I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a tracker here or there. The article uses the example of the print version of the New Yorker, as a way of how things can be. From interviews with David Remnick, the editor, I learned that it has been mostly his vision to decrease the ads in the print and making up the lost revenue by increasing the subscription fees. It’s these people we need to save the media landscape.

I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously)

but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try

we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop

I literally stopped using these websites for a long time ago. And if I run into an article with this kind of hostile design I just close the tab. No article ever worth that shit.

Granted I don’t follow news, so it’s easy for me to say maybe, but same applies other websites. If I land on hostile page (despite idea blockers) I’ll just leave it, what can be so important that can justify me to suffer through it.

Just like in the example in the article, would you eat in McDonald that treated like that? Classical case of vote with your wallet, or vote with your attention.

"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data."

Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not truly relevant to the story)

News sites are almost like lyric sites or recipe sites in this regard. The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.

Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean. I'm often not even aware that if I send a link to an article via Whatsapp or whatever, it may reflect badly on me that I send such an ad-overloaded mess to them. I just don't know the mess is there except sometimes by accident.

I watched someone getting a livestream of an important (to them) soccer game going via the sort of thing usually reserved for "adult" content - that any given click, be it "play" or "fullscreen" or whatever, has a 9/10 chance of triggering a junk popup rather than the intended action, so you play whack-a-mole until you finally get it playing, whack-a-mole again until you get fullscreen, and then for heaven's sake don't touch it any more. Whereas with the adblocker, typically it looks completely clean, with no junk popups, and every click doing exactly what it should on the first try.

Anyway so could it be that the web having turned into such ad-overloaded garbage, that even its designers have adblockers running and don't even fully realize what a mess they're publishing?

> No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.

In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville noted that American publications (unlike those from Europe) packed their pages with ads

But if I used an ad blocker, I never would have found out about Github for Lesbians!!!

Following the nested "go read this" links to the "The 49MB Web Page" page:

> Simplified versions like text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com and www.cbc.ca/lite still exist out there.

TIL, these are awesome. Not in the sense that they're a visual tour de force, obviously, but they make for an easy "hey, type this in for a second and tell me what you think" contrast, to help people realize how inconvenient the default experience has slowly become.

I worked for a startup once for a brief time.

Engineering would make tools for the sales guys to make websites. We hated those bastards because they would litter the pates with adds.

"We need revenue" they'd protest. Engineering would respond that past two ads, the revenue was too small to be worth destroying the brand.

What I got out of that was that business folks, often, don't give a shit about the product reputation on a timescale longer then their ownership of it.

It’s ironic seeing Gruber gripe about screen percentages used when his own website dedicates only about 50% of the screen width (on mobile) to content, and leaves the other half blank. Not to mention the light-grey-on-dark-grey and the tiny font.

Just as I need an ad blocker to browse the modern web, I need Reader mode to read Gruber’s rant about it.

> the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions for other shows on the same channel. Almost no one would watch such a channel.

I recently was in a 45 minutes Uber ride where the driver had the stereo set to the Sirius XM self-advertising channel - the one you get if you haven't subscribed. For 45 minutes, all he listened to was an ad for XM.

Most people just don't care.

> No print publication on the planet does this

At least in India, most popular newspapers actually do this nowadays. Several full page ads including on the front page have become the norm.

It is mostly a function of how little the reader is willing to pay for content. When the price point is too low (which for online content is too low), publishers make their money by other means. It is not rocket science.

These days, I assume every web page is actively hostile until proven otherwise. Use as many layers of protection (uBlock, PiHole, various other extensions, etc.) as possible, filter out content when possible, and bail if those don't work.

Youtube is just about the worst that I've put up with for it. Every single second it's trying desperately to inject more ads, which the blocker swiftly removes. After watching for a few minutes the block count can be in the several hundred...

> No print publication on the planet does this.

Of course they do, there are ads and unrelated articles on the same page , or, for magazines, full page ads interrupting your reading experience, or flashy callouts.

