposing your whole patterns in speech make you a ripe target for manipulation at a scale that some may not fully understand yet. 4o is very adept at cold reading and it is genuinely fascinating to read those from that perspective alone. Combine it with style evaluation and a form of rudimentary history analysis, and you end up with actual dossier on everyone using that service. Right now, we are lucky, because it is the least altered version of it ( and we all know how many filters public models have to go through ).
    - lopis 1y ago
      Which sounds very illegal in most places, as clearly identifying sponsored content is required. Let's see how that turns out.
      - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
        For hire drivers/having employees had very specific legal requirements in most areas. Let's see how that turned out. Oh yeah, the dystopian tech companies won and we the people got the benefit job/job rules being thrown out for the beauty that is independent contractor 'gig work'.
Mars008 1y ago
That's why I don't use mobile for browsing. Only Firefox with JS disabled unless it's needed and I need that page.
- ianis-r 1y ago
  Firefox with ublock origin does wonder on mobile
Propelloni 1y ago
I use Firefox with standard security options and the uBlock Origin Add-On on my Android phone and I virtually never see what you describe, bar the tracking consent nag screen ofc. Maybe we visit vastly different web content? I guess if my experience was as much degraded as yours I wouldn't bother with the web anymore, so yay for AI summarizers, at least for the time being. And don't get me wrong, a summarizer is a workaround, not a solution.
- cudder 1y ago
  There is an extension called "I still don't care about cookies" that mostly solves the nag screens (There's also a similar one that doesn't have the "still" in its name but that one was bought by an ad company and enshittified.) AFAIU it usually accepts the cookies though, so you should combine it with something that clears your cookies periodically. Sometimes it breaks the site so that you can't scroll or something, but that's quite rare. And most of the time it's solved by a refresh. Very infrequently you need to whitelist the site and then deal with the nag screen manually. A bit annoying, but way better than rawdogging it. Works on desktop & mobile.
  - reddalo 1y ago
    No need to use a specific extension, uBlock Origin is all you need. Just enable the "Easy List/uBO - Cookie Notices" filter from the filters list (the default is off).
    - aembleton 1y ago
      You can also add this filter to uBO: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/ https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
    - cudder 1y ago
      Sweet, didn't know that. I'm gonna try if it works with less breakage. Thanks!
    - Propelloni 1y ago
weinzierl 1y ago
What you describe is subtly different from what is in the article. The article is about Google (and other traditional search engines) snatching away clicks from web site owners. What you describe is AI tools (for lack of a better word[1]) snatching away traffic from the ruling gatekeepers of the web. I think the latter is a much bigger shift and might well be the end of Google. By extension it will be the end of SEO as we know it. A lot of discussion currently (especially on HN) is about how to keep the bad crawlers out and in general hide from the oh so bad AI guys. That is not unlike the early days of search engines. I predict we will soon see a phase where this switches by 180° and everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into their view of the world. A new three letter acronym will be coined, like AIO or something and we will see a shift from textual content to assets the AI tools can only link to. Maybe this has already happened to some degree. [1] Where would I put the boundary? Is Kagi the former or the latter? I'd say if a tool does a non-predetermined number of independent activities (like searches) on its own and only stops if some criteria are fulfilled it is clearly in the latter category.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  > everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into their view of the world In this model, only monetizable content will be generated though. As much as we abhor what advertising has done to the web, at least it’s independent of content: pair quality content with ads, make money. In the brave new AI search world, only content which itself is directly monetizable will be created. E.g. astroturf ads
  - ricardobeat 1y ago
    > pair quality content with ads, make money Huh, the exact opposite happened. Create as much filler content as possible, optimized for SEO, generate thousands of variants to capture search traffic, cover as much of the screen as possible with ads, use tricks to increase page view count, and then make money. Publishers of quality content have moved to subscriptions, which is a different kind of trouble. > only content which itself is directly monetizable will be created We have already been here for a while and it can hardly get any worse.
agent327 1y ago
Oh, don't worry, they'll be monetizing this as soon as you're hooked. Google will show you the AI content... after you've seen this ad. Those data centers don't pay for themselves, you know.
libertine 1y ago
Also people are just lazy and will choose the path of least resistance. I'll bet that Wikipedia and other websites are affected and don't fit in that list of legitimate grievances.
dspillett 1y ago
>* If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only".* I never use those. I suspect that in many cases if there are "legitimate interest" options¹ those will remain opted-in. ---- [1] which I read as "we see your preference not to be stalked online, but fuck you and your silly little preferences we want to anyway"
- cudder 1y ago
  That is such a silly stupid thing in the GDPR consent. - "Please don't track me." - "But what if we realllly want to?" A normal response to that would be an even more resounding FCK NO, but somehow the EU came to the completely opposite conclusion.
  - indigo945 1y ago
    Claiming tracking cookies as "necessary" is often illegal under the GDPR. This is an enforcement problem, not a problem with the law itself, or the EU. "Necessary" means "necessary for fulfilment of the contract". Your name and address are necessary data when you order off Amazon, your clickstream is not.
    - lazide 1y ago
      If the content is free, monetizing you is clearly necessary (/s, kinda)
      - skinkestek 1y ago
        Monetizing is fine with me: There’s nothing stopping creators from showing relevant ads—ones they choose themselves. Sometimes I have even found myself wishing there had been an ad a few months ago for a software conference I just realized I missed. If someone blogs about woodworking, show static ads for tools they actually use and love. If they're into programming, show JetBrains, cloud providers, or anything dev-adjacent. Totally fine by me. The problem is that almost everyone defaults to Google Ads—which then serves me wildly irrelevant junk, think brain-melting pay-to-win mobile games or even scammy dating sites that have zero connection to the content I’m reading and zero relevance to my interests. It’s not just noise, it’s actively degrading the experience.
nightfly 1y ago
> Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent It was with the best of intentions but cookie banners have done more to hurt web browsing than anything else in the last decade
- tyfon 1y ago
  The banner is not the problem, the predatory tracking by webpages are. You can make a webpage without it no problem, my home page does not have it.
  - Voultapher 1y ago
    To add onto it the do-not-track header can be used to signal an opt out. There needs to be a browser wide setting that is communicated to websites without user interaction. Some German court even ruled that Linkdin IIRC has to respect DNT for that.
  - nightfly 1y ago
    The banners themselves are ugly and can fill almost half the screen Even website makers who don't use predatory tracking end up including them as a CYA tactic
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - plemer 1y ago
    Yes, but is your webpage profitable?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nikanj 1y ago
  The law is good, but websites implement it badly on purpose to inflict consumer ire towards the EU. There's good money to be made if they manage to make the voting public hate the cookie banners so much the anti-tracking legislation gets repelled
