11 ms·

“Your frustration is the product”

606 points by llm_nerd 7mo ago

throwaway81523 7mo ago
But if I used an ad blocker, I never would have found out about Github for Lesbians!!!
righthand 7mo ago
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-cybersecurity-government https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...
- lapcat 7mo ago
  > This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article. It's a link blog.
  - righthand 7mo ago
    okay. And?
- snowwrestler 7mo ago
  > This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article. He does this to amplify things, and look: it worked! The original post made the HN homepage a couple days ago, and now Gruber’s post about it has made the HN homepage again.
  - righthand 7mo ago
    Amplified but redundant for HN crowd is my point. I’m not clueless as to why a person who blogs to maintain attention would amplify a topic. Your explanation was not needed.
donohoe 7mo ago
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/ https://webperf.xyz/ TL;DR Keep using an ad blocker
- dgb23 7mo ago
  This is pretty cool!
- golfer 7mo ago
  This is very cool, nicely done. One note: the Property link, that links to the actual news source, is broken. Also, the test link you're using for Nautilus (the top scoring site) is 404 (https://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-multiverse-as-muse https://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-multiverse-as-muse)
- GraemeMeyer 7mo ago
  Wow, it’s really interesting to see the sudden unchanged nautil.us made around the 4th of March!
  - mschulze 7mo ago
    The Test URL is a 404 for me though - if that's what the data is based on, it might not be completely fair...
- donohoe 7mo ago
  Fixed the URL for Nautilus. Updates will roll in over the next 24 hours as tests happen and it averages out. Its on my roadmap to auto-update the URL over time to avoid this very thing! Thx to those who pointed it out.
mystraline 7mo ago
> 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.
- ripptydes 7mo ago
  (reads:) People making the decisions do not understand they want to look good in front of their sources. They want to bring something nice and they want to be up to date to do what marketing demands, ...but how are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them? If everyone looks equal, sites ('to pick') are going irrelevant it seems.... but OT: about 14y ago there was a request for ads that may be liked. and yes...in the meantime, even you would've said, 'yes ther were some ads, i liked (maybe the music, the product or something other about).' But that it wasn't originally about. 10y ago the pendulum swinged to: "we lose the web", some saying that books (typewriters for example^^) were replaced by video (TV) and that the internet eaten the book- and video-stuff. so one asked: "what is next? do we become an internet of the internet (if any may use this as a description of todays so called 'AI') ?" And i looked on the HN frontpage which shows exactly that 'exagerated' (generated support) each of you is just echoing another... but who the heck, i am even not a native english speaker, so wayne ... Comic (in german): https://iili.io/qwVP7R9.md.png https://iili.io/qwVP7R9.md.png (diddn't know if the hoster likes direct linking)... regards...
pembrook 7mo ago
> 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.
- malfist 7mo ago
  Paying for them absolutely does not mean you won't be treated the same way. Paying removes the paywall, not the insanity.
  - Xenoamorphous 7mo ago
    Some news sites do have ad-free or at least ad-lite versions if you're a subscriber.
- mikestew 7mo ago
  You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for. Yeah? How about when I go to the site as a paid subscriber and get the exact same experience? Did the number or obnoxiousness of ads go down when I gave NYT money? Nope.
julienEAD 7mo ago
[dead]
rcarr 7mo ago
> 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.
- philipallstar 7mo ago
  > 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. Some companies are like this, but they generally lose their best people to better salaried jobs elsewhere. They exist because not everything needs to be done by top people.
mhitza 7mo ago
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.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3oqfoprid.onion https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3...
- netsharc 7mo ago
  Maybe someone with some brain on The Guardian realized if you're browsing through Tor, no way you're going to create a login and link your browsing to a name/email address... That makes it sound like no one of The Guardian has a brain, it's not the intention, it's my most trusted news source, but maybe someone on the IT department thought a little bit further.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    More likely Tor was set up years ago and receives no attention unless it horribly breaks; and so nobody notices nor cares that ads aren't working there (and if they were they'd probably not get paid for them anyway).
- mikestew 7mo ago
  I was surprised at the claim that The Guardian leaves very little room for the article. I loaded up a Guardian article this morning on my new 14" MBP, only to find out that there was so much crap on the page I couldn't even see the full headline without using Safari's "hide shit" feature.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 7mo ago
    > Safari's "hide shit" feature. Is this reader mode or some sort of adblock-style list? (if it's the latter, I'm looking for one that I can easily add without it breaking too many sites - in my experience, the "annoyance" lists for uBlock cause too much breakage to have them enabled by default).
everdrive 7mo ago
"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.
- red_admiral 7mo ago
  For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.
  - AlienRobot 7mo ago
    People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
    - mattw2121 7mo ago
      Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing. If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.
huitzitziltzin 7mo ago
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.
- weedhopper 7mo ago
  Exactly, paying for quality content should be normalised. Even a trivial amount - 10-50c. And the reality is that it is unheard of.
  - intrasight 7mo ago
    I would gladly pay a few cents to read an article. Isn't the problem that no one figured out the business or technical model to accomplish that? I think I remember reading, 10 years ago, that bitcoin would solve that problem.
    - someguyorother 7mo ago
      The mental transaction cost is the hard part. The effort required to decide whether to pay at all is significant enough that payments don't scale down to the micro- level.
    - Phemist 7mo ago
      Well, the largest ad tech company on the planet owning the largest platform to view content on (Chrome) certainly may or may not have something to do with the viability of alternative payment models.
- ramon156 7mo ago
  I feel like this is relatively short-sighted. I don't enjoy reading global news articles as often times it just makes me upset. I like reading local news because I can relate to it. I pay for one, and I read the other one in a frustrated mood. I'm sure there are people who enjoy reading global newspapers daily, and I'm sure a good quantity pays for it. That just doesn't include me.
tacostakohashi 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
"... 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."
- red_admiral 7mo ago
  Teleshopping channels are a thing, and they have more of an audience than one might guess.
- naravara 7mo ago
  The internet equivalent of QVC would be TikTok I believe. The ads are thinly veiled, but it seems like after you go through a few chunks of content eventually it’s basically all ads disguised as content with bits of entertainment thrown in to keep you strung along. It meshes the distinction between advert and content so completely that it doesn’t really matter anymore.
- matheusmoreira 7mo ago
  In that case it's not really advertising, it's just information. People watch that channel when they want to see products. They're giving people exactly what they asked for. Advertising is when you're baited into watching some fun "content" and then they interrupt it to shove ads in your face. Nobody asked for this.
- 9rx 7mo ago
  Especially now that we can render TV ads in realtime on top of real-world objects, but even before, the 7 minutes of actual TV content and 53 minutes of paid commercials exists too. Better known as professional sports. Unlike QVC, a break from the ads is occasionally given when an athlete is interviewed or things like that. Although, granted, one could argue even an interview is trying to advertise the athlete's brand. Still, potentially a reprieve from having to look at advertising in the form of things like slogans and logos.
s1mn 7mo ago
I've used an ad blocker for so long, I'd forgotten the web has got so terrible.
- z500 7mo ago
  Any time I have to use the Internet without an ad blocker it's truly shocking how absolutely lousy everything is with ads
red_admiral 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
Why bother with ad blockers? These organizations don't want you reading their articles, so take the hint.
renegat0x0 7mo ago
Reminds me of "Website obesity crisis" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U - https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm 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.
- georgeecollins 7mo ago
  It kills programmatic advertising, not sponsorships or subscriptions. I always subscribe to the four or five sites I use most and use a blocker. If HN had a subscription tier I would pay it to support them.
  - VorpalWay 7mo ago
    HN doesn't need your money, it is run by YCombinator, a venture capital firm. As far as I can determine HN is a way to raise brand awareness for them. Sure, there are probably some people passionate about the concept at the company, but it wouldn't stick around if it they didn't also determine that it has more value to them than the operating costs of the site.
    - AlienRobot 7mo ago
      The interesting thing about this strategy is that there are many people on this very website who have no idea what YCombinator is and just call this website "Hacker News."
