
Please let this not be the future of reading on the web - pascal07
http://www.elezea.com/2011/11/future-of-web-reading/
======
edw519
edw519's simple rules for reading on the internet:

That's a Back Button

(to the cadence of "That's a Paddlin'" from "The Simpsons")

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFgR0m-9FmM>

    
    
      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 & text in my browser? That's a back button.
      Overlapping ads & 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.
    

It's a wonder I find anything readable any more.

~~~
ladon86
Publishers' solution to your problem:

Disable the back button.

~~~
pjscott
I tend to open things in new tabs. Closing the tab works. If things get
annoying enough, other people can adopt my habits on this.

~~~
hollerith
Or switch to a browser that doesnt allow a website to disable your back
button.

------
EwanToo
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...

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.

~~~
icebraining
I don't know about most people, but I don't read many articles from the same
source: I read a few from some online newspaper, then some from another, then
a blog post, etc. Now take NYT.com: the minimum subscription is $15/month -
it's absurdly expensive for the three or four articles I might read there.

You need to solve micropayments to make paywalls work.

~~~
EwanToo
I think the view that NYT.com and www.thetimes.co.uk are taking is that if you
pay the $15, you'll end up sourcing most of your news from that site,
justifying the price.

I don't know how true that premise is, but it's definitely a simpler solution
for them than coming up with a solution to micropayments (which you're
absolutely right, does need to get solved).

~~~
hollerith
Sourcing most of my news from the NYT would seriously impair my knowledge of
the world. It would be like going back to the bad old days before access to
the internet.

------
citricsquid
"...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.

~~~
iaskwhy
Why? Is it because The Deck is selective? Because if that's the reason then
there you have a problem to be fixed by another startup. Bloggers of the
world, unite?

(I know there are already a couple of offerings and people working on new ad
networks.)

~~~
citricsquid
That is exactly why it can't be considered a good option and why it is "bad"
for the wider internet. The Deck being selective is saying "we know adverts
suck, so if you're actually good you can be in our super neat actually good
system!" so instead of solving the problem of bad adverts, they're just
ignoring it and saying that the sites they like can be in their small network
that doesn't have the problem.

Their entire network does ~100m monthly impressions, that's nothing.

~~~
absconditus
Is your concern that the millions of sites with bad content will not have many
options?

~~~
drumdance
No, it's that thousands of sites with good content will only have crappy
options.

~~~
dasil003
Ads are a race to the bottom though. The Deck recognized that exclusivity is
the only way to create an oasis, and I'd rather have that oasis than have
nothing at all.

To effect wider change what's necessary is for users to start to value content
and be willing to pay for it. If the major pubs could make money from the
readers than they would be inclined to improve their experience. However,
mass-market readers have never really been willing to pay the full cost of
quality content, so don't hold your breath.

~~~
prawn
And there's not much stopping others creating their own versions of The Deck,
especially around niche areas. I'm surprised more people haven't done this, or
even created some sort of simple and reliable engine that allowed people to do
it easily.

------
jrabone
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.

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.

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...

------
qjz
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?

------
jimbobimbo
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...

------
tallanvor
Well, which would we prefer? Seeing the ads, or having to pay for access to
each site?

Personally, as annoying as ads are, I still prefer them being there to the
content not being available at all.

~~~
brigade
The issue is not the existence of advertising.

The issue is (primarily for me) the new wave of popup ads that don't let you
view the content until you find the 30x30 pixel close area. And secondly the
sites where ads have become more important than content (reflected in the
design.) And thirdly the dozen social media buttons on every single page.

Non-horrid advertising should be possible for any respectable website.
Advertising that abuses your users is only going to be tolerated for so long,
and pushes more people to use adblock.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> And thirdly the dozen social media buttons on every single page.

You mean the "Like" / "+1" / "Tweet" buttons under articles? What's wrong with
these?

I personally want them to be on websites and I _actively seek them_ after
reading an article, because clicking on two or three buttons is so much easier
and less distracting than having to copy the URL and paste it into every
social website I use.