ChocolateGod 1y ago
You forgot the popup requesting access to send you background notifications.
hereonout2 1y ago
You forgot the part about when you actually get to the content, there's usually about 5 paragraphs of SEO filler text before it actually gets onto answering the topic of the post.
- jgord 1y ago
  not to mention the mandatory cloudflare "are you human" pre-vetting page Im seeing on 15% of sites. jesus wept.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    And that I often have to wait for it to automatically get through it, which it does not, requiring me to click to verify I am indeed a human. Even if I am not even using Tor or VPNs.
    - nathan_douglas 1y ago
      Assuming that clicking to verify even works, which is shaky. On Safari, it seems to just loop me most of the time... which bums me out, since I generally don't have many issues with Safari.
- mmikeff 1y ago
  And that when the adverts refresh all the content on the page shifts and you lose track of what you have read.
- the_real_cher 1y ago
  This is most of the results on the first page of Google search are AI slop.
- blendergeek 1y ago
  or even worse, the page itself is just an AI summary of the topic
- Disposal8433 1y ago
  I have noticed that a lot. For example: What is the price of the Switch 2? The Switch 2 can be purchased with money. <Insert the Wikipedia article about currencies since the bronze age>
CafeRacer 1y ago
Literally this other link from a first page of HN: https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pixel-3575477/ https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...
federiconafria 1y ago
I make the point of leaving right away, I hope some metric somewhere is showing them or that it screws with their SEO... I might come back later though.
msgodel 1y ago
Don't forget the drop in device performance/battery from the ridiculously spammy analytics scripts they force on you.
create-username 1y ago
I send the link to another browser, one with JavaScript disabled
3036e4 1y ago
NoScript removes almost all of that, at the insignificant cost of sometimes having to add some (usually temporary) exceptions to run scripts from a few domains.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  You don't have NoScript or AdBlock on any default browser on any relevant mobile platform.
  - ports543u 1y ago
    You have adblock on firefox mobile or in browsers like Cromite (fork of Bromite, based on Chromium).
- IgorPartola 1y ago
  Clay tablets and library books have no ads either. NoScript is not the solution to the web being full of AI-generated SEO crap. It’s a bandaid over the real problem.
hualapais 1y ago
I have been leaning more and more on Marginalia Search to avoid the type of webpages you are describing. The filters centered on page technologies seem to weed out much that is wrong with the modern style-over-substance web, IMHO.
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  I'm actually rolling out changes as we speak that should make nuisance identification even better, and will result in throwing out fewer babies with the bathwater. https://marginalia-search.com/site/www.fontstruct.com?view=traffic https://marginalia-search.com/site/www.fontstruct.com?view=t... https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=special%3Apopover&profile=corpo https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=special%3Apopover...
carlosjobim 1y ago
Set up your browser to open all websites in reader view and all these problems are solved.
inopinatus 1y ago
Your AI chat bot is ad free for now. This comment brought to you by PlavaLaguna Ultrasonic Water. Make your next VC pitch higher than you ever thought possible! Consume responsibly
- aerhardt 1y ago
  At least there is more credible competition, so there could be a variety of business models to pick - ad-backed or paid. The search engine wars truly ended up being winner-take-all.
  - nicbou 1y ago
    There was virtually unlimited competition on the web
garylkz 1y ago
That's because AI is still in the honeymoon phase, unless it's a paying service, at some point the summary will start to have context relevant ads. Also, I felt like in long term that's going to kill off the good faith of all those smaller sites that are actually good, while the bigger ones still produce subpar contents.
quectophoton 1y ago
For those who want to experience it: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ The only inaccurate thing of that meme page is that you only need to uncheck 5 cookie "partners", when in reality there should be at least a few hundred.
- Jenk 1y ago
  document.querySelectorAll("[type='checkbox']").forEach(c => c.checked = undefined) Adjust the selector as neccessary, sometimes I'll use `#id-of-cookie-banner [type='checkbox']` Probably useless for mobile though, unless you can punch it in the omnibar with `javascript:` prefix
- lightbulbish 1y ago
  that was great, thanks for the laugh.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  The site has a few other issues... The ads contrast with the content instead of blending in; there are only 2 ads inline with the content, and one is clearly an easy to ignore banner; all the cookie "partners" could be disabled, there should be 2 or 3 that you can't change.
- tempodox 1y ago
  And you get a laundry list of several hundred switches that you have to manually switch off to deny their “legitimate interests”.
- zahlman 1y ago
  The web page source seems full of Easter eggs and I'm not sure how intentional that is. The generic labels and descriptions of content as "useless" make sense, but then I noticed things like multiple redundant </ul> tags and this script comment: src: "https://js.monitor.azure.com/scripts/b/ai.2.min.js", // The SDK URL Source crossOrigin: "anonymous", // When supplied this will add the provided value as the cross origin attribute on the script tag which is part of configuration for some minified/obfuscated driver.... Anyway, is it really not even possible to set up things like NoScript and uBlock Origin on mobile?
cluckindan 1y ago
On iOS Safari, ”Hide distracting items” allows you to bypass the consent dialogs about 95% of the time without consenting to anything.
alentred 1y ago
My big hope is that somehow magically we avoid bringing this experience back to AI summaries and chats. Realistically, though, I will be on the lookout for the next generation of uBlock, NextDNS and the like.
rco8786 1y ago
> you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance. for now! and we should enjoy it while it lasts. Ad-driven AIs are coming, it is inevitable.
wonderwonder 1y ago
Pretty accurate, the web is generally unpleasant at the moment especially using a search engine as your entry point. The first page of results are irrelevant paid ads. My web experience has been reduced to a handful of bookmarks, X, and chatgpt or grok. Occasionally I’ll go looking for government sites to validate something I read on X. Everything else is noise
pembrook 1y ago
Yes, this is the experience on virtually every content website that used to be tolerable or even good. But this is because there is no viable monetization model for non-editorial written word content anymore and hasn’t been for a decade. Google killed the ecosystem they helped create. Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results. Search ads is now the most profitable monopoly business of all time. YouTube is still young, but give it time. Google will eventually kill the golden goose there as well, by trying to harvest too many eggs for themselves. The same will happen with AI results as well. Companies will be happy to lose money on it for a decade while they fight for dominance. But eventually the call for profits will come and the AI results will require scrolling through mountains of ads to see an answer. This is the shape of this market. Search driven content in any form is and will always be a yellow pages business. Doesn’t matter if it’s on paper or some future AGI.
- jakebennet89 1y ago
  [dead]
- kelvinjps10 1y ago
  There is filters links in unlock for these kind of things, they're called annoyances
- brokencode 1y ago
  YouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is very slow or they landed on a decent ad model. Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too. I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads. The key part here will be monetization for content creators. People are no longer clicking links, so how do they get revenue? I think direct payments from AI companies to content creators will be necessary or the whole internet will implode.
