“Your frustration is the product” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#221

Post by user3939382 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #11

"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…

I made a lyrics cli. “lyrics sublime santeria” boom you get a text file with the lyrics. Couldn’t deal with the garbage anymore.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#222

Post by keybored » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

AlienRobot wrote: post #33

red_admiral wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.

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.

Why not? People will post apologia on behalf of ad corporations on the Internet, that too for free.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#223

Post by keybored » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

dmd wrote: post #178

> 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 minu…

Tales from HN techies interacting with regular people.

> Most people just don't care.

So proceed as normal.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#224

Post by djeastm » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:17 PM UTC

suzzer99 wrote: post #202

suzzer99 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Chrome?

I do web development, it makes no sense for me to use a browser most of the public doesn't use. Also I have a ton of extensions that help with development. Firefox is painful.

You can have two different browsers, one for work and one for non-work.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#225

Post by ajkjk » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC

pcl wrote: post #194

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.

not really "just as" at all if you think about it, though.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#226

Post by djeastm » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:20 PM UTC

cabalamat wrote: post #110

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

I'm using lite.cnn.com while it still exists

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#227

Post by bloppe » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:21 PM UTC

suzzer99 wrote: post #202

suzzer99 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Chrome?

I do web development, it makes no sense for me to use a browser most of the public doesn't use. Also I have a ton of extensions that help with development. Firefox is painful.

Actually, it makes a ton of sense for you to use multiple different browsers.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#228

Post by porkloin » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

BizarroLand wrote: post #190

MyHonestOpinon wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been waiting for "Netflix for news or magazines". Pay $20 a month and get access to multiple publishers.

I would gladly pay an extra $20/m for a Disney style internet fast pass where I can browse any site that is subscribed to the service without ads, cookie preferences already set, no login or login managed by the extension for the fast pass service, and maybe a search provider that allows me to filter out SSO spam sites and adwhores like Meta and Google, and where some significant portion of my monthly pay is sent to…

I think Kagi is kind of making this happen currently with search. Not sure how their adoption number are going, but people are willing to pay $$ for better search with no "sponsored content" rising to the top.

I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that paying extra for quality of service or "fast lanes" for specific content types are "necessary" is to degrade the existing experience so much that it seems inevitable.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#229

Post by tredre3 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:40 PM UTC

butlike wrote: post #117

MarkusWandel wrote: post #91

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 g…

To be fair, I don't think the porn sites have ever had egregious UX/UI. It's mostly Sourceforge and image hosters from the early 00's that have my votes as the worst offenders. To be fair to your point though, the pirate sports streams are AWFUL in terms of link landmines.

> I don't think the porn sites have ever had egregious UX/UI

Pornsites and pirating websites have always been amongst the most egregious UX/UI designed to make you accidentally click or open ads.

The only way I can explain your differing experience is that you only visit pornhub.com which is indeed the one well behaved beast in a pack of rabid possums.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#230

Post by maybewhenthesun » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

llm_nerd wrote: post #57

maybewhenthesun wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true in a historical sense. People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue. This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here). On top of t…

>For an organization who get their main income from ads The NYT makes about $2B per year from subscriber revenue. They make about $450M from digital ads over all properties. Obviously not all news orgs are the same, but the lead example of a shitty experience is the NYT, so weird that all of the rationalizations work so hard to diverge. >tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it "Tailoring" a d…

Ok, point taken. I've heard very different numbers for dutch newspapers and blindly extrapolated that to the US. And if the numbers are like that than maybe the numbers I heard about dutch newspapers are bullshit too, who knows!