52-6F-62 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
This made me create a simple reading website for myself that blunts all the models, adverts and newsletter/subscription popups. https://readwd.vercel.app 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.
- BirAdam 7mo ago
  I wish this were available for more browsers...
ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
Discussion on source, which this is just a comment on: The 49MB web page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945
- gjvc 7mo ago
  [dead]
sailorganymede 7mo ago
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.
- kogasa240p 7mo ago
  The problem is that both Medium and Substack are bloated as hell but ultimately I think it's a positive move overall.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
HexPhantom 7mo ago
At some point, either subscriptions have to carry more of the load or the web experience just keeps degrading
- naravara 7mo ago
  Or someone can invent an ad supported business model that isn’t abusive. A lot of print magazines, like Vogue or even Field & Stream, are like 60% or more full page ads. But if you’re reading something like New Bride magazine you’re probably actively shopping for wedding dresses and flowers and such, so the advertising ideally works as part of what makes the magazine valuable for the reader and the advertiser. The real problem is that the finance and business folks are addicted to performance metrics and they preferentially put their money towards things that can be represented as graphs because it’s hard to argue with a graph. Jon Gruber has a vague sense for what sort of audience he has and what they’re into, so he can pitch advertisers on the idea that by advertising with him they’re going to reach an audience of Apple enthusiast technologists who presumably care about design and UI/UX and whatever other intuitions he has about his readership. But none of that is a quantitative metric, so only a small market is open to putting money into it.
  - compiler-guy 7mo ago
    He also has no shareholders except himself. So the only person he has to please is himself, and if he is wrong, the only person who suffers is himself (and, I suppose, his family). This very direct, very personal connection to the web business doesn't exist in most other sites.
    - naravara 7mo ago
      He also has no ambitions towards being a billionaire, he just wants to make enough money to sustain a mostly upper middle class lifestyle and keep his business going. I think a lot of online publications could be modestly sized businesses with a very respectable annual revenue range in the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions, but they erode their own brand value chasing tantalizingly higher numbers that SEEM in reach but actually aren’t.
Xenoamorphous 7mo ago
> 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.
- snowwrestler 7mo ago
  You have to pay for the web version of the NY Times as well.
- compiler-guy 7mo ago
  The amount you pay for the print version just barely covers physical print and physical distribution costs--and that's if the publication is lucky. The vast majority of revenue comes from ads. They are just placed and handled in less obnoxious ways.
- cjpearson 7mo ago
  Unfortunately, this does not save you. The NYT has a paywall and still has this terrible experience, which caused me to unsubscribe. I remain subscribed to The Atlantic because while it still relies on advertising, the print version is at least readable. The March 2026 issue has 12 ads across 109 pages including the back cover. Ads do not appear within an article. I even sometimes read the ads, because many are about new book releases. I opened the cover story (just one article!) of this issue within the mobile app and encountered 38 advertisements. The ads take up nearly half the screen and there is almost always one visible. These 38 instances were just the same four ads repeated many, many times. This is just one issue of one publication, but it's representative of the broader problem the author discusses. I want to support good journalism and am willing to pay for good writers and articles but strategies that are so frustrating and disrespectful to the reader make it difficult.
- IAmBroom 7mo ago
  My local alternative paper has always been free.
alentred 7mo ago
> 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 Yes, I tried YouTube iOS app recently, without an ad blocker. It pretty much describes the experience.
PaulHoule 7mo ago
It was funny but when we switched from my failing Alienware laptop to a new M4 Mac Mini my wife was absolutely furious at the ad saturation until I switched her from Safari to Firefox and installed an ad blocker. I guess I could have installed one in Safari if she registered an Apple account but that's something she'd feel no need for at all. (e.g. as maligned as it is, the Microsoft account really is one account you can use to log into your computer, your XBOX, and all sorts of things. The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on)
- carlosjobim 7mo ago
  You can block ads on a system level with NextDNS. Much easier to use for non-tech users then any browser plugin.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    I find a multi-layered method is best - things like NextDNS + browser based blocking (especially as I like to use it to block annoyances that aren't ads).
- genthree 7mo ago
  > The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on Depends how you use it, I guess? The close and zero-effort integration and syncing with iOS is pretty key to my desktop (well, laptop) still having enough utility-to-effort to be worth having around at all. Probably still won't save it when my M1 Air gets a bit dodgy in a year or two and I start thinking about an upgrade (I'll likely upgrade my aging, last-pre-M-series-model iPad Pro instead) but if not for that it'd already have become inconvenient enough that I'd likely have forgotten about it in a storage bin somewhere.
- Schiendelman 7mo ago
  She doesn't use icloud? I'm surprised she'd get no utility...
jes5199 7mo ago
I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously) but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop
- superjared 7mo ago
  > we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop this is batshit insane, yet I believe it
  - likium 7mo ago
    "Parable of the broken window", except instead of preventing the kid from throwing the rocks, they hired a someone to catch the rocks midair.
    - WorldPeas 7mo ago
      though in this case it seems "the rocks were coming from inside the building"
      - c0balt 7mo ago
        Somewhere in the net of tubes of our AC we have a machine that produces rocks. They randomly shoot of the air vents, please install ballistic shields in front of the vents to stop them from hitting our customers.
        monkpit 7mo ago
        The pelxiglas is cheaper than taking the system down…
alex_smart 7mo ago
> No print publication on the planet does this At least in India, most popular newspapers actually do this nowadays. Several full page ads including on the front page have become the norm. It is mostly a function of how little the reader is willing to pay for content. When the price point is too low (which for online content is too low), publishers make their money by other means. It is not rocket science.
- TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
  A lot of print publications used to do it, and many still do. Print magazines make most of their money from ad sales, not subscriptions. A typical ratio is 60:40 ads vs editorial. Magazines like Vogue go >70% ads, and I'm fairly sure old issues of Byte and other computer magazines were in that ballpark. The difference in print is that the ads are targeted, and even welcome. Many of the ads in old computer magazines were price lists and mini-brochures, and pre-web that was the only way to get that information to customers.
  - aucisson_masque 7mo ago
    You also have the paid articles where 'journalist' interview some company ceo or influencer that happened to have given them a substantial amount of money.
andai 7mo ago
Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer? On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.) On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code." I only really see those two options. Maybe the manual one is not so bad? I mean people don't want to see an ad either way, but if there's one, and you hand-approved it, and it doesn't spy on you... then we've eliminated most of the ethical and respect issues, right? There's a temptation to "set it and forget it", but if you have even an atom of respect for your readers or customers, it only seems right that you'd put in a few minutes of work per month instead of deploying spyware on their machines. (Just making it <a><img> also seems to solve all 49MB of ass.)
- piperswe 7mo ago
  Project Wonderful took the best of both (automated auction for ads, but there's only one ad active at any given moment for any given ad slot so no targeting) but apparently it wasn't able to keep making enough money to stay around
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - frmersdog 7mo ago
    IIUC this is how ads on 4chan work. I learned this during my brief foray into targeted merchandising (https://www.temporary-url.com/9CBFE https://www.temporary-url.com/9CBFE). Everyone on a given board at a given time was seeing the same ads.
    - frmersdog 7mo ago
      >When the temporary url dies, it becomes a referral link to cryptocrap. Huh. Good to know. Please don't click it anymore, thanks.
  - egypturnash 7mo ago
MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean. I'm often not even aware that if I send a link to an article via Whatsapp or whatever, it may reflect badly on me that I send such an ad-overloaded mess to them. I just don't know the mess is there except sometimes by accident. I watched someone getting a livestream of an important (to them) soccer game going via the sort of thing usually reserved for "adult" content - that any given click, be it "play" or "fullscreen" or whatever, has a 9/10 chance of triggering a junk popup rather than the intended action, so you play whack-a-mole until you finally get it playing, whack-a-mole again until you get fullscreen, and then for heaven's sake don't touch it any more. Whereas with the adblocker, typically it looks completely clean, with no junk popups, and every click doing exactly what it should on the first try. Anyway so could it be that the web having turned into such ad-overloaded garbage, that even its designers have adblockers running and don't even fully realize what a mess they're publishing?
