How I Experience Web Today (opens in new tab)

I'm still amazed that https://gail.com/ is still just a pleasant personal website that reminds me of the early days of the web...

> I long for a curated list of such sites.

I don't know if this is good news but I started doing this a while back and found so many sites that it was futile to keep them in one list. These days I tend to keep them in contextual notes or databases.

Also many of them fail to pass one or two annoyance tests, but I find that they're worth it anyway. For example they are not mobile friendly in some minor way, like the touch target for their menu is annoyingly small, or they are a little bit cluttered, or use more CPU than I'd like (specific mapping sites).

So it's not easy to fit a perfect list, but it's impressive to me just how deep the less-discovered, high quality web really is.

(Also I try to make my own obscure personal sites all the time as my contribution to this mess...)

> These days, when even a few hurdles of crap present themselves, I often just leave. I don’t care what the site has to say or sell me.

I find that disabling JavaScript often helps. I have it enabled by default, but disable it in uBlock on a per-site basis if some crap pops up. A lot of the times that fixes things.

For example for some reason the BBC thinks it's helpful to display a big fat "Register for an account today!" every fucking time I visit their website, but with JS disabled you don't get it. I think missing out on all BBC content would be too high of a price to pay, especially since most news sites do something similar (or worse).

Downside is that sometimes stuff like images no longer work. It's usually not a big deal.

I started just leaving as well. If uBlock Origin failed for any reason I just closed the tab.

Now this site is the only one I still actively browse.

https://wiby.me/ is a cool search engine for classic internet sites you might like

it's not a curated list, but there is a "surprise me" button

It's seemingly becoming harder to have an "experience" on the Web, and I find myself turning away from progressively more sources as a result.

In the 2000s, running with an ad blocker was a near surefire way to speed up loading a page without any functional issues cropping up - the ad blocking tech even then was _good_.

Then came paywalls - pay for this content, or you won't see it. I suppose, then, I won't see the content.

Then came JavaScript frameworks in the 2010s - ads weren't assets anymore, they were actually part of the content. But for the most part, the Web still worked without JavaScript, and many sites (for what reason, I still don't totally understand) would gracefully fall back to presenting "just the content" if JavaScript was disabled. So I traded an ad blocker for NoScript, turning the lot of it off instead. Some sites need a minimal amount of JS to function, which I'll allow (first-party and CDNs like `jsdelivr`). But if you require JS from stripe.com, I suppose I also won't see then content.

But eventually those JavaScript frameworks became bold - displaying partial content, or no content at all, became the fallback. I count the "Continue reading" button among these (and I get why - tracking who actually read the article must be vastly more lucrative than counting pageviews), though some pages are so bold as to display _nothing_ but the "You need to enable JavaScript" text itself.

Most recently, I've noticed a new tactic: setting a CSS "opacity: 0;" on the page, then removing it with JS, even when JS is not required to load the page. Removing the rule with dev tools shows the entire page. I can only assume this is a way to make sure the page doesn't become visible until all of the content is loaded, but again, the content includes the ads, upsells, and otherwise.

Thankfully I've logged into Hacker News and posted this comment without JavaScript enabled. I wonder how long I'll be able to do that.

> Whenever I come across a site that just displays content immediately, it fills me with joy.

Web search for such websites: https://wiby.me/.

This is why I love the gemini space. It feels ... unadulterated somehow.

Here's mine: https://danuker.go.ro/

Tip: add your site to your HN profile, and look at others' profile.

Some more lightweight old-fashioned internet portals other than the ones mentioned before:

https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/

https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/

https://webring.xxiivv.com/

https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/

https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html

https://www.cameronsworld.net/

I keep a list of personal/small websites as well. Sites that don't have this endless amount of marketing and tracking cruft.

Unfortunately it makes for pretty boring reading. So many sites out there have like 4 or 5 blog posts, and that's it.

You can use the Reader View in Firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...) or Readability bookmarklet in all browsers (https://ejucovy.github.io/readability/) instead of leaving the page.

As an alternative, there is FrogFind search engine (http://frogfind.com) for text-only websites.

> I long for a curated list of such sites.

Like you, I'm a fan of this kind of websites. I have one of my own in fact.

