John Gruber over at Daring Fireball recently gave a name to something we've all been quietly furious about for years: the dickover. It's that full-screen curtain that drops the second you land on an article, demanding you subscribe to a newsletter, accept seventeen kinds of cookies, or download an app you will never use, before it lets you read a single word of the thing you actually clicked on.
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Dickover (noun) — a full-screen or pop-up panel that blocks a site's own content until you deal with it: agree to cookies, subscribe to the newsletter, install the app, accept the terms, something you didn't come there to do. |
I hate them. Like, a lot, more than a little pop-up probably deserves. Maybe that's just me being particular about it, but I'd bet a lot of you feel the same way and just haven't had a word for it until now.
Here's my sarcastic public service announcement: I hereby declare that dickovers should be banned forever, retroactively, and anyone who ever coded one should have to personally apologize to every reader whose scroll position they ruined. Somebody somewhere thought "you know what this article needs? A wall." And the rest of us have been paying for that decision every single day since.
Dickovers are a veritable scourge.
— John Gruber, Daring Fireball
I've read more blogs in the past few years than in my first twenty years of blogging combined, and dickovers are honestly a big part of why I notice this stuff now. I get it, there's probably a reason behind most of them somewhere: cookie compliance, growth metrics, whatever the business case is. On some giant commercial news site or a SaaS company's homepage, fine, that's just the cost of doing business online. Annoying, sure. Expected, also sure.
But blogging? Blogging was supposed to be the one corner of the internet that didn't do this to you. Gruber even calls out Substack by name, a platform built entirely around blogs, greeting visitors with a full-screen curtain before they can read a single post. That's the part that stings. It's not just that dickovers exist somewhere out there. It's that they found their way into the one place that was never supposed to have them.
I wish nobody had ever invented them, full stop, but out of everything, this is the part I actually care about: other corners of the web can keep doing whatever they're going to do, that's on them. Blogging should have been the exception.
Full disclosure: my own Substack used to pop up that exact same subscribe prompt, and for a while I didn't think much of it. I didn't really know what the platform was doing by default at the time.
It wasn't until I started reading other people's Substacks as a reader myself that it started to wear on me, that same wall, over and over, blog after blog. Then Gruber's article gave it a name, and my first reaction was a quick "wait, was I doing that to people?" No, not really. I just didn't know any better yet.
But that's exactly why moving this blog over to Micro.blog is one of the better decisions I've made in twenty-some years of doing this. I'm not out here chasing audience growth, I'm just putting my thoughts down and hoping someone finds them useful or interesting along the way. If you're reading this, thank you, I appreciate you being here.
There's a quiet little note tucked in somewhere if you want new posts sent to your email, but that's all it is: a note. Not a curtain. Not a wall you have to fight through first.
So here's where I've landed: dickovers are never going away, I'm never going to stop being annoyed by them, and honestly that feels like a fair trade. :-)
Further Reading