- arcxi 7mo ago
  > RIP full Ublock Origin it's alive and well
  - suzzer99 7mo ago
    In Chrome?
    - MichaelDickens 7mo ago
      No, but Chrome is not the only browser.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7mo ago
      Get a better browser. If you use the browser from an ad company, that's on you.
    - bdangubic 7mo ago
      it is 2026, you should not be using Chrome
jwr 7mo ago
I have seen from the other side how this can happen. The people making the decisions do not understand the technical costs. In fact, many of them pretend to understand the technical costs and say things like "Well, it's just a single line that we're adding to our website". They want to look good in front of their bosses. They want to bring nice charts with nice performance metrics and they want to be up to date with the latest developments in the market of marketing tools, so they use every tool that is out there. "IT" has no choice but to do what marketing demands, because IT is a cost center, while marketing is closer to revenues. And so, over time, you end up with 49MB web pages with hundreds of trackers.
lordleft 7mo ago
I don't disagree that reading news articles online today is a deeply unenjoyable experience. At the same time, I think not enough people acknowledge that the decision to put so much content online for free is how we ended up in this hellscape. Even when a website has a paywall, the cost of the paywall often dwarfs what you would have paid for a print equivalent of the same paper or journal, which is what enabled the flourishing of journalism in the 20th century.
cabalamat 7mo ago
I don't even try to read newspaper sites, I just look at the Archive Today version.
- djeastm 7mo ago
  I'm using lite.cnn.com while it still exists
jamesvzb 7mo ago
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burgreblast 7mo ago
I'm afraid he has it actually inverted. What if the "sanctity of the prose" is just a old gloss, and the Taboola / Outbrain ads are the reality that don't hide the org's true character? The printed version does _look_ better, but can org that serves Taboola ever be taken seriously anymore? Sanctity is miles away from "6 simple steps to $1 Million" ads. We can be sad in general about their passing. But let's not think it's isolated to issue surrounding online/ads. WaPo isn't the same either.
jdp 7mo ago
I'm doing my small part by paying for websites that respect me in the way TFA describes. I have annual subscriptions to Defector, Brand New, and DIELINE, and I'll add more as other websites follow their lead. Maybe it'll become too much to manage one day, but it might be for other readers too, and then maybe that will pressure our card companies and banks to start providing some more useful consumer services. We need enough people to actually subscribe to these websites to make that future happen though.
- JohnMakin 7mo ago
  Are you sure they are? Loading dieline home page I get a ton of tracking blocks. Defector was better, but I still see adtech endpoints. I don't really know of any modern monetized site that isn't like this.
- suzzer99 7mo ago
  Every time I load an article in archive.ph, I think "I want to support these guys. I would happily pay $.10, maybe even $.25 for this, if it was seamless and instantaneous." But that's never the option and apparently it never will be. Sorry, I'm just never getting yearly subscriptions to 30 different content websites. That would probably 10x my spam email intake, I'd have to worry about them jacking up prices and playing games after the initial subscription ran out, and I'd have yet another subscription floating out there in the ether for me to forget about.
tlhunter 7mo ago
> No print publication on the planet does this. 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. Ehh... I cancelled my SF Chronicle subscription a year ago. Since then I've received a dozen predatory phone calls and just add many letters. Plus when you do have the subscription they alter prices on you like a cable TV provider. So in some ways print is better than web but in other ways it's worse.
falcoteu89 7mo ago
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martinsb 7mo ago
I really wish that browsers natively supported some sort of "402 Payment Required" HTTP status code (or any other well-known specified indicator) that users could pay with micropayments, so that they wouldn't have to drown us in this ad garbage. I would gladly pay small but justified sum for an article without setting up payment method on each site and be able to return to it. I would be glad even to donate some amount of money to some authority that'd pay for viewership of those less fortunate and not being able to afford reading quality news.
- krunck 7mo ago
  This is doable today if there was a will. But the advertising/surveillance industry doesn't want it.
  - aldousd666 7mo ago
    Transaction costs make it inefficient. Costs more to effect the transfer than they would be able to charge for the articles.
robinhood 7mo ago
This is why I have NextDNS installed at the router level. No need for Adblocking extensions if we can't even make the requests to those ad servers.
egypturnash 7mo ago
> As Bose notes, “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 would presume that this fascination with pushing viewers to the app is because they make better money off of you reading stuff in the app.
- grishka 7mo ago
  Also because they can spam you with notifications through the app and that surely makes some chart go up. As someone with meticulous notification hygiene, it's always surprising to me just how many people allow every app to send notifications when it asks, without thinking about it at all.
  - aldousd666 7mo ago
    Some advice I follow, and give to others: Refuse notifications by default. Only enable them when you're getting paid to see them. (slack and work email, for example count as getting paid to see them)
    - grishka 7mo ago
      My version of that is to ask yourself what this app could notify you about and decide based on that. What could a game notify you about? Nothing, probably spam. Deny. What could a social app notify you about? Interactions with your content and profile. These are useful, allow. What could an instant messaging app notify you about? Messages, obviously. Allow. What could a fast food establishment app notify your about? Probably your order status if you order from the app. But it might also spam you. Allow but be prepared to turn off categories that are spammy if spam does arrive.
notsure357 7mo ago
Apple News is a fantastic service for avoiding most of these problems. The BBC put up a paywall on their site for anyone in the US but I can still read every article for free on Apple News. Politico wants me to create an account on my phone to read their articles but I can read them just fine on Apple News. New York Times is one of the few major publications not on Apple News, overall there are enough national news choices that I don't care which ones aren't there.
1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago
"The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it. As Bose notes, "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." It has nothing to do with "understand[ing] or enjoy[ing] the web". It comes from people at organisations running websites that know where the money is, probably because some cretinous nerds encouraged them. Generally, the amount of potential data collection, surveillance, ad serving and _money-making_ is greater with an "app" than with a website "Ad blockers" are popular but "app blockers"^1 are not. The "smartphone" is a remotely-controlled "entire surveillance device" (recent HN title: "Your phone is an entire computer") 1. Application firewalls like Netguard. And even this does not solve the problem entirely because the design of the "entire computer" includes extensive surveillance capabilities
doublediamond21 7mo ago
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dmd 7mo ago
> 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 for other shows on the same channel. Almost no one would watch such a channel. I recently was in a 45 minutes Uber ride where the driver had the stereo set to the Sirius XM self-advertising channel - the one you get if you haven't subscribed. For 45 minutes, all he listened to was an ad for XM. Most people just don't care.
- etiennebausson 7mo ago
  Is it possible that he was paid to play such add to his passengers?
  - AxEy 7mo ago
    Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've definitely seen behind-the-front-seats screen ad placement and other weird things in ride shares in the U.S. so this doesn't seem out of the question.
- keybored 7mo ago
  Tales from HN techies interacting with regular people. > Most people just don't care. So proceed as normal.
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  Or perhaps his free trial ran out and he can't justify the extra expense. Driving Uber isn't exactly a path to riches.
  - dmd 7mo ago
    ok ... but why would you listen to the ad - and nothing else, jsut the ad - for 45 minutes straight? it's not like there aren't a billion other options.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 7mo ago
    I realized that we may soon live in a reality where that's not an option, but I bet the car he had still allowed him to turn off the radio with the ad. (I'm sure there would have also been countless ways to make the thing play actual music, but turning it off is the most obvious course of action.)
Archit3ch 7mo ago
Related, did Spotify go from 1 ad to 4 at a time?
touwer 7mo ago
It's crazy, sometimes I get 22 mb, sometimes 27, one time even 57.8!!!
pmdr 7mo ago
The Guardian's twitter/X "exit" must be the dumbest thing they ever did. Their site was not so aggressively pushing for donations/subscriptions/accounts before that.
tasuki 7mo ago
