
Dickbars and Other Readability Excrement (2017) - dredmorbius
http://shindoisshin.net/blog/dickbars-and-other-readability-excrement
======
DonHopkins
By the title, I though this would be a discussion about the MacOS System 7
Penis Bar: that weird resizable control strip that stuck out from the edge of
the the screen with control panel pop-up menus and a grinning spotted dick
head at the end.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7.6.1_emulated_inside_of_SheepShaver.png)

You could drag the dick head left and right to make it shorter or longer, or
drag it around to different parts of the screen, but it was always horizontal
and stuck out from the left or right edge of the screen, never vertical
sticking out from the top or bottom.

You could click the head and it would retract so only the head stuck out, and
then click again and it would sproing back out to reveal the shaft at its
original length that you'd set.

I would have loved to see the focus groups they ran on that. I wonder if there
are any video tapes of Steve Jobs demonstrating it at MacWorld?

Eventually somebody at Apple must have realized that it looked like a penis,
and then it quietly disappeared from a later version of MacOS. The spots on
the head did not look healthy.

~~~
Mikhail_Edoshin
Jobs wasn't there when they added this in 1991. And it was pretty convenient
to use, by the way. I admire your adolescent spirit that manages to see
penises in such things. The "spotted" pattern is called "affordance" and it's
meant to indicate this thing is to be dragged. The similar pattern was used on
windows title bar where it looked like stripes in larger areas and dots in
smaller. Later generations forgot what it was for and lost the subtle art of
good user interface.

~~~
flqn
The dots are a "signifier" that the end of the bar "affords" being dragged by
the cursor. Signifiers are the part of an interface that show the user an
affordance exists, whereas affordances are the things that can be done. A
button affords being pressed, its shape and colour signify that it is a
button.

~~~
Mikhail_Edoshin
Yes, "signifier" is the right term, thank you.

------
floatboth
I don't often go to bad sites, but when I do… it's usually SourceForge. It's
not as bad as it used to be, and it's not nearly as bad as Mainstream News
Type Stuff, but still.

Literally no one wants to "Get latest updates about Open Source Projects,
Conferences and News", thank you very much. Why is there a giant banner
dickbar (that got blocked by my DNS resolver so it's a USELESS STICKY GIANT
WHITE STRIPE with a tiny gray "Advertisement" label) below the navigation bar?
Why does the navigation lead to nested categories of "Business Software"? Why
is the sidebar (which is 100% junk anyway) impossible to scroll fully as it
sticks to the top all the way and then gets obscured by the footer? Who
decided to make the breadcrumbs in 12px font next to a gigantic 3.42857rem
(comes out to 48px!!) current thing title?

------
brenden2
It feels like the Internet is back to where it was in the 90s where you had
malicious popup windows all over the place. I remember when browsers started
adding popup blocking as a core feature, and also adblockers became a thing
thanks to Firefox's extensions.

Now the difference is that the popups are within the page, rather than opening
a new browser window. Since the browser has slowly become the window through
which we do everything on computers, moving the popups inside the window pane
makes sense.

The adblockers will catch up (I hope), but in the meantime I just avoid
websites that are known to suck (which is nearly all mainstream sites these
days).

------
PaulHoule
It finally hit me that the whole point of that crap is to cause you to
accidentally click on ads that you're completely uninterested in.

On mobile in particular there are sites that move the content around in such a
way that when you click on a link in the content it will move an ad to the
place you want to click -- KA-CHING!

They must use machine learning or A.I. to make it work just "right".

~~~
shantly
I wonder what percentage of Google's ad clicks come from people clicking an ad
for something they would have ended up at anyway, because it's exactly what
they were searching for. Especially with their deceptive bullshit ad placement
on mobile results.

~~~
mbanerjeepalmer
See: [https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-
is-h...](https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-
called-online-advertising/13228924500-22d5fd24)

Its conclusions are overdrawn (for example ignoring businesses that don't
already have a brand presence). But it makes intuitive sense for the scenario
you mention.

------
annoyingnoob
I just avoid those sites - if your site is unusable or the blocking I use
makes your site unusable then I'm just gonna move on. Create a bad user
experience at your own peril.

