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

https://mastodon.technology/@rysiek/107390725207653910

by dredmorbius • 5 years ago

483 294 5 years ago

muppetman• 5 years ago

If they can trigger a "video fired" message in the analytics, that's one more "Person viewed our video" they can show to a potential advertiser. That's all it's about, not the end user's experience.

jtmarmon• 5 years ago

+1 - duh. This is like asking people if they find the experience of stopping at a toll booth to be a pleasant part of the driving experience

Dylan16807• 5 years ago

Except it's a toll booth that you don't pay. It's part of some weird scam that depends on annoying you.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 5 years ago

Often, they can also show the much more important "well-paid video ad played" event. Video ads pay much better than other ads, and I believe that those videos are often ad-ridden - we just don't notice because your ad blocker takes care of that. (I know I've seen it a couple of times, but I don't know how frequent it is because I rarely make the mistake of visiting a news site on a browser without an ad blocker.)

donohoe2• 5 years ago

Yes, but unlikely.

Its usually a deal with a 3rd-party that gives the guaranteed revenue based on views per week/month.

mmis1000• 5 years ago

And the one publish ads gets absolutely no attention even though the numbers looks good. Who on the earth will watch a video stick at the corner of a news site page?

thirdsun• 5 years ago

And yet everyone knows that those views are absolutely worthless. Who is paying for that? Who thinks this is a good use of their ad budget?

resonious• 5 years ago

Classic example of that "if a metric becomes the goal, that metric is no longer useful" quote. At least, I think that's a real quote.

factotvm• 5 years ago

In essence, Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Mikushi• 5 years ago

Having worked on video delivery, first play is not paid much attention. In most VPAID supported ads -one of the standards for video ad delivery- you have events fired at set intervals which are what is actually looked at when evaluating a placement value.

A placement that has high first play rate but a terrible 5sec event firing will just be worth nothing. In a programmatic world it means you'll get little to no bids for it or a default placement with payment in the fraction of cents per thousands.

deergomoo• 5 years ago

Are there people out there that actually engage with the auto-playing videos, or the “articles you should also read” callouts forced between every other paragraph? There must be right?

I know no-one likes them, but there must be some increase in engagement somewhere that causes the marketing folks to keep pushing these things.

Personally I find it makes the articles very hard to read without reader mode. Sites owned by G/O Media (The Onion, Kotaku) are particularly egregious. On mobile you can typically only get about 20-30 words of the article on screen at any one time (that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one).

Nextgrid• 5 years ago

When it comes to chumboxes aka "articles you should also read" I could definitely see old people less experienced with the internet's scumminess falling for them at least the first few times.

jjbinx0072• 5 years ago

I take a particularly dim view on websites that have these. I don't care if that's how they make their living - they are making money by scamming people.

paul7986• 5 years ago

Most of my browsing is done on my TV via my Mac Mini connected to it.

The resolution is jack up to the lowest so I can easily see from the couch.

This is a fringe case as most people arent enjoying the Internet on their TV via a web browser and wireless mouse. Nevertheless those nuisance videos are the worst in my view on the TV ... take up the screen and there's no X button. Always just have to hit the back button quickly and not bother reading the site.

keyle• 5 years ago

I'm surprised there isn't an extension for some kind of white-list only video stream content.

I too find these sites despicable. But usually, by the time the video play you've already been fighting some popup about joining, dismissed a browser native window saying this site is asking to send you notifications in the future, and GRDP @#$%^$%^& "we care about your privacy so here is a booklet about our privacy policy, in your face" with select all-of-which cookies you'd like to not, maybe (one time) receive in a game of dark patterns.

I have an outline.com bookmarklet at that point, which I click as fast as possible to get out of this mess!

    javascript:window.location='https://outline.com/'%20+%20window.location

gruez8• 5 years ago

I'm surprised there isn't an extension for some kind of white-list only video stream content.

the main problem is that it's impossible to distinguish between "autoplaying video that's annoying" and "animation that's part of the page". If you're willing to block both, firefox allows you to change the autoplay policy from "allow videos by default but block sound" to "block all videos".

Zak• 5 years ago

Firefox has that built in; Chrome has the option to block audio. Both support a whitelist; Chrome supports a blacklist. There are extensions with more options.

A combination of the "I don't care about cookies" extension and an adblocker with a couple tracking blacklists should avoid both the cookie popups and the tracking cookies themselves.

throwaway815233• 5 years ago

You know the old joke about the prison where all the prisoners all knew the same jokes, so instead of bothering to tell them at dinnertime, they would just call out a number? Seems like the interweb is like that, except it's XKCD comics instead of joke numbers. There is one for every occasion. With that in mind: 624.

darkteflon• 5 years ago

Not exactly the same thing but related: shout out to the excellent Vinegar extension for iOS Safari, which disables the abhorrent YouTube “play video on initial touch” behaviour that triggers play on every goddamn embedded YT video as you are simply trying to scroll down a page to read an article. Absolute lifesaver. Metaphorically speaking.

VWWHFSfQ• 5 years ago

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.

ipaddr• 5 years ago

That's a passport book.

baud147258• 5 years ago

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

adewinter• 5 years ago

A log of where you've traveled (and a partial log at that) hardly constitutes your "entire person".

throwawayboise3• 5 years ago

That's E-ZPass, FasTrak, etc. Also those toll bridges where they take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill that includes a $6 "convenience fee"

hammock2• 5 years ago

They hide ALPR everywhere. All it takes is a camera. I've seen it on the backside of normal green highway signs, where you can't see it and would never suspect it. The idea is to create a dragnet.

KennyBlanken• 5 years ago

Ohhhh, it's a lot more than that.