Somewhat tangential... I clicked on the "Dithering" link on Gruber's website. It leads to a podcast of his. The cover image is a 6.6mb JPEG. Man, do you even know what "dithering" means?
- chipotle_coyote 7mo ago
  "Be indecisive." It means multiple things. :) Also, (1) the image is dithered, ha ha, and (2) The image on the page https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/dithering https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/dithering is an 863K PNG. (Which I bet we could still get down to a smaller size, granted.) It took me a bit to figure out what you're looking at -- the Dithering site on passport.online, where the cover art is inexplicably 3000x3000 pixels. I'm too tired to come up with a good crack about how that explains what I don't like about Ben Thompson, but I bet it's there.
pcl 7mo ago
It’s ironic seeing Gruber gripe about screen percentages used when his own website dedicates only about 50% of the screen width (on mobile) to content, and leaves the other half blank. Not to mention the light-grey-on-dark-grey and the tiny font. Just as I need an ad blocker to browse the modern web, I need Reader mode to read Gruber’s rant about it.
- ajkjk 7mo ago
  not really "just as" at all if you think about it, though.
- magiclaw 7mo ago
  That's what CTRL+MouseWheel is for
  - weird_tentacles 7mo ago
    [dead]
- pixelatedindex 7mo ago
  If zooming in to read content is the biggest concern, that’s a win in the modern web. I double tap on the content and it fits to screen perfectly.
- brianpan 7mo ago
  Optimal line length is a thing.
hggalvan59 7mo ago
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Night_Thastus 7mo ago
These days, I assume every web page is actively hostile until proven otherwise. Use as many layers of protection (uBlock, PiHole, various other extensions, etc.) as possible, filter out content when possible, and bail if those don't work. Youtube is just about the worst that I've put up with for it. Every single second it's trying desperately to inject more ads, which the blocker swiftly removes. After watching for a few minutes the block count can be in the several hundred...
aldousd666 7mo ago
The web is the enemy. I have an ad blocking VPN and I use GroundNews to filter out sites that have paywalls. Between those two things, I lead a relatively sane life. But I tried looking at some of the same places on an unflitered device and man, I can't even imagine living like that. It now costs me $100/year in ad blocking/circumvention just so I don't want to kill the browser.
- doubled112 7mo ago
  Is the adblocking VPN doing anything some DNS block lists on your router or device wouldn’t do? You can’t do MITM on HTTPS anyway, so I can’t imagine they would do anything more than a $20 Pi Zero and PiHole, except for the fact that somebody else is managing it.
  - aldousd666 7mo ago
    I could do that, but then I'd have to maintain it. I used to hostfile hack my devices. but the vpn is just easier.
    - doubled112 7mo ago
      Fair enough. Sometimes a VPN is also easier than forcing each device to use a specific DNS server too. I get it.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
magiclaw 7mo ago
> The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns. lol, they're doing for the money. Not because they're "held hostage". More time on site means more money. They know this. They know it's a shitty experience. Look, I get it, they have to make money somehow, but some of these sites try to squeeze every last drop of money out of users. It's a fine line to walk between "I'll stay because this content is interesting" and "F this man, I'm leaving", and some push that line hard.
thyrsus 7mo ago
As a subscriber to The Guardian, I have a very different experience.
returnofswagn25 7mo ago
[dead]
silexia 7mo ago
NyTimes and the Guardian have very much gone downhill unfortunately.
ojbyrne 7mo ago
The referenced article ends like this: "I'm Shubham, a full-stack product engineer passionate about fixing hostile UI, building privacy-first tools (like my YouTube extension with 51k+ DAU), and making the web usable again. I am currently looking for my next role." :-(
bandrami 7mo ago
I still in 2026 do not understand the absolute manic drive websites have to push me to the app. I've administered services that have both a web client and an app client and the metrics just really weren't better, certainly not enough to spend energy actively pushing people to the app.
- luigi23 7mo ago
  so much easier to collect your data and having their app on your screen is extremely valuable
nstj 7mo ago
> I’ve been browsing the web without content-blocking extensions on the Neo. It’s been a while since I’ve done that for an extended period of time. Most of the advertising-bearing websites I read have gotten so bad that it’s almost beyond parody. Surprised Gruber isn’t using network level adblocking. I can’t imagine life without it these days. (Yes I realise you need extensions when not on your own network etc - unless you use your own DNS!)
shdudns 7mo ago
I worked for a startup once for a brief time. Engineering would make tools for the sales guys to make websites. We hated those bastards because they would litter the pates with adds. "We need revenue" they'd protest. Engineering would respond that past two ads, the revenue was too small to be worth destroying the brand. What I got out of that was that business folks, often, don't give a shit about the product reputation on a timescale longer then their ownership of it.
Terr_ 7mo ago
Following the nested "go read this" links to the "The 49MB Web Page" page: > Simplified versions like text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com and www.cbc.ca/lite still exist out there. TIL, these are awesome. Not in the sense that they're a visual tour de force, obviously, but they make for an easy "hey, type this in for a second and tell me what you think" contrast, to help people realize how inconvenient the default experience has slowly become.
eviks 7mo ago
> No print publication on the planet does this. Of course they do, there are ads and unrelated articles on the same page , or, for magazines, full page ads interrupting your reading experience, or flashy callouts. Paper is just a much more constrained technology, do they can't ruin it dynamically, not that they don't want to or somehow magically respect the reader very much for free
wouterjanl 7mo ago
I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a tracker here or there. The article uses the example of the print version of the New Yorker, as a way of how things can be. From interviews with David Remnick, the editor, I learned that it has been mostly his vision to decrease the ads in the print and making up the lost revenue by increasing the subscription fees. It’s these people we need to save the media landscape.
- schneems 7mo ago
  Pedantic point: YC has ads, they are just blend in much better and are delivered in the same medium. Hiring posts (definitively) and tech posts (maybe) by YC companies. The whole product is one big ad for a venture fund. Its generally well done and unobtrusive. So kudos to them for that it goes relatively unnoticed.
  - alexchantavy 7mo ago
    Relevancy is a big point here. HN readers work in tech or are super interested in tech, YC companies do very technical things so hiring posts or launches tend to blend right in for the most part.
  - pkilgore 7mo ago
    In other words, we're still the product at HN: the customers are just not advertisers.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  YCombinator, the accelerator which invests in startups, is a money printer. Any tiny amount of money generated by ads on Hacker News would be a rounding error. The site does technically show ads. YCombinator companies can post job ads here. The job ads are privileged in that users are not allowed to comment on them. Now that I think about it, I haven't seen many job postings from YCombinator companies in a long time. Though to be honest, after some of my experiences with applicants from postings I put in the "Who's hiring" threads I could see why they this site might have fallen out of favor as a hiring location.
jackconsidine 7mo ago
> No print publication on the planet does this. 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. In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville noted that American publications (unlike those from Europe) packed their pages with ads
- BloondAndDoom 7mo ago
  This is a fact, America is absolutely leading with this kind of capitalism but Europe is following closely, just like the rest of the world. It’s just matter of time, US just happens to be ahead of everyone else.
BloondAndDoom 7mo ago
I literally stopped using these websites for a long time ago. And if I run into an article with this kind of hostile design I just close the tab. No article ever worth that shit. Granted I don’t follow news, so it’s easy for me to say maybe, but same applies other websites. If I land on hostile page (despite idea blockers) I’ll just leave it, what can be so important that can justify me to suffer through it. Just like in the example in the article, would you eat in McDonald that treated like that? Classical case of vote with your wallet, or vote with your attention.
Zak 7mo ago
> I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from. I do. I once read that app users are seven times more profitable than web users on average. That number isn't current, and I don't know if it was ever broadly correct, but it's obvious that an installed app provides more opportunities to try to get the user to do something profitable, and it's harder to block ads in native apps. I would be surprised if convincing a user to install a native app doesn't reliably increase profits by a large amount for most kinds of business.
dang 7mo ago
Recent and related: The 49MB web page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 - March 2026 (371 comments)
fud101 7mo ago
This reminds me of Amazon Prime video advertising Molly Mae. It knows I would never ever watch that trash but it shows it to me precisely for that reason, that'll I get annoyed enough to vent about it and contribute to it going viral. It works i guess, since I am typing this garbage on hn.
pkilgore 7mo ago
This blog not having any mobile layout is a bit funny.
crispi42 7mo ago
Thought I'm alone constantly complaining that most UX is like a labyrinth lately!