~~~
moheeb
I personally consider Facebook, etc. to be lame wastes of time and consider
those buttons tacky and unneeded.

It seems a simple browser plugin could still allow Facebookers and Diggers and
whomever else the ability to poop back and forth as much as they like while
not polluting the web for the rest of us.

As it is now we have to pray that some of these sites don't make it...imagine
how many buttons there will be in 50 years!

EDIT: Just wanted to point out this was not a personal attack. I was just
trying to raise awareness that not everyone has the same interests.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> Just wanted to point out this was not a personal attack. I was just trying
> to raise awareness that not everyone has the same interests.

Don't worry, it didn't sound like one :).

Thanks for explaining your point of view. I just realized I didn't really stop
and think about people who, like you, don't like Facebook et al. Personally, I
think I'd be happy to use a browser plugin or whatever, just like I use e.g.
Instapaper. Hell, in browser like Conkeror it would be even more convenient
(for Instapaper I now just press "C-x i", it's even easier than pressing a
button on the address bar).

~~~
moheeb
I think this method is inevitable. Either that or a protocol/standard to
handle them all.

As it is now we'll eventually run out of real estate on the screen for 'like'
buttons.

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

~~~
ticks
That's a technique I have considered in the past, i.e. making my images look
like ads, so that those users either disable the blocker or move on.

If ad blocker users were more than a minority, then I would have to shut my
websites down, but thankfully most people allow the ads.

The recent (and potentially upcoming recession) means ad revenue is very weak,
so that's why we are seeing/using more aggressive advertising.

------
AndrewDucker
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.

------
nicksergeant
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.

The ads you see on websites right now are remnants from the newspaper, nearly
identical to their print counterparts.

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".

Solving this requires something larger.

~~~
gergles
"Solving this" implies that there are users who like, value, and _want_
advertising. I don't feel that there are that many people who do.

The better thing to solve is "how can websites make money without ads"? How
did TV networks stay on the air before commercial breaks? Maybe a similar
model can be applied.

~~~
superuser2
Big government, taxes, licenses required to own televisions. As unpopular as
advertising is, that's even less likely to fly.

~~~
gergles
Well, we still have 2/3 of those things in the US and 3/3 in many European
countries.

I was more alluding to the idea of "this website sponsored by ___" being
inserted into the content in a tasteful, subdued way - kind of like how "Beat
the Clock" was actually "Calgon's Beat the Clock".

------
DanielBMarkham
This is driving me crazy. I feel the author's pain.

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. <http://newspaper23.com>

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.

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?

Nope, the problem is _stickiness_. 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 _engagement_. 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.)

~~~
prawn
I don't think the issue is just stickiness, I think it's more about publishers
trying to squeeze out the next dollar, and the one after that. They're all
gradual steps down into reading hell that is horrible when looked at from
afar, but easier to understand when you consider them on their own.

    
    
      Add one more promo spot for a few extra bucks. I guess. OK.
      Make the header banner larger. OK.
      Boss wants a Send To Friend feature because they heard about someone using one, once.
      Maybe trial an interstitial because it will cover the costs of the new SEO guy.
      Etc.

------
jetz
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!

I don't know the solution but I'm (we're) trying with our startup.

------
scriptproof
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.

~~~
prawn
I'm an AdSense publisher and I get emails from Google suggesting that I add
more ad blocks to my site, and also tips on where to place them to get noticed
most - above the fold, primarily. They also coach on making the ads stand out
by using bold/bright colours. I suspect you'd have to go above and beyond with
your ad placements to frustrate Google...

~~~
prawn
Also wanted to mention that they also routinely email me suggesting I swap out
my text-only ads for image-based ads (which in my testing don't perform as
well).

------
jiggy2011
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.

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..

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.

There are still plenty of people writing high quality content and lots of it
gets linked to here on HN.

People will just be more discerning about the content portals they use.

------
jvdh
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.

AFAIK he gets a lot more from the weekly feed-sponsorships, The Deck ads, and
Amazon referrals.

------
franze
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.

out of curiosity: is there anybody out-there who thinks swipeware on blogs is
a great idea/experience?

~~~
m_eiman
What's swipeware?