You're being tracked by your car and phone bluetooth MAC addresses. That's how the "X minutes to exit Y" signboards work. They time how long it takes to see a particular MAC address appear at the next receiver.

nightpool2• 5 years ago

This is a pretty bad analogy, because there's very little that online advertisers track that license plate readers can't. In both cases, it rarely stretches beyond a dataset of "Which people have visited which (pages|businesses)" and whatever statistical inferences you can claim to make from that data. Businesses already use license plate readers for marketing and analytics purposes. (Although, of course, not as widely deployed or as well-known as advertising cookie tracking)

jjbinx0072• 5 years ago

It's not just autoplaying video that's the problem, it's the fact that these videos then go on to autoplay something else completely unconnected to what you were reading without asking you first.

You might argue this is to do with advertisers and so on, but this also happens on the BBC News website too. I recently clicked on a video story and after the video was finished I didn't notice there was a 5 second timer and suddenly I got a totally different video play by itself.

WHY?!

gruez8• 5 years ago

It's not just autoplaying video that's the problem, it's the fact that these videos then go on to autoplay something else completely unconnected to what you were reading without asking you first.

No, screw that as well. If there's a text article with a video attached, I don't want to be interrupted by the autoplaying video while I'm reading the text.

chiefalchemist• 5 years ago

WHY?

Because that's how the web team is measured and rewarded. Management wants to see more view views, longer time on site, etc. Leadership doesn't understand nor care about a shite UX (so no one lower in the org is concerned).

rozab2• 5 years ago

BBC management has gone down the horrible path of mimicking social media companies because they think that's the modern thing to do.

But these companies have completely different goals than the BBC: they aim to abuse and exploit their users as much as possible.

zrm2• 5 years ago

This is a common theme with non-profits and open source projects. They see the for-profit incumbents doing something toxic and cargo cult it like not providing a similar experience would betray the users when it's really the opposite.

northwest653• 5 years ago

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 potentially be anything (follow subscribe links, consuming traffic in the background, a simple DoS), but ideally something that reduces the offending servers ability to do what it's supposed to.

stavros2• 5 years ago

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.

noah_buddy• 5 years ago

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

wffurr• 5 years ago

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

northwest653• 5 years ago

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

brutal_chaos_• 5 years ago

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).

northwest653• 5 years ago

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.

ronsor• 5 years ago

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

smoldesu• 5 years ago

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

tedunangst• 5 years ago

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

dredmorbius8• 5 years ago

Care to implement the W3C or WATWG browser spec over the next week?

How many independent browser engine variants are viable today? Three?

Ramping the difficulty of that problem has specifically limited choice and options.

One class of devices (iOS) mandates a single browser engine (Webkit / Safari). Android has a slight pretense of greater openness, but bundles Chrome into most apps.

https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

isamuel• 5 years ago

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

thomascgalvin2• 5 years ago

I've heard rentahitman.com is great. For example: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/rent-a...

emptyparadise• 5 years ago

Ad blocking grows from the barrel of a gun?

sroussey2• 5 years ago

Yeah, so I’ve been a host of things a few times, and got the hate mail, bomb threats and various lawsuits that were aimed at other people but landed with me.

The bomb threats and car bomb threats did get me talking to the sheriff about concealed carry permit, but I backed away.

The poor woman that answered the phone for a shared office space quit.

At Weebly, people bought DDOS but didn’t realize that every site had the backing of our entire infrastructure.

the_only_law• 5 years ago

Although you joke, I’ve seen slightly less extreme propositions that were only half-jokes.

tejtm• 5 years ago

Selective pressure for programmer ethics. May take a more than a few generations to cut through all this cash.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

that is vigilante justice and it will end about as well as Reddit trying to catch the Boston bomber.

What actually to do when you find someone's website annoying: Don't go there, it's not your site. Same thing I do when I don't like a bar, I leave, I don't start clogging the drain with toilet paper

sseagull• 5 years ago

This is a bit like the Blue Frog anti-spam project from years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog

sheprogrammer• 5 years ago

That's an awful idea. Illegal, immoral, and would be abused.

millzlane• 5 years ago

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

GabeIsko• 5 years ago

I think the default filter lists don't seek to block video content like this, but you can definitely accomplish this with custom filters. I have filters set up to block these videos on cnn.

leeoniya• 5 years ago

you're describing https://adnauseam.io/

3np• 5 years ago

Even if you assume the server operator is benevolent, that would be trivial to fork (and no one should run a closed-source version of that in the first place) bu someone just forking the extension and using it to trivially DDoS sites for other purposes. Or just break out that part of the code and use it in other malicious client code.

Consider also the sybil vector; I could just use a proxy network to vote millions of times for a site I'd like to see targeted. Or how do you ensure that 1 human = 1 vote? Throw in some PoW? No.

I'm not for building easily available tools for remotely and unilaterally coordinating DDoS attacks.

unclebucknasty• 5 years ago

when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment...botnet...

Or just share the site's reputation with other extension users.

scrose• 5 years ago

Legality aside(on both sides), you assume a media site will take an increase in ‘impressions’ on their site as negative on its own. A lot of these places just care about making it look like there’s eyeballs looking at their stuff so they can sell that ad space at a premium, not whether there actually is. Ie. The places that put these auto play videos.

xmprt• 5 years ago

Do advertisers actually believe these impressions metrics are valuable? It's strange that they put value in these metrics that everyone hates while completely shunning other forms of content like porn. I'm not suggesting that advertisers start showing their ads next to porn but rather questioning why they are showing their ads next to news websites based on what are essentially fake metrics.

npsimons2• 5 years ago

Tempting as this is, it's a colossally bad idea: just as one point, how long do you think it would take for the usual operators of botnets (spammers, those attempting DDoS for other purposes, etc) to target the C&C for this botnet? Why go to the trouble of building a botnet when someone else has already done it for you!

coretx• 5 years ago

Ad nauseam browser plugin

__MatrixMan__2• 5 years ago

Instead, how about we make a combination browser extension/hosted service which renders the page server-side, extracts the content, and serves it clean.