AlienRobot 1y ago
All because "content" isn't free to produce. AI stole all the content from those websites, starving them from ad revenue. The Google overview is made by the same company that puts those ads in those websites in first place. What is coming next is that there will be ads in the overview and you will have no choice but to read it because all its cited links will be rotten.
ekianjo 1y ago
> If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance. ad-free? For now. That's just a matter of time.
- ndr 1y ago
  I don't know which models they use but it's likely already happening. Yesterday's SEO battles are today battles to convince LLMs to produce ad tokens. The corpus is already ridden of such content. And LLM make it even easier to produce more such spam.
bgwalter 1y ago
If nobody writes "content" any more, there will be nothing to summarize. Google is stealing the clicks from real websites that try to make a living. This is naturally not addressed in the US "AI" Action Plan, same as copyright theft.
somenameforme 1y ago
> "This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me (often it is not)." This is the huge one for me. If you search for something in natural language, the results you get on any search engine completely suck - yet ironically the AI overview is generally spot on. Search engines have been stuck in ~2003 for decades. Now the next 'breakthrough' is to use their LLMs to actually link to relevant content instead of using pagerank+ or whatever dysfunctional SEO'd algorithm they're still using.
tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
You forgot that after you've run the gauntlet of popups, you have a 50% chance of getting a hard paywall.
latortuga 1y ago
Ugh this just makes me wonder how long it will be before we start seeing responses to AI chat like "please watch this 30s ad / drink a verification can to get your answer". I have to believe that ads are coming.
niutech 1y ago
There were solutions like Google Web Lite, AMP HTML or Facebook Instant Articles, but sadly they are mostly gone. There is still reader mode in some web browsers (e.g. Speedreader in Brave) which helps a lot. And of course uBlock Origin (Lite) is a must.
LearnYouALisp 1y ago
On a smaller phone I often can't even see the button and it won't let me zoom out/scroll to get to it
otherayden 1y ago
I’ve actually been working on a tool that uses jina.ai’s “reader” api to let you see a rendered markdown view of a pages contents. Check it out at https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb or try it out with https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb#example.com https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb#example.com
bgro 1y ago
also gotta have every click on the page to highlight text navigate to a shopping cart subscription page and then break the back button. Clicking on a video to mute it also needs to navigate to a sponsor’s page and break the back button. And then the page reloads which doubles the page view count. Genius web dev decision. I bet they said “there’s literally no downsides to doing this!” Also, the ads need to autoplay on full volume, often bypassing my system volume somehow so they can play even though the rest of the audio is on mute and none of the mute functionality works. Surely the user simply forgot they had mute on so we should just go ahead and fix that. They also need to play on 4K ultra HD to use my entire monthly cell plan if I don’t stop it in the first 3 seconds, which I can’t do because the video has to fully load before I’m able to interact with it to click stop. Or clicking stop pauses it and then automatically restarts playing the video. These webdev chrome devs need to stop adding new random features and start fixing the basic functionality. I don’t want fading rotating banners that save 3 lines of CSS. I want the “DO NOT AUTOPLAY. EVER.” Button to actually work.
grishka 1y ago
On desktop I have one of those one-click JS toggle extensions, so the moment I see any attempts to interfere with me reading the goddamn article, that website gets its privilege of client-side interactivity revoked due to abuse. Some annoyed me so much I even disabled JS for them on my phone. I do that more rarely because of how unnecessarily convoluted that setting is in Chromium browsers on Android. You have to navigate 4 levels deep in the settings and enter the domain you want to block into a text field! For example, I have JS disabled on everything Substack (and it really annoys me when I end up on Substack hosted on a custom domain).
greymalik 1y ago
For now. Some LLM responses will contain advertising eventually too. Google’s search revenue is plummeting. They have to make it up somewhere.
jorl17 1y ago
My "favorite" Google dark-pattern, for which the dreamy kid in me hopes they get fucking sued to oblivion for how offensive it is[1]: 1. Open safari 2. Type something so that it goes search google 3. A web results page appears 4. Immediately a popup appears with two buttons: - They have the same size - One is highlighted in blue and it says CONTINUE - The other is faint and reads "Stay in browser" (but in my native language the distinction is even less clear) 5. Clicking CONTINUE means "CONTINUE in the app", so it takes me to the Google App (or, actually, to the app store, because I don't have this app), but this does not end there! 6. If I go back to the browser to try to fucking use google on my fucking browser, as I fucking wanted to, I realize that doing "Back" now constantly moves me to the app (or app store). So, in effect, I can never get the search results once I have clicked continue. The back button has been highjacked (long pressing does not help). My only option is to NEVER click continue 7. Bonus: All of this happens regardless of my iPhone having the google app installed or not So: Big button that says "CONTINUE" does not "CONTINUE" this action (it, of course, "CONTINUES" outside). I just want to FUCKING BROWSE THE WEB. If I use the google app, then clicking a link presumably either keeps me in its specific view of the web (outside of my browser), or it takes me out of the app. This is not the experience I want. I have a BROWSER for a reason (e.g. shared groups/tabs...) Oh! And since this happens even if I don't have the app, it takes me to the app store. If I install the app via the app store, it then DOES NOT have any mechanism to actually "Continue". It's a fresh install. And, of course, if I go back to the browser and hit "back", I can't. So for users who DO NOT HAVE THE APP, this will NEVER LET THEM CONTINUE. It will PREVENT THEM FROM USING GOOGLE. And it will force them to do their query AGAIN. Did the people who work on this feature simply give up? What. The. Fuck? This behavior seems to happen on-and-off, as if google is gaslighting me. Sometimes it happens every time I open Safari. Some other times it goes for days without appearing. Sometimes in anonymous tabs, sometimes not. Logged in or not, I've seen both scenarios. I can't be sure, but I genuinely believe that the order of the buttons has been swapped, messing with my muscle memory. Basically it's this image: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m76elp/how_do_i_stop_this_from_popping_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m76elp/how_do_i_st... Except a still image cannot describe the excruciating process of dealing with it — especially realizing "oh, wait, I clicked the wrong button, oh wait, no no no, get out of the app store, oh oh oh what did I type again? Damn I lost it all!..." [1]I would quit before implementing this feature. It disgusts me, and we're talking about google, not some run-of-the-mill company whom you have to work for to barely survive. This is absolutely shameful.
kraig911 1y ago
I mean you're not wrong try searching for any recipe or just a search result where you want a simple answer. This problem you're outlining isn't just the search engines/ai/results fault. Simple questions should have answers in paragraphs of dialogue and anymore than 1 ad.
ssernikk 1y ago
I know it won't fix the core issue, but you can try (at least on android) Firefox with uBlock Origin (with filter lists for cookies and annoyances enabled). It makes the web usable on mobile for me.
netdevphoenix 1y ago
> If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance. Now. Nothing stopping them from injecting ads in their summary. And chances are that they will eventually

