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No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

python.sh

141–150 of 221 posts

Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

#141
I'm not too annoyed by modals but I'm sick and tired of websites whose content shifts around due to inline ads loading.

It's very frustrating when you're trying to read something and the page keeps changing its layout for 10 seconds, especially on a mobile device where you can accidentally click on a link or ad pretty easily. Makes me wonder if they do this on purpose...

Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

#143
post #9

This is what happens when you mindlessly optimise for metrics like user signups - not surprisingly, you get more signups when you block the content with an obnoxious modal but after a few years, you wonder where all your users went. How much value do you really get from a user who was forced to sign up with a gun to their head?

Yes, cannot vote up twice

Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you call that giant banner that drops down on Medium (and other sites) every time I accidentally scroll up a pixel? I hate that thing.

I call it the nav teabag.

Naming things is hard, but you've captured the essence of it really nicely.

Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

#147
It's interesting how most of the solutions here surround just blacklisting those websites, removing them entirely like ad blocks do with ads. I'd like to point out in a lot of cases we visit those websites not because there are 20 other sites with the same content, but because we care about their content! That's why we're there. Or if there are other sites with similar content we haven't found them yet and/or that would require additional expenditure of time/energy to do so. So I'm not so sure why this is a highly shared solution here.

I also think we have to differentiate between behavior that is user action based vs. default case. Pop ups were stopped by browsers because they were triggered on page load for example, it was an action that should have produced a deterministic outcome. If part of a page that is not tied to a user action is blocked that is a passively executed scenario and can be used arbitrarily to censor anything by anyone and that's not a place we should move to.

Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

#148
post #65
post #53

I made a add-on for myself to shun sites that behave in ways I don't like. It removes links to their sites from every page. It effectively removes them from the internet. I think that's a way scarier scenario for a website owner than just getting their ads blocked. If the list were community driven and widely used, I think site owners would start changing their behavior. I know most people just want the content and d…

You should probably copy that comment into the description on mozilla. If I only read what is there I would not have made the connection.

Yeah I know. Like I said, it was only originally published so I could use it without FFs stupid rules for running local add-ons. But if people dig it, I'll spruce it up. I don't want to bill it as strictly a URL hider either, although I guess I could make a version of it that just makes that specific goal easier and keep this one as a general decorator tool. I thought it might be useful for research as well but I don't really do research so I'm not sure how useful it would be.

Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

#149
My solution to any site that tells me to disable my adblocker is to just bail out of whatever article I was going to read. It is often the NYTimes or WaPo anyways, and they have destroyed their own credibility. I long for the NY Times of my youth where I would read the science and technology section of the Sunday Times and back when they had real journalists, not these partisan hacks who only see the world in one color.

Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

#150
post #70

These are also bad for accessibility reasons — they generally have a light gray "x" on a white background, which you have to hunt for if you want to dismiss the modal. For normally-sighted individuals, this is a hassle. For people with low vision or motor impairments (e.g. Parkinson's or other tremors), this creates a much bigger problem.

Some have Aria and actually dismiss with ESC. It's rare

It used to be much more common until FE devs figured out how to stop it.
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