[HN Gopher] The 'Fuck You' Pattern
___________________________________________________________________
The 'Fuck You' Pattern
Author : c7DJTLrn
Score : 778 points
Date : 2021-06-28 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cedwards.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (cedwards.xyz)
| surround wrote:
| Bibliogram is an unofficial front end to Instagram. Among other
| features, it won't prompt you to log in. Here's Ollie's page on
| Bibliogram:
|
| https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official
|
| Reddit on mobile is also beginning to require logging in to view
| certain pages, in which case you can use:
|
| https://libredd.it/
|
| Or
|
| https://teddit.net/
| lxe wrote:
| If you think forcing to log in to consume content is a 'fuck you'
| pattern, then what do you think of paywalls?
| Groxx wrote:
| Yeah - this is why I stay out of Instagram. They're repeatedly,
| blatantly hostile to any non-user use.
|
| At least they're not as bad as Pinterest, which has done this for
| years, plus their million alternate domains polluting search
| results.
| avalys wrote:
| What exactly is a "non-user use"?
| Groxx wrote:
| E.g. sending links to your post to friends and family. Many
| family members don't have accounts, and some days all they
| see is a login prompt. Many times, my recipient is on a
| different device / using a different browser / cleared their
| cookies because their ISP tech support somehow thinks that
| helps - some days, all they see is a login prompt, and don't
| remember their password, and don't want to go searching for
| it.
|
| All of this has ensured that none of them like Instagram
| links, and do not want an account.
| insomniacity wrote:
| Anyone who hasn't signed up for various tracking!
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| "Non-member use"
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Pinterest is the absolute worst at this. I died a little inside
| when I finally gave in and made an account (using google
| login). But I needed to use an image for some research I was
| doing.
| B4CKlash wrote:
| I was actually under the impression that what Pinterest does
| was against the ToS of Google. I can't find the link or
| reference, but I believe it was along the lines of 'You can't
| post images just to farm user account creation on your
| services' which is exactly what Pinterest does.
|
| I would love if we could do away with these sites and those
| websites that insist I use their 'app' to view simple text
| data.
| miohtama wrote:
| I recommend trying to hit Reader mode button to defeat Fuck You
| patterns. This simple trick works on surprisingly many websites,
| because they need to conform with Google SEO rules.
| abdusco wrote:
| Yep. Works on many paywall sites, too. Whenever you hit a
| paywall, turn on the reader mode, then refresh.
| cabalamat wrote:
| I don't like stikcy header,s so I use the Kill Sticky bookmarklet
| ( https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ )
|
| When I do this, some websites do the same thing, i.e. don't let
| me scroll down.
|
| I think calling this the Fuck You pattern is entirely
| appropriate.
| ajharrison wrote:
| Such strong opinions for something you don't and aren't willing
| to pay a dime for. Why don't you just shut up and use what you're
| given for free?
| klyrs wrote:
| I _love_ instagram. It 's the best social media site. Last time I
| checked, I couldn't even make an account from my desktop
| computer. I'm not gonna even try to install their app on my
| G-free phone.
|
| When a friends sends me a link to Instagram, I know that I don't
| need to click on it -- the thumbnail contains all the information
| that I'd ever see without creating an account. When news articles
| consist of a bunch of embedded Instagram crap, it doesn't even
| load on vanilla firefox. That's cool, those stories are usually
| celebrity gossip that I don't actually want to read but got
| baited into clicking on.
|
| It's my favorite social media site, because their hooks just
| bounce straight off me.
|
| Thanks, Instagram, for the consistent signalling. I never wanted
| to be your friend anyway.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| you can make an account from desktop no problem
| [deleted]
| subsubzero wrote:
| This was a dark pattern they launched almost a year ago, as a
| non user of mostly every social media site, instagram is
| probably the worst in terms of forcing users to login to view
| public content.
|
| I wouldn't normally have a problem with this but public content
| should be just that, viewable by the general public and not
| being forced to install a tracke.. err, their app on my phone.