AlecSchueler 1y ago

> This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me And to find that out you have to hit Page Down about twenty times, scanning as you, because the content is padded out to increase ad coverage.

jonplackett 1y ago

I made this game inspired by all the dark patterns from darkpatterns.org - every pop up is based on a real dark pattern https://www.termsandconditions.game/ https://www.termsandconditions.game/

jama211 1y ago
Haha, this is great, nice work
bokkies 1y ago
Application error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command heroku logs --tail
- seszett 1y ago
  I also get that.
  - jonplackett 1y ago
    Weird only some people getting an error. Works ok for me. It’s on a very old Heroku hosting plan. I should probably update that one day.
    - seszett 1y ago
      Just for the record, I get the same result with Firefox or Chromium and with IPs in different EU countries.
    - Barbing 1y ago
      LMK, reporting in as well: broken when trying multiple ways on my end and wanna play! Great idea!
    - esskay 1y ago
      Dead here in the UK too
  - andruby 1y ago
    me too. Are we all in the EU? (I am)
    - gorbypark 1y ago
      When you posted this, it would have been 1-3AM in North America (and probably large parts of South America), so yeah, probably mostly Europeans!
      - bokkies 1y ago
        And the many keen HN readers down in South Africa! (also CET)
- 1y ago
DaanDL 1y ago
Oh this is good, I like it!
Barbing 1y ago
working now - ahaha nice!

