Please let this not be the future of reading on the web

edw519's simple rules for reading on the internet:<p>That's a Back Button<p>(to the cadence of "That's a Paddlin'" from "The Simpsons")<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFgR0m-9FmM" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFgR0m-9FmM</a><p><pre><code> Login button below the fold? That's a back button. Animated ads? That's a back button. Shifting content? That's a back button. More than 2 pages? That's a back button. Need to be logged in to Facebook. That's a back button. Unexpected video? That's a back button. Unexpected sound? That's a back button. Overlapping ads &#38; text in my browser? That's a back button. Overlapping ads &#38; text at 800 x 600? That's a back button. No horizontal scroll bar to get beyond right fold? That's a back button. Flash? That's a back button. pdf? That's a back button. Slideshow? Oooh, you better believe that's a back button. Freezes my computer? That's a battery removal. </code></pre> It's a wonder I find anything readable any more.

The future of reading on the web is easy to change, all we need to do is pay some money for each article we want to read without adverts...<p>Unfortunately, the primary impact of putting up a paywall for premium content seems to be to raise huge arguments about why "information wants to be free", not the reality of what happens without one.

"...Ad networks like The Deck come to mind..." everytime someone says this I just switch off. The Deck and other hipster brand ad networks are not a workable solution for 99.99% of bloggers, please stop using them as an example of how advertising can be "good"; they're an example of why it can't.

This has been the future of reading on the web for about the last 10 years. It's now so bad that my default browser setup (the one I use for sites I've never visited before / known offenders, as opposed to my online bank) is Firefox + AdBlock + RequestPolicy + NoScript + FlashBlock. Yes, I know some of these overlap. Yes, I probably want to look at Ghostery too. I also run a fairly aggressive filtering proxy on another server on the LAN and all LAN HTTP/HTTPS traffic goes through that by default (with exemptions for some sites that fail to cope). I don't care about your ad dollars. The chances are I don't actually care about your content either, but it's something to do to pass the time. If you want to throw up a paywall, knock yourself out - if the content is good enough, I will pay.<p>Around this time of year, every dickhead with a WordPress install seems to discover the same crappy JavaScript snow plugin, so that gets a special regexp all to itself in my filtering proxy. I didn't pay for a fast quad core CPU so you can animate snowflakes / leaves / puppies in the most inefficient way possible.<p>Amusingly the mobile experience is actually better in some ways - a double tap to zoom often fits the actual content postage-stamp-sized region to the screen, and I don't see the rest of the page...

I dislike the trend towards light grey text on a white background. Unfortunately, the article itself is guilty of this. It's fine for timestamps and other page noise, but why dim a blockquote?

My "favorite" "feature" is when you arrive on the web page for the first time in your life and you are being prompted with a popup to take a survey on the web site you never seen before...

Well, which would we prefer? Seeing the ads, or having to pay for access to each site?<p>Personally, as annoying as ads are, I still prefer them being there to the content not being available at all.

I find it ironic that I had to disable AdBlock Plus to see the images in the post.

This is why I use Adblock on my desktop, and ReadItLater to extract the text on mobile. Without these the web would be pretty unusable.

Why don't we start by trying to raise the quality and therefore effectiveness of ads on the Internet? A fundamental shift in how ads work and what they're trying to do needs to be done.<p>The ads you see on websites right now are remnants from the newspaper, nearly identical to their print counterparts.<p>Creating a "prettier ad network" or "other way to be profitable" is only patchwork. We need to completely rework the execution of "I have something to sell and I'd like to tell your readers / customers about it".<p>Solving this requires something larger.

