[tantivy]

I'm often so flustered to be interrupted by yet-another-marketing-modal that I will just close the tab and abandon whatever task, or purchase, I was undertaking. They are actively harmful to my holistic state-of-mind and make me into a more agitated and cynical user of the web.

Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?

[analogpixel]

btw, if you use https://kagi.com/ , they have a workflow for this: if you are on a site, and they popup a modal asking for you to sign up for something, you click back to the kagi.com search results, click the shield icon, and then click block. Now you'll never see that site show up again in your search results.

I've found those sites that want you to sign up for stuff usually have poor content to begin with, so this is just helping you curate out all the bad content out there.

[signal11]

Many people forget — Google once used to penalise sites with some abusive behaviours, so webmasters had a vested interest in having decent web pages if they wanted good rankings.

Somewhere along the line (when Prabhakar Raghavan was running search maybe?) that seems to have changed. Part of it might be cookie popups (thanks EU*). Part of it might be giving networks using Google’s own ad networks a free pass. In any case, webmasters had no reason to stop abusive/dark UX any more.

*This is not an anti-EU jab. It’s a jab at an inadequate technical measure. Given how many sites people visit, cookie consent popups do not provide informed consent, and further legitimise popups.

[redwall_hp]

Paywalls used to get you deranked, too. Serving different content to Googlebot than what a user would see was considered an attempt to game it, and the domain would be penalized.

[93po]

the point of the EU law wasnt to get everyone to plaster banners saying they're selling or giving away your personal info, the point was to make websites stop doing it by shaming them with the banner if they chose to continue anti-privacy behaviors.

the problem isnt the EU, it's the websites

[srdjanr]

Well if the solution doesn't work in real world, it is EU's problem

[mwarkentin]

Some have done it (repo includes links to main articles covering the process): https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-watchdog

Note: I work for sentry.

[ravikapoor101]

~Dont be evil~

During Sunday Pichai, google has become a S*t hole. He sucked up all goodwill

[thousand_nights]

sadly sometimes it's e-commerce websites where you actually want to buy their product and they interrupt you three times with "sign up to our newsletter and get 5% off with the code" modals, like they're actively trying to frustrate me into not giving them my money

[kevin_thibedeau]

It's infuriating when you click on the search box, start typing, and the modal pops up disrupting your attempt to give them money.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Back in the ‘90s and early aughts, there was a well-known book called Web Pages That Suck.

One of their biggest refrains, was “Stop interfering with your user, when they are giving you money.”

They used to regularly hold up Amazon as the platonic ideal of an e-commerce site, but even Amazon has devolved into mis-click hell. Nowadays, I often click a button that takes me to some useless page, instead of the cart.

[conductr]

They usually succeed with me. Or if I really plan on purchasing I sign up to get the discount only to immediately opt out, so what’s the point? We’ve been furnishing a new house and so getting usually ~15% off a high ticket purchase I’m already decided on buying just for giving them my email which I also already will be giving them when I purchase is a good enough deal that I’ll do it temporarily. So much so, I can only think about how is this a good ROI for them.

That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.

[losteric]

The ROI is you’re more likely to buy thinking you get a discount, and especially after doing the work to get the discount code.

The trick is it’s priced assuming that discount will be taken off.

[Freak_NL]

> That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.

I get the impression that that stupid wheel is some kind of feature of one or several large e-commerce platforms shops can enable. If the shop is genuinely stocking useful products in some niche I make it a point to e-mail them and tell them how scammy it makes their site look.

[rustystump]

It is an allusion of discount if they run those and opting out never works hr information is now stored on god knows how many servers.

They do it though because it works. Spin to win too is a total fabrication but gambling works. Just because something works doesnt mean there shouldnt be regulations against it.

[flexagoon]

> opting out never works hr information is now stored on god knows how many servers.

Just sign up for the newsletter with a disposable email to use the code. Or search for "<website name> promo codes" and the newsletter one will usually be the first result.

[rustystump]

Burner emails work but they usually send it so you need to receive it. Assuming they use a generic code searching works but often they generate the code for single use at the time the email is sent. Promo code logic can get complex.

Best way i found is to buy when there is some xyz site wide sale but even then they can be sketch and jack up prices. Philips does this with their hue lights every time. Hilarious in how obvious it is.

[TheUnhinged]

DuckDuckGo has that feature, too.

