[HN Gopher] Filtering out newsletter signup forms embedded in we...
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Filtering out newsletter signup forms embedded in web articles
Author : k1m
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-06-14 08:30 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fivefilters.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fivefilters.org)
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Am I the only one who doesn't think these are that big of a deal?
| I'd gladly take this over a big ugly ad. Hell ANY ad at all.
| rchaud wrote:
| This by far is by biggest pet peeve of reading online: an article
| can't even be shown in full. It has to be broken up into
| disembodied sections, with ads, newsletter signups, or a block of
| links appearing every few paragraphs.
|
| Fortunately, the NYT appears to have scaled back on this. I'm
| finding that I can do "Print to PDF" on the majority of articles
| (excl. interactive stories) and the layout is very clean with no
| interruptions.
|
| If that changes, I still have the option of going to FF's
| "reading view" and Print to PDF from there.
| k1m wrote:
| > This by far is by biggest pet peeve of reading online: an
| article can't even be shown in full. It has to be broken up
| into disembodied sections, with ads, newsletter signups, or a
| block of links appearing every few paragraphs.
|
| Absolutely. I'm actually a little worried that with the growing
| popularity of utility-first CSS and build tools that replace
| semantic information on HTML elements with randomly generated
| values, it's going to be increasingly difficult to have filter
| lists remove these.
|
| Currently the selectors in Fanboy's Annoyance List target
| semantic attributes, e.g. "newsletter-widget", but already
| there are a lot of sites that don't contain any semantic info
| around the sections that aren't a part of the content. The BBC
| website is one example, they have a list of related links
| between paragraphs of text on many articles, e.g.
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57464097. This is the HTML markup:
| <div data-component="unordered-list-block" class="ssrcss-
| uf6wea-RichTextComponentWrapper e1xue1i84"> <div
| class="ssrcss-18snukc-RichTextContainer e5tfeyi1">
| <div class="ssrcss-1pzprxn-BulletListContainer e5tfeyi0">
| <ul role="list"> <li>[related link 1]</li>
| <li>[related link 2]</li> <li>[related link
| 3]</li> </ul> </div> </div>
| </div>
|
| These are just related links randomly inserted into the
| content, but no clear attribute values marking them as such,
| making automatic removal difficult.
|
| > If that changes, I still have the option of going to FF's
| "reading view" and Print to PDF from there.
|
| FF's reading view does well on a lot of articles. It handles
| the BBC situation above quite well, but not others (see for
| example the screenshot in our article with the newsletter
| signup).
| shortformblog wrote:
| FWIW: The reason why they aren't easy to automatically remove
| is because they are often put in manually by editors.
| rchaud wrote:
| I'm not a web developer (more like a hobbyist), so I never
| used tools like Webpack to run 'builds'. Someone recently
| explained this phenomenon to me when I asked about the
| nonsensical class names I was seeing on some websites.
|
| I now understand that those machine-generated classes are
| designed to prevent styling conflicts on modern websites
| where multiple developers' work may appear on a single page.
| But with adblockers currently set up to detect cruft via
| class names, I'm thinking that the clock is ticking on how
| long these lists remain accurate.
| bartvk wrote:
| Personally I use the "No, Thanks" extension.
|
| It costs a bit of money. Daniel Kladnik, the developer, provides
| you with an invoice so you can deduct it as a business, or ask
| your boss to pay.
|
| https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/
|
| Note that I haven't compared it to Fanboy's Annoyance List
| mentioned in the article. Ages ago, I just wanted a no-configure
| option.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| Another vote for No thanks-- just works out of the box and
| blocks most(all?) irritating full screen "popups" that everyone
| seems to love so much
| traceroute66 wrote:
| I'm afraid I take issue with your "ask your boss to pay"
| statement.
|
| As someone who has been involved with running small businesses,
| I can tell you that "the boss" very quickly gets annoyed with
| employees who nickle & dime their employer and try to get "the
| boss" to pay things that the employee should be paying for.
|
| Sure if a piece of software, hardware or a service is an
| essential part of your work (e.g. mobile phones for field
| engineers) then it should be paid for in an appropriate manner
| by "the boss" (or a suitable alternative provided, e.g. company
| phone). No question, no argument.