And since you're after curated lists, let me share a few links:

https://512kb.club/ https://terra.finzdani.net https://gossipsweb.net/directory https://theforest.link/ (I built this one for fun)

> I long for a curated list of such sites.

Text only websites - https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html (Disclaimer: The author has kindly included couple of my websites in the list).

Sometimes you need the content and for that I use browser reader mode or if the content is really good, subscribe via rss. If they don't have rss, use a service to build one for the site

Also, with javascript off, it doesn't work hardly at all. Just like a real site.

If it's straight HTML and some CSS, I just can't do anything but smile. I love the people who just keep with the old way cause it will be the easiest to support and last the longest. After all, it's just text.

I am not seeing any autoplaying videos unrelated to the article that pop into a PIP window in the bottom of the screen as you scroll causing the amount that you've scrolled to jump so you lose your place

After all the popups, it needs a last one saying "this site works best in our mobile app".

Especially the 'More options' on the cookie popup. Needs to take at least 20 seconds and reload the page

And ads should load later so if you try to click a link the whole page content jumps down when you click and you click the ad instead of the link.

And my Laptop fan wasn't spinning up with all those Ads. And web page scrolling started to jank.

I was about to say it needs about 7 or 8 additional ads inserted into the text of the article. Ideally they would load at random times and displace text out of the way as you're trying to read so you keep losing your place.

Also, the article itself is clickbaity garbage that you resent yourself for clicking into in the first place.

Needs more `await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, t));`

and the "no" button on the cookie prompt didn't open another page with 50 radio inputs, and an intentionally oddly placed reject all (or none at all)

Those giant dynamic headers are the worst. If you try to save the page to PDF, those headers will block the content at the top of the page.

I've taken to using the element zapper on Ublock Origin to remove them. Sometimes I worry that it'll break the navigation, but then again I rarely come back to sites like those.

> [EDIT] I think I figured out the main difference: this lets me imagine that more than 10% of the "content" isn't also SEO garbage, and has actual value.

Yup. I think the author forgot to color the main article text, and to label it "also an ad".

How about a "Find everything you needed?" popover that appears near the top when you move your cursor up to the tab bar to close the tab?

In real life, the news article is actually a PR release written entirely by a PR company and fed to some low-level staffer (because actual journalism is expensive and nobody can even tell that this is happening)

You can make a bookmark called "Kill Sticky" or something and put this in it [1]:

  javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()

It will delete any fixed headers and footers on your current page.

[1]:https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

Those headers are a biscuit(<-euphemism).

So you're basically telling us they do it to make money, and they're not wrong, it works to make money? I don't think that actually comes as a shock to anyone!

My favorite scene in the movie Sorry To Bother You:

- See? It's all just a big misunderstanding.

- This ain't no fucking misunderstanding, man! So, you making half-human, half-horse fucking things so you can make more money?

- Yeah, basically. I just didn't want you to think I was crazy. That I was doing this for no reason. Because this isn't irrational.

- Oh. Cool. Alright. Cool. No, I understand. I just I just got to leave now, man. So, please get the fuck out of my way.

A/B testing seems very greedy in practice -- even in the purely economic sense (not in the user satisfaction sense).

For example, say you "A/B tested" product pricing naively. I would expect demand to have a momentum component. If you set your prices to a large value abruptly, you will probably keep getting a similar sales rate for a while, until demand starts dropping over long term (could be years for all I know -- enough time for most opinions around information sources to have shifted, for example). Compare this to a strategy like Optimal Pricing[1] based on more refined methods.

Overall, I can locate at least 3 large scale problems here:

(1) Short term behavior of websites (maximizing ads, poor experience)

(2) Poor industrial coordination: surely this practice brings the entire (web) industry down. If most of what you see is plagued by ads and infinite popups, you will seek alternatives.

(3) Regulation failure. Sometimes even industrial coordination is insufficient, because joint efforts are still limited to a single domain, and not all of society. In this case usually regulation is necessary.

Privacy is great and all, but clicking a cookie disclaimer for every website seems such unnecessary friction. Most inexperienced users I've met did not know what cookies meant and couldn't make the privacy-convenience decision effectively.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand#Opt...

I have not worked in any company doing ab tests like that, it is always base vs variant. Option 1 vs option 2/3 and then if the feature wins, you can try option 2 vs option 3, if not they would scrap it, or blame it on the implementation and keep retrying until they either get false positive, or survivor bias makes it positive.

