dickover n. : 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.
You know what a dickover is, even if you didn't know what to call it (until now). If you use the Internet, you encounter them every day. They're popovers, but dickheaded. The web is absolutely lousy with them, and mobile apps present them too, with increasing frequency.
Dickovers are a veritable scourge. They're so common they're effectively part of the firmament. I started calling these things dickpanels in 2022 , but when dickover popped into my head last week, 1 I couldn't shake the feeling that it's a better term for these ubiquitous odious irritations. You can hardly go anywhere on the web without getting dicked over by a dickover. They often pester you about permitting cookies, like this one from Euronews or this one from Gallup . This malicious design pattern is so ubiquitous that it has spread even to personal blogs, like this one from my friend Om Malik , and to great brands like Field Notes , both asking you to sign up for their newsletters.
The homepage for every single blog hosted by Substack shows a particularly pernicious dickover on its homepage. The Substack dickover doesn't even look like a panel. It's a full-screen curtain designed and worded to suggest, strongly, that you need to sign up for the blog's email newsletter just to read anything. The dismissal button for the Substack dickover is a small text link — that doesn't look anything like a button — that says something like "No thanks" (e.g. Paul Krugman , Matt Yglesias ) or something that adds insult to injury with a cloyingly saccharine label like "Just gimme that content!" (e.g. Volts ).
Here's one from The Philadelphia Inquirer , for which I pay $20/month to subscribe, asking me to sign up for SMS text messages about the Jersey shore, while I'm logged into their cursed website, before they'll let me see the article I came to read. Every time I see one of these I think about unsubscribing. I'm paying them to abuse my time and attention. I started capturing screenshots of every dickover I saw when I started working on this article, and I soon had to give up because I was collecting too many of them. But this one from Tom's Hardware I actually enjoyed, because their own dickover got dicked over by one of their own fucking ads in a JavaScript Z-axis slapfight.
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.
Some sites hit you with their dickovers on page load, when you might be braced for it. We're all braced for obstacles and annoyances these days when we load web pages. But some sneaky, cowardly bastards sucker-punch you with their dickbars only after you have started reading, and begin to scroll down the page. Then, wham , they hit with their dickover. It's a goddamn privilege for anyone to bestow your article, story, or product page with their attention. The gall, to deliberately interrupt them while they are in the middle of actively reading, to present them with a dickover. It is no different from snatching a physical copy of a book or magazine out of a reader's hands in order to badger them for something other than the attention they were already granting your work, except that the physical act of snatching a publication from a reader's hands would subject you to being punched in the face.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SemperOSS on Sunday May 31, @09:01AM (8 children)
You are absolutely right, but it is a complicated matter, to say the least.
Due to European rules, we have the cookie pop-ups/pop-overs (that mostly do not follow the directive as they use dark patterns to try to get people to accept cookies).
For economic reasons (read "advertising"/"personal information sales") there is a "necessity" to track users, actions and whatever else the sites want to follow, cookies beyond mere technical — i.e. beyond those to keep track of where a visitor is and has been (bread-crumbs) — must be used.
For the same economic reasons plus exposure (which indirectly is a matter of economy) as well, pop-ups/-overs are used to entice people into more engagement.
And again, for the same economic reasons, advertising must be used and — through misconstrued ideas that people just want to get them slapped into their desensitised eyeballs — they are created as pop-ups/-overs.
So, basically, to enjoy the "free" internet, someone has to pay and we, the users, do it by watching adverts we never click on and selling our first-born^W soul^W personal information to the sites.
Open Source Solutions and Digital Sovereignty is the new black
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Sunday May 31, @09:49AM (1 child)
That's debatable. DuckDuckGo argues they do not need to track users, they achieve the same click-throughs as google only taking into account the search topic. Similarly, advertisement on websites could be based on the content of the website. I am not aware of hard evidence comparing tracking vs. content based advertisement. Managers can be lured all to easily into tracking.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SemperOSS on Sunday May 31, @05:16PM
I agree with you and the word "necessity" was in quotes exactly because it does not have to be necessary.
I find most websites use and abuse capabilities (like JavaScript and cookies) for many reasons — often, it seems, out of "laziness", i.e. the front-end developers will rather use a JS library that loads megabytes of code (mostly an exaggeration, but I have met them) to make something that could easily be made with CSS; the cookie issue is solved by issuing a pop-up because that is how the others have done it.
Open Source Solutions and Digital Sovereignty is the new black
(Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Sunday May 31, @10:07AM (4 children)
Just to be clear, 'European rules' do not mandate cookie pop-ups. They are the advertisers' (maliciously 'compliant') response to the 'ePrivacy directive', not, as many people believe, part of the GDPR.
(From: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ [gdpr.eu] )
So a website does not need a pop-up if it uses only strictly necessary cookies. A cookie consent is required only if you intend to use non strictly necessary cookies. And it legally, must be as easy to withdraw consent as give it. If you have a button that is 'Consent to all', you should have a button that is 'Decline all'.