Users can leave bounties on sites and once the bounties pile up high enough somebody will come along, sanitize it for everybody, and collect the bounty. Sorry about your ad revenue, next time don't piss off the masses.

The bounties will be public, so site maintainers can see if they're on the list and address the issues. If the community decides that the redesign addresses the problem, the bounty goes back to its issuers.

SilasX• 5 years ago

That sounds like the Blue Frog model from 10-15 years ago where IIRC each spam email would trigger one “please opt me out” request from everyone on the user base. Then the spammers started trying to DDOS them back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog

gkya5• 5 years ago

The replies to this are so funny :D "It's illegal! Immoral! Assassination! Theft! Murder! Felony! To the gallows!"

Yeah, no.

So it's legal, moral, and acceptable that software and websites are made, by you folk reading this here website no less, to consume orders of magnitude more resources than they need to, just so that web companies---you folk, remember---can make some stats go up and turn them into money. It's okay to make the web less accessible to poor people, disabled people, people in places with bad internet connection, perfectly functional devices which have only become unusable because of this whole bullshit &c, it's okay to mine shitcoins in people's browsers, to sell their life for profits, it's okay to literally get into their private life and play loud videos in there if they don't know how to make that stop, but it's immoral, illegal, unacceptable to retaliate? Immoral and triggering for you lot for folk to just jokingly entertain such idea?

This whole business is basically turning wasted money and energy into dollars, not really different than blockchain bullshit essentially.

Imagine the resources wasted to produce and consume this nonsense went to making computers user friendly, programmable and accessible. Like, why should my browser occupy ~6G of memory for ~50 pages which could all be just pure HTML and a couple PDFs? Why should I need 6G of memory when 1 or 2GB must do? Why tf a computer with 1GHz or 666MHz CPU can't handle the web, ie a bunch of text documents? This whole bubble is creating immense amount of waste, and it's nonsensical to just limit your thinking to "oh, some annoying websites, just run uBlock". IMHO comes from the same place with "if car-dominated cities bother you and you feel unsafe, just get a car, or better, an SUV". What about fixing the city? What about climate and pollution?.

the_pwner2242• 5 years ago

It is sad that most of the web is like this, but no, there's nothing illegal, immoral, or unacceptable about people offering to you (for free) shitty services which are a hassle (cost you resources) to use. You're free to not use them if you don't like them.

Your argument is like saying if a barbershop always has 2 hour wait times and has crappy music playing on an excessively loud radio, it's ok to retaliate against them.

If every barbershop is like this, that's sad and should be fixed, but it still doesn't make it ok to retaliate against them.

dang• 5 years ago

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how bad someone's idea is or you feel it is. This comment is a noticeable step downward into hell.

Also, please don't post supercilious putdowns of the rest of the community. You have no idea who you're talking to here (none of us does). That sort of rhetoric is not only flamebait, it's reliably a marker of extremely low comment quality. We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, not users acting like they're better than others.

Edit: you did it even worse here too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29456018, and worse yet at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28688315. Would you please review the site guidelines and stick to them? They explicitly ask you not to post like this, and we ban accounts that keep doing it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cblconfederate5• 5 years ago

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

monkeybutton• 5 years ago

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.

cblconfederate5• 5 years ago

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

LegitShady3• 5 years ago

my mom still has msn has her home page because she's always had msn as he home page. many computers later she still sets it as her homepage. She went from there to their games pages, their chatroom pages, who knows that else.

So they exist. They're just not very tech savvy, and they like the way its been since thats the way its always been, even if they have to change it to make it so.

cblconfederate5• 5 years ago

What homepage would you prefer her to have?

yellowapple2• 5 years ago

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.

rstat1• 5 years ago

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

gruez8• 5 years ago

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.

jeroenhd3• 5 years ago

With some ad blocking I can at least get the videos to stop playing. The black rectangles are only slightly less annoying, though.

grishka2• 5 years ago

I don't understand why there isn't a browser feature that would simply disable all and any support for <video> and <audio> elements, or ask you a permission before a website can create any. It's really that simple. No need to try, and fail, to figure out which videos are "safe" to autoplay and which aren't. Let the user decide.

judge2020• 5 years ago

Hosted mediawiki isn't cheap, so I don't see another player coming into the market. The consolidation of gamepedia into "Fandom" is the worst in this respect.

Blackthorn2• 5 years ago

Hosted mediawiki is plenty cheap. When wikicities became Wikia they added some ads. They eventually redesigned it to look like a monstrosity because the $. I moved my very large wiki, which eventually became dnd-wiki.org, off of it at this point and self hosted it for a $10/mo virtual machine. Then Wikia became fandom and somehow became even worse.

It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.

WorldMaker• 5 years ago

Memory Alpha (primary Star Trek wiki) is another one that was self-hosted and as a user of it I mostly just accepted that sometimes it would be down due to Mediawiki upgrades or traffic reasons or otherwise. They also migrated to Wikia when shared hosting seemed like a better deal than hosting Mediawiki themselves, and now in the "Fandom" age it's just irritating that it is no longer just disconnected shared hosting (which Wikia had briefly promised to Memory Alpha that it would stay independent) and is now such a blatant advertising infested cash grab. I don't directly know who runs that wiki, but I do sometimes wonder (as a user) if they regret the consolidation (and if they have any escape plans).

rwky• 5 years ago

If you're using Firefox on Android then under settings > site permissions. Set block auto play to video and audio. For some unknown reason video is set to play by default. This seems to work at blocking the fandom crap for me. I also have ublock origin installed.

tpaulin• 5 years ago

A few months back I opened a link to a new article using an in-app browser (no ad-blockers). I kid you not, upon initial load the entireiy of the screen was ads or "annoyances". The one thing missing was the entire reason I clicked on the link.

