I've found those sites that want you to sign up for stuff usually have poor content to begin with, so this is just helping you curate out all the bad content out there.
You can ask claude to write you a 10 lines userscript that integrates with google/ddg/kagi/whatever is your search engine, and hides the websites from the result page.
Generally, you shouldn't do server side what you can do on client side
They do have anonimised logins for this though: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass which is a pretty good mitigation IMO. As it's a paid service of course proving you paid is a must.
And as for control, I can't agree there. Kagi offers more control than any other search engine through its lenses and the ability to influence the ranking of search results from specific sites.
I don't use their service at the moment, I'm pretty ok with my self hosted SearXNG and I like being able to customise the look and feel there too. But Kagi is excellent as search engines go.
I'm doing it for having a clean adfree experience, having multi-engine searches and having control over which engine and features it uses. And it also helps really well against search engine enshittification by raising search results higher when they're received from multiple engines so you have less of the clickbait crap that search engines promote these days.
It has some amazing features where it can search much more specific sites if you search for things like books, movies etc instead of treating everything like a general search. And everything can be tailored and tweaked.
One of their biggest refrains, was “Stop interfering with your user, when they are giving you money.”
They used to regularly hold up Amazon as the platonic ideal of an e-commerce site, but even Amazon has devolved into mis-click hell. Nowadays, I often click a button that takes me to some useless page, instead of the cart.
That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.
The trick is it’s priced assuming that discount will be taken off.
They do it though because it works. Spin to win too is a total fabrication but gambling works. Just because something works doesnt mean there shouldnt be regulations against it.
Just sign up for the newsletter with a disposable email to use the code. Or search for "<website name> promo codes" and the newsletter one will usually be the first result.
Best way i found is to buy when there is some xyz site wide sale but even then they can be sketch and jack up prices. Philips does this with their hue lights every time. Hilarious in how obvious it is.
I get the impression that that stupid wheel is some kind of feature of one or several large e-commerce platforms shops can enable. If the shop is genuinely stocking useful products in some niche I make it a point to e-mail them and tell them how scammy it makes their site look.
Edit: if it influences their search ranking it may be able to be gamed though.
Somewhere along the line (when Prabhakar Raghavan was running search maybe?) that seems to have changed. Part of it might be cookie popups (thanks EU*). Part of it might be giving networks using Google’s own ad networks a free pass. In any case, webmasters had no reason to stop abusive/dark UX any more.
*This is not an anti-EU jab. It’s a jab at an inadequate technical measure. Given how many sites people visit, cookie consent popups do not provide informed consent, and further legitimise popups.
the problem isnt the EU, it's the websites
Note: I work for sentry.
During Sunday Pichai, google has become a S*t hole. He sucked up all goodwill
Or more charitably it is difficult to be successful without annoying many people.
One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.
* Arrogance
* Overconfidence
* Schmoozing with the right people
* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation
What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:
* Caring about teammates and your future self
* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want
* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems
It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.
Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.
You described word for word the archetypical engineer, competent technically, incompetent politically. A liability to his team and superiors in a cut-throat corporate environment. That's why they fail, they can't be trusted to not screw their team over to do the right thing.
https://tcpca.org/blog/2019/2/1/when-complacency-is-complici...
During the rise of the Third Reich, a German named Dietrich Bonhoeffer rejected the path of comfortable ignorance and valiantly chose instead to stand against the banality of evil in his land. May his words haunt the collective soul of our country:
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
People mistake confidence for having good leadership skills.
Then I realized that it's not their incompetence that gets them promoted per se, it's that if they're employed while being utterly useless and incompetent they have SOMETHING else going on that keeps them employed.
And it's that something else (whether that is politics, brown nosing, nepotism, bullying) that also gets them promoted.
"Having friends is a skill."
Sure, capitalist, hyper-individualistic societies might say the most toxic, selfish companies are the most successful.
But in huge swathes of the world - I'm inclined to say most of the world - success is defined by quality, respect, the test of time, and how well one achieves one's stated objectives.
Even in UK, which is not exactly a socialist utopia, a business or company that is self-sustaining and well -regarded counts as way more successful than, say, Elon Musk or Dyson (since they sold out).
Your definition of success is like defining beauty as 'women with full lips and unlined' and wondering why so many of the most beautiful people you see have had surgery. And pushing for other definitions of beauty won't help, either. Most people define beauty as a spectrum or confluence of various factors which only tangentially relate to the 2 most obvious, currently fashionable factors like lips and wrinkles.
Or, more succinctly: if you define success as financial gain, you don't value moral factors. So of course your most esteemed companies won't either.
And as they don’t use Posthog or any other tool for monitoring users’ behaviour, they don’t see patterns.
