Ublock Origin kills the popover and the auto-play video, but the site also appears to be blank outside of the first paragraph of the article.

I also closed the tab immediately.

There is only one paragraph. The page is a just a holder for the video.

Firefox Tracking Protection blocked most everything on the page all by itself, even the content.

I'm just using Firefox, no add-ons, no pihole, and I only get one paragraph.

You'll find it easier to just watch the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k88Cu5SoABg

Changed above from https://www.businessinsider.com/why-pine-nuts-are-so-expensi.... Thanks!

I've been having a very good experience using Safari with "Stop auto-play" turned on, and the AdGuard extension installed.

You can enable search ads, self-promotion, and other non-obtrusive advertising in the "Other" category, but it continues to successfully block the nasty ads, including the anti-adblocker popups.

Recommended.

Didn't happen whith hosts-based AB. Also no autoplay. Had to explicitely click on the play button in the middle of the still frame.

Besides that it looked like about 3 pages of empty white space, which I scrolled through to find the missing article.

Complaining about website layouts and design is against HN guidelines.

This is an important issue that goes beyond layout and design. When active elements of a web site generate extreme distractions or lock up the browser or even the entire computer then not only is that site largely unusable with the content being unreadable but it also impacts any other use or application of the computer. This is a serious problem which has been growing worse over time with the bulking up of web content and proliferation of trackers and aggressive promotions.

It makes sense that many resort to ad and script blockers of various sorts, but it is also pretty clear that this has led to escalation and competition. Instead of being confident that powerful machines and blockers can solve this we need to find some way of taming the problem that ordinary people with ordinary browsers and configurations and machines can use to navigate the web and access content while retaining basic control of their attention, their browser, and their machines that they own.

I completely agree with you. Such comments are still against the site's guidelines.

Then you are not agreeing with me at all. In my opinion these issues have to do primarily with the out of control scale and scripting of modern sites. Scale and scripting has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with layout and graphical design which is the target of the site guidelines. Reasonable people can differ but let us be clear about the lines we are both drawing.

Why? Because the people responsible for the abusive website might see the complaints and be offended?

Personally I'd prefer a warning about sites that pull the things like what this one does. I see that people are already warning about PDF files, some other similar warning about autoplay that can't be easily stopped would be nice for office environments.

I didn't know it was against guidelines. Often I'll come to the comments to see things like links to web archive to get a better or working link to contents. Comments are helpful, don't know why such a thing would be against guidelines.

Edit; a number of other comments are listed here about blockers etc etc. Maybe it would make more sense to not post sites that pull stuff like this at all?

>Please don't complain about website formatting...

>They're too common to be interesting.

>Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.