I found a few bugs: It only has one JS file, and that isn't even 3KB. Needs to be at least 3MB. uBlock only blocks 2 items, not 30. It doesn't have infinite scroll, a sticky header, a fake chat window that pops up and says, "Shana from support is here to answer any questions"... Oh, and the back button still works.
Publishers live and die by Google. They do everything they can to try and milk out ANY ROI from ANY visitor to try and sell/market/promote.
Users don't really visit websites anymore - they sit on facebook/google/Reddit/hacker news. So you have to REALLY market to those few people you get from Google search results... as Google really wants you to BUY those users from them - not write good content to get them (even though that's what they say to do..)
one day you can be doing well with google - making enough money a day to pay for your hosting and then next day, serps change and your traffic tanks and you then spend more money to try and correct it and you start copying what others say works - email lists, live chats, exit ads, moore mobile ads - you pray you start earning high CPMs and you start looking to arbitrate - find cheap traffic to hopefully pay less than what you earn to get more traffic and you start falling for fiverr deals that are fake an SEO tricks that penalyze you in the end and before you know it, you're 20k in debt running a website that most people leave within 30 seconds and even though you may have solved thousands of people problems my helping them fix something, learn something, do something or expereince something they choose to create a facebook post or tweet about it rather than comment or join your community - so those big giants earn a LOT more revenue on publisher backs.. for the average deal, facebook and google will earn 80 plus bucks a year on what you do, but us lowly publishers will spend more than that per user to try and ink out some successs
and in the end, the irony is that a website set up to show how bad the industry is will end up with more links, more traffic, more google juice, and higher link authority than a publisher with thousands of hours of work put in being creative, helpful and insightful..
and you wonder why the web is getting so painful :)
Can you expand (I know there was a lot here ) but I still don't "get" it.
How do you buy traffic from Google? Ads? Are you saying that "great content" does not work? That great content if i find it at the top of the results has also been paying for ads for those keywords?
but will better quality content without ads get ranked higher than worse quality with ads?
Google prioritizes paid content - people buying Google ads on search results to get top tier spots on search pages. That means for a lot of results only a handful of "natural" results/links are at the top - and how they're there is often being gamed by people to keep them there. The algorithm changes all the time and there is HUGE pressure/competition to get those coveted spots.
This algorithm approach to everything means its not just google controlling who gets to be "top" but facebook/twitter does the same - if you're not already at the top then the algorithm diminishes your reach - you don't show up on searches, you don't show up on followers of your page, you don't show up on your followers twitter streamline unless you're trending - and for the most part to trend you need status or to pay to play...
its tough... but what it really means is google/facebook/twitter don't create any content whatsoever but they monetize it by controlling it algorithmically and you have to generally pay to play to perform well - buy facebook ads, twitter ads, google ads.
more often then not, the higher the ranked content is in google - the more ads you will see because they're monetizing the crap out of that position.. ironically if you're a publisher and you do google Adsense (their ad network) and you choose to embrace their automatic ad platform they inject so many ads on your website that its almost saddening - and again, they control this algorithmically.
The sticky header is nowhere near as bad as the header that slides down over the lines you're reading every time you scroll. I don't understand who decided this feature needed to exist.
http://staticding.org/ helps with those, the only thing I don't like about it is the overlay it puts on the screen and fades out. I forked the github repo to remove it.
Exactly, I hate the bait-and-switch of chat windows.
"Oh hey there, do you have any questions?" pops up after a couple minutes on the site, then you reply with a question and you get "We will respond to you within a couple hours, you are important to us".
I run a website where we used to use one of these. People were constantly getting fooled by it. They would reply:
"Oh awesome, yeah I have a question about using XYZ"
and then the system would instantly reply, "Please enter your email here and we will get back to you. <Company Name> typically responds within 3 hours."
I've used them in the past, knowing that 99% of the time it'll be a "We'll get back to you" message. But for the most part, I find it helpful as a quick "contact us" option without having to wade through contact pages trying to find a contact email.
Maybe I'm an outlier, but I've used these things a handful of times and have always received an immediate response. I don't mean an automated response trying to "answer" my question either. It was an actual person responding to my specific questions.
I have also seen chat windows that display an "Away Message" showing that you won't receive a response right away before you type anything at all, which isn't deceptive.
Don't forget auto-playing video that requires 4 clicks to close when you find the semi-hidden close button, like a pesky roach... and restarts every time you navigate to another page or revisit the page
What it really needs is to slightly change the layout several times over the course of the first 30 seconds of page load, pushing and pulling links all over the place. I love playing whack-a-mole with your site's links.