_dain_3• 5 years ago

Isn't most (all?) of the content on fandom.com under a Creative Commons license? Is there anything stopping someone from scraping all the content and forking the projects, giving it a more humane and user-friendly interface?

iamacyborg4• 5 years ago

I’m currently working with a number of folks to fork a wiki off of Fandom.

Forking the content itself is easy but good luck beating Fandom on a search page.

kayxspre• 5 years ago

Every time I use Fandom without logging in, I will be faced with similar experience. A pop-up video with ads about the content it tried to promote (sometimes related to the content of the Wiki I visited, but mostly not) will play automatically, and I have to stop it every time.

As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.

frosted-flakes• 5 years ago

uBlock Origin's element picker mode works just fine for me on Firefox Android.

salamandersauce• 5 years ago

It is incredibly annoying. My other "favorite" is AMP reddit which will autoplay some video with sound completely unrelated to the link you clicked on somewhere down the page. How the hell autoplaying video leads to ACCELERATED mobile pages I have no clue.

severine• 5 years ago

uBlock Origin's element picker works fine for me in Firefox for Android, and always has, try again! Thank you, gorhill and co.

yellowapple2• 5 years ago

How do you activate it?

darksaints• 5 years ago

Yeah that mobile experience is just about as bad as you can make it. Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing crypto mining in the browser...at least that's what my device temperatures are implying.

account422• 5 years ago

I'm always thankful for the game communities that still have independently hosted wikis so that I can avoid that fandom/wikia mess.

TruthWillHurt• 5 years ago

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...

kristofferR• 5 years ago

Feels almost as bad as opening a HN story and discovering that the only content is a whiny tweet/mastadon about a minor annoyance.

dredmorbius8• 5 years ago

You're welcome to go through the New submissions list, or my submissions, or any other user's, and upvote the more substantial content.

Trust me, I do try to steer discussion in directions I think would prove more valuable for HN and its readers. There's some help in this through the 2nd Chance and invited submissions queues. See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

https://news.ycombinator.com/invited

That said, the hivemind has certain rather predictably-popular themes. I wish myself it would steer more substantive, but site mechanics make that challenging.

That said, the unanimity of the response, given the ubiquity of the practice, shines a light on, oh, say, the "consumer value" arguemnt usually put forth. And that's possibly worth noting.

nmstoker• 5 years ago

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.

thomascgalvin2• 5 years ago

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 `<div class='advertisement'>`. Now, they're buried a thousand divs deeps, and the ads and content both have nonsensical, non-semantic class names.

discordance• 5 years ago

It's technologically possible, but not legally possible and not convenient.

People in the know have the right extensions to block stuff and get past paywalls using the right snapshot services etc. Firefox can't officially offer this, but they can let people do whatever they want if they run their own extensions.

If this was common place or convenient for the masses then it would be actively discouraged or outlawed, similar to what happened with Napster and MP3s.

throwaway815233• 5 years ago

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

Sorry but Firefox is mostly on the dark side these days. That shouldn't be too surprising since most of its money comes from google.

It does have a setting to stop embedded video from playing sound unless you send an event, but it is too easy for obnoxious pages to evade and play sound against your wishes.

waltbosz2• 5 years ago

I also noticed super deep div structure, and weird random class names. I assume it's to prevent automation and scraping. They're really hard to run querySelector against.

s-lambert• 5 years ago

Isn't this what Web 3.0 was supposed to be before crypto-fans stole the term?

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

- Tim Berners Lee

npsimons2• 5 years ago

"Five minute precis" has been the dream since Gibson's "Count Zero." Unfortunately, getting something anywhere near worthwhile isn't easy.

gpm• 5 years ago

This is what Google has been trying to figure out forever isn't it? Things like the automagic answers block at the top of the search results, google assistant, etc.

Unfortunately we aren't very good at making robot butlers yet, and copyright severely limits what they can do (provided they are running as a third party service) in the first place.

LegitShady3• 5 years ago

would anyone with any sense trust google to be the sole arbiter of what they read and see anyways?

_dain_3• 5 years ago

a robot butler to do it for us and come back with the things we wanted,

That's what an RSS reader does.

Mezzie• 5 years ago

It's technologically possible, but the 'user intent guessing' makes this messy. The Venn diagram of people who understand information seeking behavior and science well enough to design this and people who have a deep enough understanding of development to design it in a way that it doesn't break every 3 seconds is two circles.

So you'd need a team, and as somebody with a tech and a library background, good luck getting those two groups to communicate and work together. Doing it without the information seeking background just recreates the issues with the modern web where your 'robot butler' comes back with a ton of irrelevant information, and doing it without the tech background just gets you a bunch of librarians high-fiving themselves over 'solving' a problem using outdated tech and is used by 20 people because it doesn't scale well.

rozab2• 5 years ago

The worst offender for this, in my opinion, is Wikia (sorry, "Fandom™"). There is zero attempt to make the autoplaying content at all relevant to the wiki in question, and it generally isn't even advertising anything, it's just... crap.