606 points by llm_nerd 7mo ago

But if I used an ad blocker, I never would have found out about Github for Lesbians!!!

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-cybersecurity-government https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...

lapcat 7mo ago
> This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article. It's a link blog.
- righthand 7mo ago
  okay. And?
snowwrestler 7mo ago
> This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article. He does this to amplify things, and look: it worked! The original post made the HN homepage a couple days ago, and now Gruber’s post about it has made the HN homepage again.
- righthand 7mo ago
  Amplified but redundant for HN crowd is my point. I’m not clueless as to why a person who blogs to maintain attention would amplify a topic. Your explanation was not needed.

donohoe 7mo ago

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/ https://webperf.xyz/ TL;DR Keep using an ad blocker

dgb23 7mo ago
This is pretty cool!
golfer 7mo ago
This is very cool, nicely done. One note: the Property link, that links to the actual news source, is broken. Also, the test link you're using for Nautilus (the top scoring site) is 404 (https://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-multiverse-as-muse https://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-multiverse-as-muse)
GraemeMeyer 7mo ago
Wow, it’s really interesting to see the sudden unchanged nautil.us made around the 4th of March!
- mschulze 7mo ago
  The Test URL is a 404 for me though - if that's what the data is based on, it might not be completely fair...
donohoe 7mo ago
Fixed the URL for Nautilus. Updates will roll in over the next 24 hours as tests happen and it averages out. Its on my roadmap to auto-update the URL over time to avoid this very thing! Thx to those who pointed it out.

mystraline 7mo ago

> 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.

ripptydes 7mo ago
(reads:) People making the decisions do not understand they want to look good in front of their sources. They want to bring something nice and they want to be up to date to do what marketing demands, ...but how are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them? If everyone looks equal, sites ('to pick') are going irrelevant it seems.... but OT: about 14y ago there was a request for ads that may be liked. and yes...in the meantime, even you would've said, 'yes ther were some ads, i liked (maybe the music, the product or something other about).' But that it wasn't originally about. 10y ago the pendulum swinged to: "we lose the web", some saying that books (typewriters for example^^) were replaced by video (TV) and that the internet eaten the book- and video-stuff. so one asked: "what is next? do we become an internet of the internet (if any may use this as a description of todays so called 'AI') ?" And i looked on the HN frontpage which shows exactly that 'exagerated' (generated support) each of you is just echoing another... but who the heck, i am even not a native english speaker, so wayne ... Comic (in german): https://iili.io/qwVP7R9.md.png https://iili.io/qwVP7R9.md.png (diddn't know if the hoster likes direct linking)... regards...

pembrook 7mo ago

> 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.

malfist 7mo ago
Paying for them absolutely does not mean you won't be treated the same way. Paying removes the paywall, not the insanity.
- Xenoamorphous 7mo ago
  Some news sites do have ad-free or at least ad-lite versions if you're a subscriber.
mikestew 7mo ago
You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for. Yeah? How about when I go to the site as a paid subscriber and get the exact same experience? Did the number or obnoxiousness of ads go down when I gave NYT money? Nope.

julienEAD 7mo ago

[dead]

rcarr 7mo ago

> 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.

philipallstar 7mo ago
> 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. Some companies are like this, but they generally lose their best people to better salaried jobs elsewhere. They exist because not everything needs to be done by top people.

mhitza 7mo ago

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.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3oqfoprid.onion https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3...

netsharc 7mo ago
Maybe someone with some brain on The Guardian realized if you're browsing through Tor, no way you're going to create a login and link your browsing to a name/email address... That makes it sound like no one of The Guardian has a brain, it's not the intention, it's my most trusted news source, but maybe someone on the IT department thought a little bit further.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  More likely Tor was set up years ago and receives no attention unless it horribly breaks; and so nobody notices nor cares that ads aren't working there (and if they were they'd probably not get paid for them anyway).
mikestew 7mo ago
I was surprised at the claim that The Guardian leaves very little room for the article. I loaded up a Guardian article this morning on my new 14" MBP, only to find out that there was so much crap on the page I couldn't even see the full headline without using Safari's "hide shit" feature.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7mo ago
  > Safari's "hide shit" feature. Is this reader mode or some sort of adblock-style list? (if it's the latter, I'm looking for one that I can easily add without it breaking too many sites - in my experience, the "annoyance" lists for uBlock cause too much breakage to have them enabled by default).

everdrive 7mo ago

"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.

red_admiral 7mo ago
For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.
- AlienRobot 7mo ago
  People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
  - mattw2121 7mo ago
    Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing. If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.

huitzitziltzin 7mo ago

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.

weedhopper 7mo ago
Exactly, paying for quality content should be normalised. Even a trivial amount - 10-50c. And the reality is that it is unheard of.
- intrasight 7mo ago
  I would gladly pay a few cents to read an article. Isn't the problem that no one figured out the business or technical model to accomplish that? I think I remember reading, 10 years ago, that bitcoin would solve that problem.
  - someguyorother 7mo ago
    The mental transaction cost is the hard part. The effort required to decide whether to pay at all is significant enough that payments don't scale down to the micro- level.
  - Phemist 7mo ago
    Well, the largest ad tech company on the planet owning the largest platform to view content on (Chrome) certainly may or may not have something to do with the viability of alternative payment models.
ramon156 7mo ago
I feel like this is relatively short-sighted. I don't enjoy reading global news articles as often times it just makes me upset. I like reading local news because I can relate to it. I pay for one, and I read the other one in a frustrated mood. I'm sure there are people who enjoy reading global newspapers daily, and I'm sure a good quantity pays for it. That just doesn't include me.

tacostakohashi 7mo ago

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 7mo ago

"... 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."

red_admiral 7mo ago
Teleshopping channels are a thing, and they have more of an audience than one might guess.
naravara 7mo ago
The internet equivalent of QVC would be TikTok I believe. The ads are thinly veiled, but it seems like after you go through a few chunks of content eventually it’s basically all ads disguised as content with bits of entertainment thrown in to keep you strung along. It meshes the distinction between advert and content so completely that it doesn’t really matter anymore.
matheusmoreira 7mo ago
In that case it's not really advertising, it's just information. People watch that channel when they want to see products. They're giving people exactly what they asked for. Advertising is when you're baited into watching some fun "content" and then they interrupt it to shove ads in your face. Nobody asked for this.
9rx 7mo ago
Especially now that we can render TV ads in realtime on top of real-world objects, but even before, the 7 minutes of actual TV content and 53 minutes of paid commercials exists too. Better known as professional sports. Unlike QVC, a break from the ads is occasionally given when an athlete is interviewed or things like that. Although, granted, one could argue even an interview is trying to advertise the athlete's brand. Still, potentially a reprieve from having to look at advertising in the form of things like slogans and logos.

s1mn 7mo ago

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

z500 7mo ago
Any time I have to use the Internet without an ad blocker it's truly shocking how absolutely lousy everything is with ads

red_admiral 7mo ago

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 7mo ago

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

renegat0x0 7mo ago

Reminds me of "Website obesity crisis" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U - https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm 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.

georgeecollins 7mo ago
It kills programmatic advertising, not sponsorships or subscriptions. I always subscribe to the four or five sites I use most and use a blocker. If HN had a subscription tier I would pay it to support them.
- VorpalWay 7mo ago
  HN doesn't need your money, it is run by YCombinator, a venture capital firm. As far as I can determine HN is a way to raise brand awareness for them. Sure, there are probably some people passionate about the concept at the company, but it wouldn't stick around if it they didn't also determine that it has more value to them than the operating costs of the site.
  - AlienRobot 7mo ago
    The interesting thing about this strategy is that there are many people on this very website who have no idea what YCombinator is and just call this website "Hacker News."