It also doesn't have a sticky footer, which appears after I close the "sign up for our newsletter" popup, asking if I would like to sign up for their newsletter.
Nah, just use a js file from a different "free template!" for every function on the page. Added benefit of stressing the templating engine depending on the back end.
I was in the AWS control panel yesterday and it popped a modal at me and I habitually swatted it so fast before I realized “Oh snap, I’m in my AWS account - that might have been something important” and had no way to get it back. Page refreshes didn’t regenerate the modal.
Sad that I’ve turned into one of Pavlov’s dogs and that very reasonable methods of increasing functionality have been abused so much that they are no longer useable.
I honestly consider this one of the most important computer skills, and its something you can really only get by understanding the different layers (is my prompt the os, software, which framework was it written in, a browser prompt, a website prompt, etc) and that is: what happens when i click [ok] [cancel] [x] (blankspace) etc. Its probably one of the most inconsistent experiences on a computer. One popups Ok is anothers x is anothers cancel.
Ive seen most prompts before. I know what pressing cancel or ok on each one does without thinking. And if I dont know what it does, I have to pause and figure out the consequence of each button.
And when I watch other people use computers, they will close things, and I ask them "what was that" they often respond "I dont know, I didnt ask for it, so I closed it." There seems to be a persuasive misunderstandig that dismissing a prompt will leave everything in its previous state, and that it cant make any changes.
Not at all. Read and understand what you are clicking. there are popups in windows (and 3rd party software) all the time, and if you click x, things stop working.
thinks akin to "by closing this box or clicking ok, you are enabling autosave."
I'm always amazed at peoples' ability to observe users, and when user behaviour doesn't match up with the intended design, think "Hmm... the users have a pervasive misunderstanding. They need to be educated to understand the design."
Could it be that the model you describe doesn't fit the mental model of a typical human very well? Could the cause of this "pervasive misunderstanding" be bad design, rather than dumb users?
Its not about education. Its about a mindset. Trying to understand the consequence of your action before you click. Reading what a box says before dismissing it.
Read your prompts before closing them isnt the same as "the users have a pervasive misunderstanding." Its usually panic. Its "im not a computer person so Im not even going to try reading this."
I am all for simple-to-understand user experiences, but at some point the user has to make some effort if they want to do anything even mildly complex.
It took me more clicks than I care to admit to realize that the awfulness was the point of the site. When I first got there, I was thinking, "How did such an awful site get to the front page of HN?"
I thought it was a list of some unqiue interesting websites in 2018 and robotically started dismissing these things until i started getting a little furious when it hit me. Good work, it definitely fooled me.
I’ve seen sites with those being fake. If you say “no” to the browser prompt, the website can’t ask again. But if you make a fake prompt, you can repeat it any time you like. (Agreeing becomes a two-step process. Who the hell wants notifications from 99% of websites though?!)
Immediately, but only because most web sites think it's OK to show all of these things at once, making it a good 2 second task to work out which parts of the page is the content (if any).
I'm not certain this is 2018. I saw the words and letters immedately instead of gray rectangles showing me where words and letters could be before being shocked by the appearance of the actual words and letters.
Oh god. This is so accurate. I think the GDPR is overall a good thing, but I wish they'd encoded respecting browser sent preferences into law, rather than requiring a user-visible prompt everywhere.
The proposal for the ePrivacy regulation (not the same as the old ePrivacy directive) is supposed to do that but unfortunately there hasn't been much movement on it in the last year.
Europe should do this for their cookie law, too. Instead of every website having its own UI for it, we should force browsers to give the user some reasonable options like "accept all cookies", "reject all cookies", and "ask me every time" .. oh wait.
My guess is, even if there were some elegant, widely-supported standard for machine-readable privacy policies and even if browsers had some dedicated built-in API for privacy consents with some really polished and frictionless UI, you'd probably still be bombarded with popups begging you to click the "consent" buttons on that UI.
The problem is that it's not a technical problem, but a political. No matter how technically elegant your spec, it doesn't change anything about the underlying conflict of interest: Website operators want to collect personal data and show ads, while users want to keep personal data to themselves and don't want to see ads.
So trying to solve this via any kind of web standard is asking the website operators to act against their own interests. If you have no enforcement or incentive, you will end up with a standard that is either toothless (P3P, DNT with opt-in) or simply ignored (DNT with opt-out).