ssss11 1y ago

And don’t try to exit or you’ll get another pop up “why are you leaving? Please don’t go”

visarga 1y ago
Sometimes they hack the back navigation function and present their own clone of Google Discover feed. If you are not careful you might end up in a different feed.
- Barbing 1y ago
  Anyone know the largest site that does this reliably? I've seen e.g. Meta's FB mess with the back button but not the cloning grift.
- federiconafria 1y ago
  Or sending you back to their home page...

tmountain 1y ago

AI is following the drug dealer model. “The first dose is free!” Given the cost incurred, lots of dark patterns will be coming for sure.

littlecranky67 1y ago
I fail to see how that will work out. Just I have an adblocker now, I could have a very simple local llm in my browser that modifies the search-AIs answer and strips obvious ads.
- svachalek 1y ago
  They won't be obvious. They'll be highly customized brain worms influencing your votes and purchases to the highest bidder.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
    Yep. Right now, even with cookies inferences about individual humans are minimal, but exposing your whole patterns in speech make you a ripe target for manipulation at a scale that some may not fully understand yet. 4o is very adept at cold reading and it is genuinely fascinating to read those from that perspective alone. Combine it with style evaluation and a form of rudimentary history analysis, and you end up with actual dossier on everyone using that service. Right now, we are lucky, because it is the least altered version of it ( and we all know how many filters public models have to go through ).
  - lopis 1y ago
    Which sounds very illegal in most places, as clearly identifying sponsored content is required. Let's see how that turns out.
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      For hire drivers/having employees had very specific legal requirements in most areas. Let's see how that turned out. Oh yeah, the dystopian tech companies won and we the people got the benefit job/job rules being thrown out for the beauty that is independent contractor 'gig work'.

Mars008 1y ago

That's why I don't use mobile for browsing. Only Firefox with JS disabled unless it's needed and I need that page.

ianis-r 1y ago
Firefox with ublock origin does wonder on mobile

Propelloni 1y ago

I use Firefox with standard security options and the uBlock Origin Add-On on my Android phone and I virtually never see what you describe, bar the tracking consent nag screen ofc. Maybe we visit vastly different web content? I guess if my experience was as much degraded as yours I wouldn't bother with the web anymore, so yay for AI summarizers, at least for the time being. And don't get me wrong, a summarizer is a workaround, not a solution.

cudder 1y ago
There is an extension called "I still don't care about cookies" that mostly solves the nag screens (There's also a similar one that doesn't have the "still" in its name but that one was bought by an ad company and enshittified.) AFAIU it usually accepts the cookies though, so you should combine it with something that clears your cookies periodically. Sometimes it breaks the site so that you can't scroll or something, but that's quite rare. And most of the time it's solved by a refresh. Very infrequently you need to whitelist the site and then deal with the nag screen manually. A bit annoying, but way better than rawdogging it. Works on desktop & mobile.
- reddalo 1y ago
  No need to use a specific extension, uBlock Origin is all you need. Just enable the "Easy List/uBO - Cookie Notices" filter from the filters list (the default is off).
  - aembleton 1y ago
    You can also add this filter to uBO: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/ https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
  - cudder 1y ago
    Sweet, didn't know that. I'm gonna try if it works with less breakage. Thanks!
  - Propelloni 1y ago

weinzierl 1y ago

What you describe is subtly different from what is in the article. The article is about Google (and other traditional search engines) snatching away clicks from web site owners. What you describe is AI tools (for lack of a better word[1]) snatching away traffic from the ruling gatekeepers of the web. I think the latter is a much bigger shift and might well be the end of Google. By extension it will be the end of SEO as we know it. A lot of discussion currently (especially on HN) is about how to keep the bad crawlers out and in general hide from the oh so bad AI guys. That is not unlike the early days of search engines. I predict we will soon see a phase where this switches by 180° and everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into their view of the world. A new three letter acronym will be coined, like AIO or something and we will see a shift from textual content to assets the AI tools can only link to. Maybe this has already happened to some degree. [1] Where would I put the boundary? Is Kagi the former or the latter? I'd say if a tool does a non-predetermined number of independent activities (like searches) on its own and only stops if some criteria are fulfilled it is clearly in the latter category.

ethbr1 1y ago
> everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into their view of the world In this model, only monetizable content will be generated though. As much as we abhor what advertising has done to the web, at least it’s independent of content: pair quality content with ads, make money. In the brave new AI search world, only content which itself is directly monetizable will be created. E.g. astroturf ads
- ricardobeat 1y ago
  > pair quality content with ads, make money Huh, the exact opposite happened. Create as much filler content as possible, optimized for SEO, generate thousands of variants to capture search traffic, cover as much of the screen as possible with ads, use tricks to increase page view count, and then make money. Publishers of quality content have moved to subscriptions, which is a different kind of trouble. > only content which itself is directly monetizable will be created We have already been here for a while and it can hardly get any worse.

agent327 1y ago

Oh, don't worry, they'll be monetizing this as soon as you're hooked. Google will show you the AI content... after you've seen this ad. Those data centers don't pay for themselves, you know.

libertine 1y ago

Also people are just lazy and will choose the path of least resistance. I'll bet that Wikipedia and other websites are affected and don't fit in that list of legitimate grievances.

