Daring Fireball

What Is a Dickover?

2026-05-29 · 00:00 UTC ·John Gruber ·5 min read

Brief

A dickover, John Gruber argues (Daring Fireball, 2026‑05‑29), is a deliberate, unnecessary modal that hides a webpage’s content—cookie consents, newsletter signups, app install prompts—designed to frustrate users. He gives concrete instances: Substack’s full‑screen curtains (Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias, Volts) with tiny “No thanks” dismissals; The Philadelphia Inquirer asking for SMS signup while he’s logged in despite a $20/month subscription; and a Tom’s Hardware modal colliding with an ad in a JavaScript Z‑axis conflict. Gruber separates dickovers from related nuisances: horizontal “dickbars” are non‑modal but still harmful because they break space‑bar paging by covering unread text, and not every modal blocker is a dickover (paywalls can be legitimate). He explains the term’s evolution from “dickpanel” (2022), notes a Mastodon poll (1,130 votes, 51–49 favoring “dickover”), and says he amassed—but ultimately abandoned—an archive of screenshots due to volume.

Why it matters

John Gruber defines a “dickover” (published 2026-05-29) as a modal panel, popover, or full‑screen curtain that deliberately obscures a site’s own content to force unwanted actions (cookie consent, newsletter signup, app install).

Key details

  • He documents concrete examples: Substack homepages that show full‑screen curtains with tiny “No thanks” links (examples include Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias, Volts), The Philadelphia Inquirer prompting SMS signup about the Jersey shore while he’s logged in despite paying $20/month, and a Tom’s Hardware dickover overridden by an ad in a JavaScript Z‑axis conflict.
  • Gruber distinguishes related UI patterns: “dickbars” are non‑modal horizontal bars (lesser offense) that also disrupt reading—specifically they break space‑bar paging because pages scroll by full page height, letting the dickbar cover unread text; all dickovers are modal blockers but necessary modal blockers (e.g., paywall sign‑in) are not dickovers.
  • Origin and adoption: he previously used “dickpanel” in 2022, rebranded to “dickover” after writing about Dropover and an Euronews cookie modal, ran a Mastodon poll with 1,130 responses where “dickover” won 51–49%, and collected screenshots of many examples but abandoned the archive because there were too many.
Source evidence

By John Gruber

Stop searching the App Store. Start telling your phone what to build.

Please enjoy this article on its own webpage. Trust me.

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

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 dickovers 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.

  • Dickbarsare 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. Here are typical dickbar examples- on desktopand- mobilelayouts. Here’s a relatively attractive one- from Apple on its Newsroom blog, and one- from the excellent Acquired podcastthat is gracious enough to tuck itself into a corner. Here’s an- obnoxious one from the Four Seasonsthat is large enough to edge toward dickover consideration. 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.)

  • 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.

  • The neologism came to me when I decided to write about Dropover, a great little drag-and-drop “shelf”utility for the Mac, shortly after I postedan item complaining abouta particularly ridiculous cookie modal blocker from Euronews. That Euronews post got me thinking thatdickpaneljust wasn’t sticking. Thedickpart was right but thepanelpart lacked oomph. It didn’t snap. Then I got to writing about Dropoverand it came to me. That nightI ran a poll on Mastodon asking“What’s a better word for in-window fake ‘dialog boxes’ that websites (and some apps) use to cover up content?” —dickpanelordickover— and, with 1,130 responses,dickoverwon by a slim 51–49 percent margin. But after sleeping on it I was convinceddickoverwas the better term, no matter how the poll turned out. Those who voted fordickpanelwere, judging from their comments, concerned that “over” isn’t descriptive enough. But what makes a neologism stick isn’t descriptiveness or obviousness, but usage. If we use it, it’ll stick. And I, for one, want to usedickoverbecause it stings, and it’s fun to sting people who are doing something dickheaded.↩︎