Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you

this is exactly the sort of idealistic post that appeals to HN and nobody else. i dont have a problem with that apart from when technologists try to take these "back to basics" stuff to shame the substacks and the company blogs out there that have to be more powered by economics than by personal passion.

its -obvious- things are mostly "better"/can be less "annoying" when money/resources are not a concern. i too would like to spend all my time in a world with no scarcity.

the engineering challenge is finding alignments where "better for reader" overlaps with "better for writer" - as google did with doubleclick back in the day.

To me, it seems like basically everything on this page is both better for reader and better for writer. Which ones are not, in your opinion?

The author isn't trying to profit from the reader's attention; it's just a personal blog. An ad-based business would. Neither is right or wrong, but the latter is distinctly annoying.

All the tracking stuff is better for advertisers than going without, and most writers are paid by advertisers. So transitively it would be reasonable to say that tracking is good for writers and bad for readers.

People oversell this tracking/advertising. It's not a goldmine for every site. For this blog, if she wanted to include analytics into her decision about what content to produce, does she really need super high resolution stuff like where people moved their mouse? Would she ever make a significant income from these "ads", or selling the data for possibly pennies?

Besides, just google analytics or something like that wouldn't be that bad (I know the blog author would disagree). A lot of sites go nuts and have like 20 different trackers that probably track the same things. People just tack stuff on, YAGNI be damned, that's a big part of the problem and it's a net drain on both parties.

Ad-based businesses are indeed wrong and immoral.

This actually appeals to everyone. There are words and people can read them. It literally just works. With zero friction. This is peak engineering. It's how the web is supposed to work. It is objectively better. For everyone. Everyone except advertisers.

The only problem to be solved here is the fact advertisers are the ones paying the people who make web pages. They're the ones distorting the web into engagement maximizing content consumption platforms like television.

The words are nice and all, but it's no https://ciechanow.ski/

Most people don't remember, and some have never experienced, the Internet before it became a money grab.

I think a lot of people outside of HN would prefer that Internet way more than what we have now.

The Web has been a money grab since Netscape was went public in 1995.

My first for pay project was enhancing a Gopher server in 1993.

The nice thing about your example is that it works even in eww (emacs), and quite well (not the JS part, of course).

Substack's UI is fairly minimal and does not appear to have many anti-patterns. My only complaint is that it is not easy to see just the people I am subscribed to.

Ad-based businesses exist because a lot of people (including many on this forum) refuse to pay for anything. During the late 1990s/early 2000s, people hated paying for anything and demanded that everything on the Internet should be free. Well, that led to the vast surveillance machine which powers Google, Facebook, and every ad-tech business out there. They need surveillance because it lets them serve more relevant ads and more relevant ads make more money.

The bottom line is if you hate ad-based businesses, start paying for things.

Yes, it’s the individuals’ fault. Google, FB, and the rest need to spy on us! I feel just awful for those poor companies.

No. If your business model requires you to do evil things, your business should not exist.

Anyway, I do pay for services that provide value. I was a paying Kagi customer until recently, for example (not thrilled with the direction things are going there now though).

Does this work? Which paid platform doesn’t eventually start showing ads to paid users?

What is the direction that things are going at Kagi now? What were they before?

Substack disable zooming on mobile and I hate it.

Substack fails on several points for me.

On the first or second page view of any particular blog, the platform likes to greet you with a modal dialog to subscribe to the newsletter, and you have to find and click the "No thanks" text to continue.

Once you're on a page with text content, the header bar disappears when you scroll downward but reappears when you scroll upward. I scroll a lot - in both directions - because I skim and jump around, not reading in a rigidly linear way. My scrolling behavior is perfectly fine on static/traditional pages. It interacts badly with Substack's "smart" header bar, whose animation constantly grabs my attention, and also it hides the text at the top of the page - which might be the very text I wanted to read if it wasn't being covered up by the "smart" header bar.

All the AI shit, plus this

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_ka...

Really? I can still zoom in and out in the normal way on a Substack article on Safari and iOS.

What did they disable exactly?

A personal take is that ad-based businesses exist because there’s no secure widespread reliable approach for micropayments (yet?).

The mean value of adverts on a page is in the order of a tiny fraction of a cent per reader, which is presumably enough for the businesses that continue to exist online. If it was possible to pay this amount directly instead, and have an ad-free experience, I suspect many would do so, as the cumulative amount would usually be negligible. Yet so far, no-one’s figured it out.

(I should mention, there are very strong reasons why it’s difficult to figure out currently, but AIUI these are rooted in the current setup of global payments and risk management by credit card companies.)

Pinboard is the obvious example that springs to mind.

I see the zoom-breaking on android. I also see the top and bottom dick bars, a newsletter popup on every article, and links opening in new windows.

Some people making money on the Internet is a lot different than what the Internet has become today - and what I meant by money grab.

You do remember the entire dot com boom and bust, the punch the monkey banner ads, X11 pop under ads, etc?