Advertisers cannot point at EU rules as mandating pop-ups: they do not. It is the advertisers' own behaviour that generates the requirement.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SemperOSS on Sunday May 31, @05:08PM (3 children)
Re. the European (more correctly, I should have said EU) rules: the cookie pop-ups/-overs are caused by the EU rules not mandated.
Open Source Solutions and Digital Sovereignty is the new black
(Score: 2, Disagree) by pTamok on Sunday May 31, @06:27PM (2 children)
Still nope.
The cause is advertisers' greed. It is entirely possible to be compliant with EU cookie rules without pop-ups.
(Score: 2) by SemperOSS on Monday June 01, @09:17AM (1 child)
Hm, let me try this again … I do not say the EU rules mandate pop-ups, but that the websites choose to use that to comply.
Did you see any cookie pop-ups before the EU directive?
Me neither.
Since I am pretty sure the cookies now requiring user opt-in were there before the EU directive, the pop-ups are caused by the EU directive to continue the previous cookie behaviour. Those cookies may be there for whatever reason, including greed, I don't deny that, but that in itself is not the direct cause.
Open Source Solutions and Digital Sovereignty is the new black
(Score: 1, Disagree) by pTamok on Monday June 01, @11:16AM
Still no.
To use 'cause' requires one of two things to be true:
Either: The effect is a consequence of the application of non-sentient 'forces of nature' on the objects or systems to which the cause is applied. A rock has no choice in falling under the influence of gravity. The cause of its motion is the physical phenomenon of gravity.
Or: The effect is a resut of an intentional choice by a sentient being to effect (do) or not effect (no do) something. The animal died because you shot it for food.
The mere existence of a cookie law does not magically produce pop-ups. There's no physical law here. For a pop-up to be produced, someone has to decide to program it and put it into production. The intentionality in is in the person deciding to do that.
There is an old saw: "You cannot legislate for morality.", which means that making something illegal does not stop people from doing said thing. It is illegal to steal, yet people do steal. It is illegal to exceed the speed limit, yet people exceed the speed limit. A law does not determine behaviour: individuals making their own decisions do that. So, laws do not cause behaviour, only people do that by using their own intentionality and deciding to comply with current law, or not.
The law cannot be a cause. But, it can be an influence on people's decision making behaviour. People do decide to flout laws, or not.
A cookie law is not a physical law. Unlike the rock with gravity, you have a choice as to whether you comply, or not. The intentionality is within the person.
For this reason, a cookie law does not cause pop-ups. It might influence people's decisions, but it is down to people's intentionality as to whether pop-ups are programmed or not. You yourself said "the websites choose to use that to comply." The sentient entity in control of the website chooses to want to use cookies other than 'strictly necessary', and so chooses to comply with the law and put a pop-up in place. The reasons for that choice can be many, and could include greed.
Causation is a complicated topic, and I am no expert. For a slightly deeper view (with a lot of jargon) go here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-metaphysics/ [stanford.edu]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Undefined on Sunday May 31, @11:35AM
Just FYI, I've been running multiple websites, most of them broadly public since the 1990's. The only one that collects user information does so when they actively purchase a product. The info in question is their shipping and email addresses, available via the payment gateway, info which is discarded on my end when delivery confirmation is received.
Actual financial info is between them and their payment gateway. I never collect, keep, or even see, any financial info but incoming payments. No credit card numbers, CCVs, expiration dates, etc. The payment gateway does keep address, email, and payment received info on my behalf, but I almost never have cause to refer to it after the product has been shipped unless the customer has some kind of problem in which case it is used responsibly and only to the customer's benefit, IE to re-ship, refund, whatever needs to be done to resolve the issue. I never sell email addresses, nor have I ever opted-in anyone to any group mailing of ours for instance for software update notices, etc. There are far better, completely non-invasive ways to handle software update notifications in-app anyway.
There are no popovers, popunders, windowed advertisements, "dickovers" or cross-site cookies of any kind on my sites. In fact, as far as cookies go, I don't use them at all except on my private, custom social media sites where family and friends use passwords and the site uses them indirectly to keep them logged in or out.
Same thing for donations. Where it's appropriate, there's a small text link. That's it. Soylent does this as well.
While commercial sites require at least a little info to operate, other sites do not. It's easy to offer services without being a shitheel. Making a living giving out free/donation-based services is pretty hard, and I don't recommend trying it, frankly, but then again, nor do I recommend engaging with most sites that are trying to do so unless you're willing to donate. And it's 100% up to the site to earn, and keep earning, (at least my) donations. Pop-up/over, intrusive ads, shitty no-click menus... they get the banhammer on my end. Because not only do you not have to impose that crap on people, you don't have to put up with it, either.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday May 31, @09:03AM (1 child)
Yes. Popovers. They have been named. For quite some time. They are not new. It was always for ads or to be nagging or annoying. Nothing has changed in that regard. This "rebranding" or renaming is just silly. They sure are annoying and a dick move but we don't need another word for it. Or a rebranding. I'm fairly sure of that.
What does he call the popunders? As in all the popup windows that does not steal focus and try to slide behind, usually to show annoying ads or for tracking reasons.