|
| Where I have a huge problem with this is public health or other
| official announcements from community leaders or essential
| information and its being put out on facebook. So now I can't
| access a public message by a publicly elected entity for
| general consumption. It seems extremely slimy and it feels
| illegal on some level as I don't want to be forced to login to
| facebook to view local updates.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Also, it's 2021 and their iPad app is just the non-iPad app
| where it's just a scaled portrait-only version of the iOS app.
| Do they not have the resources to do a proper iPad app?
| xmprt wrote:
| My favorite feature is how when someone shares an Instagram
| post of Whatsapp it's blurred out. I realized this today and it
| just hit me that they don't care about making the apps actually
| good. All they care about is that you go back to the main app
| where they can advertise to you.
| mercury_craze wrote:
| I'll stick my head above the parapet and say that as a content
| consumer I really like Instagram and it genuinely is my
| favourite social media platform. I'm probably an atypical user
| but now that I'm well out of my 20's the friends I still
| connect with online I have real connections with so it's a joy
| to see what they're up to. My interests (food, 70's sci-fi,
| cats, modern art) are well catered to and I've done a good job
| of curating the accounts I follow to get a good mix of
| interesting content. Even my promoted posts are mostly local
| restaurants and businessess so I've never really felt aggrieved
| that I'm getting controlled by big corporates. I've also found
| my experience mostly apolitical with the advantage that because
| commenting is so tacked on I don't feel the urge to interact
| with anything beyond liking images or sharing the ocasional
| post with my friends and family
|
| I understand it's mindless, but I dont want it to be anything
| else. It's a toy platform for looking at device sized images
| and short videos on my mobile and that's all I want it to be.
| drdeadringer wrote:
| Perhaps I'm "old" for this.
|
| I don't "get" Instagram. I'm not on it, I don't use it, all
| that "I just don't just because".
|
| I have a room mate // romantic partner who does use Instagram.
| OK, that's great, that's fine. They're younger than I am so
| perhaps they get something I don't; times change, I get that; I
| still don't get "The Insta".
|
| Maybe some social media will ding on me the next time around.
| I'll wait.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| Instagram is terrible but I can defend forcing account creation
| via app only. It seems likely that such a route would draw a
| disproportionately large interest from scammers and
| disproportionately small interest from real customers.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I don't know if it's just me or what, but I can no longer view
| Instagram posts while logged out.
|
| Other people report being able to, but it just sends me
| straight to a login page.
| iamwpj wrote:
| Instagram allows you to create an account in the browser.
|
| https://www.instagram.com/accounts/emailsignup/
|
| I don't understand this post and the blog author's comments
| about using desktop. I get the appeal of not having apps
| installed on your phone, but wasn't Instagram phone-first? I
| remember not having a smartphone in the early 10's and not
| being able to use Instagram because you couldn't use their
| site. I would argue the phone-based experience is far superior
| to the browser...
| handrous wrote:
| Is the way that Twitter links often fail to load on the first
| _several_ tries (then finally, mysteriously, work as if nothing
| happened) one of these "force you to log in and use the app"
| dark patterns? It's been that way for years now, so I have to
| think it's not accidental.
| easrng wrote:
| It always takes exactly 3 reloads for me.
| bserge wrote:
| Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok. Just... No. Funny enough, I was a
| big Imgur user until one day I somehow realized I'm wasting my
| life on the dumbest shit in the dumbest format possible.
|
| Reddit on the other hand, is trying hard to push me away and I
| thank them for it, but a lot of info you can only find there.
| Like real measurements of graphics cards and just real
| information from real people.
|
| Kind of sad, but Reddit has attracted all the people who used
| to frequent niche forms in one place.
| dheera wrote:
| > From TFA: "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."
|
| You need to not only remove the modal, but remove the
| "overflow:hidden;" in the <body> tag. After that you should be
| able to scroll.
|
| I have CSS/JS injectors that do this for me already, I really
| fucking hate popups and scrolling impediments of any sort.
| LegitShady wrote:
| i don't do social media anymore, but I used to use instagram to
| browse favorite artists. I found chrome developer tools would
| let you change to mobile view and then you could browse
| instagram/upload photos/etc like normal.
|
| Haven't tried it in a long time so maybe doesn't work anymore.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Best part, it is all conveniently grouped on a single site
| unmarred by useful content so you can easily just ignore it all
| without anxiety you are going to miss out on something
| important.
