This has already happened: Just look at how many websites pester you to download their mobile app or even block content unless you access from the app. From a user functionality perspective the vast majority of apps do nothing a browser can't do. But the killer feature for apps is how much easier it is for the developer to get your location data, contact list, and importantly show you unskippable, auto-playing, 90s-era-popup-level-annoying ads

Sometimes I wonder what keeps ad networks from becoming more aggressive. Wonder what keeps them from breaking the content and force users to disable ad blocking. Because I know it can be done.

It's probably because publishers don't want to piss users off. Or maybe it's because on mobile most clicks come from Facebook or Twitter or other apps using web views that don't do ad blocking.

The main reason content blocking works is because anyone can introspect webpages and the source is available for modification. When things become byte-compiled it gets exponentially harder, if not impossible.

On every page you navigate to from within the website you'll first get a pop up asking to choose between browser and reddit app.

Or maybe I'm just getting old :D

The new UI is terrible and barely useable. But Gen-Z is used to barely useable UX. (looking at you, Snapchat)

Heyo that's awesome! I feel ten years younger.

There's a user setting for this, somewhere. I found it once. It's default on but once you un-check it you no longer see the app nags. It's great. And terrible they hid it like that.

--edit-- Or there was, damned if I can find it now.

Snapchat is of course app only.

https://www.instagram.com/direct/inbox/

Using FF on my desktop worked fine.

Users should respond by creating an open source replacement for the official app. Surely there's a way to fool the server into thinking it's talking to the official app.

Thankfully, iOS does not represent all systems out there. Android systems allow installation of apps from any source and PCs traditionally have no limitations on which programs can be executed by the user. Better alternatives to these abusive "official" apps should be a selling point for these free systems. A perfect example of adversarial interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...

That's pretty much the entire difference. It's a difference of degree more than of kind. As I said, Javascript is making much of the web inaccessible to me, and WebAssembly, if it becomes popular, will only accelerate this loss.

Interactivity would be tricky, but static HTML is better than a blank page.

Edit: Found something very similar, but it targets legacy browsers using clickable image maps rather than privacy/security.

https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

int64

uint32

popcnt

copysign

reinterpret_cast equivalent (the js hack for this is abysmal)

pthreads

SIMD

AOT compilation

To be fair, it's been a while since I was last one of the authors of the webassembly spec, so I could be missing some things.

If ads were more expensive to purchase we'd see a lot fewer of them and they would not be as intrusive. But this ain't so and we need adblockers.

They (the advertising industry) come back with a stronger system that is harder to ad block and we retaliate with something else. What baffles me is that they don't see that we are resisting, they produce something that nobody really wants. The whole advertising industry is something questionable.

HTTP/HTML will become the next gopher, and this makes me incredibly sad

And then I'll just stop visiting. (:

Actually the issue is that the companies paying you to run the ads don't want you to host it yourself.

* They're paying for impressions, and they don't trust you to report those honestly.

* Real time bidding means the ad to be displayed often hasn't been determined until a few milliseconds before the page loads in your browser.

* They can't (as easily and reliably) collect demographic and behavioral data (ie spy on you) if you don't contact their servers directly.

I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point they decided they available needed to have some terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice.

I paid $10/mo or $10/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads. At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and users...and going off to a server adminned by me again.

If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see.

The answer to that is to disable Web Assembly, much like a lot of people disable JS. The whole idea of running other peoples code on your machine is the problem, and it baffles me that browser companies are still trying to enable more and more of this. I don't want your code running on my computer.

This future seems inevitable. The only sites you'll be able to actually use without some custom web assembly renderer will be those which don't serve ads at all now - wikis, open source projects, non profits, corporate web sites, etc. Any site funded by ad revenue will effectively remove itself from the web and into its own web assembly app instead.

We might even see the rebirth of something like AOL, a meta app that will be a portal to render content for others who want to use the platform. It might even just be an upcoming version of amp, or a new feature offered by Facebook or cloudflare...