This is driving me crazy. I feel the author's pain.<p>It's gotten so bad I've created a web site that gives me plain headlines of all the tech, science, world, sports, and political stories I might want to read. Phase 2 is walking the links and using something like Readability to make those readable as well. <a href="http://newspaper23.com" rel="nofollow">http://newspaper23.com</a><p>I didn't do this as a for-profit startup kind of thing -- it's for my own sanity. Everywhere you go folks are screwing with you instead of just giving you content. I wanted a place I could go to just catch up quickly on the opinion of the day. No bullshit.<p>I also feel like it is a mistake to blame this on SEO. SEO has nothing to do with it. I have a few sites optimized for SEO myself, and the only thing I want to do is present plain, simple, easy-to-understand text. How else would people easily consume it and recommend it to others?<p>Nope, the problem is <i>stickiness</i>. Everybody wants their site to be sticky and entertaining -- to the point of popping up email sign-ups, ads, social crap, you name it. SEO just means getting people to visit. Believe me, the last thing you want to do is annoy them. It's the folks who already have large audiences that are crapping all over the net. And they're not doing that for new eyeballs, they're doing that to keep the eyeballs they already have -- it's called <i>engagement</i>. Content providers make a clear and decisive design statement when they decide to screw over readability for stickiness. (Yes, some small-traffic sites do this, but only because they could care less about the audience in the first place. Any visitor for them is a mark. These are the guys who are never going to grow and stay big and simply don't care.)

This is just the beginning guys! Big web properties are becoming more like a TV Network. They interrupt you with an ad because they think that if their name is not some power of 10 then they have to use this TV-like experience. Maybe they're right but if this "platformization" thing catches on then you will _not_ have option to block them out!<p>I don't know the solution but I'm (we're) trying with our startup.

There was a statement of Matt Cutts at PubCon saying Google will penalyze pages with too much ads above the fold. Expect to see that.

I think I have mentioned this in the past on other articles about advertising. The overall game of creating aggressive advertising has not changed, they just now have more tools to do it.<p>If your going to force me to have a fullscreen ad before reading your content then at least allow me to dismiss it easily with a single click on the ad and not having to hunt for a close button (if there even is one). The amount of times I've had a fullscreen ad completely block a page with no way to remove it..<p>Regards content, I think this is partly just a function of so many people now reading stuff online. With more people reading things on smartphones/tablets on their way to work on the bus etc there is a market for more "tabloid" style writing that can be consumed quickly.<p>There are still plenty of people writing high quality content and lots of it gets linked to here on HN.<p>People will just be more discerning about the content portals they use.

I don't think that Daring Fireball is a good example for a membership based blog. Gruber made all feeds freely available in August 2007. The membership button is still there, but besides a T-shirt, it doesn't provide you with anything new.<p>AFAIK he gets a lot more from the weekly feed-sponsorships, The Deck ads, and Amazon referrals.

the biggest thread for reading on the web is - in my humble opinion - the swipeware deployed on multiple small and big sites (i.e.: all *.wordpress.com blogs) for mobile devices like the iPad. swipeware has a horrific user experience, adds nothing of value to the page or the article and makes it impossible to read an article from start to finish.<p>out of curiosity: is there anybody out-there who thinks swipeware on blogs is a great idea/experience?

This:<p>"The question for reddit isn't whether or not people enjoy it and want to spend time on it, but whether or not the owners can make money selling those people's attention. The traffic to reddit - while admirably large - is relatively unattractive to most advertisers.<p>"Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits.<p>Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.<p>I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah. If you're in the content game, your business's value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn't be to sell your audience's attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.<p>Condé Nast isn't built to do this."<p>Via - <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628</a>

I use, (and pay for), Readability, and I don't really see this as a extra work or a hack or a a necessary evil on my part.<p>Even if these interstitials weren't there, I'd much rather hit tilde without even thinking, than have to read a page that's even 90% as nice as Readability is with my consistent settings. I do it all the time on blogs without ads or pages that are already very readable like bostonglobe.com.<p>It's like an office coffee pot, nobody complains that the coffee isn't already sweetened or creamed, they're fine doing the little extra step so that everyone has it the way they want it.<p>(The one-click send-to-kindle is a time/productivity saver that offsets the cost of that extra click, as it isn't even an option on most sites, and certainly not without hoops to jump through.)

The problem is not the poor state of the reading experience -- that's the symptom -- the problem is the per-page-view model of the online advertising, which breaks an article into pages, sharing buttons in your face... etc.<p>A better paradigm has to come.