Paper is just a much more constrained technology, do they can't ruin it dynamically, not that they don't want to or somehow magically respect the reader very much for free

I was surprised at the claim that The Guardian leaves very little room for the article. Sure enough, I loaded it up in a private window with adblocks disabled and the above the fold was very obnoxious.

Which is very surprising to me. I only read The Guardian within the Tor browser, and when the website is loaded over their onion urls I do not see the same large obnoxious ads. A rare Tor win? Maybe adnetworks block Tor IP addresses and the reason why ads don't show up?

The onion url https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3...

I'm doing my small part by paying for websites that respect me in the way TFA describes. I have annual subscriptions to Defector, Brand New, and DIELINE, and I'll add more as other websites follow their lead. Maybe it'll become too much to manage one day, but it might be for other readers too, and then maybe that will pressure our card companies and banks to start providing some more useful consumer services. We need enough people to actually subscribe to these websites to make that future happen though.

Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer?

On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.)

On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code."

I only really see those two options.

Maybe the manual one is not so bad? I mean people don't want to see an ad either way, but if there's one, and you hand-approved it, and it doesn't spy on you... then we've eliminated most of the ethical and respect issues, right?

There's a temptation to "set it and forget it", but if you have even an atom of respect for your readers or customers, it only seems right that you'd put in a few minutes of work per month instead of deploying spyware on their machines.

(Just making it <a><img> also seems to solve all 49MB of ass.)

I still in 2026 do not understand the absolute manic drive websites have to push me to the app. I've administered services that have both a web client and an app client and the metrics just really weren't better, certainly not enough to spend energy actively pushing people to the app.

The referenced article ends like this:

"I'm Shubham, a full-stack product engineer passionate about fixing hostile UI, building privacy-first tools (like my YouTube extension with 51k+ DAU), and making the web usable again. I am currently looking for my next role."

:-(

"... the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions ... Almost no one would watch such a channel."

QVC exists. That channel is ONLY ads.

Not to detract from the point, which seems to be "yes what this other guy said."

I have seen from the other side how this can happen. The people making the decisions do not understand the technical costs. In fact, many of them pretend to understand the technical costs and say things like "Well, it's just a single line that we're adding to our website".

They want to look good in front of their bosses. They want to bring nice charts with nice performance metrics and they want to be up to date with the latest developments in the market of marketing tools, so they use every tool that is out there.

"IT" has no choice but to do what marketing demands, because IT is a cost center, while marketing is closer to revenues.

And so, over time, you end up with 49MB web pages with hundreds of trackers.

> No print publication on the planet does this.

Because you have to pay for the print version. They have plenty of ads, too, but they're not the sole revenue stream.

> As Bose notes, “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.

I would presume that this fascination with pushing viewers to the app is because they make better money off of you reading stuff in the app.

It was funny but when we switched from my failing Alienware laptop to a new M4 Mac Mini my wife was absolutely furious at the ad saturation until I switched her from Safari to Firefox and installed an ad blocker. I guess I could have installed one in Safari if she registered an Apple account but that's something she'd feel no need for at all.

(e.g. as maligned as it is, the Microsoft account really is one account you can use to log into your computer, your XBOX, and all sorts of things. The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on)

I'm afraid he has it actually inverted. What if the "sanctity of the prose" is just a old gloss, and the Taboola / Outbrain ads are the reality that don't hide the org's true character?

The printed version does _look_ better, but can org that serves Taboola ever be taken seriously anymore? Sanctity is miles away from "6 simple steps to $1 Million" ads. We can be sad in general about their passing. But let's not think it's isolated to issue surrounding online/ads. WaPo isn't the same either.

Here is the most frustrating part:

Publishers could create efficient fast-loading web pages if they prioritized it (and a rare few do) but its just not a priority for most even though its in their best interest.

