The user-hostile design of web sites in 2021 is appalling. Even simple text articles or blog posts have become horrible. I was just reading a blog post linked from HN which featured 3 different popups: two modals and a modeless sidebar popup that follows you as you scroll.
No, I don't want to subscribe to your email newsletter.
No, I don't want to sign up for a course or webinar or some service or whatever.
No, I don't want to know more about something other than what I'm trying to read on this page while you keep interrupting me and telling me I should be doing something else.
(And that was a site that lacked the typical annoying cookie popup – maybe it actually respected the "do not track" feature? That would be a first.)
Popups were despised by users to such an extent that web browsers built in an option to block them. The sensible response to such a clear user preference would have been to abandon popups, but instead web designers came up with a way to work around the popup blocking feature by using modal javascript panes and sliding overlays to obscure the page content.
Autoplaying video was similarly viewed as obnoxious and battery draining, so web browsers built in a feature to block it; web designers responded by doing their best to defeat that feature as well, and it seems to be an ongoing arms race.
Obviously that was before 'Engagement is King', where content became second-class and Google Tag Manager empowered marketing teams to load up each page with whatever new widget or analytics or advertising system they could get their hands on.
I've been maintaining my own site and I actually enjoy building it in the most barebones way possible. It's just HTML and CSS. Any time I feel tempted to add any JS I spend the time on making a noscript equivalent as best as I can. I'd love to see a swing back to that style of web dev again (keeping it separate from web app dev).
Can't recommend it enough. There's no extension for Safari on iOS yet but it's so worth it.
The website I live from counters all of these patterns. Nothing appears above or in the content, only below it. There are no popups, no calls to actions and no GDPR notices. It's just one page of uninterrupted text. Everything else appears under the article. This has worked really well for me.
The way I see it, if your business model involves adding friction, you're doing something wrong.
Browser vendors have just given up and let mute videos autoplay because otherwise the websites would show even less efficient gif/apng/canvas animation/manual slideshows instead.
In Defense Of The Popup https://cxl.com/blog/popup-defense/ (yes, page has a popup).
1. Someone makes a good newsletter and reports high engagement
2. Anecdotes circulate in the pre-alchemy world of marketing
3. Everyone tells their boss they’ll get great engagement if they launch a newsletter, omitting the “if we do the hard part of producing good content”
4. Nobody remembers that if they’d put good content on their website people would have read it there, too.
At some point, browsers will switch strategies from mitigations to scraping.
I'd LOVE for an RSS Reader (like NetNewsWire) to prefetch the "reader view" of linked web pages. Instead of malware blockers curating zillions of filters and patches, just create scripts to scrape the top 100 websites. And then allow sharing of user supplied scrapers.
That said, it's embarrassing how many iOS extensions I have installed just to work around today's shitty websites. AdGuard to make the web usable, AMPlosion to avoid AMP nonsense, Open in Apollo to avoid mobile Reddit dark pattens, now this (which I installed because YouTube's new embed widget starts playing on touch-start instead of touch-release, so it triggers while scrolling...)