dspillett 1y ago

>* If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only".* I never use those. I suspect that in many cases if there are "legitimate interest" options¹ those will remain opted-in. ---- [1] which I read as "we see your preference not to be stalked online, but fuck you and your silly little preferences we want to anyway"

cudder 1y ago
That is such a silly stupid thing in the GDPR consent. - "Please don't track me." - "But what if we realllly want to?" A normal response to that would be an even more resounding FCK NO, but somehow the EU came to the completely opposite conclusion.
- indigo945 1y ago
  Claiming tracking cookies as "necessary" is often illegal under the GDPR. This is an enforcement problem, not a problem with the law itself, or the EU. "Necessary" means "necessary for fulfilment of the contract". Your name and address are necessary data when you order off Amazon, your clickstream is not.
  - lazide 1y ago
    If the content is free, monetizing you is clearly necessary (/s, kinda)
    - skinkestek 1y ago
      Monetizing is fine with me: There’s nothing stopping creators from showing relevant ads—ones they choose themselves. Sometimes I have even found myself wishing there had been an ad a few months ago for a software conference I just realized I missed. If someone blogs about woodworking, show static ads for tools they actually use and love. If they're into programming, show JetBrains, cloud providers, or anything dev-adjacent. Totally fine by me. The problem is that almost everyone defaults to Google Ads—which then serves me wildly irrelevant junk, think brain-melting pay-to-win mobile games or even scammy dating sites that have zero connection to the content I’m reading and zero relevance to my interests. It’s not just noise, it’s actively degrading the experience.

nightfly 1y ago

> Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent It was with the best of intentions but cookie banners have done more to hurt web browsing than anything else in the last decade

tyfon 1y ago
The banner is not the problem, the predatory tracking by webpages are. You can make a webpage without it no problem, my home page does not have it.
- Voultapher 1y ago
  To add onto it the do-not-track header can be used to signal an opt out. There needs to be a browser wide setting that is communicated to websites without user interaction. Some German court even ruled that Linkdin IIRC has to respect DNT for that.
- nightfly 1y ago
  The banners themselves are ugly and can fill almost half the screen Even website makers who don't use predatory tracking end up including them as a CYA tactic
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- plemer 1y ago
  Yes, but is your webpage profitable?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
nikanj 1y ago
The law is good, but websites implement it badly on purpose to inflict consumer ire towards the EU. There's good money to be made if they manage to make the voting public hate the cookie banners so much the anti-tracking legislation gets repelled

ChocolateGod 1y ago

You forgot the popup requesting access to send you background notifications.

hereonout2 1y ago

You forgot the part about when you actually get to the content, there's usually about 5 paragraphs of SEO filler text before it actually gets onto answering the topic of the post.

jgord 1y ago
not to mention the mandatory cloudflare "are you human" pre-vetting page Im seeing on 15% of sites. jesus wept.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  And that I often have to wait for it to automatically get through it, which it does not, requiring me to click to verify I am indeed a human. Even if I am not even using Tor or VPNs.
  - nathan_douglas 1y ago
    Assuming that clicking to verify even works, which is shaky. On Safari, it seems to just loop me most of the time... which bums me out, since I generally don't have many issues with Safari.
mmikeff 1y ago
And that when the adverts refresh all the content on the page shifts and you lose track of what you have read.
the_real_cher 1y ago
This is most of the results on the first page of Google search are AI slop.
blendergeek 1y ago
or even worse, the page itself is just an AI summary of the topic
Disposal8433 1y ago
I have noticed that a lot. For example: What is the price of the Switch 2? The Switch 2 can be purchased with money. <Insert the Wikipedia article about currencies since the bronze age>

CafeRacer 1y ago

Literally this other link from a first page of HN: https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pixel-3575477/ https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...

federiconafria 1y ago

I make the point of leaving right away, I hope some metric somewhere is showing them or that it screws with their SEO... I might come back later though.

msgodel 1y ago

Don't forget the drop in device performance/battery from the ridiculously spammy analytics scripts they force on you.

create-username 1y ago

I send the link to another browser, one with JavaScript disabled

3036e4 1y ago

NoScript removes almost all of that, at the insignificant cost of sometimes having to add some (usually temporary) exceptions to run scripts from a few domains.

mschuster91 1y ago
You don't have NoScript or AdBlock on any default browser on any relevant mobile platform.
- ports543u 1y ago
  You have adblock on firefox mobile or in browsers like Cromite (fork of Bromite, based on Chromium).
IgorPartola 1y ago
Clay tablets and library books have no ads either. NoScript is not the solution to the web being full of AI-generated SEO crap. It’s a bandaid over the real problem.

hualapais 1y ago

I have been leaning more and more on Marginalia Search to avoid the type of webpages you are describing. The filters centered on page technologies seem to weed out much that is wrong with the modern style-over-substance web, IMHO.

marginalia_nu 1y ago
I'm actually rolling out changes as we speak that should make nuisance identification even better, and will result in throwing out fewer babies with the bathwater. https://marginalia-search.com/site/www.fontstruct.com?view=traffic https://marginalia-search.com/site/www.fontstruct.com?view=t... https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=special%3Apopover&profile=corpo https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=special%3Apopover...

carlosjobim 1y ago

Set up your browser to open all websites in reader view and all these problems are solved.

inopinatus 1y ago

Your AI chat bot is ad free for now. This comment brought to you by PlavaLaguna Ultrasonic Water. Make your next VC pitch higher than you ever thought possible! Consume responsibly

aerhardt 1y ago
At least there is more credible competition, so there could be a variety of business models to pick - ad-backed or paid. The search engine wars truly ended up being winner-take-all.
- nicbou 1y ago
  There was virtually unlimited competition on the web

garylkz 1y ago

That's because AI is still in the honeymoon phase, unless it's a paying service, at some point the summary will start to have context relevant ads. Also, I felt like in long term that's going to kill off the good faith of all those smaller sites that are actually good, while the bigger ones still produce subpar contents.

quectophoton 1y ago

For those who want to experience it: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ The only inaccurate thing of that meme page is that you only need to uncheck 5 cookie "partners", when in reality there should be at least a few hundred.

