DuckDuckGo has that feature, too.

sadly sometimes it's e-commerce websites where you actually want to buy their product and they interrupt you three times with "sign up to our newsletter and get 5% off with the code" modals, like they're actively trying to frustrate me into not giving them my money

But if you truly care about privacy or any kind of control, just don’t use kagi

There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.

One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.

What I've seen lead to success:

* Arrogance

* Overconfidence

* Schmoozing with the right people

* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation

What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:

* Caring about teammates and your future self

* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want

* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems

It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.

Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.

For a while I would put “f***yournewsletter@gmail.com” but then I realized no one would ever see it, and it probably just helps their click numbers.

I detest newsletter modals.

You forgot to sub to push.

It’s because they care about your privacy, they want you to know just how much their care, so much so they’re ready to show you popups /s.

The market did choose it's most optimal. The real burning question is who's the customer.

> She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery

If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?

I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?

Declining industries can get into a death spiral where they can’t find a way to stop bleeding customers, so they focus on extracting more money from the customers who remain. Which then drives away even more of them. It’s not a good strategy, but there may not be a good strategy.

SponsorBlock. Granted, doesn’t do much for my iPhone but on computers it’s a solved problem.

It's just nihilism, we can put the urls on dht when we are ready.

Although to be fair YouTube itself has started to defeat those - they put a little white dot in the timeline when the ad finishes.

I'm not sure how they do it but I think AI could pretty easily detect current ad transitions. Especially when combined with data about which bits of the video most people skip.

I think it'll lead to sponsorships being much more integrated into videos rather than a sponsorship segment. Or possibly people will switch to much shorter segments like LTT does.

I never really understood why they want long segments anyway. Shorter ones mean I'm much more likely to actually see it.

"Click here to prove you're human"

Coincidentally, the most devious way I've seen to make users enable notifications from a site.

Like... scrolling down the page?

Anyway, forbidding pages from loading secondary content would break millions of sites, including the most visited sites in the world. That would be equivalent to completely redesigning HTML/JS.

Or worse, be [secretly] biased towards sponsored answers/solutions. There's a reason "they" don't want AI to be regulated.

Everything you say and do with the robot is uploaded into the cloud for someone else's benefit. You'd have to be getting something really good out of using the robot for that to be worth it, and I think that's been the case with me so far, mostly because I'm someone who doesn't really have much in the way of confidential information. The advantage of having a bunch of claudes and geminis running around doing things for me is too much fun to turn down. The best benefit though is just being less lonely, since it's never been easy for me to find other people who care about the set of weird things I'm interested in, which is constantly changing, and even harder to find someone who not only knows but is willing to collaborate too, during all the oddball times of any given day or night I happen to be both productive and awake.

I mean, don’t give your “search the web and tell me what it says” bot access to local files or commands.