What Is a Dickover?

什么是“Dickover”？

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.

“Dickover”（名词）：指网站或应用弹出的模态面板、浮窗或遮罩层。它们故意遮挡内容，通过强制用户进行不必要且不受欢迎的交互来干扰用户体验；例如要求用户接受“Cookie”、订阅时事通讯、安装移动应用、同意服务条款，或任何用户根本不在乎的其他事项。

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.

你一定知道什么是 dickover，即使你（直到现在）还不知道该怎么称呼它。如果你使用互联网，你每天都会遇到它们。它们本质上就是浮窗，但却极其令人讨厌。网络上到处都是这种东西，移动应用中出现的频率也越来越高。Dickovers 简直是一场灾难。它们太常见了，以至于几乎成了互联网环境的一部分。

I started calling these things dickpanels in 2022, but when dickover popped into my head last week, 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.

我从 2022 年开始把这些东西称为“dickpanels”，但上周当“dickover”这个词蹦进我脑海时，我深感这才是形容这些无处不在、令人作呕的干扰项的最佳词汇。在网上，你几乎去哪儿都会被 dickover 恶心到。

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.

它们经常纠缠你要求允许 Cookie，比如欧洲新闻台（Euronews）或盖洛普（Gallup）的那些。这种恶意设计模式无处不在，甚至蔓延到了个人博客（比如我朋友 Om Malik 的博客）和像 Field Notes 这样优秀的品牌网站上，它们都在要求你订阅时事通讯。

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.

Substack 托管的每一个博客主页上都有一个极其恶劣的 dickover。Substack 的 dickover 甚至看起来不像个面板，它是一个全屏遮罩，其设计和措辞强烈暗示你必须订阅该博客的电子邮件通讯才能阅读任何内容。

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).

Substack 的 dickover 关闭按钮只是一个不起眼的小文本链接——看起来一点也不像按钮——上面写着“不用了，谢谢”（例如 Paul Krugman、Matt Yglesias 的博客），或者用一种令人作呕的甜腻标签来羞辱用户，比如“快把内容给我！”（例如 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.

再看《费城问询报》（The Philadelphia Inquirer）的例子，我每月支付 20 美元订阅，但当我登录他们那该死的网站时，在让我阅读文章之前，他们竟然要求我注册接收关于泽西海岸的短信。每次看到这种东西，我都想退订。我付钱给他们，结果却是在浪费我的时间和注意力。

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.

在写这篇文章时，我开始截图记录我遇到的每一个 dickover，但很快我就放弃了，因为收集的数量实在太多。不过，Tom’s Hardware 的一个例子让我觉得很有趣，因为他们的 dickover 在 JavaScript 的 Z 轴层级混战中，被他们自己那该死的广告给“干掉”了。

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.

如果你访问一个网站，你应该……看到这个网站，看到它的内容，能够阅读你想要访问的文章。向一个试图阅读文章的用户展示“订阅我们的通讯”或“接受我们该死的 Cookie”的 dickover，其荒谬程度不亚于发送一封只包含一个网页链接的电子邮件通讯。网页就该显示网页内容，邮件就该显示邮件内容。这道理本不该由我来解释。

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.

有些网站在页面加载时就弹出 dickover，那时你可能已经有了心理准备。如今，我们在加载网页时都已习惯了各种障碍和烦恼。但有些卑鄙、懦弱的混蛋会在你开始阅读并向下滚动页面时，突然给你来个“偷袭”。然后，砰的一声，dickover 就弹出来了。

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.

有人愿意关注你的文章、故事或产品页面，这是一种莫大的荣幸。竟然敢在他们专心阅读时故意打断他们，并强行展示一个 dickover，这简直厚颜无耻。这和从读者手中抢走书本或杂志，强迫他们关注其他无关紧要的事情没什么两样——唯一的区别是，如果你在现实中敢从读者手中抢走出版物，你可能会挨上一记老拳。

Addendums

附录

Dickbars are related to dickovers, but are far lesser crimes against design and user experience. A dickbar is a non-modal popover that obstructs only a portion of the underlying content, often just a short horizontal strip. If dickovers are design felonies, dickbars are misdemeanors.

“Dickbars”与 dickovers 相关，但对设计和用户体验的破坏程度要轻得多。Dickbar 是一种非模态浮窗，仅遮挡部分底层内容，通常只是一条短横幅。如果说 dickovers 是设计上的重罪，那么 dickbars 顶多算是轻罪。

What makes dickbars lesser offenses is that they do not obscure the entirety of the underlying content, and thus do not demand mandatory action to dismiss them. You can view and scroll the page below them. What makes dickbars crimes is that they still obstruct and distract. (Horizontal dickbars, the most common form, interfere with paging via the space bar one screenful at a time. The content scrolls by the height of the webpage, not the height of the webpage minus the height of the dickbar. Thus the dickbar covers unread text each time you page down.)

Dickbars 的罪过较轻，是因为它们不会遮挡全部内容，因此不需要强制操作来关闭。你仍然可以查看并滚动其下方的页面。但它们依然是“罪行”，因为它们仍然造成了遮挡和干扰。（最常见的水平式 dickbars 会干扰通过空格键进行的一屏一屏翻页。页面滚动的高度是整个网页的高度，而不是网页高度减去 dickbar 高度。因此，每次向下翻页时，dickbar 都会遮住一部分未读文本。）

All dickovers are modal blockers, but not all modal blockers are dickovers. A paywall sign-up / sign-in panel, for example, is not a dickover. Paywalls are, at times, annoying, but one of the defining aspects of a dickover is that they are unnecessary. Cookie permissions are unnecessary. Signing up for an email newsletter is unnecessary. But for paywalled content, asking for sign-up / sign-in is necessary.

所有的 dickovers 都是模态拦截器，但并非所有的模态拦截器都是 dickovers。例如，付费墙的注册/登录面板就不是 dickover。付费墙有时很烦人，但 dickover 的一个定义特征是它们是“不必要”的。Cookie 许可是不必要的，订阅电子邮件通讯也是不必要的。但对于付费内容而言，要求注册/登录是必要的。