~~~
a3n
Is it common for site developers to test with ad blocking and other usability
tools?

~~~
annoyingnoob
I find this most with sites that use a 3rd party for something. Sometimes the
3rd party analytics won't load and that breaks the entire site.

There are plenty of sites that detect ad blockers and block content until you
allow ads or pay.

Publishers like to make it all about ads and revenue while ignoring the train-
wreck that is tracking for personalized ads. I'll look at first-party ads that
don't track. Don't share my use and browsing history with others. Respect is a
two way street, to get respect you have to give respect.

------
lostgame
I was reading an article from FastCompany the other day on my iPhone, until a
circle requesting my email address covered half the screen.

The target size on the 'close' icon was unbearably small, to the point where I
tried tapping it three times only to have this giant circle covering the
content jump around the screen like it was having a seizure, only to end up
larger than it was before - it had somehow zoomed in while the rest of the
content didn't zoom.

Worse are the sites that include a large header bar along with an ad bar at
the bottom, _along_ with interstitial ads in the article. I've had several of
these pages where I would close the ad at the bottom only for it to re-appear
several seconds later as I scrolled down the screen.

I resort to manually removing <div>'s that contain ad-related content from the
page if I really need the content - in the cases that Reader Mode doesn't
exist.

I have enable Reader Mode by default set up on my iPhone. It's immensely
useful.

UBlock origin is really the only effective ad blocking platform these days, it
seems - I consistently get requests to disable AdBlock Plus when I'm using it.

~~~
gshdg
How do you get the iPhone to go into reader mode by default?

~~~
saagarjha
It's under Settings > Safari > Reader.

~~~
bashinator
Thank you!

------
userbinator
A lot of sites become free of all this crap when you have JS disabled;
especially news ones, which often still have good static content you can read.
I recommend giving it a try --- and whitelisting those sites you use regularly
which really do require it.

------
na85
I always think of sites like these when someone on HN claims that the web will
disappear unless I turn off my ad blocker.

If CNET, Forbes, and these other sites disappeared absolutely nothing of value
would be lost.

~~~
iudqnolq
If they provide absolutely nothing of value why do you read them?

~~~
peterwwillis
SEO. Try to search for _anything_ anymore without being trapped in an endless
sea of infuriatingly-designed ad-encrusted bullshit. I often end up going
through multiple results only to find they were a trap to generate page views
or ad clicks.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've recently started experimenting with adding "-site:.com" to web searches.

This ... is frequently an improvement.

------
dredmorbius
(Re)posted as I'd just run across an issue with Yet Another Online Book Reader
that wastes 25-50% _or more_ of screen space with unnecessary screen elements.

I'd reported the issue to the institution in question. In this case, the
default viewer is embedded in a web page with no "maximise" functionality.
There's a partial workaround of going directly to the viewer page, but _that_
has a persistent header which, when added to the browser and Android elements
that are then persisted (status bar, tabs, nav bar) chew up fully 25% of the
vertical real estate of the screen.

Which is only _just_ usable (9" Android tablet) for viewing scanned-in books
when those are fully maximised, though in portrait mode that works pretty
well.

The point being that even a _very small_ persistent element can result in a
_large_ reduction in useful screen space, and in many cases makes the
difference between a useful/usable and entirely useless interface.

The crap being rendered on most websites is ... just plain bad.

Reader mode, where that's available, is great. I'm a frequent user of
[https://outline.com/](https://outline.com/) There are others (one recently
linked heavily in HN comments).

------
nominated1
I’ve found the following list to help with “dickbars” and other modern
nonsense.

[https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances](https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances)

------
carapace
I sometimes browse with Dillo and there's what you might call the "Dillo-
compatible" web, which is often IMO nicer than the "full" fancy web. I think
they're working on adding JS, so it will probably all end in tears.

[https://www.dillo.org/](https://www.dillo.org/)

FWIW, I think a web reboot with some sort of deliberately-constrained client
and protocol(s) would be fun. (In the spirit of e.g.
[https://tildeverse.org/](https://tildeverse.org/) )

~~~
boring_twenties
Just bring back Gopher. I think there are a hundred or two sites operational
even today.

------
ljw1001
I was just on Smithsonian Magazine and it's a disgrace. See
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/20-best-small-towns-
vi...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/20-best-small-towns-
visit-2018-180969125/)

Is this not the magazine for the US's main national museums?

------
alasarmas
Here is the bookmarklet I use for dickbar removal, it works a lot of the time.
Use at your own risk; urldecode and read thoroughly before use:

[https://pastebin.com/raw/41WxsFY3](https://pastebin.com/raw/41WxsFY3)

------
flyinghamster
Google News on mobile has reached a new low with their un-dismissable "There
is a new version of Google News available" dickbar when reading. Even worse,
it pops up even when you're reading a story.

------
pkamb
blocking Google "YOLO" sign-in prompts:
[https://superuser.com/q/1414410/122042](https://superuser.com/q/1414410/122042)

~~~
saagarjha
Oh, those ones are horrible on Medium. They pop up exactly where the close
button for a different banner shows up!

------
sidpatil
OP's website isn't much more readable either, in my opinion. The color scheme
is horrible, and the main text isn't much wider than that in the Fortune
screenshot.

~~~
masukomi
I'm getting 12-15 words per line vs 3-4 on fortune.

the color scheme is debatable but anything other than black on white has
people who don't like it. I find it rather nice, myself, but it may fail basic
contrast checking for accessibility purposes.