[dhosek]

They have it hidden behind a … menu though which is unfortunate because it’s a great feature to have.

[tosapple]

That is a decent feature.

Edit: if it influences their search ranking it may be able to be gamed though.

[aaplok]

Being obnoxious works well. Obnoxious people get elected to power. Obnoxious companies (and CEOs) generate hype that increases stock prices. Obnoxious youtubers call themselves influencers and make a good living out of it.

Or more charitably it is difficult to be successful without annoying many people.

[ranger_danger]

What I've seen lead to success:

* Arrogance

* Overconfidence

* Schmoozing with the right people

* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation

What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:

* Caring about teammates and your future self

* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want

* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems

It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.

Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.

[otikik]

Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer

[joquarky]

The 'con' in con-man is short for 'confidence'.

People mistake confidence for having good leadership skills.

[samiv]

Early on in my career I couldn't understand why it was always the worst and most incompetent people who got promoted.

Then I realized that it's not their incompetence that gets them promoted per se, it's that if they're employed while being utterly useless and incompetent they have SOMETHING else going on that keeps them employed.

And it's that something else (whether that is politics, brown nosing, nepotism, bullying) that also gets them promoted.

[LexiMax]

Someone I once knew put it in a slightly more charitable way.

"Having friends is a skill."

[thenthenthen]

This can applied to a lot of sectors, look at the arts and culture for example

[Bridged7756]

No, the first one thrives because they know how to play politics, the second one fails because they don't know how to play politics.

You described word for word the archetypical engineer, competent technically, incompetent politically. A liability to his team and superiors in a cut-throat corporate environment. That's why they fail, they can't be trusted to not screw their team over to do the right thing.

[zelphirkalt]

There is also the type of person, who just wants to do a good job and has passion for what they do well, but does not want to engage in silly political games. Just saying, it doesn't have to be incompetence at that.

[majorchord]

Complacency is complicity

https://tcpca.org/blog/2019/2/1/when-complacency-is-complici...

During the rise of the Third Reich, a German named Dietrich Bonhoeffer rejected the path of comfortable ignorance and valiantly chose instead to stand against the banality of evil in his land. May his words haunt the collective soul of our country:

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

[moffkalast]

Yep that sounds about right.

[collaborative]

No, you are right

[DontForgetMe]

If your definition of success includes - nay, depends on - arrogance, overconfidence, and style over substance, then it's fair to say that your definition of success differs greatly from many societies' norm.

Sure, capitalist, hyper-individualistic societies might say the most toxic, selfish companies are the most successful.

But in huge swathes of the world - I'm inclined to say most of the world - success is defined by quality, respect, the test of time, and how well one achieves one's stated objectives.

Even in UK, which is not exactly a socialist utopia, a business or company that is self-sustaining and well -regarded counts as way more successful than, say, Elon Musk or Dyson (since they sold out).

Your definition of success is like defining beauty as 'women with full lips and unlined' and wondering why so many of the most beautiful people you see have had surgery. And pushing for other definitions of beauty won't help, either. Most people define beauty as a spectrum or confluence of various factors which only tangentially relate to the 2 most obvious, currently fashionable factors like lips and wrinkles.

Or, more succinctly: if you define success as financial gain, you don't value moral factors. So of course your most esteemed companies won't either.

[BuyMyBitcoins]

There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.

One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.

[burningChrome]

Someone made a funny video about this approach with a guy at Petsmart and you hear the lady say, "Ok, just follow the prompts." and gets worse/funnier from there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDUvykJVmMU

[ocdtrekkie]

Quite true. Sundar Pichai got his start on the path to fame at Google by getting the Google Toolbar install injected into things like the Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Flash installers. Look at him now.

[jonway]

Oh man I totally forgot about that Toolbar scourge back in the day day! These trash piles were all over and everyone’s mom that I knew had like 3 or 4.

[PaulHoule]

More like 12 or 15 and you were lucky to have an 800x600 screen and so they were looking through an 800x150 viewport.

[kstrauser]

Every year, the post-Thanksgiving ritual of deleting all of them from a relative’s PC, at their request because “it’s running slow”, knowing darn well they’d re-install them within the week.

[sixtyj]

Similar people who used animated banners in '00s.

And as they don’t use Posthog or any other tool for monitoring users’ behaviour, they don’t see patterns.