|
| But frankly, ad-blockers or other non-essentials ? Forget about
| it. Being a "good boss" includes being able to draw a line in
| the sand somewhere. A "bad boss" is one who thinks "the
| company" can pay for everything "just because" is doing the
| themselves, their employees and their company a disservice.
| Businesses are not charities and everyone should be doing their
| bit to keep overheads in control.
|
| Not only that. But in some jurisdictions the local tax
| authorities will make taxation differentiation between items
| that are of demonstrable business needs and those that are not.
| This tax differentiation may not only impact the business
| itself, but your own personal tax situation too.
| Permit wrote:
| > Being a "good boss" includes being able to draw a line in
| the sand somewhere. A "bad boss" is one who thinks "the
| company" can pay for everything "just because" is doing the
| themselves, their employees and their company a disservice.
|
| I have never met an employee who would characterize a "good
| boss" this way. At the very least I would not expect these
| qualities to win you any favours with prospective employees.
|
| No one looks at "free work lunches" as some negative
| reflection of their boss' financial acumen. The closest
| complaint I could think of is that the employee would rather
| that money go directly into their pocket. Maybe there is a
| middle ground here where you could allocate $50/year for
| these sort of expenditures in order to prevent them from
| getting out of hand?
|
| I'm not sure, but I would consider reflecting on what really
| makes a "good boss" and whether or not your employees would
| agree with you on it. To me the distinction between a good
| boss and a bad one is always decided by the employees, never
| the boss.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Maybe there is a middle ground here where you could
| allocate $50/year for these sort of expenditures in order
| to prevent them from getting out of hand?
|
| Here I would agree and indeed I think certain people
| misunderstood my original comment.
|
| What I was trying to say originally is a bad boss is one
| who has an open-wallet policy to "but its just $10 a year",
| because that sort of policy will absolutely come back and
| bite them or their company in the backside one day once the
| numbers start adding up. So yes, absolutely, set a hard
| dollar limit per employee and we're in agreement.
|
| Because yes, if you don't, things will soon get out of hand
| (as I posted in more detail a little further down).
| criddell wrote:
| It can cost more to get approval on some small amount than
| the actual invoice is. Some places don't require approval for
| amounts under $x.
| unknown_error wrote:
| Sorry, but if the employees have to worry about $10 a year
| because of nickle-and-diming from the boss, you're either not
| paying them enough or your process for small reimbursements
| suck. Why don't the employees have enough freedom to get the
| tools to do their job in an appropriate way instead of
| wasting your time and theirs discussing whether $10/yr for
| adblocking is an essential part of their job? That argument
| alone would cost you more than $10, not to mention the
| productivity loss from intrusive advertising.
|
| Yeesh, I'd hate to work for a boss like you...
| traceroute66 wrote:
| unknown_error
|
| I'm sorry but the "its only $10/year, the boss can pay for
| it" argument is complete BS.
|
| That "its only $10/year" multiplied by how many employees ?
| It soon adds up.
|
| Then we move into the same BS "only $10/year" argument that
| charities use when they are asking you to donate "only $5"
| or that Disney+ uses when it says its "only $10/month".
|
| The "only $5" to the charity and the "only $10/month" to
| Disney+ is ON TOP OF all the other household expenses. So
| really, you are foolish to buy into the "its only" school
| of nonsensical argument.
|
| So we soon find ourselves in an exponential situation. One
| day we say "yes, the boss will pay $10/year for this" ....
| roll forward a few weeks then its "oh, just another
| $10/year for that" ... etc. etc. ... multiplied by X
| employees .... soon equals $$$$.
|
| That's why a good boss is one who is capable of standing
| their ground and putting that line in the sand.
|
| Otherwise the overheads soon run away from you and you find
| yourself spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on
| "but its just $10" non-essential stuff.
|
| Basic business good practice.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| What if you just looked at it as a cost for employee
| satisfaction? If I ask my boss for a license to try a new
| tool, or something to make my workflow better, it's a win
| for the company if it works out. If it doesn't work out,
| it's a win for my morale, because I don't have a
| skinflint of a boss.
|
| When a manager evaluates what is "essential", it creates
| a dynamic where they either agree with me (which wastes
| both our time), or they disagree (which creates
| conflict). For $10/year, it's better to avoid the
| conflict and just buy the stupid tool that makes the ICs
| life better.