It seems like they're desperately trying to believe they have a social network on their hands rather than a collection of disparate knowledge bases, and they're trying to sell this non-existent 'fandom' culture to visitors.

stewx• 5 years ago

If I remember correctly, if you make an account with them, or sign in with Google or whatever, it lets you turn off the video nonsense.

fnord77• 5 years ago

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

arn• 5 years ago

Video ads pay well.

cercatrova• 5 years ago

Off topic, but I've never seen mastodon linked like this before on HN. Interesting this this might've normally been a link to a tweet.

ksherlock• 5 years ago

It could have been a poll right here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

mattowen_uk2• 5 years ago

I can't recall the last time I saw someone use that on HN. I'm pretty sure most people don't know it exists.

rapnie2• 5 years ago

Would be interesting to know how it compares in user base and exposure. The fediverse poll lasted 1 day and gained 268 votes and with only 31 boosts (i.e. "retweets" in fediverse terminology). How many people saw the poll is hard to tell and depends too on the social graph from author and boosters, as well as the network of federated instances involved.

When posting a poll on HN, it of course has to reach the minimum number of upvotes to reach front page (which I believe for Polls and Ask HN is a bit higher than regular submissions).

xupybd• 5 years ago

I've just joined the technology mastodon because of this link.

dredmorbius8• 5 years ago

World Domination!!! ;-)

Ping me: @dredmorbius@toot.cat

proactivesvcs• 5 years ago

I'm seeing the Fediverse linked to more and more often, in the wild. Not the first time I've seen it linked here, either. It's heartening to see that there's a little light at the end of the tunnel.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 5 years ago

For better or worse, Trump saga helped as a search for alternatives began. In a sense, I am not complaining, but it is odd to see people, who were arguing for Patriot Act surprised it is being used against them.

Still, I agree. Despite worry, it may be a good thing its entering mainstream slowly.

cblconfederate5• 5 years ago

I have a bad feeling about these "invite only" servers though. They are remaking the blue checkmarks of twitter in an even less-transparent way.

rapnie2• 5 years ago

There is no such concept on Mastodon. People add it for fun, just like they do any kind of emoji, but it carries zero extra 'gravitas' as it does on Twitter.

dredmorbius8• 5 years ago

Individual Fediverse servers are typically run by individuals or groups for their own interests, on their own dime. Some of those are generally open (e.g., mastodon.social and mastodon.cloud), some are invite-only or serve specific communities. Many are individual's own instances and serve a single user or a very small set.

Anyone can stand up a Mastodon instance. There are companies which specialise in fully-hosted turnkey services. And as noted, there are many instances which are free to join for the asking.

The system overall is in no way closed on this regard.

That said, individuals (or instances) which engage in antisocial behaviours or prove nuisances may find that they are blocked by numeous others.

In general, what exists is widely available but also subject to local rules. There are instances which run strongly counter to the mainstream culture on the Fediverse. They exist and can talk amongst themselves, but have limited (and often no) interaction with the mainstream of the rest of the network.

riffic• 5 years ago

You don't need to use any particular server to publish to this ecosystem. You don't even need to use the Mastodon software. Just hook up the AP plugin to your WordPress (or insert necessary logic into your CMS of choice) and you're a participant.

geuis• 5 years ago

I additionally love whatever is happening on that mastodon site that takes over the browser back button that somehow involves Reddit.com

swader999• 5 years ago

This is especially not good when it wakes my wife up by accident.

WesolyKubeczek3• 5 years ago

Something about the post itself: while I'm firmly in the "it's annoying" camp, as is the author, the poll is a textbook example of how to make a heavily biased poll.

Maybe there is a person or two who actually like it, but the dripping sarcasm of the poll's response is saying "whoever you are, you're cretins", and is not quite inviting for a discussion.

I'd love to hear from someone who actually liked this pattern (and many others) as a consumer. It's so alien. Maybe I'd learn something.

Then again, I'm probably going to write that crawling bot that would frequent the sites I read, snip the actual content and deliver it to me via email or my Kindle. Call RMS what you will, but that bit of his digital life is quite clever.

dredmorbius8• 5 years ago

The poll is pretty obviously flippant.

All the same, for such a widely-used dark pattern, the visceral hostile response is absolutely overwhelming.

Think of all the weasly, greasy, contemptuous justifications that have been offerred for this practice. Clearly, someone's lying, and not at all convincingly.

WesolyKubeczek3• 5 years ago

I've heard plenty from content managers, website owners, management, that is, the side of barricade making this shit.

I suspect the overwhelming response from those who sorta tolerate is going to be: well, I want my dose of news, and everyone is doing that anyway, so I suppose that's how things are done today? But maybe there is someone who actually enjoys this. I'd like to hear from them.

forgotmypw17• 5 years ago

I don't get annoyed, I just close the tab and never return to the site again.

throwawayboise3• 5 years ago

Reader mode. Learn it, use it, love it.

throwawayboise3• 5 years ago

I disable media auto-play in firefox, but somehow some sites are able to play these videos anyway. Are they gifs?

throwaway815233• 5 years ago

The video can start playing when you "permit" it to by giving it a suitable input event. Apparently a mouse motion is enough. It doesn't have to be a click. There is a bugzilla item about this somewhere, where the FF devs think that is a good interface. Upton Sinclair anyone?

lmm• 5 years ago

Remind me again why people thought the video tag was a good idea? Flash with click-to-start made for a much better browsing experience.

coolandsmartrr• 5 years ago

How about you disable autoplay? Firefox does this.

victorbstan• 5 years ago

Anyone remember how terrible Macromedia Flash ads were?

kristopolous• 5 years ago

10 years ago I wrote this:

"what will the ad-haters use in this future world of 2022? Some amalgamated FlashBlock equivalent that can easily just turn off all the annoying stuff? This line will be blurred and it won't be possible."

I wish I was wrong on these types of things.

http://kristopolous.blogspot.com/2011/12/flash-sucks.html

anigbrowl• 5 years ago

Marketing is a trash industry episode #451.

waltbosz2• 5 years ago

How about an extension that disables video elements until you click on them ... Like how Internet Explorer treated Java applets towards the end on their days.