Yes, websites popups, asynchronous ads or autoplay videos are such annoying that someone should come with a solution. I think that a lot of people would pay for it - e.g. collected money could be redistributed back to visited sites. (As micropayment projects weren’t successful due to transaction fees.)

I use Adblock, cookies consent autoclick, Facebook antitracker - but others must be mad as they see all popups and ads.

But I understand that sites have to have some revenue stream to pay authors…

[zelphirkalt]

There are other approaches than ads.

(1) Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.

(2) Have your small blog as a private person and shoulder the minimal cost of running a blog, if any.

(3) Have valuable content and ask people for donations, if you are not willing to shoulder it yourself.

(4) Have a community of people, who are interested in keeping things running and chipping in.

We would be better off following those approaches, than infesting everything with silly ads, which don't work anyway and are blocked by 60% or more, depending on viewership.

[LexiMax]

> Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.

And how do you suppose people find out about that product?

Like, I hate the modern ad ecosystem as much as the next person, but I also understand the abstract need for the existence of advertisements of some kind.

[zelphirkalt]

> And how do you suppose people find out about that product?

Probably by having a good website, that is easily searchable for search engines and found with the right keywords. If I have a need for something, I should be able to search in a search engine and their website should show up in the results. The results should also be specific enough to my query. If I search for some business or solution in my area, it should surface things in my area predominantly.

[sumalamana]

> Like, I hate the modern ad ecosystem as much as the next person, but I also understand the abstract need for the existence of advertisements of some kind. We used to have catalogs and yellow pages before ads were everywhere.

[BlueTemplar]

It's not just transaction fees, since Patreon succeeds while Flattr (2.0) failed.

[dpark]

1. Pop up demanding I make a choice about their cookies.

2. Pop up telling me my adblocker is bad and I should feel bad.

3. Pop up suggesting I join their club/newsletter/whatever.

Every. fucking. site.

The newsletter one is especially obnoxious because it’s always got a delay so it shows up when I’m actually trying to read something or do something.

Edit: Oh, yeah. 4. Pop up to remind me I should really be using their app.

[conductr]

Your feedback is important, Take a survey about our site… after I just got there for the first time and haven’t even seen enough content to make any worthwhile observations about the site other than “leave me alone”

[dpark]

Bonus points if they never tested this in mobile so they don’t realize (don’t care?) that they completely broke the website because the ‘X’ to close the popup was rendered offscreen and they broke scrolling so you can’t get to it.

[wolvoleo]

For the cookies you have the Consent-O-Matic plugin. For the rest Ublock Origin is pretty effective with the optional Annoyances lists switched on.

[zelphirkalt]

But Consent-O-Matic is a trap doing the wrong thing. It shouldn't be accepting everything automatically, leading to what businesses want, manufactured consent, but it should be rejecting everything. Of course that's a lot harder, because of websites engaging in illegal practices / dark patterns.

[Macha]

I believe you’re thinking of “I don’t care about cookies”, which accepts everything. Consent-o-matic goes for maximum opt out by default unless you configure it otherwise (I doubt anyone does).

Unfortunately as the opt out flow is tweaked more often than the accept all flow (as cmp vendors work to minimise opt outs), this does mean it breaks more often on sites so sometimes it fails to remove the banner

[encrypted_bird]

To be fair, the name isn't doing it any favors. "Consent-o-matic" sounds like it "automatically consents".

[zelphirkalt]

Yes, that must be it. Thank you for the correction!

[wolvoleo]

No this is not how it works. You can configure it how you want. In fact by default it denies everything because tracking is supposed to be opt-in.

The name consent-O-matic implies that you automatically give consent but this is not what it actually does. At least not unless you explicitly want to do that. Maybe not the best name for it.

[FergusArgyll]

You can choose what you want it to accept. In my settings these toggles are available.

  Preferences and Functionality
  Performance and Analytics
  Information Storage and Access
  Content selection, delivery, and reporting
  Ad selection, delivery, and reporting
  Other Purposes

Of which I only allow the first

[zelphirkalt]

It offers that? I didn't know that, thanks for correcting me, TIL. I might consider using it then.

[Marsymars]

That's not even what I generally want either - I just want cookie dialogs suppressed, nothing accepted/rejected, and cookies all thrown out once I leave the site.

