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You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

mastodon.technology

21–30 of 318 posts

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#21

How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…

[deleted]

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#22
Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load. Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user experience as frustrating as possible. And not once has the video had even a tangential relationship to the article being viewed.

The worst part is that uBlock Origin's element picker doesn't work on Firefox for Android (or if it does, I haven't figured out how to use it), so on the one platform where it's maximally annoying I can't do anything to block it.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#23

Is the point of the video to make users stay longer? How long do they need the user to stay in order to improve their ad profit. Here is an idea, obnoxious webmasters: add an interstitial timer, "your article will be ready in ...". It's less intrusive and i might even tolerate that if it's less than ... 9 seconds. I m sorry that google and FB are sucking up all your revenue, i d like to help

The only reason users are staying longer is because the embedded video slows down the whole page loading, especially on mobile. News sites that have these are cancer and I actively avoid opening links to them when I'm on my phone. I can see my battery life lose whole percentage points when I open these pages. Can't see the content though; between the cookie consent toast, the video embedded in the lower right corner, the "allow us to send notifications" and "allow this site to see your location" popups.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#24
Problem is - it probably works. It gets a percentage of people to stay longer.

You can argue that those full screen "before you leave" popups are annoying, and who in their right mind will abuse users like that?

Then they'll show you the results of A/B testing, prooving 15% more users subscribed thanks to that banner.

We're screwing ourselves over statistics...

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#25

How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…

I like this idea a LOT. However, the potential for abuse is, forgive me, too damn high. The extension owner can extort sites to not be attacked or attacked less. (a la AdBlock Plus, ghostery(?), etc).

How about if it merely followed links at a rate not high enough to impact the server itself, but enough to poison the analytics well as much as possible, and rather than opt sites in, it just randomly disrupts the 10,000 largest sites.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#27

How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…

That extension would be banned in minutes because that's illegal.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#28

How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…

Why not just use a browser that doesn't do things you don't like?

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#29
post #19

How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…

Because why? Just don't visit these sites if they annoy you. I don't burn down jazz bars just because I don't like jazz.

I'm inclined to agree that committing felonies to avoid patronizing or supporting businesses is a little extreme.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#30
I feel browsing the web is long overdue having a robot butler to do it for us and come back with the things we wanted, leaving the "People in Norwich are using this genius trick"-style nonsense on the cutting room floor.

It ought to be trivially possible, going on from things like grease monkey and ad blocking scripts to add a bit of user intent guessing / content filtering / simplified view logic.

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