| anikan_vader wrote:
| Thanks for this comment. I've been annoyed by the fact that
| click-baity articles don't load Instagram content in the past,
| but re-framing the issue as a bullet dodged and time saved is a
| surprisingly powerful shift of perspective.
| specialist wrote:
| I organize a puppy meetup. Right now via a group SMS. Sub-
| optimal. Sharing event pics is flakey (mix of android and ios).
| The responses (LOL, hearts, etc) become their own text messages
| (?!). Etc.
|
| Since some of us have Instagram, I thought to try it, if only
| to share pics. Sign up was brutal. I can't figure out how to
| use my phone account on my desktop. Sharing existing pics
| _sucks_. Taking pics with Instagram _sucks_.
|
| I can't even figure out how to simply browse a friend's feed.
|
| I legit can't imagine why anyone uses Instagram, for any
| purpose.
| recursive wrote:
| Is this way I always get text messages from one of my friends
| that say > Liked "{$ENTIRE_CONTENTS_OF_PREVIOUS_MESSAGE}"
| guscost wrote:
| Most people don't really _use_ Instagram, it's more like
| Instagram uses _them_.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Cute babes. It's like the point of contact now for them
| because none of them want to be on facebook with their mom
| commenting dumb shit on their page.
|
| if it wasn't for them i would so delete this shit
| cdstyh wrote:
| I had the same experience. I wanted to watch someone's podcast
| Livestream that was being broadcasted on Instagram (I don't
| know why they didn't just use YouTube). But I couldn't even
| create an account. I tried with my desktop and phone on
| different networks. It wouldn't work.
| limeblack wrote:
| I run the web app on my google free phone quite easily. Just
| add to Home Screen.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Pinterest and Reddit are not better these days. The amount of
| things you can view on reddit on your phone without creating an
| account or installing the app is dwindling daily.
|
| Every time my wife sends me a Pinterest link I just ask her to
| screenshot it as I can't see shit on the default mobile page. I
| don't even know why Google continues to allow them in the
| results when there is clear-cut policies around showing
| something different to the crawler than the user.
|
| Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the
| Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.
| newacct583 wrote:
| > The amount of things you can view on reddit on your phone
| without creating an account or installing the app is
| dwindling daily.
|
| Like what? The phone browser works just great. IIRC there's a
| nag dialog that prompts you once to install the app, then it
| caches the answer and shuts up.
| EastSmith wrote:
| > The phone browser works just great.
|
| No, it is not. I can not access any subreddit without
| installing an app (which I am not going to do).
| newacct583 wrote:
| Sorry... I literally do this every day of my life, across
| several devices. I'm just on Firefox on Android, it's not
| like it's a weird setup or anything. What are you running
| that reddit won't let you into a subreddit?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Really? I still occasionally visit a handful of subs,
| almost exclusively through android chrome. I'll certainly
| never download an app to do it though.
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| >a good workaround is setting your user agent to the
| Googlebot
|
| Can't believe I've never thought of this.
| eitland wrote:
| > Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to
| the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens
| disappear.
|
| Hmmmm. Now that I think of it I'm fairly sure that serving
| different content to Googlebot compared to what you served
| ordinary users used to be a good way to call down the wrath
| of the SEO master upon your (or your clients) website.
|
| Then again, that was before. Back when Google was a nice
| company and acted in the best interest of its users.
| js4ever wrote:
| In fact it's still forbidden by Google ... Except if you
| are very large like Pinterest
| ipaddr wrote:
| It might not be forbidden if it works. Google is famous
| for undocumented workarounds.
| cjohansson wrote:
| Only the most expensive SEO-experts know the occult
| methods of success on Google's search results
| davidkunz wrote:
| Just go to https://teddit.net/
| fullstop wrote:
| old.reddit.com is still around, for now, and does not have
| any of this garbage.
| kgwxd wrote:
| old.reddit is ok, but it's rarely used for links. I know
| there's a plugin, but I can't stand the idea of adding
| plugins for things like that. The only reason I have a
| reddit account is because you can change preferences to be
| even better than old.reddit (e.g. turn off custom themes,
| disable outbound click tracking, no thumbnails, compact
| list, etc.). It basically looks like HN after what I do to
| it. I know it's all arranging deck chairs on a sinking ship
| but I hope a decent rescue ship gets here before it's all
| gone.
