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Comment by port11 | Hacker News Reader

Reddit might be worse, actually, given their app is mediocre at best and they killed 3rd-party apps.

In the last couple months if you go to their site in a mobile browser (e.g. from search results), after a short scroll down they have this popup demanding you install their app and it completely takes over the screen. I take it as a reminder never to install their app.

I thought I'd be clever and use iOS's "Hide Distracting Items" to get rid of elements like that. But reddit kills the scroll, too, so even after the dickover[0] is gone the page is still non-functional. Nothing says, "we don't want your business" like a non-functional web page, which seems like a bad move unless you're selling food or potable water. 'cuz I get along just fine w/o reddit.

[0] https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

I've been trying to figure out for years how to keep specific bits of Javascript like that from triggering. But so many modern webpages are procedurally generated messes born from frameworks that I can't reliably track down a way to do it. On Reddit for example there's reddit.com, redd.it, redditstatic.com, and cdn-apple.com that are all subdomains that load on the page, and each pull Javascript from dozens of different sources. If you disable Javascript entirely the page won't load and instead nags you to enable it. I don't want to go digging through the page inspector in my dev console just to track down which .js file is causing that, and then figure out how to only stop it from killing the scrollbar. If you can even do that. Some pages are so labyrinthine that you can't.

I'm sure there must be something on https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Resources-Library but I've still not really been able to make sense/use of these rules much. At this point blocking certain things in js universally seems kind of impossible now that everything is webpack-chunked with random names or hidden in react context that seems inaccessible.

But I think this css rule covers many simple cases

    html[style*="overflow:hidden"], html[style*="overflow: hidden"]
    {
        overflow: auto !important;
    }

Many websites might be broken, but I’d like a toggle to disable listening for scroll events. And no overflow overrides on major and screen-wide elements.

> 'cuz I get along just fine w/o reddit.

Killing xcancel and nitter was an awesome callout that I was again spending too much time on social media, even if logged out. Back to my cave.

Reddit does have great communities, and can be useful even when you’re logged out.

Making their website really crappy does mean I use it, like, 15 minutes a week, as opposed to 1h/day on Apollo. It’s indeed a positive.

I use various bookmarklets to address this issue. The javascript is easy enough that you can modify it even if you're not a programmer. For example see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43488943

“Oh, you were busy reading this content created by the community? Please stop doing that and download our app instead.

Surely it wasn’t important and you’ll harbour no ill-feelings about this whatsoever, John in Marketing needs a promotion and his KPIs are down.”

It's the worst on iPhone, because it won't even let me scroll back up to show the button to open the tabs view, I have to switch out of the browser and re-open it to be able to scroll to show.

I think you can just tap the tab bar to bring the controls back. Works for me on whatever iOS this is before “Lucas would be proud with this numbering” 26.

Yikes, that shouldn't be possible.

Maybe you can two-finger pinch to shrink the web page to the grid view, then close the page from there?

Ublock origin on Firefox has an option to disable this which is nice.

Also they disabled old.reddit without login pretty recently. Which sucks, so I guess no more reddit boards for my debugging.

Safari on iOS 27 lets you design custom personal browser extensions and customizations just by writing out what you want.

This sounds cool at first but I think I really want vetted, up-to-date, edge-case-covered community extensions. You know, like we already have without arTiFicIAl ‘inteligence’.

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