I am not defending it as I also believe that ab tests ruin the web, but if anyone does option2/3 at start they are not doing AB test at all.

This is why I cringe every time when I hear about "data-centric approaches". Data-centric gives you this.

> If you had offered me a rating pop-up, you would have been the first one I ever use (and gave 5 stars to).

I've recently started to. For example, just last week, my telco's app (that I use because it's the least-hassle way to pay my phone/Internet bills) got 2 stars on Google Play Store, with a comment explaining that the app is fine, except slowish, and constantly nags about rating it on the Play Store.

>Thank you for doing this! I wish I could send the link to almost every organization whose web sites I have had to endure.

Yeah I almost wonder how many of the people responsible for the final UX actually experienced it themselves. Not some debug or dev mode, but what the end user actually deals with. Would they tolerate it? Then how does this stuff persist?

- Needs a CTA interruption that triggers when you move your mouse upwards to navigate back or close the tab.

- Social Share buttons served by a third party script loaded with trackers. Bonus points if they include the usually pathetic number of likes and retweets.

I almost cried when the "Leave Site?" alert popped up

- CAPTCHA

- cloudflare redirections

- Affiliate links to Amazon

... to read a minimally informative article.

Great sleuthing!

Indeed. We can only hope this is an intentional self-referential joke.

I allowed scripts from cdn.jsdeliver.net and that was enough to get it going. Way less painful than getting an embedded third party video widget working.

As someone who used to work for one of those companies selling a « support chat » platform, no, they don’t.

The marketing and sales departments never targeted the editorial/dev team of a website/company but directly the sales department or an upper management department of the potential new customer.

Chances are that the developers of those websites have to suffer those bullshit integrations as much as you do. And they also are asked to integrate them.

As long as there is an actual live person who can help me behind that chat I actually appreciate it.

I used the chat solution of my broadband provider just a couple of weeks ago and it was a really good experience.

Also, as a former support technician I far prefer text from both sides of the table.

A website is a tool, a means to an end. The purpose of chat popups or feedback forms is to further a business goal, not to increase the website's usability.

I visited a retailer's website recently and wanted to use what I thought was a text-chat popover thing to ask a question about stock availability. Once I clicked it, it asked for permission to access my microphone -- err, what? -- when I denied it, I got a chiding message telling me to enable microphone access so I could speak my question, so that some salesperson could listen to it and send me a reply email within the next business day answering my question.

Ridiculous.

Hmm, when I was working on one of these customer facing websites the support popup was quite literally directly connected to me (very small company) until we integrated it with the real support system (still just me and one or two other people).

Very often, they do not, especially if the site creators are not a part of their own target demographic

Web 2.0 included cool stuff like Flash. The real culprit here is Google AdSense. A few sites made a ton of money, and then it became the entire business model for "new media" companies that in turn loaded up search results with SEO-optimized listicle garbage.

... immediately overwriting the URL in your address bar, so at the very moment you're most likely to share or bookmark the article you've just read, you can't.

On Bloomberg Opinion, this extra article used to always count as one of my 10 free ones, too.

The auto playing videos that are not related to the content of the article are, perhaps, the most baffling thing for me. I open an article and watch a video for a minute trying to understand the point - to only then realize that the video is unrelated. What’s the point of this? In most cases I close the website and add it to my blocklist.

Yup, and it has a close button that conveniently appears right beneath the scrollbar.

I feel like we're going full circle to having web rings again.

Go ahead and ruin it for me. I got as far as a fake article with two giant text boxes that couldn't be closed and had non-working send/submit buttons. If anything exists past this, it isn't loading for me.

same :) came here to see if anyone else had commented on it

Same, literally laughed out loud.

This sounds more like Brave's shtick, but I agree. I'd love to have a couple of symbols that warned of paywalls, ad/content ratio, cookie consent, etc.

the worst is video players without separate audio control.

Is it just me or has Youtube screwed something up here? About 1/3rd chance that the back button doesn't do anything on the last Youtube page in Safari.

Wait, can any webdevs explain a legitimate use for these features? Because my (admittedly uninformed) mind can only think of bad uses...