~~~
jetz
application controlled by swipes. you know ones you do on a touch device.

------
InfinityX0
This:

"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.

"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.

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.

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.

Condé Nast isn't built to do this."

Via - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628>

------
efsavage
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.

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.

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.

(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.)

------
ivanzhao
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.

A better paradigm has to come.

------
rythie
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):

[http://posterous.richardcunningham.co.uk/the-problem-with-
on...](http://posterous.richardcunningham.co.uk/the-problem-with-online-
advertising)

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

------
monkeypizza
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.

It took a long time before I was convinced to try it - but it's sweet.

------
ChuckMcM
_"... as well as the growing number of sites that offer memberships (like The
Loop and Daring Fireball)."_

So there is a concept, that you can't tell people about, they have to
experience it, then they "get it."

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:

1) Technical users of the time were chanting "information wants to be free"
and were rabidly opposed to paying for content.

2) Nearly nobody had Java in their browser yet, so supporting this meant a
very small market to work from.

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.

[Trust me, in 2015 after all that crap expires, we're going to have some
really useful tools available.]

So Golfweb, like others, turned to putting banner ads on the pages and using
that to pay the bills.

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.

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.

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.

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 _for_ 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.

~~~
muyuu
The problem with paid content is that you only know whether it's worthy for
you in hindsight. On top of that you have to compete with gratis (and often
surprisingly good quality).

You have all the problems of an asymmetrical information market and you also
have to break a cultural gap.

Honestly, I don't subscribe to magazines anymore. I just can't get
consistently satisfied with any single source. The only subscription I pay is
the broadband contract itself. I don't consistently watch TV or follow any
sports for me to consider paying. I know there is a market for that, but it's
a really difficult one.

~~~
ChuckMcM
In my opinion the quality problem (knowing apriori) is endemic to any market.
Unknown entities will be hard pressed to convince but that is true of most
things. What will be interesting though (and this is starting) the good 'free'
quality stuff starts becoming harder to find for free as those folks develop
appreciative audiences.

I still subscribe to several magazines, but by far my favorite in terms of
understanding this new reality is The Economist. If you subscribe you get your
content digitally for no additional cost. Presentation is good and not
overwhelming with ads (of course the magazine isn't either so perhaps its more
cultural to the publisher as well). One magazine I subscribe to but _don't_
pay for as an 'app' is Popular Mechanics. Their presentation is less useful in
digital form than their printed form sadly.

------
paulnelligan
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.

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 ...

~~~
prawn
You pay for a newspaper and it still has advertising...

~~~
JoeAltmaier
...but my newspaper ads are a wad of color-printed coupon sheets etc. I
extract the ad-wad and drop it in the bin on the way out of the market.

Leaving me with 3 or 4 thin sheets of local news.

~~~
prawn
Newspapers here in Australia will have those catalogue inserts (we don't
really have coupons) PLUS ads on almost every page. In fact, the amount of
pages in the daily newspapers is directly decided by the ad inventory they
have - fewer ads and they'll leave out content, more ads and they'll find more
stories or lower the bar a bit.

------
zobzu
Use ghostery. :-)

------
deepakgupta1
Evernote Clearly, anyone?

~~~
mainevent
Definitely. Actually read this article with it.
[http://blog.evernote.com/2011/11/16/introducing-evernote-
cle...](http://blog.evernote.com/2011/11/16/introducing-evernote-clearly-one-
click-for-distraction-free-online-reading/)

------
wavephorm
Q: Do you want to pay for reading content on the web?

A: No.

Q: Do you want to see ads while reading content on the web?

A: No.

Q: Do you want everything to be free all the time but maintain a capitalistic
society?

A: Yes.

------
funkah
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.

~~~
jasonkester
Article: It sucks that we need to use things like Readability just to read
things on the internet.

Parent: Just use Readability.

In short, not very helpful as comments go.

~~~
funkah
I suppose you've got me there. If the argument is "but it's an extra click", I
can't say I feel much sympathy.