| marto1 wrote:
| And you just KNOW it's going to disappear. Not immediately
| of course, some slight visual breakages here and there.
| Then some hotshot manager is going to point out how it
| doesn't bring any "value" to the company and how in fact it
| actually hurts reddit's image. Then it will be gone.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| And then somebody makes a substitute UI that calls the
| api, then reddit tries to take it down, then someone
| builds an open source version, then github gets a C&D
| letter and the creator makes blog post about it that
| reaches the front page of HN. I'm looking forward to the
| journey.
| scott_w wrote:
| The first part happened: https://teddit.net ;-)
| mdaniel wrote:
| > then someone builds an open source version
|
| Damn, I went to dig up the URL for reddit's source and it
| seems it is no longer open :-(
|
| https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
| mike_d wrote:
| From my time at Reddit I can say the reason it has lasted
| this long is there are no hotshot managers.
|
| Chris Slowe is the hand guiding the ship day to day, with
| a bunch of really passionate hackers underneath him. They
| are maintaining like 4 different code bases and keeping
| feature parity as best they can with a team that could
| still comfortably go on a ski trip together (compare that
| to the 60k+ at Facebook). The users hate change while
| also demanding new features. The business makes no sense.
| Steve is off doing... something, to ads or something and
| make investors happy so they keep the ship afloat. UI is
| going to hell to drive DAU metrics for investors. Banning
| shitweasels brings down the wrath of the conservatives.
| Yet they are still working their assess off to keep a
| mound of spaghetti from bursting into flames with 1/10th
| the staff they need to do so.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Good to know that a major social media platform is built
| on the same shit and bailing wire that most of us have to
| deal with every day. Sort of makes me feel like the SV
| companies really aren't any different than anyone else,
| they just (typically) have a lot more money.
| Syonyk wrote:
| It doesn't... but the nature of Reddit has been clearly
| driven by the "new" interface. There's a lot less text-
| based technical content, and a lot more image/gif meme-
| based content because that's what the new interface is
| optimized for - and it goes out of its way to make it very,
| very hard to see the deep text nested comments that are the
| dominant feature of the old interface (and HN).
|
| So, while you can browse the place with the old interface,
| the nature and trends of Reddit are mostly driven by the
| new interface.
|
| Which is fine, if they want to go that way, it's just a
| shame that what used to make it any good is dead or dying.
| mcbutterbunz wrote:
| It'll eventually be removed with the reasoning that its
| hardly used and most traffic uses the new Reddit and now
| they can focus on improvements without having to support
| this legacy code.
| thatswrong0 wrote:
| And then I will stop using Reddit for the most part
| (although it's still the best resource for finding
| authentic reviews of things / services.. I Google
| "<thoughts on something> reddit" more often than not
| these days). Which is probably for the best for my
| productivity / sanity tbh
|
| The redesign is still a slower, worse experience,
| especially on mobile.
| Qwertious wrote:
| If they do (and it wouldn't surprise me), people will
| start making third party desktop clients (or rather,
| they'll start getting popular).
|
| If they ban _those_ , then we'll see some major
| migrations methinks.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I wonder what their relative market share is. Lots of the
| people that have been on Reddit for years may user
| old.reddit. I certainly do.
|
| I really can't stand their hostility to no using their
| app on mobile though. The UX seems purposely difficult to
| drive users towards the app, for the obvious reason of
| greater access to user data most likely.
| dmoy wrote:
| One of their biggest hurdles to overcome is, I gather,
| that a lot of the super large subreddits' moderator teams
| are exclusively on old.reddit.com for moderation. If they
| break old.reddit.com completely right now, a lot of the
| biggest subs would implode with bots, spam, and angry
| human word-vomit.
|
| If they fix the moderation story for new reddit, I'd
| imagine they have a pretty quick path towards obsoleting
| old reddit by just not caring about anyone else still on
| old reddit.
|
| They've already 'fixed' modmail for new reddit. So I
| think they're actively working on that problem.