> So now someone tell me why we get such sites?

People posting on HN usually work on web applications. Those don't need to serve ads because somebody is already paying for the service provided (e.g. Netflix, Salesforce, JIRA).

Similarly, they don't serve annoying email popups because every user is already logged in, and their email is already known. A random website you came across while searching for X, doesn't have that luxury.

So they can afford to talk about bad UX elsewhere, because their websites don't have to compromise on UX to make money.

Web developers get zero say in all this. I've been in the room when developers - and UX people - call out this crap. After all, regardless of the user experience, adding all the popups and analytics garbage and whatnot makes developers' jobs much harder.

And every single time, they are overruled.

It's the business that doesn't care about you, not the developers.

Check Gemini network. Far from being the network that will replace the web (and that’s not even a goal), it’s really… interesting.

The current state exists because the web can't be monetized without it. How is Gemini different? Who will make content for free?

I did something along those lines as a proof of concept, seeded with links harvested from this site.

http://kakapo.susa.net:8080/cfs/

A similar (and in my opinion more viable) approach is Marginalia Search. This down-scores pages with a large number of scripts, among other heuristics.

https://search.marginalia.nu/

wiby.me is an interesting one.

Because maintaining web sites and services cost money. And making money on the web is still non-trivial. That’s because the only way to make money is either by the subscription model or by the add revenue model. Since nobody likes to pay for many subscriptions in parallel, the add revenue model is the dominating one.

If there was an easy micro-payment solution on the web this could make it more accessible and enjoyable again. This what the web3 movement is all about: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-web3.

With in-browser cryptographic wallets like Metamask, Ethereum‘s proposed token economy and the current generation of „Dapps“ we got quite a bit closer to that vision. Web3 has the added benefit to eradicate the need for password managers because your public key becomes your identity.

Money.

The web was great until someone said "I love this, but how do we make money with it?"

VC-backed companies like Buzzfeed have made serious ad money peddling the lowest-brow "content" possible (excl. Buzzfeed News, which came later). They in turn attracted numerous entrants like Vox, Mic.com and a bunch of others. Together they've compiled quite the SEO landfill.

At most companies? No. The vast majority of data siphoned isn't being actioned upon by most systems. The more mature data driven organizations will have multiple teams between data and marketing to ensure it is business ready which is code for getting rid of the shit data.

Actual content was above the fold, it's already better than many websites.

Do you have uBlock Origin enabled by any chance?

Would you care to share some useful extensions for these problems?

And I looked in the console messages, expecting to see a lil' easter egg or something, but instead I see `Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-S8P17EH...”.`. Extra realism!

A static ad wouldn't be nearly as bad as a "audience-targeted" ad that's dynamically served several seconds after the page loads, reflowing the entire layout and causing page jank.

For example, I know that every issue of the Economist is going to have an ad for a luxury watch I will never buy on the inside cover. I have full-on banner blindness to that. That's impossible on display ads that are dynamically placed right in the middle of the article body.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=4e530344963049 take a break.

Ah, I was wondering If I was supposed to see something else there… Really though, that extension (coupled with Privacy Badger) has made it so much less frustrating to browse the net.

That's about the traditional ratio of the adverts-to-newshole in newspapers.

In the past few years, the (very much suffering) principle local daily began falling far below this level. During the first wave of COVID-19, there were days with virtually no advertising at all.

On the one hand, that made for less distraction. But knowing that ad revenue is the mainstay of newspaper revenues, it was terrifying. The bleeding has continued, and the household eventually cancelled its subscription (something I'd long advocated for).

As per new trend even the content is advertisement

I'm using Brave and the whole website is annoying.

it really doesn't

I'm honestly liking it.

When Youtube started showing ads for me I just stopped binge-watching videos on the site, and started using YouTube-dl and watching everything offline.

I added those paywall sites to my hosts file block, I just don't care anymore. I already block everything from Facebook/Instagram, and I'm about to do the same with Twitter. My whole family and friend circle only really use WhatsApp/Telegram anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Those things reduced my screen time a lot and I honestly find it healthy.

uBO and sponsorblock work for me. Have you updated your lists? On my phone I use NewPipe+SB. I use privacy redirect to go to nitter.

reddit req

Agreed, I'm especially fond of uMatrix lately for firefox.