Don’t romanticize the early internet.

Product development disagreements are largely immaterial to me, though the discussion around their integrations with Yandex remind me of prior discussions around their integrations with Brave.

Either way, thanks for sharing.

Netflix does $30B in revenue. Spotify over $10B. Steam estimated around $10B. Those are are services where anyone could figure out how to get the stuff for free with a few minutes of research. People pay when they perceive value.

A better way to characterize what's happening is that there is a lot of material out there that no one would ever pay for, so those companies instead try to get people's attention and then sell it.

Their bait never was and never will be worth anything. People aren't "paying with ads"; they're being baited into receiving malware, and a different group of people pay for that malware delivery.

Doesn't substack nag you to log in? That's a non-starter for me

>They need surveillance because it lets them serve more relevant ads and more relevant ads make more money.

Don't they have enough money?

I pay for things, but often there is no option to pay. When there is, eventually the company figures out that they can have you pay AND show you ads. Then the argument becomes "well if they opt not to have ads, you should pay more for the privilege."

But no matter the cost of a thing, you can always "make more" by adding ads and keeping the cost as is. So eventually, every service seems to decide that, well, you DESERVE the ads, even if you pay.

Sure, competition could solve this, but often there isn't any.

Substack absolutely refuses to stop emailing you. It's simply not possible to subscribe to paid content and NOT have them either email you or force push notifications. Enough people have complained about this that it's pretty obvious this is intentional on their part.

Flattr 2.0 (and Brave ?) got pretty close.

I lived through the early internet, and by and large you didn’t come across much page-view monetization or engagement-maximization tactics.

Oh man. Pop under ads. Those sucked. I’d still take the old Internet with pop under ads over what we have today.

> appeals to HN and nobody else

Your argument is that writers do this because of "economics", but to the detriment of readers. I don't see how this extends only to HN readers. It applies to all readers in general.

> just google analytics or something like that wouldn't be that bad

Google Analytics is the worse. Not on an individual website but by the fact it is almost everywhere. So Google has been getting everyone's web history since more than a decade.

Add Android, gmail, the social "share" or "login with" integrations and any Stasi member would have called you delirious for thinking this kind of surveillance apparatus was possible. Even more that people would willingly accept it.

Let's be real. If you have a website were you are trying to sell something to your page visitors (not ad clicks or referral links), then each of these annoyances and hurdles increase the risk that a potential customer backs out of it.

If you give great customer service, you get great customers – and they don't mind paying a premium.

If you're coercing customers, then you get bad customers – and they are much more likely to give you trouble later.

Most business owners are your run of the mill dimwits, because we live in a global feudal economic system – and owning a business doesn't mean you are great at sales or have any special knowledge in your business domain. It usually just means you got an inheritance or that you have the social standing to be granted a loan.

Is there anything that indicates that customers want micropayments?

Music and video streaming services are syndicating content from millions of creators into single subscription services. Why is it so impossible to make mega conglomerates for textual content? Why is nobody doing this?

Right now, creators are forced to make YouTube videos, because that's their most viable path to getting paid for their work. Why does it have to be this way, when a lot of what they do would be better as text instead of as a talking head?

I mostly agree with this. Commercial websites probably should track engagement and try to increase it. They should probably use secure http. They probably should not care about supporting browsers without JS. If they need sign in then signing in with Google is useful. There's no harm in having buttons to share on social media if that will help you commercially.

Where I think the post hits on something real is the horrible UI patterns. Those floating bars, weird scroll windows, moving elements that follow you around the site. I don't believe these have been AB tested and shown to increase engagement. Those things are going to lose you customers. I genuinely don't understand why people do this.

People won't pay for things they can get free elsewhere. People happily pay for differentiated goods.

What do you call banner ads?

Banner ads back then were more obnoxious. Today they are deceptive.

The point being made here is that it wasn’t perfect before but for many it was better.

You do remember the punch the monkey ads that were just an animated gif that you could click anywhere and “win”. They were an early form of engagement bait.

There were unscrupulous people posting on Usenet for monetary gain before the web

I reject that idea, simply because companies will then offer microservice access and STILL put ads on them. Sure, youtube and spotify will disable them for you. But for every one of those we have a netflix and its dark side cohort.

Interesting question.

I guess the truth is that the large subscription 'streaming' services (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, etc.) are effectively micropayment systems, just not quite as transparent and/or direct as the concept I'd envisioned.

As to why there's no 'Spotify for newspapers/magazines/blogs', I don't know. We're definitely not the first to consider the question. Maybe the economics (too few customers?) doesn't make sense? Maybe there's resistance to it amongst socially- and politically-connected owners and journalists who like their position in society? Maybe because it would presumably require centralisation (in terms of where and how it was consumed, akin to using the Spotify app to listen to music) and ultimately commoditisation of the media? Maybe the modern drift away from reading and longer-form media makes it unattractive, leading to a quality drift to the bottom?

Fair point, as seen with Netflix and Amazon Prime video.