| ansible wrote:
| > _They 've already 'fixed' modmail for new reddit. So I
| think they're actively working on that problem._
|
| Though that has had some funny issues. One thing I
| noticed was the enrollment for the new modmail. It is on
| the settings page on old reddit for a sub, but I couldn't
| find it anywhere for the new reddit UI. Wacky.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| For Android at least, there are multiple free-as-in-
| freedom reddit client apps available. Two I know of are
| Infinity and Slide. Both are way better than the mobile
| website, and I'm sure better than the official app.
| VRay wrote:
| Yeah, it's really infuriating.. Reddit consumed most of
| the cool niche forums on the internet, and now it's
| slowly mashing them all up into a bland Facebook clone
| Scoundreller wrote:
| A lot of those niche forums were already being killed by
| VerticalScope and InternetBrands.
|
| It's a lot of what lead to Reddit's popularity in the
| first place.
| malka wrote:
| Embrace, extand, extinguish.
|
| Never, ever trust an incorporated company.
| throaway3141593 wrote:
| Does that include the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned
| subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation?
| fullstop wrote:
| And then something else will replace it. They'll digg
| themselves their own grave.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Maybe Ycombinator will incubate a rival that uses the HN
| model.
| tomrod wrote:
| I thought they already did, this little company called
| Reddit that went on to benefit from the banality of digg.
| ds206 wrote:
| "digg themselves their own grave" ;)
| fullstop wrote:
| Ha, thanks for picking up on that! I was hoping that
| someone would notice. :-)
| rcfox wrote:
| old.reddit.com is clearly beginning to rot:
|
| 1. The new Reddit seems to have a different markdown parser
| which allows surrounding unindented code with ``` lines.
| This doesn't render on old Reddit.
|
| 2. New Reddit seems to be saving links with escaped
| underscores and correcting for it at render time? I've
| started to see people posting broken links like
| https://example.com/some\\_path\\_with\\_underscores when
| it should be https://example.com/some_path_with_underscores
|
| 3. Posts with multiple images sometimes don't work? I
| haven't been inconvenienced enough by this yet to
| investigate.
| scrooched_moose wrote:
| I've started having weird redirects on any v.reddit.com
| posts too - they redirect back to main page instead of
| taking me to the video.
|
| I haven't fully tested what's causing it, but it feels
| like the beginning of the end of old.reddit.com.
| frereubu wrote:
| I'm starting to find that title links to posts with
| multiple images just link back to the page you're on. It
| feels like it's just going to slowly disintegrate. Which I
| think on balance I'd be happy about because I spend too
| much time on there anyway.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| for Reddit, you can "sign up" with a bogus email address and
| still interact (browse, join, comment, vote, message) freely.
| the only possible downside is it asks you to verify your
| email address every launch, but I don't see this as a
| downside since I am using Reddit anonymously, and it is
| easily dismissed. been doing this for over a year now
| axguscbklp wrote:
| You can actually just click "Next" on the sign-up screen
| without having entered any email address at all. It works
| fine, for now at least.
| ReaLNero wrote:
| What's valuable is your interests so that they know what
| ads to put in your face. Whether or not your email is
| linked to you is irrelevant -- you can click on ads all the
| same. This solution doesn't save you from the data mining
| they do on your usage.
| klyrs wrote:
| > Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to
| the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens
| disappear.
|
| This is _hilarious_ and makes so much sense. God, the
| internet is broken
| spinny wrote:
| Yup. Googlebot can also traverse some paywalls
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Does Google not check for this at all? They could _easily_
| spoof their User-Agent to see if sites lie about what they
| show.
| klyrs wrote:
| I dunno, folks might get salty if google's bots used
| misleading useragents. And it just escalates the existing
| cat&mouse game
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| How are they not getting absolutely destroyed by the Google
| search algos, since that's the definition of cloaking: http
| s://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
| simfree wrote:
| Big players like LinkedIn, Facebook, et all play by
| different rules. Losing LinkedIns results would damage
| Google.
|
| Half the reason I use Qwant is it works better than
| LinkedIn's paid search results. Google does much worse.
| bingidingi wrote:
| The content is pretty much the same _if_ you log in.