52-6F-62 7mo ago

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 7mo ago

This made me create a simple reading website for myself that blunts all the models, adverts and newsletter/subscription popups. https://readwd.vercel.app 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.

BirAdam 7mo ago
I wish this were available for more browsers...

ChrisArchitect 7mo ago

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

gjvc 7mo ago
[dead]

sailorganymede 7mo ago

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.

kogasa240p 7mo ago
The problem is that both Medium and Substack are bloated as hell but ultimately I think it's a positive move overall.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

HexPhantom 7mo ago

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

naravara 7mo ago
Or someone can invent an ad supported business model that isn’t abusive. A lot of print magazines, like Vogue or even Field & Stream, are like 60% or more full page ads. But if you’re reading something like New Bride magazine you’re probably actively shopping for wedding dresses and flowers and such, so the advertising ideally works as part of what makes the magazine valuable for the reader and the advertiser. The real problem is that the finance and business folks are addicted to performance metrics and they preferentially put their money towards things that can be represented as graphs because it’s hard to argue with a graph. Jon Gruber has a vague sense for what sort of audience he has and what they’re into, so he can pitch advertisers on the idea that by advertising with him they’re going to reach an audience of Apple enthusiast technologists who presumably care about design and UI/UX and whatever other intuitions he has about his readership. But none of that is a quantitative metric, so only a small market is open to putting money into it.
- compiler-guy 7mo ago
  He also has no shareholders except himself. So the only person he has to please is himself, and if he is wrong, the only person who suffers is himself (and, I suppose, his family). This very direct, very personal connection to the web business doesn't exist in most other sites.
  - naravara 7mo ago
    He also has no ambitions towards being a billionaire, he just wants to make enough money to sustain a mostly upper middle class lifestyle and keep his business going. I think a lot of online publications could be modestly sized businesses with a very respectable annual revenue range in the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions, but they erode their own brand value chasing tantalizingly higher numbers that SEEM in reach but actually aren’t.

Xenoamorphous 7mo ago

> 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.

snowwrestler 7mo ago
You have to pay for the web version of the NY Times as well.
compiler-guy 7mo ago
The amount you pay for the print version just barely covers physical print and physical distribution costs--and that's if the publication is lucky. The vast majority of revenue comes from ads. They are just placed and handled in less obnoxious ways.
cjpearson 7mo ago
Unfortunately, this does not save you. The NYT has a paywall and still has this terrible experience, which caused me to unsubscribe. I remain subscribed to The Atlantic because while it still relies on advertising, the print version is at least readable. The March 2026 issue has 12 ads across 109 pages including the back cover. Ads do not appear within an article. I even sometimes read the ads, because many are about new book releases. I opened the cover story (just one article!) of this issue within the mobile app and encountered 38 advertisements. The ads take up nearly half the screen and there is almost always one visible. These 38 instances were just the same four ads repeated many, many times. This is just one issue of one publication, but it's representative of the broader problem the author discusses. I want to support good journalism and am willing to pay for good writers and articles but strategies that are so frustrating and disrespectful to the reader make it difficult.
IAmBroom 7mo ago
My local alternative paper has always been free.

alentred 7mo ago

> 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 Yes, I tried YouTube iOS app recently, without an ad blocker. It pretty much describes the experience.

PaulHoule 7mo ago

It was funny but when we switched from my failing Alienware laptop to a new M4 Mac Mini my wife was absolutely furious at the ad saturation until I switched her from Safari to Firefox and installed an ad blocker. I guess I could have installed one in Safari if she registered an Apple account but that's something she'd feel no need for at all. (e.g. as maligned as it is, the Microsoft account really is one account you can use to log into your computer, your XBOX, and all sorts of things. The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on)

carlosjobim 7mo ago
You can block ads on a system level with NextDNS. Much easier to use for non-tech users then any browser plugin.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  I find a multi-layered method is best - things like NextDNS + browser based blocking (especially as I like to use it to block annoyances that aren't ads).
genthree 7mo ago
> The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on Depends how you use it, I guess? The close and zero-effort integration and syncing with iOS is pretty key to my desktop (well, laptop) still having enough utility-to-effort to be worth having around at all. Probably still won't save it when my M1 Air gets a bit dodgy in a year or two and I start thinking about an upgrade (I'll likely upgrade my aging, last-pre-M-series-model iPad Pro instead) but if not for that it'd already have become inconvenient enough that I'd likely have forgotten about it in a storage bin somewhere.
Schiendelman 7mo ago
She doesn't use icloud? I'm surprised she'd get no utility...

jes5199 7mo ago

I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously) but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop

superjared 7mo ago
> we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop this is batshit insane, yet I believe it
- likium 7mo ago
  "Parable of the broken window", except instead of preventing the kid from throwing the rocks, they hired a someone to catch the rocks midair.
  - WorldPeas 7mo ago
    though in this case it seems "the rocks were coming from inside the building"
    - c0balt 7mo ago
      Somewhere in the net of tubes of our AC we have a machine that produces rocks. They randomly shoot of the air vents, please install ballistic shields in front of the vents to stop them from hitting our customers.
      - monkpit 7mo ago
        The pelxiglas is cheaper than taking the system down…

alex_smart 7mo ago

> No print publication on the planet does this At least in India, most popular newspapers actually do this nowadays. Several full page ads including on the front page have become the norm. It is mostly a function of how little the reader is willing to pay for content. When the price point is too low (which for online content is too low), publishers make their money by other means. It is not rocket science.

TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
A lot of print publications used to do it, and many still do. Print magazines make most of their money from ad sales, not subscriptions. A typical ratio is 60:40 ads vs editorial. Magazines like Vogue go >70% ads, and I'm fairly sure old issues of Byte and other computer magazines were in that ballpark. The difference in print is that the ads are targeted, and even welcome. Many of the ads in old computer magazines were price lists and mini-brochures, and pre-web that was the only way to get that information to customers.
- aucisson_masque 7mo ago
  You also have the paid articles where 'journalist' interview some company ceo or influencer that happened to have given them a substantial amount of money.

andai 7mo ago

Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer? On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.) On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code." I only really see those two options. Maybe the manual one is not so bad? I mean people don't want to see an ad either way, but if there's one, and you hand-approved it, and it doesn't spy on you... then we've eliminated most of the ethical and respect issues, right? There's a temptation to "set it and forget it", but if you have even an atom of respect for your readers or customers, it only seems right that you'd put in a few minutes of work per month instead of deploying spyware on their machines. (Just making it <a><img> also seems to solve all 49MB of ass.)

piperswe 7mo ago
Project Wonderful took the best of both (automated auction for ads, but there's only one ad active at any given moment for any given ad slot so no targeting) but apparently it wasn't able to keep making enough money to stay around
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- frmersdog 7mo ago
  IIUC this is how ads on 4chan work. I learned this during my brief foray into targeted merchandising (https://www.temporary-url.com/9CBFE https://www.temporary-url.com/9CBFE). Everyone on a given board at a given time was seeing the same ads.
  - frmersdog 7mo ago
    >When the temporary url dies, it becomes a referral link to cryptocrap. Huh. Good to know. Please don't click it anymore, thanks.
- egypturnash 7mo ago

MarkusWandel 7mo ago

Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean. I'm often not even aware that if I send a link to an article via Whatsapp or whatever, it may reflect badly on me that I send such an ad-overloaded mess to them. I just don't know the mess is there except sometimes by accident. I watched someone getting a livestream of an important (to them) soccer game going via the sort of thing usually reserved for "adult" content - that any given click, be it "play" or "fullscreen" or whatever, has a 9/10 chance of triggering a junk popup rather than the intended action, so you play whack-a-mole until you finally get it playing, whack-a-mole again until you get fullscreen, and then for heaven's sake don't touch it any more. Whereas with the adblocker, typically it looks completely clean, with no junk popups, and every click doing exactly what it should on the first try. Anyway so could it be that the web having turned into such ad-overloaded garbage, that even its designers have adblockers running and don't even fully realize what a mess they're publishing?