Yes, websites popups, asynchronous ads or autoplay videos are such annoying that someone should come with a solution. I think that a lot of people would pay for it - e.g. collected money could be redistributed back to visited sites. (As micropayment projects weren’t successful due to transaction fees.)
I use Adblock, cookies consent autoclick, Facebook antitracker - but others must be mad as they see all popups and ads.
But I understand that sites have to have some revenue stream to pay authors…
(1) Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.
(2) Have your small blog as a private person and shoulder the minimal cost of running a blog, if any.
(3) Have valuable content and ask people for donations, if you are not willing to shoulder it yourself.
(4) Have a community of people, who are interested in keeping things running and chipping in.
We would be better off following those approaches, than infesting everything with silly ads, which don't work anyway and are blocked by 60% or more, depending on viewership.
And how do you suppose people find out about that product?
Like, I hate the modern ad ecosystem as much as the next person, but I also understand the abstract need for the existence of advertisements of some kind.
Probably by having a good website, that is easily searchable for search engines and found with the right keywords. If I have a need for something, I should be able to search in a search engine and their website should show up in the results. The results should also be specific enough to my query. If I search for some business or solution in my area, it should surface things in my area predominantly.
2. Pop up telling me my adblocker is bad and I should feel bad.
3. Pop up suggesting I join their club/newsletter/whatever.
Every. fucking. site.
The newsletter one is especially obnoxious because it’s always got a delay so it shows up when I’m actually trying to read something or do something.
Edit: Oh, yeah. 4. Pop up to remind me I should really be using their app.
Followed by something about 1800+ companies they want to sent my data to .. :|
I detest newsletter modals.
Preferences and Functionality
Performance and Analytics
Information Storage and Access
Content selection, delivery, and reporting
Ad selection, delivery, and reporting
Other Purposes
The name consent-O-matic implies that you automatically give consent but this is not what it actually does. At least not unless you explicitly want to do that. Maybe not the best name for it.
Unfortunately as the opt out flow is tweaked more often than the accept all flow (as cmp vendors work to minimise opt outs), this does mean it breaks more often on sites so sometimes it fails to remove the banner
If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?
I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?
So … ops normal?
If you get more than "insignificantly little" spam in your inbox, you are using the wrong mail provider.
My email address is on every spam list under the sun. I get 600 spam messages per day[0], but only a few per week hit my inbox.
[0] It was 600/day before I made a small change to my mail configuration. Now it's only about 50/day which is few enough that, every month or so, I actually check for false positives. I occasionally see a low-value marketing list message that isn't technically spam in the sense of being entirely unsolicited, but content-wise it's not differentiable. Zero legitimate personal messages. I can live with this.
Most discounts I run into seem to be based on incredibly inflated pricess to begin with. If a shop offers me a 20% discount on something it is often cheaper to buy it somewhere else.
It is the worst of German "incumbents über alles" and American legalism. "Respect DNT or go to jail" would have been fair and easier to administer but Big Tech lobbyists helped design the GDPR to stifle smaller competitors who couldn't laugh at the occasional fine for malicious compliance.
It's trivial, truly trivial, to not need a cookie popup. I never put them on my website. We must then conclude that people are putting them on their website because they want to annoy users.
It is actually trivial to comply with GDPR for smaller companies than for incumbents simply because smaller companies don't collect and sell copious amounts of user data.
What people are tired about is "technologists" completely absolving the tech (that they are a part of) of any wrongoping in this. "Oh, the EU made these mandatory" they cry and happily impöement dark patterns to collect and indefinitely store all your data.
The only blame you can lay on EU is not enough enforcement.
That's a very big "only". Malicious compliance (and non-compliance) was an easily predictable consequence of the law, they've completely failed at responding to it, and the web is now worse as a result.
Note how you, too, absolve the companies of any responsibility because it was apparently "an obvious and expected response" to a law which only asks to not track without consent.
It's the same economic model as for spam: You'd need only to get a critical number of clicks for it to become profitable.
Each time it came up, I would argue against it, believing that it was not only a bad experience and that people would click away, but that few people would actually sign up.
Eventually, a more assertive marketing person came on board, made the case for the pop-up, and won the argument. We added the pop-up.
The result?
I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
To this day, I still hate it, and I hate pop-ups in general, but I try to have some humility about it. I have no doubt that my previous intransigence cost the company some business.
You were absolutely correct that it's a bad experience, and that probably a lot of people hated it and think less of your company for doing it. But since every site behaves this way it's not a deal-breaker for people anymore. People either find a way to get around it or just suffer with the crappiness of the modern web and your metrics just go brrrrr.
Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?