You could add a whitelist feature to the extension for YouTube et al.

Sure, it would be nice if websites didn't do shitty UX, but as others have said, don't visit those sites.

The other extension idea I had was one which would reference a database of sites known to use dark UX, and warn you not to click thru.

I myself run a userscript on Google that removes results from websites that I'd prefer to avoid.

dragontamer8• 5 years ago

How about an extension that disables video elements until you click on them ... Like how Internet Explorer treated Java applets towards the end on their days.

No.

Short MP4 files should replace GIFs. MP4 files are more efficient than the terrible compression GIF files have. I've made a few video game pages where auto-playing MP4s were essential at giving the right message... discussion of tactics and "movement" of dynamic video game stuff is pretty common. (Any game requires the player to gain instincts that "predict the future", and short GIFs and/or MP4 files really help show off key moments).

Factorio thing I wrote a while back:

https://factorioguide.nfshost.com/backpressure.html

TedDoesntTalk3• 5 years ago

auto-playing MP4s were essential

I never want auto playing videos. Ever. It is my personal preference and i should be able to express that in my browser, overriding your preference, as the author of the web page.

notfed• 5 years ago

Great so the extension should disable gif animations as well, good point.

Fnoord• 5 years ago

Its too much abused.

Just like gif was in 90s.

The client has two important values: attention/time and battery. Your preference screws both.

There's a couple of solutions to that (such as only looping once or for X seconds or not showing it).

Either way, you think too much from content creator PoV, IMO.

The web was made in such a way that clients are able to (massively) modify the content or the way it is shown. If you don't fancy that then you don't fancy one of the core foundations of the web. I use all kind of extensions to modify my web experience. If your PoV would become dominant, I simply would not use WWW anymore.

Default experience matters because most people don't use extensions, or not the same ones (power users do) so you get your way anyway. And I don't get my way on Firefox Mobile because they decided to axe a lot of extensions, and I don't get my way on work Citrix because admins decided which extensions are worthwhile (they block all video stuff, btw).

sroussey2• 5 years ago

Not sure why you are downvoted. Animated gifs are huge in comparison.

One thing to note, however, is that it must be without sound. Auto playing sound of any sort is complete garbage.

Supermancho• 5 years ago

You mean "yes and..." not no.

Your post has no content explaining why you wrote "No."

This is a bad habit that makes your sentiment confusing.

cabalamat• 5 years ago

I've made a few video game pages where auto-playing MP4s were essential at giving the right message

No. What you say is simply factually inaccurate. I've looked at the web page in your URL and it would be much better without distracting auto-playing video.

The video should play then the user wants it to play. Is that really so hard to understand?

renewiltord• 5 years ago

Everyone else here is wrong and you are right. The animated GIFs (as h.264 video or whatever) were the right play here.

Safari didn't block no-sound-track video for this reason. It's a good reason.

wyager• 5 years ago

I swear Safari used to block autoplay-with-audio, and it recently stopped blocking it. I remember this because I specifically needed to set audio to disabled to get a video clip to autoplay on my blog (basically just a more efficient GIF).

marcosdumay• 5 years ago

You know, Firefox has that option right at the settings window. And if there's audio, it blocks by default.

jeroenhd3• 5 years ago

Websites still find their way around this setting. I think they put an overlay on the page and intercept the first mouse event they can, and use that to start playing the video.

I usually just blacklist these websites in my Pihole.

radley• 5 years ago

There's an old add-on, Disable HTML5 Autoplay, that still works most of the time and can whitelist sites.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...

pjmlp2• 5 years ago

In theory, in practice videos can be rendered on the fly into image or canvas elements, either via JavaScript or WebAssembly. :)

Or even better, endless server stream for an animated gif.

matheusmoreira2• 5 years ago

Inexplicably, it was not blocked by your ad-blocker.

This is the real problem. Why wasn't it blocked? We must fix that!

bambax• 5 years ago

I think because technically, it's not an ad. But you can surely block the zone. Or, more simply, just disable javascript for the whole site. If it breaks the site, you know you don't want to come back.

matheusmoreira2• 5 years ago

uBlock Origin has an annoyances filter list, these autoplaying videos fall in that category. I agree with you on Javascript.

makecheck• 5 years ago

I feel like these are “somebody got a promotion” patterns.

Basically, somebody was able to “prove” to Higher-Up Managers that $X number of these videos were “watched” or “engaged with” (or whatever today’s BS lingo is), and therefore the business “benefited” in some way by “reaching” more people. Profit?

In reality, at least in my case, what happens is: (1) I say “WTF!?!?”, (2) I make a mental note to never ever visit the site again, and (3) (sadly) I see it again and again at different sites.

mhb2• 5 years ago

Sort of related - is geeksforgeeks the new experts-exchange?

ndynan• 5 years ago

This pattern is purely a representation of how financially hurt news institutions are. They are desperate to make revenue and the end user experience is sacrificed in the name of keeping the ship afloat (and sometimes profit).

hellbannedguy• 5 years ago

I'm to the point I'd like to see them go 501c3 nonprofit.

Admit defeat.

Get used to just making a barely livable income, like the rest of us.

Stop begging. Stop the obnoxious ads. Stop the shady subscription schemes. Enough with the .99 cent for six week promos. We obviously don't value you enough to give your access to our debit cards.

Newspapers you lost the war.

The sooner you realize it the better.

Follow the PBS model at this point.

(And I realize the importance of non-biased news. I wouldn't mind seeing tax money going to certain high quality organizations.)

donohoe2• 5 years ago

Sort of.

When I worked at a rather large publisher they did a deal like this because someone promised a large truck of revenue by a company.