| Google doesn't seem to care in instances like this, I've
| worked on multiple very large sites that do the exact
| same thing (further in so e instances: present a JS app
| to users and a faster JS--less experience to google).
| Many news sites do it too, for example.
| einpoklum wrote:
| This should help:
|
| https://sumtips.com/software/browsers/set-user-agent-on-a-
| pe...
| e12e wrote:
| Hm, nothing for Android - for either ff or chrome?
| SanchoPanda wrote:
| You may be looking for iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome,
| the chrome repo has the firefox extension as well, fyi.
| mdaniel wrote:
| It's been reported[0] that Firefox Nightly has a Debug
| menu through which one can bless a custom collection of
| allowed extensions to get around the new Mozilla Nanny
| State(tm) but I haven't personally expended the energy to
| try it
|
| 0 = https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-
| install-any-ad...
| matt123456789 wrote:
| Those Windows 7 screenshots evoke a sense of nostalgia
| for the time before a Windows that broadcasts and
| monetizes my every action. I think an even bigger "fuck
| you" pattern is when an OS that I paid for tracks me and
| monetizes my private information.
|
| Maybe I'm just getting old.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Nope; Windows is getting old :-P
|
| Time to switch to another OS. Consider some newbie-
| friendly Linux, like Mint (linuxmint.com).
| jude- wrote:
| Pretending to be a robot, in order to not get caught by
| robots. Kinds makes sense. In a sci-fi dystopian way.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to
| the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens
| disappear.
|
| Cloudflare slaps you for this, though.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Pinterest is by the far the worst because it takes content
| from the rest of the world and strips away all context. It's
| the anti-wikipedia, an information black hole.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I couldn't put my vague dislike for Pinterest into words
| until this: you have it exactly.
| wnkrshm wrote:
| I hate Pinterest with a passion. If you want to find
| reference images for whatever topic, all you get is the
| medium res crap with a 'make an account' pop-up instead of
| the original source they stole it from. I think alphabet or
| whatever will acquire it in the near future (or have they
| already?) because there is just no other explanation for
| letting Pinterest poison image search that much.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Image search is practically dead and Pintrest
| singlehandedly killed it. I just use Wikimedia Commons
| now.
| klyrs wrote:
| I fully agree, but do they count as social media? I kinda
| categorize them as crowdsourced SEO spam
| Bilters wrote:
| Whenever I put a google search down, and see one page of
| Pinterest on there I immediately go back to the search box
| and go for; "-site:pinterest.*". I absolutely hate that
| site with a passion.
| Solocomplex wrote:
| Unpinterested is an extension do do this automatically
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Is there a Google option to perma-ban a domain?
|
| Maybe a place I can upload a HOSTS file?
|
| Or an extension that adds this to every search?
| 9dev wrote:
| There is: uBlacklist[1]. I've been searching for the
| exact same thing to get rid of Indian tutorial scamsites,
| bad GitHub and StackOverflow clones and, of course,
| Pinterest results :) Can recommend.
|
| [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/
| pncfbmi...
| Laforet wrote:
| You can try this extension. It was forked from a project
| once maintained and abandoned by Google themselves.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-
| blocklist...
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/personal-
| bloc...
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Even though I have the app and an account, I still
| despise using it. They break things like zoom and saving
| images. Clicking on something interesting takes you
| to...a site that doesn't actually have that.
|
| I truly don't understand how Pinterest is so popular when
| it's also so awful. Tumblr was so much better until
| Verizon destroyed it with management incompetence.
| taftster wrote:
| > a good workaround is setting your user agent to the
| Googlebot
|
| Be sure to follow the site's robots.txt rules, though.
| Otherwise, you could end getting googlebot banned! /s
| nvr219 wrote:
| Reddit (the service) is tons better than Pinterest, facebook,
| instagram... I think it's totally out of line to group Reddit
| in with them. The new reddit website is total trash but you
| can use like 99% of reddit without ever visiting the website.
| I use Apollo for example, and there are many other apps you
| can use or develop your own. You can also use old.reddit.com.
| Access to reddit is much more open than any of these other
| networks that require you to use their app only.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Reddit on desktop is still okay. The mobile version of
| Reddit is deliberately broken in order to force you to use
| the app. Many subreddits can't be viewed, you can only view
| the first couple of comments in each thread, the front page
| is hidden behind a huge nag screen,...