[zelphirkalt]

That's what I sometimes do when a consent banner/popup/whatever seems disingenious/dishonest/illegal. I use uBlock Origin element zapper, and I hope that the element doesn't have bullshit random id/class or that its position in the document doesn't change every time I load the page. However, if a website is so broken, that those things happen, maybe it is not worth for me to visit it, and if I am breaking something by trying to block their sleazy non-conforming "consent" dialog, then that's on them and I consider their site garbage and broken.

[BuyMyBitcoins]

For a while I would put “f***[e-mail]” but then I realized no one would ever see it, and it probably just helps their click numbers.

I detest newsletter modals.

[quicklime]

I used to do that too, but now I go to my spam folder and grab the latest phishing email and use the reply-to address. I like the idea of some sales guy following up a lead with a Nigerian scammer, but sadly I’ll never see the email exchange.

[zelphirkalt]

Put such a sales person into the shoes of the Nigerian scammer, uh, I mean "prince" and they might just as well become the Nigerian scammer. It takes a specific kind of person to engage in the dark patterns stuff and be convinced of themselves doing nothing wrong.

[kstrauser]

In the days when running one’s own mailserver was the common case for small business websites, root@localhost was a fun one. “Why does this freaking thing keep filling its hard drive with our own newsletters?”

[wiml]

I used to go to the trouble of looking up the company's own sales contact or cxo or whatever and subscribing them to themselves, but now I just close the tab.

[ryandrake]

I remember in the early 2000s I started getting junk fax calls on my phone at least 4X a day. It got so annoying that I took time out of my day to get revenge. First, they made the mistake of sending it from the same number each time. So after some investigation, I identified the name of the company and even found the CEO's phone number. Unfortunately for them, I was an early VOIP adopter and it was relatively straightforward to set the PBX software to forward all calls from that number to the CEO's phone. The calls stopped happening within 48 hours.

[econ]

You forgot to sub to push.

[isodev]

It’s because they care about your privacy, they want you to know just how much their care, so much so they’re ready to show you popups /s.

[bingo-bongo]

“We care about your privacy..”

Followed by something about 1800+ companies they want to sent my data to .. :|

[mnw21cam]

No, it's "We value your privacy". That's different. That means they see your privacy as having value, and they want to extract as much of that value out of it as they possibly can.

[plagiarist]

> We and the 1600 third-parties care about your privacy.

[padjo]

I think it’s caused my data asymmetry. It’s very easy to show that x users signed up for the newsletter and to show that newsletter subscribers have a better retention rate or whatever. However it’s much harder to quantify the negative impacts, so pop ups proliferate. At least this is my experience anyway time I tried to push back against this sort of pattern.

[calvinmorrison]

I once dated a woman who had every store card, always signed up for the coupons, sign up here for free checkout, etc... and NO it did not bother her. She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery

[kogepathic]

> She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery

If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?

I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?

[josefx]

> If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?

Most discounts I run into seem to be based on incredibly inflated pricess to begin with. If a shop offers me a 20% discount on something it is often cheaper to buy it somewhere else.

[Freak_NL]

When I subscribe to these I've usually already found that either they are the only shop to carry that product, or are already the cheapest. The 10% discount is just an extra at that point.

[kevin_thibedeau]

This sort of person is a spend-a-holic. They use "sales" as an excuse to engage in unnecessary discretionary spending.

[SoftTalker]

LOL yes I had a friend who would buy stuff because it was on sale and talk about how much money he "saved." I would always ask "do you have more or less money now?"

[loloquwowndueo]

Because once they have your email and can link it to your identity via your purchase details they’re going to sell that list to some marketer sleazeball and you’ll get spam from other sources until the end of time?

[thrill]

“you’ll get spam from other sources until the end of time?”

So … ops normal?

[loloquwowndueo]

Hah you got me there.

[wat10000]

My email has been out there for 25+ years now. Filtering has been able to handle it for all but the first couple of years of that period.

[quesera]

This is true. I get arguments or indignation every time I say it, but spam is a solved problem, and has been for at least 20 years (thanks Paul!).

If you get more than "insignificantly little" spam in your inbox, you are using the wrong mail provider.

My email address is on every spam list under the sun. I get 600 spam messages per day[0], but only a few per week hit my inbox.

[0] It was 600/day before I made a small change to my mail configuration. Now it's only about 50/day which is few enough that, every month or so, I actually check for false positives. I occasionally see a low-value marketing list message that isn't technically spam in the sense of being entirely unsolicited, but content-wise it's not differentiable. Zero legitimate personal messages. I can live with this.