I don't see why Webassembly should the inevitable slippery slope to the entire web becoming some kind of closed source binary-only dystopia, other than it being loosely associated with Javascript, which half of HN hates and fears to a degree bordering on mania. The FUD really needs to end already.

Not sure what you mean by that. There were plenty of sites not usable at times because of their use of java or flash.

I'm claiming that thesis is incorrect because prior methods existed and still exist to encode websites as embedded binary applications, yet ad-driven sites still primarily use HTML, and the HTML driven web still exists.

How usable sites using java and flash were isn't relevant. Either all ad-driven sites seek to maximize their control over the end user by any available means at all cost, or they don't. As they evidently don't, the slippery slope of WASM leading to the end of the free web seems unlikely.

The thesis is that WASM will be the form of HTML's destruction, not that it is the only tool capable of it.

A confluence of trend lines lead it to be "in the right place at the right time." We've already come to accept that much of the web requires javascript, if it works in Google Chrome then that's fine, and video content requires DRM blobs.

The public is ready for this, and ad-supported content providers are floundering even though the fed keeps printing money.

With how much money is spent on bogus technical solutions in the ad space with marginal or no recognizable benefit, the time is right for innovation, and WASM is arriving just in time. Just like with AMP, I'm sure WASM-AMP will be sold for its amazing performance characteristics, because the modern web is so full of trash how could it not be at least better than the status quo?

WASM isn't some uniquely horrific development, it's just the next evolution in the downward trajectory.

For the time being, you can thank the threat of an accessibility lawsuit for slowing this future down. Building a custom renderer might not be as challenging as supporting the myriad accessibility needs of disable users.

Which in turn will start a new trend of website that are "open".

It's a cycle.

Sounds like an API that will be implemented.

https://www.onely.com/blog/medium-lost-half-visibility/

Additionally, off the top of my head Bloomberg and NYT both won't allow me to view more than a few articles but let the Google crawler index their articles.

Why not? You can inject any script into a meta header on document start from an extension or do the same in an intercepting proxy.

An obligatory link to an important talk: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

The way to fight this is to work together with accessibility advocacy agencies, like the ADA.

Personally, I would prefer to browse the web in reader mode. While we're at it we could do the have the same for PDFs.

Easier said than done, of course.

For the record, I've no problem with "fair" advertising, the kind that used to appear in newspapers and magazines in the 1970s, for example. (Well, aside from its use as a virus vector.) But modern day web ads are simply abusive in too many cases.

Then, naturally, there is no dev time set aside for copy and paste, because there is no business justification.

They would need to server side render pages like a streaming game client would.

That's a bit different than a video game that was compiled only once.

So, bring it on?

Google's AMP technology aims to do this, although they will claim to have more altruistic motivations

That doesn't seem too hard to pull off. You're not trying to find objects in an image, you're trying to find near-exact matches in a digitally rendered page.

for example: people who don't have adblockers (like everyone in my family except me)

I won't visit websites with [a lot of] ads if my adblocker stops working. I'll simply stop using these websites. Just like before Netflix, I quit watching cable TV.

Thinking about it, I might as well go to Tor. Surely someone will copy/paste the plaintext content to some hidden service over there, just so the rest of us don't have to bother with ads. I might even be one of the contributors. If there is demand, there will be supply. And nobody is going to bother to "catch these copyright infringers" because nobody gets hurt, in contrast to someone selling illegal firearms or dangerous drugs.

People who don't have adblockers are willing to put up with a heck of a lot. Agreed.

But if someone is not technically sophisticated enough to use an adblocker, they're also probably not technically sophisticated enough to find the actual content on a page and just give up.

I see this fairly frequently; someone with limited computer literacy goes to a website from Google, doesn't see anything relevant immediately (because of bad UI or really bad ads), and goes back to Google. Often the site even had relevant content when I look later, they just couldn't see it because they aren't as good at parsing website content.

There are so many websites with equivalent information, if you click on one and it's just garbage at first glance I think hitting "back" is more likely than "read and click on every ad and give them your SSN before downloading their virus scanning software".

Maybe not most, for now. But there certainly exist people who do this. I do, for one.