Pipe down pop up

Reading David Gruber's What is a Dickover? reminded me that once upon a time, the internet was not as annoying as it is today with the ubiquity of pop ups. Alas, there was a time when you could just visit a site and not have to battle against obstructions just to access the very thing you went there to do.

Gruber dabs them "dickovers" and defines a dickover as "a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website's mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn't give two shits about." It's enshittification, innit?

Guys, design better. Gruber:

If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

It's not so hard, is it?

Sidenote: RSS feeds that send you back to the website becuase they want to surveil you are also unacceptable.

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