[lkbm]

I've signed up for plenty of these lists with per-site emails, and it's very rare for me to end up getting email from anyone but the list I signed up for. Might be different when shopping on international sites (though I doubt it's worse in the EU), but in the US, sites generally don't sell your email. More likely they'll leak it accidentally.

[mrtesthah]

Clearly the market is always efficient and optimal. This is the solution it chose.

[somerandomqaguy]

The market did choose it's most optimal. The real burning question is who's the customer.

[encom]

The Market didn't create mandatory EU-banners.

[immibis]

The market didn't create hazard warning signs - the government did. Therefore, hazard warning signs must be abolished.

[troupo]

Ah yes. The Market only created "we care about your privacy by selling your precise geolocation data to be stored for 12 years" https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541

[zelphirkalt]

EU law is not at fault here. At fault are the websites that feel the need to be so obnoxious in their behavior, that they are told to have those consent prompts for all the obnoxious shit they engage in. Basically, the EU is doing the Lord's work here, making these sites annoying, so that people might be persuaded to leave those websites. Unfortunately, the EU does not persecute harshly enough, so that all kinds of grifters do not follow the law and get away with it.

[PaulHoule]

I am tired of people making excuses for the EU. The EU has had almost a decade to respond to the numerous complaints about those cookie banners and their answer has been "talk to the hand" -- and they wonder why they are being overrun by right wing populists.

It is the worst of German "incumbents über alles" and American legalism. "Respect DNT or go to jail" would have been fair and easier to administer but Big Tech lobbyists helped design the GDPR to stifle smaller competitors who couldn't laugh at the occasional fine for malicious compliance.

[zelphirkalt]

Can you refer to some examples or procedures, that you think fit the "talk to the hand" description? I would think that upholding the law is a matter of countries and only in big cases with EU-spanning big tech being the task of EU courts. Countries however, have failed to persecute tons of websites that don't adhere to the law. But that doesn't translate to "talk to the hand". It translates to tolerating crimes and not protecting citizen rights. Which actions or inaction specifically are what you are referring to?

[array_key_first]

Because they literally can't do anything. They can't make shitheads not shitheads because there's nothing illegal about being a shithead.

It's trivial, truly trivial, to not need a cookie popup. I never put them on my website. We must then conclude that people are putting them on their website because they want to annoy users.

[troupo]

> Big Tech lobbyists helped design the GDPR to stifle smaller competitors who couldn't laugh at the occasional fine for malicious compliance

It is actually trivial to comply with GDPR for smaller companies than for incumbents simply because smaller companies don't collect and sell copious amounts of user data.

What people are tired about is "technologists" completely absolving the tech (that they are a part of) of any wrongoping in this. "Oh, the EU made these mandatory" they cry and happily impöement dark patterns to collect and indefinitely store all your data.

The only blame you can lay on EU is not enough enforcement.

[orangecat]

The only blame you can lay on EU is not enough enforcement.

That's a very big "only". Malicious compliance (and non-compliance) was an easily predictable consequence of the law, they've completely failed at responding to it, and the web is now worse as a result.

[Findecanor]

> Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?

It's the same economic model as for spam: You'd need only to get a critical number of clicks for it to become profitable.

[appreciatorBus]

At a small company I used to work for, a couple of marketing adjacent people occasionally advocated for a modal newsletter sign-up pop-up on the homepage.

Each time it came up, I would argue against it, believing that it was not only a bad experience and that people would click away, but that few people would actually sign up.

Eventually, a more assertive marketing person came on board, made the case for the pop-up, and won the argument. We added the pop-up.

The result?

I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.

To this day, I still hate it, and I hate pop-ups in general, but I try to have some humility about it. I have no doubt that my previous intransigence cost the company some business.

[hollandheese]

>I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.

You were absolutely correct that it's a bad experience, and that probably a lot of people hated it and think less of your company for doing it. But since every site behaves this way it's not a deal-breaker for people anymore. People either find a way to get around it or just suffer with the crappiness of the modern web and your metrics just go brrrrr.

[econ]

Me too!

[globalnode]

the vast majority of web users arent technical like HN readers. especially boomers, they actively solicit ad's to tell them what to buy.

[barnabee]

If it takes an ad for someone to buy something, chances are they shouldn’t buy anything.