Hacker News Reader

Comment by mackwell | Hacker News Reader

Do the makers of sites like this know how terrible it is to try to actually read an article on them? Just tried on iOS. As you scroll, the ads load and change and throw you to a different part of the page and you lose your place repeatedly.

After about 4 times, I bailed.

View on HN

Its fine on PC with AdBlock. Possibly that's all they test. I sometimes wonder how these devs can sleep at night - random news websites. in the UK the sun or similar - unreadable nonsense auto play videos pop over ads etc etc. I imagine they start at - don't block ads somehow - your problem.

> I sometimes wonder how these devs can sleep at night

You might be surprised. I met a guy in Berkeley who lived out of a van. He told me that he ran a horrible ad distribution thing as a way to make his living. There was some fly-by-night colo or homelab setup he had to run some cheap pizza box hardware. "I'm basically always playing a game of how can I serve the most ads on this shitty CPU I have." All kinds of nasty stuff ran on his ad network, he totally didn't care.

I asked him how did he get paid and of course he received Bitcoin and other crypto. I asked him what did he usually buy with that crypto? He looked me dead in the eye and said: "coke and heroin."

Some people truly, truly, truly don't care about the consequences of their actions.

The Hearst papers uses some pretty terrible ad networks and it’s done so for years so one would have to assume it’s on purpose, like torrent tracker website ads. I only put up with it cause it’s free for now.

(Un)ironically, it's free precisely because of all of the ads and data harvesting

Also on iOS, using native content blocking and Wipr 2 w/ Wipr Extra extension. No ads.

https://kaylees.site/wipr2.html

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr-2/id1662217862

// by solo dev making this for some 15+ years now, worth supporting even if u prefer e.g. 1Blocker or AdGuard or etc.

I'll add another endorsement for Wipr 2, especially as one purchase grants adblocking on both iOS and Mac Safari.

Viewing the article in my HN reader app and there are no ads to be found. Quite a nice experience, I can't recommend Wipr enough!

This is why I use Firefox on mobile; I'm addicted to the ad-free browsing life.

It is against HN guidelines to post complaints like this. We all had the same experience reading the article; yes it sucks, but it sucks in a completely common way that has nothing to do with the unique content or why it was posted to HN.

And complaining about it here adds no substance to the conversation, nor does it do anything to fix the problem.

In the spirit of the subject of the article, perhaps view the terrible UX as a sort of difficult wilderness you have to cross in order to reach the interesting info in the article text. Take pride in your ability to forge ahead and reach your goal. :-)

Yes, against guidelines, yet, at least right now voted to the top, go figure.

Yes, exactly, it’s hard for people to resist the temptation; that’s why it is against the guidelines.

If no one engaged, it would not need to be addressed in guidelines. It just wouldn’t happen.

On most news sites, the ads are annoying and the sheer weight of the third party tracking and ad javascript make them unusable.

But I've found that a lot of news sites are bearable with javascript disabled. On chrome desktop, you can do that per site via the site settings in the location bar. On iOS, I'm using Quiche browser. It's subscription, but it can disable javascript per site and has auto dark mode functionality.

I wouldn't necessarily mind a paid browser if there were a lifetime option. Apparently you weren't kidding about subscription.

I like to just have JavaScript disabled by default, and as I encounter a site rarely that isn't usable with JavaScript, I just explicitly allow JavaScript for that domain

It's incredible to see how fresh the web feels and how much better your battery life is when you're not running a bunch of code in every tab you have open

My phone always routes through my home internet connection via wireguard. So I’m using both my home DNS resolvers ad blocking as well as uBlock origin lite on my iPhone. I see no ads on the page and it scrolls fine.

I actually got hit with a captcha before I could even read the article, and promptly clicked the back button. Sounds like it was for the best.

You saw the ads, right?

Job done. Who cares if you read the article.

Oh they know I am certain. For these sites it's a game of reload and go into airplane mode before too much crap loads.

If you haven't tried it, Reader mode in Firefox is perfect for this.

there we go - thank you.

And safari

Ads will also bring you zero-click exploits.

Just install ad blocker and js blocker on all devices.

On iOs with BlockBear and AdBlock works fine.

Have you heard of the existence of adblockers?

The article itself feels like clickbait.

Use reader. That’s what it is for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com