Publishers are clearly struggling to make money from their sites and decline in the quality and increase in annoyance of the adverts is the result. I wrote this a while ago (though not much has changed):<p><a href="http://posterous.richardcunningham.co.uk/the-problem-with-online-advertising" rel="nofollow">http://posterous.richardcunningham.co.uk/the-problem-with-on...</a>

This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve at Skim.Me (<a href="http://skim.me" rel="nofollow">http://skim.me</a>), except we're not focused solely on article text reading. Even reading my bank account info on the web is terrible.

AutoPager is a great browser add-on that preloads the next page of nytimes, reddit, tumblr etc. It takes care of a lot of the annoying pagination.<p>It took a long time before I was convinced to try it - but it's sweet.

<i>"... as well as the growing number of sites that offer memberships (like The Loop and Daring Fireball)."</i><p>So there is a concept, that you can't tell people about, they have to experience it, then they "get it."<p>Small anecdote, when I left Sun in 1995 I went to a startup called "GolfWeb" which was publishing an online magazine about Golf. I saw the web as the new world of publishing (I was waaaaaaaaay early :-)) and had plans for a micropayments type Java wallet applet that would allow you read articles and consume content like you did with a regular magazine only better since you only paid for the articles you read, and you didn't have to store back issues they were always online. There were three problems with this vision:<p>1) Technical users of the time were chanting "information wants to be free" and were rabidly opposed to paying for content.<p>2) Nearly nobody had Java in their browser yet, so supporting this meant a very small market to work from.<p>3) DigiCash and David Chaum had a bunch of patents on electronic versions of cash transactions and they didn't have a clue about 'reasonable' licensing.<p>[Trust me, in 2015 after all that crap expires, we're going to have some really useful tools available.]<p>So Golfweb, like others, turned to putting banner ads on the pages and using that to pay the bills.<p>Information has value. This may seem obvious but for a number of people it is not. The question is how do you convert 'demand' type value into something fungible like cash.<p>The easiest way has been selling people who want to contact people who would want to consume this particular information, an opportunity to make their case. Sort of like giving lions a seat at the watering hole where gazelles come to drink. The lions pay more for seats near a good quality watering hole. But the nature of watering holes is that the gazelles, despite their thirst, will not frequent watering holes that are saturated with lions. No gazelles, and the lions lose interest. That is the value transaction of most web sites, selling your 'demographic' to advertisers for a spot on the page. And like our eponymous watering hole, you can screw it up by over doing it. So at the tipping point, the value of the information is higher to the reader, than having access to the reader is to the advertiser. So you switch from selling access to lions to selling gazelles access to a fenced watering hole where there are no lions.<p>To date however that switch has been limited by our gazelles ability to express a preference. Some sites are experimenting with memberships, others like Kachingle are providing a way to pay authors of good sites (less reliable income that advertising). What is needed will be something which is part payment system, part rights clearinghouse, and part web framework.<p>I of course bowed out of this particular game until 2015 :-) but its going to come to pass. I pay $12/yr to get a magazine, why not $1/month to a web site to access the new content there? Especially if it means the ad farms are tapered down to something less egregious than the examples given in OP's article. Because it isn't that advertisements are bad 'per se' (I used to get BYTE magazine in part <i>for</i> the advertisements), it is the egregious nature in which publishers try to force them into your face which changes the value proposition negative for the reader. So some content publisher growth, some additional understanding in the advertising world what to expect, and voila we'll have moved off paper for this kind of stuff.

I would argue that once you dismiss ads and scroll down the page that content is entirely readable. The internet has given us an expectation that everything should be free and immediate, and we can't tolerate anything less.<p>In the old days you paid for a newspaper or magazine with money, now you pay for it with advertising (or you pay money to remove the advertising) - nothing new there, nothing surprising, good content is still good content, and the shit is still there in abundance also ...

Use ghostery. :-)

Evernote Clearly, anyone?

Q: Do you want to pay for reading content on the web?<p>A: No.<p>Q: Do you want to see ads while reading content on the web?<p>A: No.<p>Q: Do you want everything to be free all the time but maintain a capitalistic society?<p>A: Yes.

Readable sweeps all that shit away and puts the plain text on a plain background. Use it and you'll stop caring what lightboxes and other crap web sites festoon their pages with. Safari's reader is nice as well, it even auto fetches all the pages in a multi page article.