For a site that was badly monetized (because they it was over-weighed with ads and poorly engineered to begin with) this was seen as something they could not say no to.

Again, it is a slow race to the bottom.

I can assure you that often these deals are done by the business-side without consultation with product/engineering.

tete• 5 years ago

You know, if you paused it, you closed it, maybe even mis-clicked you interacted with it, that's engagement for way too many metrics. You are not gonna consider them to not be or even be negative, who wants their numbers go down? Destroys the nice hockey stick chart, promotion, etc.

It's maybe not the best, but it's also not evil. And by that standard "somebody had a good day". I won't blame them. That's what teams, managers, corporate cultures, capitalism, the system or whatever incentive for, and that's what they get.

vorhemus• 5 years ago

Most likely the leadership team is aware that these "viewers" just exist in theorey but they can fool advertisers into thinking their channel has a higher reach and collect more advertising revenue in return.

blowski• 5 years ago

The goal of these sites is normally to be as profitable as possible. If they achieve that goal at the cost of pissing off "a bunch of geeks", I don't think they'll care.

bogomipz• 5 years ago

I've noticed a variation on this which is a video that is related to the news story however since I am reading the article I press stop on the autoplaying video. However as soon as I scroll down to continue reading the page the video also moves to the lower left corner so that it is still visible even though I have paused this. This seems quite hostile as one has signaled their preference to read the article since they stopped the video. Can anyone say what the thinking is here? Is this just another technique to game some engagement metric?

authed• 5 years ago

Facebook is pretty bad too... I was just watching a video, lowered the volume and scrolled down... then it popped up an always-on-screen video player... I close it and it reverts back to playing the one that is offscreen, and the volume gets reset to maximum level.

arnaudsm• 5 years ago

Let's face it : the modern web is a nightmare without an adblocker and annoyance blocklists. And most web creators aren't even aware because they use these tools themselves.

No wonder why normal people like walled gardens, the UI is more streamlined and (mostly) more respectful.

est31• 5 years ago

No wonder why normal people like walled gardens, the UI is more streamlined and (mostly) more respectful.

Oh wow that's actually a good point, never thought about it that way. You are spot on I think, besides some heavy attempts by services to get people to use their apps (especially pronounced on mobile).

Note though that the web has always been annoying users, or at least many website have. I remember how in the 2000s, Firefox was advertised as being able to block pop ups, to give an example.

bobthepanda• 5 years ago

Remember, (one of) the revolutionary things about iPhone was that Apple just straight up refused to allow carriers to preload apps onto the phones.

I don't miss the days of Verizon attempting to hawk songs and ringtones on a janky, zero-upside store for $5 a pop.

gkya5• 5 years ago

No wonder why normal people like walled gardens, the UI is more streamlined and (mostly) more respectful.

Have you seen someone use Facebook as of recent? Respectful?

eyelidlessness3• 5 years ago

It’s not a great experience in a lot of ways, but it’s 10x better than every time I give in to curiosity and follow a Reddit link (all from here, this bastion of good web).

seoulmetro• 5 years ago

You're mis-identifying user content with Facebook UI.

Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. all do have very clean UIs for such big game. But they are pretty hostile for advanced usage (on purpose).

__MatrixMan__2• 5 years ago

I blame Javascript. Letting it become normal to implicitly execute code just because it came bundled with a document that you requested was a mistake.

We can have a web of apps, we just should've kept it separate from our web of documents so that I could only go there when what I wanted was an app.

Damogran6• 5 years ago

There MUST BE some kind of person who's default behavior is "I wonder how hard I can push this and not get in trouble".

They do this stuff.

I hope I never meet him.

colanderman• 5 years ago

On Firefox on macOS, almost always, the close button for these monstrosities is positioned flush right and sized exactly such that it extends merely 1 pixel left of the scroll bar. So, to close them, you must either aim precisely for this 1 pixel sliver, or move slowly enough that the scroll bar does not appear.

These days I just click Reader Mode for almost any news site. I wish I could somehow set domains to always open in Reader Mode.

onion2k4• 5 years ago

These days I just click Reader Mode for almost any news site.

That's more effort than I put in; I just don't bother reading the articles when the site makes it too hard.

sha016• 5 years ago

Shameless self plug: I created a website in an attempt to improve the news browsing experience - https://inshapemind.com

72deluxe2• 5 years ago

Where are the feed sources?

Have you ever used skimfeed.com?

dbavaria• 5 years ago

Some cooking recipe sites do this but I recently found it's actually helpful. While the video is playing, my phone screen stays on and the OS doesn't lock itself. Since it's always some unrelated video, I just turn the volume off and let it play while I cook, occasionally glancing over at my recipe.

MaxikCZ• 5 years ago

surely I cant be the only one thinking this: https://xkcd.com/1172/ - Workflow

pier25• 5 years ago

The amount of egress, bandwidth, and energy wasted with this crap must be mind boggling (globally speaking).

ccvannorman• 5 years ago

You click on the comments without clicking on on the article, to determine that it probably isn't worth your time

curiousigor• 5 years ago

This is me, basically every time. Most of the articles don't get opened.

camillomiller• 5 years ago

Why would anyone expect that a news site would put users first, if we’re all ok with the notion that news organization are regular businesses? For news organizations, the idiosyncrasies of corporate capitalism are more evident, because we keep on accepting the contradictory double bind that journalism has a deeply rooted social role, and that it can be managed as a regular business at the same time. That is, per se, a disqualification of what journalism can be, because business mechanics are directly negating many core tenets of journalism in itself.

Without many more meanderings, the idea is this: as long as we accept that journalistic organization can be operated as showbusiness entities, and as long as we accept that journalism can (or should) generate profits, we won’t be able to either fix these annoying elements (the embedded autoplay video, and 1000s of others) nor the generalized and growing lack of trust in journalism itself.