GDPR (and the cookie law before) do have enforcement, which is why web sites can't ignore them - instead they fight back with a barrage of popups.
The EU didn't come up with any protocols, advanced or not. The GDPR is not even specific to the internet, let alone specific ways of getting consent. It's up to the industry if they want to use fancy protocols to do so.
Please read the excellent comment of xg15 elsewhere in this thread. It basically suggests that publishers deliberately make the user experience as annoying as possible, as a way of protesting against the cookie and GDPR laws.
I think some of it might also be a function (or consequence) of the CMS being used for the site. You can either figure out a redesign that elegantly solves the problem (as NPR have done, offering a purely plain text version of their site), which might not be so easy depending on the tech; or you can treat the entire thing as pluggable and just add every new feature as a drop-in modal.
Hell, if you've got a marketing team dependent on stuff like Google Tag Manager, then have them throw it in there. Job done. Not great for the users.
Almost perfect, actually needs the following:
Needs to be material UI but poorly implemented so it's really slow.
Needs a "do you have time for a short usability survey?"--bonus points for stacking it on top of the cookie notification.
The "got it" button on donate/adblock needs to shame the user more.
There needs to be an on-hover action for some of the buttons that causes an alert to push the about-to-be-clicked button down so the user accidentally navigates away, then, when they navigate back, have to re-do the process.
As a publisher of the medical technologies news website (since 2004), I can tell you that what we have now is monopolized internet.
Few entities, like Google and FB, took over the internet and crafted the landscape to their advantage. They monopolized ads revenue, search traffic, and more importantly, they are actively spying on the general public, taking away any possible advantages from publishers. The result is a dearth of advertising money for publishers and regulations aimed at destroying any attempt to take over these behemoths.
When was the last time you saw GFPR notice on Facebook or Google? Do you think publishers enjoy having "Please Donate" pop-ups? When was the last time you heard of investment rounds in online publishers?
In the olden days we had websites and blog networks being born, Gawker, Weblogs Inc, TechCrunch network, political networks, etc etc. And what do we have now? Central stations with fake news shenanigans and retarded memes. While publishers, including your local newspaper and your favorite websites, are struggling. And that's the story behind all these popups.
pretty much spot on. We have to change our habits if we want the web to survive. I'd love to get rid of google tag mamager/analytics/facebook pixel and all that jazz and it would be nice if people would signup with patreon and donate a few bucks a month so i could work on publishing vs milking every visitor...
wish there was a way that people would realize that getting back to smaller communities and supporting publishers is actually a good thing
Totally unrealistic. It loaded way too fast. It should have: weighed 12MB, taken 10 seconds to render properly on 4G, text jumping wildly around the page while it did, and have slowed my pocket supercomputer to a stuttering mess everytime I scrolled.
One that I "like" the most is the "We'd welcome your feedback" popup that appears the moment I open a website...like how am I suppose to give you any positive feedback if you are preventing me from using your damn website in the first place!
Since pretty much every engineer under the sun knows this experience sucks, how can we attribute this to anything other than the rise of MBAs running the show?
2. For the vast majority of sites, this is a Business request, since the cookies aren't necessary for operation. They're just for tracking. A login cookie being set would trigger the legal requirement, but a user with no account shouldn't even see the box.
> A login cookie being set would trigger the legal requirement,
Are you talking about the EU privacy and data protection directives? Because they have an exception for Authentication, Session and Security Cookies as well as several other types of cookies which are necessary for the function of the site.
A user that is logged in should not need to see this either.
What ideas do you have for publishers to actually monetize their content? That's what most of these annoyances are there for...
It's not really MBAs running the show - its the sad fact that content is so centralized and monetized by the giants that independent publishers have to result to this stuff on a large scale to remain competitive... if you don't install trackers you don't earn premium CPMs on your ads and if you don't earn premium CPMs you start building email lists and then you start spamming people to sell crap and doing exit popups and constant reminders to subscribe now and crap like that.
content publishing is largely copycat - what works or what drives revenue pops up everywhere or becomes a pattern that publishers can subscribe to in order to ink out some revenue to pay for crap.
I run a small travel blog and i spend a lot of money on good fast page loads, global cdn, high performance/fast loading website and it pains me to have to have ads/trackers/facebook connect and crap like that but i'd love some feedback on how to do something different that people would actually support - or how to do ads in a way that doesn't scare people off...
just using google tag manager i see 40% of my traffic runs adblock.... i'd break even if this weren't true but that's the reality we face so lots of insane measures of trying to monetize a visit means the web just by and large becomes worse and worse...