You can have ads loading on a web page, even with header bidders, if you structure it correctly. In fact you can implement an ad solution that allows for fast loading pages and better optimize your ad revenue - whether you're doing pragmatic or direct.

I know this because I've done this before. At a past employer we cleaned up their mobile version (they used the "m.example.com" format, so we could push this as a separate rogue experiment) and saw ad revenue grow by over 30% while giving readers a better, faster overall UX.

I actively monitor top publisher article pages and you can see how bad (and good) it is:

https://webperf.xyz/

TL;DR Keep using an ad blocker

I don't even try to read newspaper sites, I just look at the Archive Today version.

This made me create a simple reading website for myself that blunts all the models, adverts and newsletter/subscription popups.

https://readwd.vercel.app

I also built an extension to redirect the article to this website, so that before these actions annoy me, I could read the article in peace.

I really wish that browsers natively supported some sort of "402 Payment Required" HTTP status code (or any other well-known specified indicator) that users could pay with micropayments, so that they wouldn't have to drown us in this ad garbage. I would gladly pay small but justified sum for an article without setting up payment method on each site and be able to return to it. I would be glad even to donate some amount of money to some authority that'd pay for viewership of those less fortunate and not being able to afford reading quality news.

> I’ve been browsing the web without content-blocking extensions on the Neo. It’s been a while since I’ve done that for an extended period of time. Most of the advertising-bearing websites I read have gotten so bad that it’s almost beyond parody.

Surprised Gruber isn’t using network level adblocking. I can’t imagine life without it these days.

(Yes I realise you need extensions when not on your own network etc - unless you use your own DNS!)

> the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials

Yes, I tried YouTube iOS app recently, without an ad blocker. It pretty much describes the experience.

Reminds me of "Website obesity crisis"

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U

- https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Some say that you should not use ad blocker, because that kills ad revenue, but I did not forced anybody to rely with their lives on ad revenue. Many of things were 'free' because we were all just using ad blocks, and then it all became commodified, simplified, so simpletons without ad blocks became a thing. Now they shame people for using ad blocks, even though it stops spreading malware and viruses.

I plan to use ad block, and use as many extensions that protect me. If there is some form of goods, be it streaming movies, audio, books I will happily pay for it. I will not accept a web with ads. I prefer touch grass. There is a clear line for me.

Also there is no line ad publisher will not cross. The goal posts are shifted, so you will never satisfy shareholder greed. The only pushback is trough ads and probably sometimes piracy. Not that I advocate it, but in reality if companies push too hard, there are consequences.

Somewhat tangential... I clicked on the "Dithering" link on Gruber's website. It leads to a podcast of his. The cover image is a 6.6mb JPEG. Man, do you even know what "dithering" means?

As a subscriber to The Guardian, I have a very different experience.

I don't disagree that reading news articles online today is a deeply unenjoyable experience. At the same time, I think not enough people acknowledge that the decision to put so much content online for free is how we ended up in this hellscape. Even when a website has a paywall, the cost of the paywall often dwarfs what you would have paid for a print equivalent of the same paper or journal, which is what enabled the flourishing of journalism in the 20th century.

This is why I have NextDNS installed at the router level. No need for Adblocking extensions if we can't even make the requests to those ad servers.

It's crazy, sometimes I get 22 mb, sometimes 27, one time even 57.8!!!

"The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it. As Bose notes, "A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their `apps' these days. I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from." It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites."

It has nothing to do with "understand[ing] or enjoy[ing] the web". It comes from people at organisations running websites that know where the money is, probably because some cretinous nerds encouraged them. Generally, the amount of potential data collection, surveillance, ad serving and _money-making_ is greater with an "app" than with a website

"Ad blockers" are popular but "app blockers"^1 are not. The "smartphone" is a remotely-controlled "entire surveillance device" (recent HN title: "Your phone is an entire computer")

1. Application firewalls like Netguard. And even this does not solve the problem entirely because the design of the "entire computer" includes extensive surveillance capabilities

At some point, either subscriptions have to carry more of the load or the web experience just keeps degrading

Related, did Spotify go from 1 ad to 4 at a time?

