My experience was probably exactly as intended. Click on the "What is a dickover?" link trying to come up with things that it might be. And a brief moment after the page loaded (this little pause is crucial) I am hit in the face with a big annoying popup saying "This is a Dickover" followed by immediate understanding.
Now at least I know what to call it the next time I visit Substack.
A combination of User stylesheet (stylus) or User scripts (greasemonkey) -- superpowered by AI models that can let users target screen elements and shape webpage display and behavior without having to manually deal with precise DOM elements or CSS JS syntax
Best useful tweaks could become part of a curated list like uOrigin ad block lists
I have a theory that about 97% of developers and managers completed the cookie consent (or whatever) on their own product 5 years ago and hence never see it again, and they have no idea how bad the experience for new customers actually is.
So the developers and bosses all think they're doing a great job and they've got a carefully curated homepage, even though the regular users get a cloudflare captcha, then a cookie modal, then a newsletter modal, then an install-our-app modal, all blocking their access to the 'buy product' button.
Oh we care, but when it comes to cookie dickovers, we care more about making the corporate lawyers happy.
I’ll admit that I definitely like collecting my paycheck much more than I worry about customer annoyance at acknowledging a cookie policy. Some hills ain't worth dying on.
I explicitly disable these on Substack but it adds them to my posts anyway. I'm not sure if that's a bug or the thing working as intended, but it was enough to make me stop using it. I don't want to do that to my readers.
Dickovers are annoying -- tell me, what's your solution? For me, a combination of a) not patronizing these sites, but when I have to b) some ad blockers help. Nothing seems to work well though.
Did you know that a Substack's author can turn the annoying popup off? Go to dashboard -> settings, and then it's "Enable subscribe prompts on post page" under "Growth."
I’m just kind of surprised that it works to convert people.
Or…maybe it doesn’t?
Some of these things that we have are just common practices that owners of websites do that are seemingly done automatically without much thought to the experience.
Did anyone else think this was a clever keming pun?
Fortunately, for those sites where either JS is required for the content or to remove the dickover, browsers still have an Inspect Element tool that makes deleting this and other annoyances not too difficult and rather cathartic.
Never thought to call them dickovers before, but it’s apt. At a certain point, I noticed my finger reflexively hitting the ESC key because that usually dismisses a lot of them.
Yeah this is really bad. Firefox + uBlock Origin + Filters cleans a lot of these dickovers. Some seem to slip through the cracks. There's a never ending fight between bad websites and the warriors trying to protect our attention.
Most people don't care about this and they should, I have the google analytics import on my business endeavors, but why would I put it into a blog? Why subject both myself and my poor readers to yet another tentacle to suck our interaction into its googolplex of data. I hope all webdevs start caring more. On that same note, I hope all webdevs stop using substack, it's so trivial nowadays to make and style your own blog however you want, why take the even lazier route of giving substack control over everything
Gruber's usually too much of a walking Apple ad for my taste, but I love this.
We need to define the things we hate. Give them words. Use the words as weapons.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently with "watermarks" of the statistical and non-visible kind used to track image creators. (Google embedding "this image is AI but also here's the user ID".)
I've been thinking that practice needs a new word too. It's not watermarking, it's signals-math based tracking, so maybe sigtracked.
I find the characterisation of his Apple praise fascinating. It's really not that zealous, unless you hate Apple (which is fine). I think this image of him speaks more of the prominence of the Apple superfan image in popular culture than the actual reality of his position.
It isn't anymore, but if you go back a decade or two, it really was that zealous. He really did used to blindly defend Apple (e.g. things like this: https://daringfireball.net/2006/09/open_challenge), but I think he's grown more skeptical of Apple lately.
I don't want to split hairs over what constitutes as overzealous, but I will say that Apple ~20 years ago earned more praise than Apple does today. This is probably reflected in the writing.
I agree, but being mildly offensive is kind of the point: makes it more memorable, and clearly differentiated from “popup” which is too broad and has many valid uses in an interface. Dickovers never have a valid reason to exist.
I don't get why people feel entitled to _not_ get dickovers. Are you paying for what you're using, to a sufficient degree that the ecosystem can work without the dickover being presented to you?
This shouldn't be the user's problem, but this is the market working. The dickovers are there because someone somewhere is making money because the dickovers are there. Saying you want the content without the spam is more or less saying you want other people to do the work and you don't want to pay for it.
If you don't like ads/dickovers, you don't have to use the site/app. The provider has decided you're not worth it. To be fair, you probably aren't making them money.
There are exceptions, but you shouldn't feel entitled to use the thing without paying the "dickover price" that the provider has decided to charge.
I guess the entitlement comes from looking at it from the other way: my employer pays me a lot for my attention. I've accepted the arrangement so now I pay attention to their problems. If you want me to pay attention to your problem, there has to be something in it for me.