Jenk 1y ago
document.querySelectorAll("[type='checkbox']").forEach(c => c.checked = undefined) Adjust the selector as neccessary, sometimes I'll use `#id-of-cookie-banner [type='checkbox']` Probably useless for mobile though, unless you can punch it in the omnibar with `javascript:` prefix
lightbulbish 1y ago
that was great, thanks for the laugh.
marcosdumay 1y ago
The site has a few other issues... The ads contrast with the content instead of blending in; there are only 2 ads inline with the content, and one is clearly an easy to ignore banner; all the cookie "partners" could be disabled, there should be 2 or 3 that you can't change.
tempodox 1y ago
And you get a laundry list of several hundred switches that you have to manually switch off to deny their “legitimate interests”.
zahlman 1y ago
The web page source seems full of Easter eggs and I'm not sure how intentional that is. The generic labels and descriptions of content as "useless" make sense, but then I noticed things like multiple redundant </ul> tags and this script comment: src: "https://js.monitor.azure.com/scripts/b/ai.2.min.js", // The SDK URL Source crossOrigin: "anonymous", // When supplied this will add the provided value as the cross origin attribute on the script tag which is part of configuration for some minified/obfuscated driver.... Anyway, is it really not even possible to set up things like NoScript and uBlock Origin on mobile?

cluckindan 1y ago

On iOS Safari, ”Hide distracting items” allows you to bypass the consent dialogs about 95% of the time without consenting to anything.

alentred 1y ago

My big hope is that somehow magically we avoid bringing this experience back to AI summaries and chats. Realistically, though, I will be on the lookout for the next generation of uBlock, NextDNS and the like.

rco8786 1y ago

> you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance. for now! and we should enjoy it while it lasts. Ad-driven AIs are coming, it is inevitable.

wonderwonder 1y ago

Pretty accurate, the web is generally unpleasant at the moment especially using a search engine as your entry point. The first page of results are irrelevant paid ads. My web experience has been reduced to a handful of bookmarks, X, and chatgpt or grok. Occasionally I’ll go looking for government sites to validate something I read on X. Everything else is noise

pembrook 1y ago

Yes, this is the experience on virtually every content website that used to be tolerable or even good. But this is because there is no viable monetization model for non-editorial written word content anymore and hasn’t been for a decade. Google killed the ecosystem they helped create. Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results. Search ads is now the most profitable monopoly business of all time. YouTube is still young, but give it time. Google will eventually kill the golden goose there as well, by trying to harvest too many eggs for themselves. The same will happen with AI results as well. Companies will be happy to lose money on it for a decade while they fight for dominance. But eventually the call for profits will come and the AI results will require scrolling through mountains of ads to see an answer. This is the shape of this market. Search driven content in any form is and will always be a yellow pages business. Doesn’t matter if it’s on paper or some future AGI.

jakebennet89 1y ago
[dead]
kelvinjps10 1y ago
There is filters links in unlock for these kind of things, they're called annoyances
brokencode 1y ago
YouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is very slow or they landed on a decent ad model. Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too. I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads. The key part here will be monetization for content creators. People are no longer clicking links, so how do they get revenue? I think direct payments from AI companies to content creators will be necessary or the whole internet will implode.

AlienRobot 1y ago

All because "content" isn't free to produce. AI stole all the content from those websites, starving them from ad revenue. The Google overview is made by the same company that puts those ads in those websites in first place. What is coming next is that there will be ads in the overview and you will have no choice but to read it because all its cited links will be rotten.

ekianjo 1y ago

> If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance. ad-free? For now. That's just a matter of time.

ndr 1y ago
I don't know which models they use but it's likely already happening. Yesterday's SEO battles are today battles to convince LLMs to produce ad tokens. The corpus is already ridden of such content. And LLM make it even easier to produce more such spam.

bgwalter 1y ago

If nobody writes "content" any more, there will be nothing to summarize. Google is stealing the clicks from real websites that try to make a living. This is naturally not addressed in the US "AI" Action Plan, same as copyright theft.

somenameforme 1y ago

> "This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me (often it is not)." This is the huge one for me. If you search for something in natural language, the results you get on any search engine completely suck - yet ironically the AI overview is generally spot on. Search engines have been stuck in ~2003 for decades. Now the next 'breakthrough' is to use their LLMs to actually link to relevant content instead of using pagerank+ or whatever dysfunctional SEO'd algorithm they're still using.

tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago

You forgot that after you've run the gauntlet of popups, you have a 50% chance of getting a hard paywall.

latortuga 1y ago

Ugh this just makes me wonder how long it will be before we start seeing responses to AI chat like "please watch this 30s ad / drink a verification can to get your answer". I have to believe that ads are coming.

niutech 1y ago

There were solutions like Google Web Lite, AMP HTML or Facebook Instant Articles, but sadly they are mostly gone. There is still reader mode in some web browsers (e.g. Speedreader in Brave) which helps a lot. And of course uBlock Origin (Lite) is a must.

