Comment by SunshineTheCat
1 day ago
I feel like the worst offenders of this are pretty much every mainstream news website.
A little while back I visited one of the bigger ones without my ad blocker on and it was completely unusable. Autoplay videos, banners, ads between every paragraph of the article, sponsored links, popups, and the list goes on.
If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
Oh hi, I noticed you closed the live video window I opened up, let me open that up again for you.
Oh, looks like you closed that live video window again, let me get that back up for you again.
Ooops, looks like your clumsy fingers accidentally closed that live video again, let me just get that opened back up for you.
Also: Oh, you scrolled past that live video and even clicked it away. Let’s make it sticky on the top of the page and auto start again with audio on full volume. And hide the stop button.
Seriously, I've seen videos that cannot be closed without zapper mode as far as I can tell
This generalizes to "Oh, I see you're running JavaScript. Let me harass you in all the ways I can think of until you relent and act according to my will instead of your own".
... and should be treated with exactly the amount of respect or deference it would be in real life -- avoid (don't follow links to sketchy sites), de-escalate or ignore (close the tab and walk away), or defend (block JavaScript).
You’re missing the asinine part of the initial popups: oh hi, I noticed you blocked video autoplay, let me force you to click on something (anything, any page interaction) so the browser will let me play the video.
They don't care about return visitors or "loyal viewers."
It's a shotgun strategy. Every once in a while a story will hit. So they maximize value for the rarest event.
Recently, I helped a family member getting set up with e-newspaper of a local newspaper. The deal is to get paper newspaper at the weekend and e-newspaper on working days.
When the time of the switch came, the newspaper maker/agency, whatever one calls that, fumbled hard. (1) We hadn't gotten a login or token or anything we needed to log in. (2) After calling them and getting access to the account, the subscription for the digital newspaper had not been properly set up, and we didn't have access to any newspaper online. (3) After calling again and after a while finally having access, they still hadn't managed to send us a bill for the subscription, so in their system we were non-paying customers, who wanted access... (4) The person delivering the paper newspaper still hasn't got the memo, that we should only receive the paper newspaper at the weekends.
So, with this kind of utter incompetence and disorganization, I am not surprised they are struggling to do anything in the digital realms correctly, let alone doing it well.
Local newspapers are all running on skeleton staff and that stuff is outsourced to some white-label newspaper platform provider, or imposed by their corporate owner, they don't have the resources to run their own platforms.
> If the news industry is in fact struggling and laying off writers, I'm not sure making people want to leave your site as quickly as possible is really the best strategy.
It definitely isn’t but I think it’s all they have left. Subscriptions just don’t work any more. And less tech savvy users just battle through it, presumably through gritted teeth.
I kinda see the opposite, all sites seem to be going to subscription models. Obviously it doesn't work because I'm not going to subscribe to every news site I see a link from on HN.
So I tend to use archive.ph . I wish there was a plugin to open a page in that more easily though. Luckily most HN posts have a reader contributing a link in the comments.
I've always wondered why I can't pay some small fee (20 cents? $1?) to read an article. Why it have to be an entire subscription? If I put $20 / month into an account and then spend that bit by bit on high quality articles from different sites I'd gladly do that.
13 replies →
Wish granted.
https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall
1 reply →
Declining industries can get into a death spiral where they can’t find a way to stop bleeding customers, so they focus on extracting more money from the customers who remain. Which then drives away even more of them. It’s not a good strategy, but there may not be a good strategy.
In the early 2000’s there was a porn site that completely covered you screen with porn pop-ups when you visited it. The funny joke back then was to opened it on school computer so that the poor teachers had to close them one by one (boot the PC if they were more savvy).
Today you can just open any major news site without ad blockers and effect is almost the same. There’s no porn, but it’s almost worst with the crap they open on your browser without asking. No wonder people rather get their news from social media.
GNAA Last Measure? It did a little bit more than just opening a bunch of windows and yelling "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porn" :)
I wasn’t the one opening up those sites and besides, we were teenagers. Somebody had had the great idea of placing a PC in the hallway for kids to use during breaks, so of course it was positively toxic the whole machine - I refused to go go one metre closer to it. I remember the site, or one of them, having nude women on it, so I doubt it was that one.