arcxi 7mo ago
> RIP full Ublock Origin it's alive and well
- suzzer99 7mo ago
  In Chrome?
  - MichaelDickens 7mo ago
    No, but Chrome is not the only browser.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7mo ago
    Get a better browser. If you use the browser from an ad company, that's on you.
  - bdangubic 7mo ago
    it is 2026, you should not be using Chrome

jwr 7mo ago

I have seen from the other side how this can happen. The people making the decisions do not understand the technical costs. In fact, many of them pretend to understand the technical costs and say things like "Well, it's just a single line that we're adding to our website". They want to look good in front of their bosses. They want to bring nice charts with nice performance metrics and they want to be up to date with the latest developments in the market of marketing tools, so they use every tool that is out there. "IT" has no choice but to do what marketing demands, because IT is a cost center, while marketing is closer to revenues. And so, over time, you end up with 49MB web pages with hundreds of trackers.

lordleft 7mo ago

I don't disagree that reading news articles online today is a deeply unenjoyable experience. At the same time, I think not enough people acknowledge that the decision to put so much content online for free is how we ended up in this hellscape. Even when a website has a paywall, the cost of the paywall often dwarfs what you would have paid for a print equivalent of the same paper or journal, which is what enabled the flourishing of journalism in the 20th century.

cabalamat 7mo ago

I don't even try to read newspaper sites, I just look at the Archive Today version.

djeastm 7mo ago
I'm using lite.cnn.com while it still exists

jamesvzb 7mo ago

[dead]

burgreblast 7mo ago

I'm afraid he has it actually inverted. What if the "sanctity of the prose" is just a old gloss, and the Taboola / Outbrain ads are the reality that don't hide the org's true character? The printed version does _look_ better, but can org that serves Taboola ever be taken seriously anymore? Sanctity is miles away from "6 simple steps to $1 Million" ads. We can be sad in general about their passing. But let's not think it's isolated to issue surrounding online/ads. WaPo isn't the same either.

jdp 7mo ago

I'm doing my small part by paying for websites that respect me in the way TFA describes. I have annual subscriptions to Defector, Brand New, and DIELINE, and I'll add more as other websites follow their lead. Maybe it'll become too much to manage one day, but it might be for other readers too, and then maybe that will pressure our card companies and banks to start providing some more useful consumer services. We need enough people to actually subscribe to these websites to make that future happen though.

JohnMakin 7mo ago
Are you sure they are? Loading dieline home page I get a ton of tracking blocks. Defector was better, but I still see adtech endpoints. I don't really know of any modern monetized site that isn't like this.
suzzer99 7mo ago
Every time I load an article in archive.ph, I think "I want to support these guys. I would happily pay $.10, maybe even $.25 for this, if it was seamless and instantaneous." But that's never the option and apparently it never will be. Sorry, I'm just never getting yearly subscriptions to 30 different content websites. That would probably 10x my spam email intake, I'd have to worry about them jacking up prices and playing games after the initial subscription ran out, and I'd have yet another subscription floating out there in the ether for me to forget about.

tlhunter 7mo ago

> No print publication on the planet does this. 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. Ehh... I cancelled my SF Chronicle subscription a year ago. Since then I've received a dozen predatory phone calls and just add many letters. Plus when you do have the subscription they alter prices on you like a cable TV provider. So in some ways print is better than web but in other ways it's worse.

falcoteu89 7mo ago

[dead]

martinsb 7mo ago

I really wish that browsers natively supported some sort of "402 Payment Required" HTTP status code (or any other well-known specified indicator) that users could pay with micropayments, so that they wouldn't have to drown us in this ad garbage. I would gladly pay small but justified sum for an article without setting up payment method on each site and be able to return to it. I would be glad even to donate some amount of money to some authority that'd pay for viewership of those less fortunate and not being able to afford reading quality news.

krunck 7mo ago
This is doable today if there was a will. But the advertising/surveillance industry doesn't want it.
- aldousd666 7mo ago
  Transaction costs make it inefficient. Costs more to effect the transfer than they would be able to charge for the articles.

robinhood 7mo ago

This is why I have NextDNS installed at the router level. No need for Adblocking extensions if we can't even make the requests to those ad servers.

egypturnash 7mo ago

> As Bose notes, “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 would presume that this fascination with pushing viewers to the app is because they make better money off of you reading stuff in the app.

grishka 7mo ago
Also because they can spam you with notifications through the app and that surely makes some chart go up. As someone with meticulous notification hygiene, it's always surprising to me just how many people allow every app to send notifications when it asks, without thinking about it at all.
- aldousd666 7mo ago
  Some advice I follow, and give to others: Refuse notifications by default. Only enable them when you're getting paid to see them. (slack and work email, for example count as getting paid to see them)
  - grishka 7mo ago
    My version of that is to ask yourself what this app could notify you about and decide based on that. What could a game notify you about? Nothing, probably spam. Deny. What could a social app notify you about? Interactions with your content and profile. These are useful, allow. What could an instant messaging app notify you about? Messages, obviously. Allow. What could a fast food establishment app notify your about? Probably your order status if you order from the app. But it might also spam you. Allow but be prepared to turn off categories that are spammy if spam does arrive.

notsure357 7mo ago

Apple News is a fantastic service for avoiding most of these problems. The BBC put up a paywall on their site for anyone in the US but I can still read every article for free on Apple News. Politico wants me to create an account on my phone to read their articles but I can read them just fine on Apple News. New York Times is one of the few major publications not on Apple News, overall there are enough national news choices that I don't care which ones aren't there.

1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago

"The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it. As Bose notes, "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." It has nothing to do with "understand[ing] or enjoy[ing] the web". It comes from people at organisations running websites that know where the money is, probably because some cretinous nerds encouraged them. Generally, the amount of potential data collection, surveillance, ad serving and _money-making_ is greater with an "app" than with a website "Ad blockers" are popular but "app blockers"^1 are not. The "smartphone" is a remotely-controlled "entire surveillance device" (recent HN title: "Your phone is an entire computer") 1. Application firewalls like Netguard. And even this does not solve the problem entirely because the design of the "entire computer" includes extensive surveillance capabilities

doublediamond21 7mo ago

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dmd 7mo ago

> 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 for other shows on the same channel. Almost no one would watch such a channel. I recently was in a 45 minutes Uber ride where the driver had the stereo set to the Sirius XM self-advertising channel - the one you get if you haven't subscribed. For 45 minutes, all he listened to was an ad for XM. Most people just don't care.

etiennebausson 7mo ago
Is it possible that he was paid to play such add to his passengers?
- AxEy 7mo ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've definitely seen behind-the-front-seats screen ad placement and other weird things in ride shares in the U.S. so this doesn't seem out of the question.
keybored 7mo ago
Tales from HN techies interacting with regular people. > Most people just don't care. So proceed as normal.
hunterpayne 7mo ago
Or perhaps his free trial ran out and he can't justify the extra expense. Driving Uber isn't exactly a path to riches.
- dmd 7mo ago
  ok ... but why would you listen to the ad - and nothing else, jsut the ad - for 45 minutes straight? it's not like there aren't a billion other options.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7mo ago
  I realized that we may soon live in a reality where that's not an option, but I bet the car he had still allowed him to turn off the radio with the ad. (I'm sure there would have also been countless ways to make the thing play actual music, but turning it off is the most obvious course of action.)