I don't know why you are asking me what you should sell. If it was easy to come up with a service/product to sell, everyone would do it. That's the challenging part of running your own thing.
I love Creative writing, journalism, etc. In fact, I've paid quite a bit of money via Patreon and Kickstarters for creative pursuits. The creators didn't sell anything to me. I'm not sure what you mean by this.
And if your only method for asking your users for donation money is buttons/links, then you should change it up. Plug it in your media, in your speeches, etc.
i'm asking what gets you to make the leap to support creatives - everyone "Says" they do it - but the reality is very few actually do. curious what triggers people to support something.
i'm not asking you what products or services i should offer, i'm asking what makes people embrace something enough to actually support it.
I can't point to any specific trigger, but I notice that I get drawn to certain creators. If I start to recognize their name/brand, and I look at their past work, I get a sense of "I want to support that".
A good example is Complexly: https://complexly.com (sorry that their website is awful)
I started getting videos sent to me by friends, and recommendations on youtube. After watching a few, I looked through their catalog, and relatively quickly and easily saw what they were creating, and I thought "I want more of that in the world".
They had a Patreon link readily available, and mentioned in the videos that Patreon was one of the ways that they funded themselves.
I know that's not a great answer, but everyone's trigger will be different.
I think for me it boils down to a few variables:
Do you have a good product that I would pay for, but aren't forced to? Am I excited for your next product, even if it ends up vastly different from your other products?
Do you consistently put out good material? (and by this I include: is your product full of ads/tracking?)
Is your income transparent?
Do you encourage people to share your work, even if you aren't going to directly make money off of every fan? Do I get the impression that you'd rather me share it with 1000 people who won't pay, or 5 people who will pay?
Do you make it easy for me to pay you, in whatever form is convenient to me?
Nobody ever fits all of this criteria perfectly (I can criticize Complexly all day long), but they have a solid product that they give to everyone, and have relatively low friction for taking my money.
Charge me money, for content. Ala NYTimes, WaPo, Wall Street Journal, etc.
Also, I'd say it's a false dichotomy of "monetize" vs. "use every dark pattern and brings-browsers-to-their-knees script".
Countless times I've clicked on a link/article, only to go through this crap, and/or have it bring my browser on a most recent generation iDevice to a crawl, and given up/closed. I'm still happy to look at ads on free content (and yes, every now and then, click on one), provided I can actually see them.
Does anyone pay for those and do you think the web could survive on paid content?
BTW, these aren't "Dark patterns" - they're industry standards - whether we like it or not. Are users interested in preserving independent media or are they mostly fine just getting what facebook and google think they should get?
I think what a lot of people are ignoring is that users support these terrible sites and that the good ones that don't join these patterns eventually just fade to oblivion
web "Surfers" need to change their behaviors just as much as content creators... if not more so - because the industry is just following the what the readers actually do...
Something can be a "dark pattern" and an industry standard at the same time.
I agree that the consumers should change their behavior, but there aren't a lot of options for supporting good news. I can't say I've ever seen a news site that was good enough that I'd actually pay money for.
Subconsciously, if I am researching a topic to gather an opinion on something, my trust weighting for a site decreases by 80% as soon as I get an email popup box.
Would've been good if, in spite of just being text and a few buttons, it had been built with react, redux, redux-saga and had some contorted webpack build resulting in five JS bundles.
Don't forget the JS library that senses your mouse position so that when you move your mouse up to the tab bar, it opens a final "Wait, don't go! Here's a free e-book, etc." modal on the page.
I would change that second to last screen to be about browser compatibility. A site being down/broken happens, no matter what year it is. But the fact sites like BofA do not support a common browser like FireFox I feel is much more in line with the other nonsense in this demo.
I used to make sites when i was a kid in the 90s. i want to get back into webdev but without all the complicated stuff. How can i make an html only site? any site builders like dreamweaver in 2018?
Dreamweaver is responsible for the horrible 640px and 800px tabular layouts from the aughts and many other web design sins. The marginalization of these vertical tools is the greatest thing to come out of modern web dev infrastructure. You can still buy it for nostalgia though.
He said "without the complicated stuff" and "Dreamweaver". Github Pages is all command-line and uses Git for file transfer, does it not? I think the OP is thinking drag-and-drop folders through FTP like good ol' Dreamweaver.
Chrome and the other browsers should be slapped actually. Of all the popups the one that annoys me the most is the chrome (I'm assuming other browsers do it too) thing that tells you to run things in the background or web workers or notifications or whatever it's doing.