LearnYouALisp 1y ago

On a smaller phone I often can't even see the button and it won't let me zoom out/scroll to get to it

otherayden 1y ago

I’ve actually been working on a tool that uses jina.ai’s “reader” api to let you see a rendered markdown view of a pages contents. Check it out at https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb or try it out with https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb#example.com https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb#example.com

bgro 1y ago

also gotta have every click on the page to highlight text navigate to a shopping cart subscription page and then break the back button. Clicking on a video to mute it also needs to navigate to a sponsor’s page and break the back button. And then the page reloads which doubles the page view count. Genius web dev decision. I bet they said “there’s literally no downsides to doing this!” Also, the ads need to autoplay on full volume, often bypassing my system volume somehow so they can play even though the rest of the audio is on mute and none of the mute functionality works. Surely the user simply forgot they had mute on so we should just go ahead and fix that. They also need to play on 4K ultra HD to use my entire monthly cell plan if I don’t stop it in the first 3 seconds, which I can’t do because the video has to fully load before I’m able to interact with it to click stop. Or clicking stop pauses it and then automatically restarts playing the video. These webdev chrome devs need to stop adding new random features and start fixing the basic functionality. I don’t want fading rotating banners that save 3 lines of CSS. I want the “DO NOT AUTOPLAY. EVER.” Button to actually work.

grishka 1y ago

On desktop I have one of those one-click JS toggle extensions, so the moment I see any attempts to interfere with me reading the goddamn article, that website gets its privilege of client-side interactivity revoked due to abuse. Some annoyed me so much I even disabled JS for them on my phone. I do that more rarely because of how unnecessarily convoluted that setting is in Chromium browsers on Android. You have to navigate 4 levels deep in the settings and enter the domain you want to block into a text field! For example, I have JS disabled on everything Substack (and it really annoys me when I end up on Substack hosted on a custom domain).

greymalik 1y ago

For now. Some LLM responses will contain advertising eventually too. Google’s search revenue is plummeting. They have to make it up somewhere.

jorl17 1y ago

My "favorite" Google dark-pattern, for which the dreamy kid in me hopes they get fucking sued to oblivion for how offensive it is[1]: 1. Open safari 2. Type something so that it goes search google 3. A web results page appears 4. Immediately a popup appears with two buttons: - They have the same size - One is highlighted in blue and it says CONTINUE - The other is faint and reads "Stay in browser" (but in my native language the distinction is even less clear) 5. Clicking CONTINUE means "CONTINUE in the app", so it takes me to the Google App (or, actually, to the app store, because I don't have this app), but this does not end there! 6. If I go back to the browser to try to fucking use google on my fucking browser, as I fucking wanted to, I realize that doing "Back" now constantly moves me to the app (or app store). So, in effect, I can never get the search results once I have clicked continue. The back button has been highjacked (long pressing does not help). My only option is to NEVER click continue 7. Bonus: All of this happens regardless of my iPhone having the google app installed or not So: Big button that says "CONTINUE" does not "CONTINUE" this action (it, of course, "CONTINUES" outside). I just want to FUCKING BROWSE THE WEB. If I use the google app, then clicking a link presumably either keeps me in its specific view of the web (outside of my browser), or it takes me out of the app. This is not the experience I want. I have a BROWSER for a reason (e.g. shared groups/tabs...) Oh! And since this happens even if I don't have the app, it takes me to the app store. If I install the app via the app store, it then DOES NOT have any mechanism to actually "Continue". It's a fresh install. And, of course, if I go back to the browser and hit "back", I can't. So for users who DO NOT HAVE THE APP, this will NEVER LET THEM CONTINUE. It will PREVENT THEM FROM USING GOOGLE. And it will force them to do their query AGAIN. Did the people who work on this feature simply give up? What. The. Fuck? This behavior seems to happen on-and-off, as if google is gaslighting me. Sometimes it happens every time I open Safari. Some other times it goes for days without appearing. Sometimes in anonymous tabs, sometimes not. Logged in or not, I've seen both scenarios. I can't be sure, but I genuinely believe that the order of the buttons has been swapped, messing with my muscle memory. Basically it's this image: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m76elp/how_do_i_stop_this_from_popping_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m76elp/how_do_i_st... Except a still image cannot describe the excruciating process of dealing with it — especially realizing "oh, wait, I clicked the wrong button, oh wait, no no no, get out of the app store, oh oh oh what did I type again? Damn I lost it all!..." [1]I would quit before implementing this feature. It disgusts me, and we're talking about google, not some run-of-the-mill company whom you have to work for to barely survive. This is absolutely shameful.

kraig911 1y ago

I mean you're not wrong try searching for any recipe or just a search result where you want a simple answer. This problem you're outlining isn't just the search engines/ai/results fault. Simple questions should have answers in paragraphs of dialogue and anymore than 1 ad.

ssernikk 1y ago

I know it won't fix the core issue, but you can try (at least on android) Firefox with uBlock Origin (with filter lists for cookies and annoyances enabled). It makes the web usable on mobile for me.

netdevphoenix 1y ago

> If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance. Now. Nothing stopping them from injecting ads in their summary. And chances are that they will eventually