They tend to be defeated by just disabling javascript, which may or may not also just disable the entire site but those be the breaks. Nothing of value was probably lost.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fab23 on Sunday May 31, @10:23AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by DadaDoofy on Sunday May 31, @12:33PM
No need to make up your own word for something that's already been named.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P214800%20Dark%20Patterns%20Report%209.14.2022%20-%20FINAL.pdf [ftc.gov]
https://lawecommons.luc.edu/lclr/vol34/iss3/6/ [luc.edu]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Sunday May 31, @01:52PM (3 children)
Typically when I come across a site that blocks or mostly obscures the content until I click through something, I just assume they don't have what I am looking for and close the window or tab. Because most of the time they don't.
I'll sometimes put up with the cookie stuff because that is a bad law - it simply needs to be illegal or technically impossible to track people beyond functional things like site logins.
If one wants to paywall a site, fine but keep those results OUT of search engines.
That is the kind of site that really pisses me off these days. Sites that Rickroll me in to thinking they have what I am looking for but then don't at all. Not even the snippet shown in the search engine preview.
[Oh, look, you scrolled down! STARTS AUTOPLAYING SEIZURE INDUCING VIDEO ADS]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday May 31, @03:04PM
Its a common feature of AI generated slop sites, wrap the output of a prompt's response with tons of ads.
I don't need to watch their ads to enter a prompt myself and not see the ads.
The future is unevenly distributed; I don't think people get the point that AI slop advertising farms like that are what the output of LLMs will look like in a couple years when the financial crunch hits. You're not going to get a nice text answer from your free LLM, you (or your employer) will have to pay $200 to $2000/month to see each response wrapped in tons of ads and annoyance.
Sort of like comparing how text-only Gopher looked in 1990 to modern web pages 35 years later. Technically going to be the same topic, but the advertising will cause eye bleeding.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 31, @04:13PM (1 child)
That is my standard response. As time passes, I am less and less tolerant of jumping through hoops to get at the content. One site may require four seconds of my time, another might require half a minute, but neither is entitled to my time.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday June 01, @07:35AM
I figure if the site is a pain in the ass to deal with, the people will be too.
Too many sites feel like stepping in a pile of poo. ( JavaScript ).
If the first thing they do is complain about my browser, that's all I need to tell me I am apt to get all snarled up in a mess of JavaScript making demands. I had just as soon to not be the monkey for the organ grinder. I have had it with a lot of these webmasters that demand I respond to legalese crap, as well as assuming the risk of executing someone else's code, which may be misleading/malicious, on my machine.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday May 31, @02:58PM
This dickover thing is a very specific example of the very general UI / social trend of the "Humiliation Ritual" which is becoming VERY popular and extremely popular with authoritarians.
Its sort of a self inflicted injury thing where they've given up on making stuff better, you're supposed to either feel better as a rebound after the pain ends, or its the joy of punishing the people you don't like by forcing them to do stuff everyone knows won't work, often not even permitting them to discuss how it's designed not to work.
Its definitely clustered in certain political/religious/cultural groups and MUCH less so in others. But it also shows up in the weirdest places like "corporate linux" decisions and other odd locations.
No no no. Make it hyper authoritarian like have a cop shoot them for resisting or get them fired from their job for not tolerating the nonsense. Or label dislike of the act as a hate crime.
Its a sociopath thing, so the larger the organization the more of this people have to put up with, because those types rise to the top.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday May 31, @08:48PM (1 child)
Stuff like
or
for the most part. Sometimes you need to unclog the scrolling or enable mouse clicking with small js scriplets in the filters like
or whatever...
But I think the browser built-in AI agents are going to do it all soon. Like, I've just recently wrote a whole Firefox browser extension using Google's AI Overview (Gemini I believe?) without even logging-in and Firefox already has APIs for the models' extensions to hook into to make it possible to ask the agent to look up prices for products and such... I mean, for all I know, it's probably already possible and widespread using the AI agent integration features? But I disabled those since they depend on remotely-run models that leak private information... But either way, it won't be long before it's doable I'm sure.
AI aside, it's all about as hard as writing regular expressions with sed or grep and you can mostly avoid the javascript 99% of the time. So, meh.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday May 31, @08:53PM
Btw, like the above, the best source for the necessary scripts is filters for manga scan groups you can find on reddit and the likes. The scanlation groups update the CMSs and plugins and their userbase is fairly aggressive in keeping the filters up-to-date. So, sed'ing through the filter list commit logs for "scan" usually brings up the most recent workarounds.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bentonite on Monday June 01, @01:24AM
Arbitrary remote malware execution on what should be your computer.
If you disable JavaScript, pop-ups tend to not load.
Substack works correctly without a pop-up without JavaScript, although there is a red bar on the bottom to punish you for not executing malware, but that can be removed by adding `substack.com###nojs-banner` to 'My filters' in ublock origin.
(Score: 3, Touché) by srobert on Monday June 01, @03:43AM
Whenever a website asks you to accept cookies I can't shake the feeling that I'm a child being offered treats by a pedophile.