My experience was probably exactly as intended. Click on the "What is a dickover?" link trying to come up with things that it might be. And a brief moment after the page loaded (this little pause is crucial) I am hit in the face with a big annoying popup saying "This is a Dickover" followed by immediate understanding.
Now at least I know what to call it the next time I visit Substack.
Did you know that a Substack's author can turn the annoying popup off? Go to dashboard -> settings, and then it's "Enable subscribe prompts on post page" under "Growth."
I have a theory that about 97% of developers and managers completed the cookie consent (or whatever) on their own product 5 years ago and hence never see it again, and they have no idea how bad the experience for new customers actually is.
So the developers and bosses all think they're doing a great job and they've got a carefully curated homepage, even though the regular users get a cloudflare captcha, then a cookie modal, then a newsletter modal, then an install-our-app modal, all blocking their access to the 'buy product' button.
Did anyone else think this was a clever keming pun?
Fortunately, for those sites where either JS is required for the content or to remove the dickover, browsers still have an Inspect Element tool that makes deleting this and other annoyances not too difficult and rather cathartic.
Never thought to call them dickovers before, but it’s apt. At a certain point, I noticed my finger reflexively hitting the ESC key because that usually dismisses a lot of them.
Yeah this is really bad. Firefox + uBlock Origin + Filters cleans a lot of these dickovers. Some seem to slip through the cracks. There's a never ending fight between bad websites and the warriors trying to protect our attention.
Most people don't care about this and they should, I have the google analytics import on my business endeavors, but why would I put it into a blog? Why subject both myself and my poor readers to yet another tentacle to suck our interaction into its googolplex of data. I hope all webdevs start caring more. On that same note, I hope all webdevs stop using substack, it's so trivial nowadays to make and style your own blog however you want, why take the even lazier route of giving substack control over everything
Gruber's usually too much of a walking Apple ad for my taste, but I love this.
We need to define the things we hate. Give them words. Use the words as weapons.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently with "watermarks" of the statistical and non-visible kind used to track image creators. (Google embedding "this image is AI but also here's the user ID".)
I've been thinking that practice needs a new word too. It's not watermarking, it's signals-math based tracking, so maybe sigtracked.
I find the characterisation of his Apple praise fascinating. It's really not that zealous, unless you hate Apple (which is fine). I think this image of him speaks more of the prominence of the Apple superfan image in popular culture than the actual reality of his position.
It isn't anymore, but if you go back a decade or two, it really was that zealous. He really did used to blindly defend Apple (e.g. things like this: https://daringfireball.net/2006/09/open_challenge), but I think he's grown more skeptical of Apple lately.
I don't want to split hairs over what constitutes as overzealous, but I will say that Apple ~20 years ago earned more praise than Apple does today. This is probably reflected in the writing.
I agree, but being mildly offensive is kind of the point: makes it more memorable, and clearly differentiated from “popup” which is too broad and has many valid uses in an interface. Dickovers never have a valid reason to exist.
I don't get why people feel entitled to _not_ get dickovers. Are you paying for what you're using, to a sufficient degree that the ecosystem can work without the dickover being presented to you?
This shouldn't be the user's problem, but this is the market working. The dickovers are there because someone somewhere is making money because the dickovers are there. Saying you want the content without the spam is more or less saying you want other people to do the work and you don't want to pay for it.
If you don't like ads/dickovers, you don't have to use the site/app. The provider has decided you're not worth it. To be fair, you probably aren't making them money.
There are exceptions, but you shouldn't feel entitled to use the thing without paying the "dickover price" that the provider has decided to charge.
I guess the entitlement comes from looking at it from the other way: my employer pays me a lot for my attention. I've accepted the arrangement so now I pay attention to their problems. If you want me to pay attention to your problem, there has to be something in it for me.
I've been wondering how we can use AI to clean up websites before they hit our eyes. If AI is as good as they say it is, surely it can clean up dickovers. If someone is allowed to shove something in front of my face should I not be allowed to make them invisible?
>What won't help is complaining that the largely free products we get don't work the way we want them to.
This makes no sense and seems bad-faith on multiple levels.
On the contrary, I'm assuming good faith on the part of those who implement these "dark" patterns we hate. They're done for a reason, and that reason is not pure evil from their perspective.
It must be worth a lot for me to see it, because if I land on a site shopping for something, I might just turn around when you interrupt me and force me to actively not sign up for your email list.
Thank you, I got a good laugh out of that.
My experience was probably exactly as intended. Click on the "What is a dickover?" link trying to come up with things that it might be. And a brief moment after the page loaded (this little pause is crucial) I am hit in the face with a big annoying popup saying "This is a Dickover" followed by immediate understanding.
Now at least I know what to call it the next time I visit Substack.
One of criteria for inclusion into Kagi Small Web [1] is no dickovers. Thanks for naming it properly John.
[1] https://kagi.com/smallweb
Did you know that a Substack's author can turn the annoying popup off? Go to dashboard -> settings, and then it's "Enable subscribe prompts on post page" under "Growth."
It's the first thing I did. Recommended.
I have a theory that about 97% of developers and managers completed the cookie consent (or whatever) on their own product 5 years ago and hence never see it again, and they have no idea how bad the experience for new customers actually is.
So the developers and bosses all think they're doing a great job and they've got a carefully curated homepage, even though the regular users get a cloudflare captcha, then a cookie modal, then a newsletter modal, then an install-our-app modal, all blocking their access to the 'buy product' button.
I wonder if cloudflare is wise enough to always skip captchas from IP addresses it detects are associated with that website's owners.
The only surprising thing about the Tom’s Hardware example was that John Gruber evidently does not use an adblocker
Did anyone else think this was a clever keming pun?
