Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you

They did not mention --

Text littered with hyperlinks on every sentence. Hyperlinks that do on-hover gimmicks like load previews or charts. Emojis or other distracting graphics (like stock ticker symbols and price indicators GOOG +7%) littered among the text.

Backgrounds and images that change with scrolling.

Popups asking to allow the website to send you notifications.

Page footers that are two pages high with 200 links.

Fine print and copyright legalese.

Cookie policy banners that have multiple confusing options and list of 1000 affiliate third parties.

Traditional banner and text ads.

Many other dark patterns.

> Hyperlinks that do on-hover gimmicks like load previews or charts.

I haven't seen one that shows charts, but I gotta admit, I miss the hover preview when not reading wikipedia.

Another: "Related" interstitial elements scattered within an article.

Fucking NPR now has ~2--6 "Related" links between paragraphs of a story. I frequently read the site via w3m, and yes, will load the rendered buffer in vim (<esc>-e) to delete those when reading an article.

I don't know if it's oversensitisation or progressive cognitive decline, but even quite modest distracting cruft is increasingly intolerable.

If you truly have related stories, pile them at the end of the article, and put in some goddamned microcontent (title, description, publication date) for the article.

As I've mentioned previously, my "cnn-sanify" script which strips story links and headlines from CNN's own "lite" page, and restructures those into section-organised, time-sorted presentation. Mostly for reading from the shell, though I can dump the rendered file locally and read it in a GUI browser as well.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535359>

My biggest disappointment: CNN's article selection is pretty poor. I'd recently checked against 719 stories collected since ~18 December 2024, and of the 111 "US" stories, 54% are relatively mundane crime. Substantive stories are the exception.

(The sense that few of the headlines really were significant was a large part of why I'd written the organisation script in the first place.)

Something else that should absolutely be a browser-native feature rather than one each site has to optionally invent poorly and/or inconsistently.

Agreed, as long as it can be turned off by user on the browser, and doing so does not break the site / ux.

> Text littered with hyperlinks on every sentence.

This is the biggest hassle associated with reading articles online. I'm never going to click on those links because:

- the linked anchor text says nothing about the website it's linking to - the link shows a 404 (common with articles 2+ years old) - the link is probably paywalled

Very annoying that article writing guidelines are unchanges from the 2000s where linkrot and paywalls were almost unheard of.

I really appreciate hyperlinks that serve as citations, like “here’s some prior art to back up what I’m saying,” or that explain some joke, reference, jargon, etc. that the reader might not be familiar with, but unfortunately a lot of sites don’t use them that way.

> put in some goddamned microcontent (title, description, publication date) for the article

Do you mean metadata?

Blink-based browsers have a built-in link preview in a popup which you can turn on.

It's native in Safari

No. Microcontent, a copywriting concept, not an information architecture one.

"Well-written, short text fragments presented out of supporting context can provide valuable information and nudge web users toward a desired action."

<https://www.nngroup.com/articles/microcontent-how-to-write-h...>

And the interstitials tend to break reader mode.

See also HTML microformats: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/microforma...

Use their text mode site:

https://text.npr.org/

That's actually what I'm referring to.

Go ahead and load that up, then start reading articles.

From the current headline set, there's "FBI says suspect in New Orleans attack twice visited the city to conduct surveillance"

<https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5249046>

That has three occurrences of:

  Related Story: NPR

Which is specifically what I was criticising.

A fascinating and useful concept, but not what I'm referring to.

Microformats are more a semantic-web type thing. I'm talking of information presented to a non-technical reader through the browser.

> Fucking NPR now has ~2--6 "Related" links between paragraphs of a story.

Some sites even have media, like videos or photo carousels in or before an article, the content of which isn't related to the article at all. So you get this weird page where you're reading an article, but other content is mixed in around each paragraph, so you have no idea what belongs where.

Then add to that all ads and references to other sections of "top stories" and the page becomes effectively unreadable without reader mode. You then left with so little content that you start questioning if you're missing important content or media.... You're normally not.

I don't believe that these pages are meant for human consumption.

Indeed, they is as though they don't want you to read the content they spend their whole professional life writing, just click on it...

IIRC, suck.com did this really well.

It can be done tastefully. I think this commenter is talking about the brief period where it was fashionable to install plugins or code on your site that mindlessly slaps "helpful" tooltips on random strings. I always assumed it was some AdSense program or SEO that gave you some revinue or good boy Google points for the number of external links on a page.

In the modern day we've come full circle. Jira uses AI to scan your tickets for non-English strings of letters and hallucinates a definition for the acronym it thinks it means, complete with a bogus "reference" to one of your documents that doesn't mention the subject. They also have RAINBOW underlines so it's impossible to ignore.

Case in point: in the Tom's Hardware article about AMD's Strix Halo (1), there's this sentence:

> AMD says this delivers groundbreaking capabilities for thin-and-light laptops and mini workstations, particularly in AI workloads. The company also shared plenty of gaming and content creation _benchmarks_. (emphasis mine)

I clicked on "benchmarks", expecting to see some, well, benchmarks for the new CPU, hoping to see some games like Cyberpunk that I might want to play. But no, it links to /tag/benchmark.

1: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-beastly...

Those are placed on the side in the full version of the site (presumably using some styling that can't be rendered in text). The side article title is there, along with a photo.

(I gave up on any sort of "text mode" of a site a long time ago)