| nvr219 wrote:
| Yes, but again, you can use their official app, or
| literally any other app developed. Those third party apps
| can view anything. Contrast that with Instagram where if
| you don't want to use their app, sucks for you.
| davesmylie wrote:
| > The mobile version of Reddit is deliberately broken in
| order to force you to use the app.
|
| fyi - if you use old reddit, the mobile site is fine -
| I've never seen a subreddit blocked or threads truncated.
|
| new reddit is a pile of steaming dogsh
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| old.reddit isn't deliberately broken, but not really
| suitable for small screens like phones.
|
| i.reddit is better for that, but it doesn't support many
| content types inline and has issues showing comments in
| some cases.
|
| teddit.net doesn't support loading more comments inline
| and the icon to unfold post content is tiny.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| My main issue with Reddit is when I'm doing mobile research
| about something, I usually Google about something, probably
| something and put site:reddit.com to read people opinions.
| When going straight from Google without having an app, the
| experience will be obviously horrible. Now I use an app
| called "Relay", but this also has some issues, it will open
| the Google link, but it will usually open the content and
| there doesn't seem to be a good way to get back to comments
| unless I'm missing something. Maybe I should try some other
| app, where I can either choose whether I want to see the
| link, or the comments. Usually comments are more
| interesting to me.
|
| There's also an issue with going back to search once I am
| finally in the all context.
|
| Ps: using android.
| nvr219 wrote:
| I use Apollo on iOS and I have to long press on a link to
| do "open with Apollo", which is fine but pretty annoying.
| Would love to be able to set the default handler so that
| I can just regular press. Of course would be nicer if
| Reddit's mobile website just worked and I didn't have to
| rely on an app to consume the content in a civilized
| manner. Nonetheless I still maintain that reddit is more
| user-respecting than the other social networks mentioned.
| Low bar, granted...
| gumby wrote:
| > Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to
| the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens
| disappear.
|
| All those robots sharing data among themselves with no humans
| needed or, apparently, wanted.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> when there is clear-cut policies around showing something
| different to the crawler than the user.
|
| yes ....
| getcrunk wrote:
| I have not been able to to get this to work. what is the
| exact ua string that works for you guys
| [deleted]
| gabes wrote:
| Speaking of fuck you patterns, has anyone else been part of the
| A/B test where navigating to an Instagram page prevents you from
| using the back button? They somehow clean my tab history so that
| I can't go back to Google. It's been happening to me for months!
| fleddr wrote:
| I'm glad you mention this, thought I was the only one. I've
| been experiencing this on facebook.com, for years.
|
| I'm puzzled how this is even technically possible. A website
| isn't supposed to be able to clear the history of where I came
| from?
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| It's Firefox doing it to prevent Facebook (and Instagram)
| from scraping your history.
|
| If you're not on Firefox, then I don't know.
| fleddr wrote:
| That makes total sense, thanks!
| commoner wrote:
| Is there an announcement, help page, or issue/commit
| explaining this feature?
| darepublic wrote:
| > 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.
|
| ^ try finding the container of the content that has its overflow
| set to 'hidden', and change it back to auto. Then you should be
| able to scroll again
| [deleted]
| snickerer wrote:
| We urgently need a functional P2P protocol for social media.
| Something where I can quickly and easily show my stuff to my
| friends - and vice versa. From my device to your device.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| this is not news about the content hidden behind login. Like come
| on. This is just a whiny post from a guy that for some reason
| didn't know this from like a 2 years ago! Nothing about a pattern
| or simply coming to the realization that IG wants only users of
| its platform who log in, to use it and see its content! Not
| really knew considering in the early days it was an APP only
| platform....we've only been lucky to have the web desktop version
| for a short number of years.
|
| Do I like this behaviour - No. But am I not surprised from a
| company, as mentioned, hasn't exactly supported anything web/open
| over its existence. I mean look at the never-resolved feud
| between twitter and instagram that means you stillllll can't post
| pics to twitter from Instagram or see preview cards on twitter of
| IG links etc --all because of a spat like 10 years ago.