I've been wondering how we can use AI to clean up websites before they hit our eyes. If AI is as good as they say it is, surely it can clean up dickovers. If someone is allowed to shove something in front of my face should I not be allowed to make them invisible?
>What won't help is complaining that the largely free products we get don't work the way we want them to.
This makes no sense and seems bad-faith on multiple levels.
It must be worth a lot for me to see it, because if I land on a site shopping for something, I might just turn around when you interrupt me and force me to actively not sign up for your email list.
You should turn around! That's literally my point.
If everyone refused to touch a site that blasts you with a dickover, they would disappear overnight. Clearly people do not do this enough, because it's still being implemented.
My experience was probably exactly as intended. Click on the "What is a dickover?" link trying to come up with things that it might be. And a brief moment after the page loaded (this little pause is crucial) I am hit in the face with a big annoying popup saying "This is a Dickover" followed by immediate understanding.
Now at least I know what to call it the next time I visit Substack.
[1] https://kagi.com/smallweb
Browser personalization tools or extensions ...
A combination of User stylesheet (stylus) or User scripts (greasemonkey) -- superpowered by AI models that can let users target screen elements and shape webpage display and behavior without having to manually deal with precise DOM elements or CSS JS syntax
Best useful tweaks could become part of a curated list like uOrigin ad block lists
So the developers and bosses all think they're doing a great job and they've got a carefully curated homepage, even though the regular users get a cloudflare captcha, then a cookie modal, then a newsletter modal, then an install-our-app modal, all blocking their access to the 'buy product' button.
I’ll admit that I definitely like collecting my paycheck much more than I worry about customer annoyance at acknowledging a cookie policy. Some hills ain't worth dying on.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
It's the first thing I did. Recommended.
I’m just kind of surprised that it works to convert people.
Or…maybe it doesn’t?
Some of these things that we have are just common practices that owners of websites do that are seemingly done automatically without much thought to the experience.
[YES, I DO, THE IMPORTANT TRACKING ONES] [YES, I DO, ALL OF THEM] ⁿᵒ ᵃⁿᵈ ᶜˡᵒˢᵉ ᵈᶦᶜᵏᵒᵛᵉʳ
Fortunately, for those sites where either JS is required for the content or to remove the dickover, browsers still have an Inspect Element tool that makes deleting this and other annoyances not too difficult and rather cathartic.
[ ] Yes
[ ] Maybe later
So they're popovers.
Seriously. I've never seen a popover used for any legitimate purpose. If it was the content the user wanted, you can put it in the page where it goes.
I know, I know, but it's a game site. It needs sound! [2]
[1] https://mooncraft2000.com
[2] Damn, I just tried my site again and a recent Safari has blocked my weak attempt to force sound.
My own blog has none of that crap. No Google analytics, no tracking. If someone visits my site, I have no idea. And I don't care.
I've always thought of blogging as just writing a note, dropping it in a bottle and tossing it. No idea what happens to it once I post it.
We need to define the things we hate. Give them words. Use the words as weapons.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently with "watermarks" of the statistical and non-visible kind used to track image creators. (Google embedding "this image is AI but also here's the user ID".)
I've been thinking that practice needs a new word too. It's not watermarking, it's signals-math based tracking, so maybe sigtracked.
That might not sound gross enough though.
Why would I say that in front of any female colleage or any non-technical layman? We already have a name for this and it is a "popup".
Which sounds better?
"Remove this popup" or "Remove this dickover"
Be honest.
> Be honest.
The latter definitely is the more honest answer.
This shouldn't be the user's problem, but this is the market working. The dickovers are there because someone somewhere is making money because the dickovers are there. Saying you want the content without the spam is more or less saying you want other people to do the work and you don't want to pay for it.
If you don't like ads/dickovers, you don't have to use the site/app. The provider has decided you're not worth it. To be fair, you probably aren't making them money.
There are exceptions, but you shouldn't feel entitled to use the thing without paying the "dickover price" that the provider has decided to charge.
I've been wondering how we can use AI to clean up websites before they hit our eyes. If AI is as good as they say it is, surely it can clean up dickovers. If someone is allowed to shove something in front of my face should I not be allowed to make them invisible?
Yes, I'm 100% on the adblock train. Local AI adblock sounds like a great solution.
Then maybe dickovers will go away when the market realizes they don't work. That's the only way.
What won't help is complaining that the largely free products we get don't work the way we want them to.
They're done for a reason, and that reason is not pure evil from their perspective.
If everyone refused to touch a site that blasts you with a dickover, they would disappear overnight. Clearly people do not do this enough, because it's still being implemented.
But this is a Chesterton's Fence problem and we need to understand where it came from if we're going to fix it.