That should never have been architected that way. It annoys me the most because its the freaking browser that is being an annoying little shit. My browser shouldn't be part of the problem it should be the solution.
So the real question is, what are the webdevs of the world going to do about it? My guess is nothing. I can't blame them really, for everyone there is a number that is greater than their sense of shame, but at least they could stop pretending that the web is some brilliant platform that will lead computing into a new golden age.
You know who has the worst intrusive popups? Stack Overflow. First, if you are logged in but haven't visited in a while. They put a position fixed huge bar on the top reminding you that you haven't been to the site in a while. I hated that popup.
They've done a lot of work on making it more annoying recently. The "continue" button that actually means "don't continue but instead go and install the app" is inspired-evil.
The flashing app icons, seemingly on every interaction, .. I mean for real.
I think the absolute worst is Imgur on mobile. They display a large modal that takes up 95% of your screen so you can't even view the image you were linked to. They don't even hint that you're opting in to something when clicking the big green button to dismiss. And instead of giving you a button saying you do not consent, they force you to uncheck hundreds of checkboxes across four different pages. I actually had to find a different image host because I don't want to subject more people to imgur.
The depressing part is that this is an understatement.
- please turn off ad blocking
- GDPR: Consent to all these things: y/n (N)
- --scroll
- -- choose from 6 confusing choices
- -- back
- -- try again
- --
With checkboxes looking like [X] (is it checked or not??), confusing on/off switches, very big ‘Allow all’ button, fake delay to opt out from tracking, a message telling you that you can’t be sure to be opted out if you do not allow 3rd party cookies, very very long list of 3rd parties to switch off one by one (unless you find the confusing optional ‘disable all’ switch) etc. etc.
It’s a concentrate of dark patterns.
Now hang on, that can't be right - I didn't once get a Google overlay asking if I've ever bought a gift card for myself instead of someone else (seriously Google, has your data analysis not yet shown you I'M NEVER ANSWERING YOUR QUESTIONS). Nor even an autoplaying video with a five-second countdown timer that expires before you can get done with the click-throughs and aim the mouse at the one-pixel-wide target that will stop it playing.
The ad blocker and donation sections hit particularly hard for me, as I've tried to make several web apps/games (like editfight.com) that didn't have a clear monetization path, so I experimented with applying for ads, which Google rejected as the site was too unimportant, and with asking for donations, which backfired as the community was small, so it just appeared as me personally being greedy to the users.
i wish there was a better way... i make about 2 bucks a day on a site that costs many more times that to run and most of my success (haha 1.00 a day is a success? meh) is based upon luck - that changes every month depending on what google thinks my content is worth...
yet those that cheat the system or have the money to "pay to play" dominate it... just not sure that they're actually making any money.
Doesn't have lots of mb of media and javascript files. Doesn't start playing video. Doesn't use ridiculously large fonts. Doesn't display a myriad of links with clickbait pictures and titles. Loads fast and doesn't make my laptop CPU with 4 cores sweat.
In a good sense, that was actually not bad for a 2018 website.
Has anyone thought about adopting the permission management on phones to solve such kind of issues?
Use NLP to modularize the T&Cs and create some sort of authorization system to manage consents to various setups so we don't need to do it over and over. Plus, it could be an unique identification system!
> According to the California Law §28, Hague Convention and > Maritime Law, we can't show the content of this website to > people who have not reached 18 years age.
I'm not sure what it was but I'm glad I didn't click that I was over 18.
This isn't so bad. Maybe it's because I'm used to an onslaught of interruptions and I automatically dismiss them. What hits me the most is when I'm halfway through an article and then the interruptions re-appear. You're never comfortable in your browsing.
Ha ha, ironically that is much nicer to use than most "real" 2018 websites. For example: news.com.au / dailymail.co.uk I dare you to try those naked with no ad blocker. Or dare I say reddit.com on mobile.
I've started blocking a bunch of these sites from my searches using uBlock Origin. I don't even use websites that aren't someone's blog anymore because I'm sick of the trendy bs.
As someone who is trying to run a website, I try and avoid these pitfalls - just not sure how to actually survive/compete in a world where this stuff you hate is where the bread and butter is.
Whats the point of surviving if it means contributing to making the world a place you don't want to live in? You can probably earn a living some other way.
I don't want to give up, I just want to see what people actually want out of content/publishers/journalism...
just for example - asking HOW/WHAT to change got me downvoted here... how can the creative publishing industry survive if it's being punished for asking what would be better?
