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

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

#51

Post by cblconfederate »

monkeybutton wrote: post #23
cblconfederate wrote: post #18

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,…

It is a tragic situation. These sites obviously provide some value (or else you wouldn't be reading them) yet they cannot get paid for that value because google&FB have coopted the entire ad market for themselves. As technologists this is a problem that we should solve, not simply something to complain about

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

#52

Post by gruez »

northwest65 wrote: post #46
stavros wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why, are you paying for said jazz bar in your taxes ala the BBC news site?

My taxes fund the DEA and I don't like them, but that doesn't mean the way to oppose them is to firebomb their offices.

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

#53

Post by arn »

fnord77 wrote: post #37

why are news/blogspam-news sites so eager to play videos? (Even if the video is just some intern reading the article with static pictures being shown) Is there extra ad revenue from this somehow? Is it an attempt to keep people on the page longer? don't get it

Video ads pay well.

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

#54

Post by thomascgalvin »

nmstoker wrote: post #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.

If it was trivially possible, Firefox would already be doing it.

But there's always an arms race with stuff like this. Our robot butler would be able to figure out how to parse the web today, but the advertisers would completely change the structure of pages tomorrow.

Facebook used to have their ads wrapped in ``. Now, they're buried a thousand divs deeps, and the ads and content both have nonsensical, non-semantic class names.

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

#55

Post by baud147258 »

ipaddr wrote: post #14
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #9

Have you ever driven across a bridge, or along a highway and run over one of those "hit counter" cables that the Department of Transportation lays out to know how many people are driving on that bridge, or that highway? Now imagine that the cable can reach up into your car at the exact moment that you cross over it and pull down your person and your entire life's history.

That's a passport book.

except strangers don't get to see it without having to ask you for it

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

#56

Post by emptyparadise »

isamuel wrote: post #31
northwest65 wrote: post #16

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 stop there? Maybe websites you don’t like should have a crowdsourced assassin come to kill the relevant developers.

Ad blocking grows from the barrel of a gun?

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

#57

Post by gruez »

smoldesu wrote: post #42
ronsor wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How exactly do you ban a browser extension? How do you consider legitimate traffic illegal?

>How exactly do you ban a browser extension?

browser vendors can blacklist it.

>How do you consider legitimate traffic illegal?

It's fairly obvious that sending traffic for the sake of generating traffic isn't "legitimate" by any means. Your excuse is flimsier as websites that sell ddos services as "stress testing" services.

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

#58

Post by mcbits »

stavros wrote: post #33
wffurr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you are trying to go to jazz bars but they inexplicably play an extremely loud high pitched tone over the jazz music?

I would go to jazz bars that didn't do that. Still wouldn't burn them down.

No need to burn it down. Just buy a bunch of gift cards for the bar and hand them out to people recently released from jail for drunk & disorderly conduct. If the bar is trying to optimize for maximum traffic at the expense of all other quality metrics, surely they won't mind.

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

#59

Post by millzlane »

northwest65 wrote: post #16

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…

Instead of the botnet just make the extension block the site with an explanation. Doesn't uBlock Origin do this?

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

#60

Post by gruez »

rstat1 wrote: post #39
yellowapple wrote: post #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…

I'd say the worst part is that Firefox has a feature for blocking auto playing video. But it never works.

I suspect that's because you can programmatically start video playback from within event handlers. That's necessary because otherwise any site that use custom playback controls will break. However, that also means malicious sites can implement "autoplay" by adding a onmousedown/onscroll/touchstart event handler and starting playback from there. Video playback will start the moment you try to interact with the page in any way.
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