Fortunately, for those sites where either JS is required for the content or to remove the dickover, browsers still have an Inspect Element tool that makes deleting this and other annoyances not too difficult and rather cathartic.
DO YOU CONSENT WITH OUR TRACKING COOKIES POLICY?
[YES, I DO, THE IMPORTANT TRACKING ONES] [YES, I DO, ALL OF THEM] ⁿᵒ ᵃⁿᵈ ᶜˡᵒˢᵉ ᵈᶦᶜᵏᵒᵛᵉʳ
Thanks, Europe!
Yep. Without Europe, we'd have no idea which websites were trying to sell us out to the highest bidder.
Surprise, they all are!
Never thought to call them dickovers before, but it’s apt. At a certain point, I noticed my finger reflexively hitting the ESC key because that usually dismisses a lot of them.
The Escape key's effect in the linked article was a delightful detail.
Any site I visit regularly gets a user stylesheet via Stylus that I use to hide anything like this.
Yeah this is really bad. Firefox + uBlock Origin + Filters cleans a lot of these dickovers. Some seem to slip through the cracks. There's a never ending fight between bad websites and the warriors trying to protect our attention.
> They’re popovers, but dickheaded.
So they're popovers.
Seriously. I've never seen a popover used for any legitimate purpose. If it was the content the user wanted, you can put it in the page where it goes.
Maybe if people don't like dickovers, paywalls, and all the other bad patterns , they should stop submitting and voting them up.
Wow, yeah, fuck off with the dickovers.
My own blog has none of that crap. No Google analytics, no tracking. If someone visits my site, I have no idea. And I don't care.
Most people don't care about this and they should, I have the google analytics import on my business endeavors, but why would I put it into a blog? Why subject both myself and my poor readers to yet another tentacle to suck our interaction into its googolplex of data. I hope all webdevs start caring more. On that same note, I hope all webdevs stop using substack, it's so trivial nowadays to make and style your own blog however you want, why take the even lazier route of giving substack control over everything
Gruber's usually too much of a walking Apple ad for my taste, but I love this.
We need to define the things we hate. Give them words. Use the words as weapons.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently with "watermarks" of the statistical and non-visible kind used to track image creators. (Google embedding "this image is AI but also here's the user ID".)
I've been thinking that practice needs a new word too. It's not watermarking, it's signals-math based tracking, so maybe sigtracked.
That might not sound gross enough though.
I find the characterisation of his Apple praise fascinating. It's really not that zealous, unless you hate Apple (which is fine). I think this image of him speaks more of the prominence of the Apple superfan image in popular culture than the actual reality of his position.
It isn't anymore, but if you go back a decade or two, it really was that zealous. He really did used to blindly defend Apple (e.g. things like this: https://daringfireball.net/2006/09/open_challenge), but I think he's grown more skeptical of Apple lately.
I don't want to split hairs over what constitutes as overzealous, but I will say that Apple ~20 years ago earned more praise than Apple does today. This is probably reflected in the writing.
It's more than just defining things. It's ridiculing them.
Fanboys Annoyances List for Ublock. Install it on your family's computers when they aren't looking. It aims to filter ALL this crap.
I'm sorry but this is such a stupid name. Where did the author get this name from?
Why would I say that in front of any female colleage or any non-technical layman? We already have a name for this and it is a "popup".
Which sounds better?
"Remove this popup" or "Remove this dickover"
Be honest.
> "Remove this popup" or "Remove this dickover"
> Be honest.
The latter definitely is the more honest answer.
I agree, but being mildly offensive is kind of the point: makes it more memorable, and clearly differentiated from “popup” which is too broad and has many valid uses in an interface. Dickovers never have a valid reason to exist.
You could call them "clickovers".
I don't get why people feel entitled to _not_ get dickovers. Are you paying for what you're using, to a sufficient degree that the ecosystem can work without the dickover being presented to you?
This shouldn't be the user's problem, but this is the market working. The dickovers are there because someone somewhere is making money because the dickovers are there. Saying you want the content without the spam is more or less saying you want other people to do the work and you don't want to pay for it.
If you don't like ads/dickovers, you don't have to use the site/app. The provider has decided you're not worth it. To be fair, you probably aren't making them money.
There are exceptions, but you shouldn't feel entitled to use the thing without paying the "dickover price" that the provider has decided to charge.
I guess the entitlement comes from looking at it from the other way: my employer pays me a lot for my attention. I've accepted the arrangement so now I pay attention to their problems. If you want me to pay attention to your problem, there has to be something in it for me.
I've been wondering how we can use AI to clean up websites before they hit our eyes. If AI is as good as they say it is, surely it can clean up dickovers. If someone is allowed to shove something in front of my face should I not be allowed to make them invisible?
> If someone is allowed to shove something in front of my face should I not be allowed to make them invisible?
Yes, I'm 100% on the adblock train. Local AI adblock sounds like a great solution.
Then maybe dickovers will go away when the market realizes they don't work. That's the only way.
What won't help is complaining that the largely free products we get don't work the way we want them to.
>What won't help is complaining that the largely free products we get don't work the way we want them to. This makes no sense and seems bad-faith on multiple levels.
On the contrary, I'm assuming good faith on the part of those who implement these "dark" patterns we hate. They're done for a reason, and that reason is not pure evil from their perspective.
It must be worth a lot for me to see it, because if I land on a site shopping for something, I might just turn around when you interrupt me and force me to actively not sign up for your email list.
You should turn around! That's literally my point.
If everyone refused to touch a site that blasts you with a dickover, they would disappear overnight.
No one is making money on cookie consent dickovers, which is the majority of them.
Bootlicker
I'm not in this industry. I block basically everything. I also think the state of things is terrible.
But this is a Chesterton's Fence problem and we need to understand where it came from if we're going to fix it.