| unknown_error wrote:
| It's not so much the particular dollar amount, but that
| it sounds like your process for evaluating whether a tool
| is "essential" is basically "whatever the boss feels like
| in any given moment" instead of having a transparent
| evaluation process that weighs, say, $10/yr/employee vs
| the potential for risk for malware/ransomware or even
| simply lost productivity from intrusive ads. Is there
| ANYTHING an employee should be able to spend money on
| without your direct approval? Is there a process for
| evaluating what is an essential business expense, per
| position? How small a business is yours?
|
| It's the lack of agency and trust in your people, rather
| than the specific dollar amount, that bothers me. If it
| was a $10,000 or even $1,000 purchase (such as buying
| that ad blocker for the whole company), yes, of course it
| should merit more evaluation, but is there really a need
| to micromanage every single transaction instead of having
| an expense account of some sort and a procedure for small
| purchases and reimbursements?
|
| Not arguing that all your employees should be able to
| arbitrarily spend company funds willy nilly, just that
| they deserve some say in how they do their jobs, and the
| tools they need for it, instead of being simply being
| told "no, because if we scaled that $10 up to all the X
| employees it would be too expensive..." Did all the X
| employees even ask for that..?
| ta988 wrote:
| Website owners are desperate to capture your attention, they have
| a few seconds to do so. What they don't realize is that beong
| annoying is also what causes people to only stay for a few
| seconds on their site. For me it is a good sign of someone who
| cares more about advertisement than content so it makes me close
| the page 99% of the time.
| unknown_error wrote:
| Totally agreed... if only I could get management to listen too.
| If were it up to me as a dev, there would NEVER be
| popups/overlays. We spend forever optimizing UX before and
| during site design, only to have some middle manager come in at
| the last minute and say "We need a newsletter modal signup to
| drive conversions." They end up chasing signup numbers instead
| of overall user satisfaction.
| tzahifadida wrote:
| Actually I think that a lot of newsletters of professionals i am
| interested in are worthy and these are edge cases. I will be more
| worried not seeing these because they were filtered out by some
| plugin. I would say that if a site has a harassing newsletter
| then the whole site is probably not worth my time.
| inshadows wrote:
| I also think that hiding newsletter sign up forms is bad,
| because you lose the ability to detect that the site is just a
| blog spam. Real blogs offer RSS/Atom. Only those freaks
| fighting for user engagement dumping zero content articles
| offer newsletters.
| shortformblog wrote:
| Hi, I run a long-form newsletter. I send it out twice a week.
| I spend many bleary nights putting content together for it,
| and its pieces occasionally appear here on Hacker News. I do
| a lot of research for it--and pay lots of money for tools to
| access that research. I often do interviews. It often brings
| in contributors. Those contributors are paid.
|
| It has an RSS feed as a service to readers. But it was built
| as a newsletter because I specifically wanted to experiment
| with that form and felt that I could do interesting things
| with it.
|
| Since I started it six and a half years ago, a couple
| interesting things have happened in the sector: One, the
| interest in building a business model around blogs has
| shifted over to the newsletter space. And two, people who
| wouldn't have paid to access a blog now are willing to pay to
| access a newsletter.
|
| I like to keep my content open to a large amount of people,
| so I rely on newsletter sponsorships as a business model, but
| my advertising approach is very minimal compared to other
| publishers. I'm not particularly aggressive with my signup
| form--I run it at the top of my front page and put a pop-up
| option at the bottom of the article, and sometimes I
| implement an occasional interstitial when an article seems
| like it's doing very well and I want to catch the user's eye.
|
| But I don't do as much as I could. It probably could be
| larger if I did.
|
| But this isn't about me. This is about this comment. Which is
| to say: This is a really cruel thing to say about
| newsletters. I know a lot of creators who put hours of work
| into their newsletters each week on top of full-time gigs,
| grinding it out with the goal of hoping to do something with
| that newsletter.
|
| It also ignores the business realities of the newsletter
| space. Trying to build a blog into a business is really tough
| these days (it was back then too, something I know because I
| was blogging back then). But newsletters have created a path
| of opportunity for those who want to build things
| independently.
|
| And while I will never claim that the work they do is
| perfect, it's certainly not blog spam.
|
| So I request, hey, maybe research the space before you use
| such a broad brush. Thanks.