Archit3ch 7mo ago

Related, did Spotify go from 1 ad to 4 at a time?

touwer 7mo ago

It's crazy, sometimes I get 22 mb, sometimes 27, one time even 57.8!!!

pmdr 7mo ago

The Guardian's twitter/X "exit" must be the dumbest thing they ever did. Their site was not so aggressively pushing for donations/subscriptions/accounts before that.

tasuki 7mo ago

Somewhat tangential... I clicked on the "Dithering" link on Gruber's website. It leads to a podcast of his. The cover image is a 6.6mb JPEG. Man, do you even know what "dithering" means?

chipotle_coyote 7mo ago
"Be indecisive." It means multiple things. :) Also, (1) the image is dithered, ha ha, and (2) The image on the page https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/dithering https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/dithering is an 863K PNG. (Which I bet we could still get down to a smaller size, granted.) It took me a bit to figure out what you're looking at -- the Dithering site on passport.online, where the cover art is inexplicably 3000x3000 pixels. I'm too tired to come up with a good crack about how that explains what I don't like about Ben Thompson, but I bet it's there.

pcl 7mo ago

It’s ironic seeing Gruber gripe about screen percentages used when his own website dedicates only about 50% of the screen width (on mobile) to content, and leaves the other half blank. Not to mention the light-grey-on-dark-grey and the tiny font. Just as I need an ad blocker to browse the modern web, I need Reader mode to read Gruber’s rant about it.

ajkjk 7mo ago
not really "just as" at all if you think about it, though.
magiclaw 7mo ago
That's what CTRL+MouseWheel is for
- weird_tentacles 7mo ago
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pixelatedindex 7mo ago
If zooming in to read content is the biggest concern, that’s a win in the modern web. I double tap on the content and it fits to screen perfectly.
brianpan 7mo ago
Optimal line length is a thing.

hggalvan59 7mo ago

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Night_Thastus 7mo ago

These days, I assume every web page is actively hostile until proven otherwise. Use as many layers of protection (uBlock, PiHole, various other extensions, etc.) as possible, filter out content when possible, and bail if those don't work. Youtube is just about the worst that I've put up with for it. Every single second it's trying desperately to inject more ads, which the blocker swiftly removes. After watching for a few minutes the block count can be in the several hundred...

aldousd666 7mo ago

The web is the enemy. I have an ad blocking VPN and I use GroundNews to filter out sites that have paywalls. Between those two things, I lead a relatively sane life. But I tried looking at some of the same places on an unflitered device and man, I can't even imagine living like that. It now costs me $100/year in ad blocking/circumvention just so I don't want to kill the browser.

doubled112 7mo ago
Is the adblocking VPN doing anything some DNS block lists on your router or device wouldn’t do? You can’t do MITM on HTTPS anyway, so I can’t imagine they would do anything more than a $20 Pi Zero and PiHole, except for the fact that somebody else is managing it.
- aldousd666 7mo ago
  I could do that, but then I'd have to maintain it. I used to hostfile hack my devices. but the vpn is just easier.
  - doubled112 7mo ago
    Fair enough. Sometimes a VPN is also easier than forcing each device to use a specific DNS server too. I get it.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

magiclaw 7mo ago

> The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns. lol, they're doing for the money. Not because they're "held hostage". More time on site means more money. They know this. They know it's a shitty experience. Look, I get it, they have to make money somehow, but some of these sites try to squeeze every last drop of money out of users. It's a fine line to walk between "I'll stay because this content is interesting" and "F this man, I'm leaving", and some push that line hard.

thyrsus 7mo ago

As a subscriber to The Guardian, I have a very different experience.

returnofswagn25 7mo ago

[dead]

silexia 7mo ago

NyTimes and the Guardian have very much gone downhill unfortunately.

ojbyrne 7mo ago

The referenced article ends like this: "I'm Shubham, a full-stack product engineer passionate about fixing hostile UI, building privacy-first tools (like my YouTube extension with 51k+ DAU), and making the web usable again. I am currently looking for my next role." :-(

bandrami 7mo ago

I still in 2026 do not understand the absolute manic drive websites have to push me to the app. I've administered services that have both a web client and an app client and the metrics just really weren't better, certainly not enough to spend energy actively pushing people to the app.

luigi23 7mo ago
so much easier to collect your data and having their app on your screen is extremely valuable

nstj 7mo ago

> I’ve been browsing the web without content-blocking extensions on the Neo. It’s been a while since I’ve done that for an extended period of time. Most of the advertising-bearing websites I read have gotten so bad that it’s almost beyond parody. Surprised Gruber isn’t using network level adblocking. I can’t imagine life without it these days. (Yes I realise you need extensions when not on your own network etc - unless you use your own DNS!)

shdudns 7mo ago

I worked for a startup once for a brief time. Engineering would make tools for the sales guys to make websites. We hated those bastards because they would litter the pates with adds. "We need revenue" they'd protest. Engineering would respond that past two ads, the revenue was too small to be worth destroying the brand. What I got out of that was that business folks, often, don't give a shit about the product reputation on a timescale longer then their ownership of it.

Terr_ 7mo ago

Following the nested "go read this" links to the "The 49MB Web Page" page: > Simplified versions like text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com and www.cbc.ca/lite still exist out there. TIL, these are awesome. Not in the sense that they're a visual tour de force, obviously, but they make for an easy "hey, type this in for a second and tell me what you think" contrast, to help people realize how inconvenient the default experience has slowly become.

eviks 7mo ago

> No print publication on the planet does this. Of course they do, there are ads and unrelated articles on the same page , or, for magazines, full page ads interrupting your reading experience, or flashy callouts. Paper is just a much more constrained technology, do they can't ruin it dynamically, not that they don't want to or somehow magically respect the reader very much for free

wouterjanl 7mo ago

I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a tracker here or there. The article uses the example of the print version of the New Yorker, as a way of how things can be. From interviews with David Remnick, the editor, I learned that it has been mostly his vision to decrease the ads in the print and making up the lost revenue by increasing the subscription fees. It’s these people we need to save the media landscape.

schneems 7mo ago
Pedantic point: YC has ads, they are just blend in much better and are delivered in the same medium. Hiring posts (definitively) and tech posts (maybe) by YC companies. The whole product is one big ad for a venture fund. Its generally well done and unobtrusive. So kudos to them for that it goes relatively unnoticed.
- alexchantavy 7mo ago
  Relevancy is a big point here. HN readers work in tech or are super interested in tech, YC companies do very technical things so hiring posts or launches tend to blend right in for the most part.
- pkilgore 7mo ago
  In other words, we're still the product at HN: the customers are just not advertisers.
Aurornis 7mo ago
YCombinator, the accelerator which invests in startups, is a money printer. Any tiny amount of money generated by ads on Hacker News would be a rounding error. The site does technically show ads. YCombinator companies can post job ads here. The job ads are privileged in that users are not allowed to comment on them. Now that I think about it, I haven't seen many job postings from YCombinator companies in a long time. Though to be honest, after some of my experiences with applicants from postings I put in the "Who's hiring" threads I could see why they this site might have fallen out of favor as a hiring location.

jackconsidine 7mo ago

> No print publication on the planet does this. 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. In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville noted that American publications (unlike those from Europe) packed their pages with ads

BloondAndDoom 7mo ago
This is a fact, America is absolutely leading with this kind of capitalism but Europe is following closely, just like the rest of the world. It’s just matter of time, US just happens to be ahead of everyone else.

BloondAndDoom 7mo ago

I literally stopped using these websites for a long time ago. And if I run into an article with this kind of hostile design I just close the tab. No article ever worth that shit. Granted I don’t follow news, so it’s easy for me to say maybe, but same applies other websites. If I land on hostile page (despite idea blockers) I’ll just leave it, what can be so important that can justify me to suffer through it. Just like in the example in the article, would you eat in McDonald that treated like that? Classical case of vote with your wallet, or vote with your attention.

Zak 7mo ago

> I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from. I do. I once read that app users are seven times more profitable than web users on average. That number isn't current, and I don't know if it was ever broadly correct, but it's obvious that an installed app provides more opportunities to try to get the user to do something profitable, and it's harder to block ads in native apps. I would be surprised if convincing a user to install a native app doesn't reliably increase profits by a large amount for most kinds of business.

dang 7mo ago

Recent and related: The 49MB web page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 - March 2026 (371 comments)

fud101 7mo ago

This reminds me of Amazon Prime video advertising Molly Mae. It knows I would never ever watch that trash but it shows it to me precisely for that reason, that'll I get annoyed enough to vent about it and contribute to it going viral. It works i guess, since I am typing this garbage on hn.

pkilgore 7mo ago

This blog not having any mobile layout is a bit funny.

crispi42 7mo ago

Thought I'm alone constantly complaining that most UX is like a labyrinth lately!