HACKER Q&A
📣 PaulHoule

Software to Grade Websites on "Annoyingness?"


When posting links to HN and social media I sometimes get complaints about cookie pops-ups, e-mail subscription pop-ups, advertising pop-ups and other behaviors people find annoying.

I do look at everything manually but I know different people have different experiences, I can’t say I am never going to link to an annoying web site (wouldn’t it be nice if adding a cookie popup immediately caused a panic because “our analytics must be broken!”) but I do want to limit how frequently I post them and require some positives to balance out negatives. Also my RSS reader is showing me so much stuff I like now that I can afford to filter some out.

Is there any kind of software or service that takes a URL and returns an “annoyingness” score?


  👤 ulrischa Accepted Answer ✓
Not easy to make such a tool. But a low Accessibility score (i.e. AXE or Google Lighthouse) is a very good indicator for an annoying website. At least for stuff on the page - not for notification badges etc.

👤 eimrine
Of course, no. Annoyingness is not something can be checked by static code analysis. Some properties of HTML standard were made for nothing except annoyingness (using onBlur event, blur CSS property, disallowing right click etc) but most of dark patterns are incredibly hard to be realized even for humans.

👤 paulcole
First, as evidenced by every discussion on HN ever, you’re not going to get agreement between people on what annoying is in terms of a website.

So whatever metric you use, there’s going to be subjectivity.

Some ideas:

• Create a Chrome extension that asks people to thumbs up/down a website then collect those results.

• Do a Facemash thing like in Social Network – put 2 sites side by side and ask which is more annoying

• Create your own Annoyance Index that can be automated. Say start with 100 points and subtract X points for a pop up, Y points for scrolljacking, Z points for ad block detection, etc. etc. Figure out the threshold for annoying/not annoying and there you go

Obviously there’s going to be a ton of bias in whatever you come up with. And you’ll have to decide whether a good site can be annoying or not.


👤 helph67
Web Annoyances Ultralist may help, previously mentioned here by crazypython. https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances

👤 tacostakohashi
I guess it's subjective - some websites like X / twitter are super terrible if you're not logged in, but almost usable if you are logged in.

👤 coding123
I would love for Google to just start blocking all websites that do that kind of thing.