NyTimes and the Guardian have very much gone downhill unfortunately.

The web is the enemy. I have an ad blocking VPN and I use GroundNews to filter out sites that have paywalls. Between those two things, I lead a relatively sane life. But I tried looking at some of the same places on an unflitered device and man, I can't even imagine living like that. It now costs me $100/year in ad blocking/circumvention just so I don't want to kill the browser.

News sites are going irrelevant anyways. I'd imagine they are pushing hard for this because traffic has died cause AI overviews have hit direct traffic to websites and independent writing platforms like Substack / Medium mean I can read a quality opinion on a matter I care about.

Why bother with ad blockers? These organizations don't want you reading their articles, so take the hint.

I've had a thought bubbling away lately, informed by AI hype, some job market research, the "enshittification" book/topic doing the rounds, and I guess lived experience too.

Computers were invented, and initially used for calculations, punch cards, databases, spreadsheets, automating warehouses and running airlines and stuff. Computers are really good for that stuff, like many orders of magnitude better than analog alternatives.

Later, computers became a mass market consumer product, and we had the web and internet, and moving everything online became a fad, much like AI is a fad now. This pushed computers into some fairly marginal use cases, like "social media", publishing, messaging, e-commerce, and CRUD apps to manage workflows like JIRA and friends. Computers are kind of ok for this stuff... but, frankly, not that much better than the original thing. Like, a telephone, fax, etc. already allowed instant communication, email is maybe a bit better than fax, but it's not 1000x better. JIRA is a bit better than a whiteboard and post-it notes, but, also probably not 1000x better.

It's these recent, marginal-ish use cases that are getting destroyed by enshittification, AI, etc... because they were just never that good an application for computers and UIs in the first place. I think, if one wants to work on, or use an application that doesn't get filled with ads or have a copilot gratuitously inserted or whatever, it's probably more likely to happen in software for fluid dynamics or some natural fit for using a computer. Conversely, anything like facebook or jira or whatever that never really needed to be a computer app apart from because it was fashionable... is now unfashionable.

> The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns.

lol, they're doing for the money. Not because they're "held hostage". More time on site means more money. They know this. They know it's a shitty experience. Look, I get it, they have to make money somehow, but some of these sites try to squeeze every last drop of money out of users. It's a fine line to walk between "I'll stay because this content is interesting" and "F this man, I'm leaving", and some push that line hard.

Apple News is a fantastic service for avoiding most of these problems. The BBC put up a paywall on their site for anyone in the US but I can still read every article for free on Apple News. Politico wants me to create an account on my phone to read their articles but I can read them just fine on Apple News. New York Times is one of the few major publications not on Apple News, overall there are enough national news choices that I don't care which ones aren't there.

> No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.

Ehh... I cancelled my SF Chronicle subscription a year ago. Since then I've received a dozen predatory phone calls and just add many letters. Plus when you do have the subscription they alter prices on you like a cable TV provider. So in some ways print is better than web but in other ways it's worse.

Discussion on source, which this is just a comment on:

The 49MB web page

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945

> The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.

Yes because they don't give the print editions away for free.

You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for.

The only reason you're confronted with articles from these legacy publications in the first place is because they've lobbied governments to get google to force them into their carousels and recommendations.

This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.

> “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.

I don't entirely agree. I think these people entirely understand the web. This comes from publications trying to steer you towards their app so you can't block their tracking/profiling requests. The screens are cluttered because we've defined acceptable metrics as more clicks and views. The easiest way to generate more clicks to put a few popups on your site. Who cares what the clicks are actually for, no one is tracking user flows and user retention anymore, it's all "get them caught in the swamp" and maybe the slow page loading, janky ui, and increased clicks will land them on one of the advertisements.