It might be useful to point out that I say this as a journalist.

jmnicolas• 5 years ago

You can disable video and sound autoplay in Firefox. But anyway I try to avoid those kind of websites.

ahonhn• 5 years ago

Channel News Asia has developed a habit of putting 2 (two) auto-playing videos on some articles and having them both play simultaneously at full volume.

johnnywasagood• 5 years ago

Wow. They even don't want to pretend that videos are for viewing.

72deluxe2• 5 years ago

That's actually made me laugh out loud. It's like you'd be constantly subjected to a cacophony of a senseless din for no reason at all whilst browsing the site. Insanity.

teekert• 5 years ago

Those 2% (if they are not trolling) may be worth it economically?

Tepix• 5 years ago

We need to both shame the websites/companies doing this and tell them that it is unacceptable.

JulianMorrison2• 5 years ago

I will actively block that video player. Spend time to do it, even.

ZeroGravitas2• 5 years ago

I worry that ad-blockers and similar contribute to this.

I, as a nerd, get to bypass all the dark patterns, either by just being informed, using specialized tools or other workarounds that let me use the service (and so increase its reach) but let others take the hit in getting sucked into the adverts or rage-based communities.

It feels like there should be a social movement to use tools that don't employ these tactics on anyone. It might mean a short term reduction in quality of life, but it equally could be long term beneficial.

How many people struggled with a thousand different sub-par experiences for decades so that today Valve can launch a handheld Linux based gaming PC with Wine based emulation of basically their entire catalog.

It's an amazing collective achievement of society, but many people take the short term view because 5 or 10 or 15 years ago it seemed outlandish that X could ever be achieved with open code and shared data. How can we get more people to take the better long term view? "Would you want your kid to use this app?"

App idea: take the core code of an open source ad-blocker, make it slightly less harsh, but totally block any site that fails it's tests rather than block only the ads. Provide alternate news stories or whatever from sites that are better. Similar to Google punishing deceptive sites, but decentralised.

(I've noticed this recently with Google provided news stories. They let me say "I'm not interested in topic" and "not interested in this specific site" which I use whenever the clickbait annoys me, but there's no generic "no clickbait please" option, nor any way to help protect other users from it who may be unaware of the dangers)

JulianMorrison2• 5 years ago

Second kind of fuckery of this sort: you watch a video about A, and it auto plays a video about a completely unrelated B. There is no option to switch this off (hello, Independent news online).

Just no. Seriously. That gets me to block your entire video player.

hamasho• 5 years ago

Somehow, I too see a lot of features that exists solely to increase the company's profit and only annoy customers. I always wonder why they think this is a good idea.

But then I remember I often implement those features as a developer. And sometimes, when I ask the marketing people or product manager, even they look to think it's a terrible idea. They are also forced to release something BS but can increase some KPI.

cobbal• 5 years ago

Goodhart's law kills again.

OJFord• 5 years ago

(Seriously) I wonder to what extent a cause is that the internet is US-dominated - because US (& Canadian) television is just like this too. Opaque and colourful channel logo that spins and barely fades, and advertising that pops up over the programme while it's playing!

If that's your norm on TV, sure, why wouldn't a web page work like that? It baffles me just like OP, but no more than it does on television programmes.

melech_ric• 5 years ago

I'm old enough to remember a time before every TV station had a logo/watermark at the bottom right. In my mind, the logos coincided with the early 80s when VCRs became more commonplace. I suppose stations that licensed shows/movies, didn't enjoy the fact that people could record that content and reuse it. So... logos.

dredmorbius8• 5 years ago

Not that I watch much TV, but persistent logos ... and animated promos for upcoming features during the current programme, which still seems mind-blowingly bad ... were something I didn't notice until the mid-2000s.

I may well have missed thier introduction.

pull_my_finger• 5 years ago

You know I hate this. The fact that they will autoplay videos with the sound off with the hope I'll turn it on is non-consensual data use. I get 0 benefit from watching some talking head with no sound, so why do you need to start loading and playing the video before I've consented to watch it? I live in an area where data is often slow, metered/throttled/capped. Please stop WASTING users data. It's not a free and never-ending resource.

comeonseriously• 5 years ago

I'm sure some lawyer someplace would tell you that by visiting the site you are consenting.

kordlessagain• 5 years ago

Turn javascript off.

annecruz1996• 5 years ago

Often times, I click on an article and just get hit with a paywall. At least before I found apps and websites to help me get around them

jackspratt33• 5 years ago

Here is a partial fix. I have Firefox set to block autoplay vids, and I also created a bookmarklet (look it up) that removes video elements from the web page. If you see a video playing, you can click on the button in your bookmark toolbar to execute javascript to kill the video. It leaves the video player visible, but it is now empty: it does not use bandwidth and it does not distract you.

Here is the javascript. To use this, you need to create a button on your bookmarks toolbar, and add this as the URL:

javascript:var x = document.querySelectorAll("video");var i;for (i = 0; i < x.length; i++) {x[i].parentNode.removeChild(x[i]);}undefined;

One way to use this bookmarklet is to make a new button by dragging (say) this page's URL to your toolbar, then editing it to set the url to above, and renaming it to FixVid.

derekpankaew• 5 years ago

News sites don't view people as "users" but as "pageviews". Clickbait and SEO drives pageviews, and you monetize pageviews by getting the highest payment per impression.

This obv comes at a long term branding cost - but only large brands like New York Times can really afford to care about the long term. Most news sites are commoditized and barely surviving these days =/

I don't agree with the practice, but I also kind of understand why it's there.

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

Related Stories