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Real blogs offer RSS/Atom. Only those freaks fighting for
| user engagement dumping zero content articles offer
| newsletters.
|
| The thing is, ever since Google Reader got terminated, the
| user base of RSS/Atom clients has been steadily dropping
| down. Firefox IIRC terminated "dynamic bookmarks" _years_
| ago, and even back when it existed it didn 't support
| notification.
|
| Yes, us nerd crowd knows that RSS exists, but ever tried
| asking your boss or your teenage kid what "Atom" is?
|
| Actual mail newsletters are the only way left other than even
| more obnoxious browser push nags to get your users notified
| that you have new content.
| inshadows wrote:
| Your point is valid. Still, I find that most "blogs"
| offering newsletters these days are frivolous content
| dumping ground, and the reason for their existence is
| likely just building Internet persona or something.
|
| EDIT: Lots of such noise (often appearing here on HN) comes
| from Substack.
| k1m wrote:
| > the reason for their existence is likely just building
| Internet persona or something.
|
| Another appeal of newsletters I think is distrust
| (rightly in my opinion) in corporate algorithms powering
| people's feeds. I'd love to see more widespread adoption
| of RSS again, rather than a push to get everyone signed
| up to a bunch of different email newsletters. Perhaps
| once people feel overwhelmed with their inbox getting
| filled with email newsletters, RSS will make a
| resurgence.
|
| I wrote the piece linked here, and it wasn't intended to
| be an anti-newsletter post. Just against newsletters
| being pushed on readers in the middle of the article
| they've started reading, as opposed to a sidebar or at
| the end of the article. We have web apps that produce
| stripped-down articles to be read on e-readers or printed
| out. These newsletter signup requests often blend into
| the content as just another paragraph of text, which can
| be a little jarring when you're engrossed in reading.
|
| Quite a few of the writers I like are on Substack, and
| earn money through it. Substack also offers full-text RSS
| feeds (for publicly-accessible content, not sure what
| level of RSS support there is for paid content - perhaps
| that's still email-only). And their Reader has RSS
| support too -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444507 - I hope
| that's a sign that they'll be doing more with RSS in the
| future.
| Breza wrote:
| I still miss Google Reader. I wonder if Google wishes it
| had kept it running now that their efforts to launch social
| networks failed and Twitter/Facebook have taken over much
| of the space that RSS used to occupy. Google could have
| built such a huge dataset of individual-level reader
| preferences (not saying that's the best use of RSS, just
| that there's a business case).
| Fnoord wrote:
| If I want to sign-up to a newsletter from a company I will
| usually find it either manually, or I subscribe to their RSS
| feed. In almost every case I visit a website, I do not want to
| subscribe to a newsletter. Therefore, it distracts from my
| goal. To draw a parallel: in almost every case I start up an
| Android application, I do not want to rate the Android
| application. I don't want to spend any time on either of such
| nonsense. In fact, from today on, I will rate applications on
| Android which ask me to rate them a bad rating just because I'm
| done with that spam. As for newsletters, if I want them, I will
| find them. Take for example Bruce Schneier's blog. You can find
| the newsletter without getting spammed about it. That's the
| correct way.
| greggturkington wrote:
| I keep a long list of these I can contribute. The authors need to
| take more advantage of fuzzy attribute matching. Really go after
| those patterns you see frequently from Mailchimp and other major
| newsletter vendors first!
| [class*="mc_embed_signup"] [id*="mc_embed_signup"]
| [class*="FreeNewsletter" i] [class*="inline-newsletter"]
| [class*="newsletter-article"] [class*="newsletter-form"]
| [class*="newsletter-signup"] [class*="newsletter-tout"]
| [class*="newsletter-widget"] [class*="NewsletterCard" i]
| [class*="NewsletterSignup" i] [class*="newssignup"]
| [id*="SignupForm" i] [id*="signupWrapper" i]
|
| CSS isn't so simple anymore though, with CSS-in-JS we're moving
| away from deterministic class name. We can still target other
| attributes with CSS though, which I don't see used in these lists
| nearly enough, for example data attributes:
| [data-title*="Mailchimp"]
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(page generated 2021-06-14 23:02 UTC)