This stuff comes from "here is the latest pattern people are using to get people to click on stuff" then the team implements the pattern 100 more times as a bandaid/movement of the way to get people to click on things. Those people rotate out and it's only another 5 years before some dev says "hey can you clean up your Google Tag Manager script tags?" to whoever is in charge then.

This also stems from the thousands and thousands of marketing companies/"startups" that do one thing. "Put our script on your page to track and improve customer retention". Of course whatever the marketing company is selling is perfectly quantifiable inside the analytics suite, but no one gets promoted for implementing a new analytics report. You get promoted for implementing "Click Tagger" or whatever.

This mentality runs deep through modern American culture. Where it's more flashy and newsworthy to strike a deal with a sales rep of some AI startup than implement the tech yourself. Look at the US CENTCOM implementing Israeli tech or even the report yesterday about the committee approving Microslop garbage for federal use.[0] All of that comes out of some sales contract as our leadership teams only know how to copy script tags, not understand systems and flows.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...

> No print publication on the planet does this.

No, "No print publication on the planet can do this"

But looking back on magazines, newspapers, etc; they have ALWAYS used a tremendous amount of advertisements. Newspapers sold classified space to sell stuff. It was always passive, and no way to have the newspaper or magazine to watch the user back to track eyeballs.

Now with tech, we can do precisely this, or with close proxies.

And with FB marketplace and Craigslist eating what was left of classifieds, yeah being in media is a very bad place.

And thats not even discussing using LLMs to make slop. Even Are Technica was generating hallucinated articles, and the editor accepted it for months until being called out.

Apart from adblock (technically ublock), I can encourage reading mode. Even F9 on Edge is pretty good at figuring out what you really want to see/read. It sometimes also bypasses paywalls by accident.

I've used an ad blocker for so long, I'd forgotten the web has got so terrible.

Let's not forget who developed the tooling, platforms, frameworks, libraries and packages and so on that these news companies use.

Nor the development practices that are hoisted as "the way to do things now" that people frantically race to adopt so they are not pushed out of the industry and a fruitful career as "obsolete".

Nor the technology companies that thought they served as a suitable replacement for news and advertising and community boards and used their massive investments to undercut the ability of traditional news outlets to survive, nevermind upstarts to have any hope of competing.

And the haranguing continues as if it was the design of these organizations in the first place.

There's no love lost for the media companies owned by billionaires, but maybe it should be more clear in these discussions exactly who started this particular mess.

The Guardian's twitter/X "exit" must be the dumbest thing they ever did. Their site was not so aggressively pushing for donations/subscriptions/accounts before that.

> The reader is not respected enough by the software.

The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a product is digital then it should be free which is maybe fine if we are going to live in a world with Universal Basic Income but in our existing system is absolutely ludicrous.

We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay. Outside of governments who have failed to take the necessary action against corporations and promote a power balance between investors, business and workers, the main cause of this is the lack of courage in middle management.

The executive suite have not tolerated this degradation and their salaries have risen accordingly. In contrast, middle management attain a level of safety/comfort and then coast - they don't want the hassle of looking for another job so they don't risk pushing for a pay rise. They just accept whatever meagre rise is offered because they think "well at least I'm still better off than the guys lower down the chain". This then filters down as the ceiling for the lower ranks can never be higher than the management. Over time this becomes a gigantic issue, particularly in countries with a strong minimum wage that rises every year as the gap between the worker and management closes every year. Management then start blaming the government rather than actually looking at themselves and the fact that they are not pushing for bigger wages out of fear of rocking the boat.

I literally saw this play out at a billion dollar revenue international non-tech company where I used to work a few years back. Directors were on £125k. Department heads on £75k. Tech leads on £55-65k. Seniors on £40-50k. Intermediates £27-35k. Juniors £25k. Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.

Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever!

No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech.

Is that so hard to understand?

Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the comments to a paywall-evading site!

The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality, highly focused on costs and with no attention at all paid to benefits.