https://cedwards.xyz/the-fuck-you-pattern/

Connor's Blog
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The 'Fuck You' Pattern
June 28, 2021

In the software industry, there is a term for intentional designs
which coerce the user into doing something, be it consciously or
subconsciously - a 'dark pattern'. These patterns are employed by
social media networks, e-commerce, video games, and many more places.

I'm coining a new term called the 'Fuck You' pattern currently
employed by Instagram.

I like cats, and there's a popular Internet meme called 'Polite Cat'
otherwise known as Ollie. I wanted to browse some pictures of Ollie
anonymously on Instagram today, but to my dismay, Instagram would
force me to login 5 seconds after navigating to Ollie's Instagram
page. Unless I'm part of an A/B test, you can give this a try and
should get the same behaviour on desktop.

Since I'm a technical person, I tried to simply remove the modal in
the browser Inspector. It sort of worked, but I wasn't able to scroll
any further on the page. After a few attempts, I could no longer even
see Ollie's page. I was immediately redirected to the login page
every time I tried to access it.

I was not sure why this happened. Did Instagram catch me trying to
bypass their login modal? Was I blocked for trying to load the page
too often? One thing I knew is that it was at the IP layer because I
could no longer access the page on any browser.

I tried accessing the page on my phone whilst disconnected from my
wireless network, and sure enough it worked. Until I refreshed three
times.

Instagram, and by extension Facebook, fuck you!