|
| But not posting nerdy rants about how I have to use bots and shit
| to workaround logging into a site I am apparently interested in
| the content of, but don't want to actually use or participate in.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| "Wow, fuck you. I just wanted to look at cats."
|
| "Well, fuck you, too. We're here to sell ads."
|
| It's not about dark patterns, that's just a second-order effect.
| It was never about dark patterns.
|
| This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't.
| And if you don't, I guess you haven't been on the web in the past
| decade or something.
|
| What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in
| technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and
| spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your
| attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who
| will pay for it.
| ozim wrote:
| People constantly think that Facebook/Insta/Google is trying to
| do good things for the users or that whatever is good for users
| is good for BigCo-s.
|
| So sometimes it is true, but most of the time it is not and
| BigCo-s have to push users to do things.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| If that's the case then Instagram should not entice people in
| by temporarily granting access. It should be upfront about
| requiring an account.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| And furthermore all the content should be delisted from
| Google for cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs
| /advanced/guideline...
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you
| don't.
|
| I'm fine with businesses who use that model and make it clear.
| Those kinds of tactics are galling coming from a company whose
| literal mission statement is "Give people the power to build
| community and bring the world closer together."
|
| If you want people to make an account, make a more compelling
| business proposition. Gatekeeping seems like the most
| vulnerable, monopolistic position to take.
| ajharrison wrote:
| Thank you! The entitlement is disgusting.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Until they populate all the top search results with those
| patterns.
|
| This apologies for any unethical practice by companies in
| Reddit/HNs are really interesting. They side completely with
| the authorities. Properly trained.
| jude- wrote:
| You can advertise without abusing the user.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| They can still have ads for people that don't create an
| account.
|
| I think the point you are trying to make is that people are
| demanding free (as in beer) content, a la WinAmp of the 1990's.
| In the past 20 years, we've come around out of that greedy
| phase and have come to accept a certain amount of advertising
| for content. But when the non-free content dominates the free
| content (e.g. pinterest's SEO), it's a fuck you pattern and not
| consumer greed.
|
| EDIT: IMHO
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| An important point is that WinAmp was not hosting content, so
| the cost was limited to the relatively small development
| cost. And there's still lots of that around.
|
| Once you get into actual hosting, it's very hard to get past
| a small number of users without a lot of funding. And since a
| lot of users don't want to pay, well...
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| That's a good point. I was referring to the sentiment at
| the time where people thought there was nothing wrong with
| sharing music files that one person paid for and then
| millions copied, rather than buy. Putting aside the ethics
| of $1/song as good or bad, there was a sense of entitlement
| that I think has been tempered. Maybe?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| The users of Instagram create the value though. The ones
| posting the cat pictures.
| rq1 wrote:
| 1/ They bait people in to destroy any sane competition. Then
| they milk them.
|
| 2/ Well fuck you even further and go to hell for defending such
| behaviours.
|
| 3/ ps. Their infra is ridiculous. A team of 100-120 engineers
| can do way better. They can't get their user base though
| because of 1/
| charwalker wrote:
| Either you're the customer or you're the product. Recognizing
| that nearly all internet companies do this allows you to
| identify what level you're comfortable with and duck out or
| move on if needed. It's always good to review your social media
| habits and scale back.
|
| I recommend doing this the same time you're spring cleaning or
| after you prep for winter. Also go through and unsubscribe from
| emails and update passwords.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions
| in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home
| and spend your time looking at cats for free?
|
| Is that really fair? Would there be nowhere to see pictures of
| cats without their millions of dollars in infrastructure and
| staffing? Or could it be that their millions of dollars in
| infrastructure and staffing for selling ads is the reason the
| goto place for pictures of cats is BigTechCo instead of a ton
| of smaller forums and communities each of which is relatively
| inexpensive to operate.
| dmkolobov wrote:
| So, which do you want? A go-to place to see <insert arbitrary
| interest here>, or a ton of smaller forums and communities?
| pietrovismara wrote:
| Have many smaller ones and aggregate them by yourself with
| RSS feeds.
| maccam94 wrote:
| Ahhh, I remember the good old days of forums where people
| would "hotlink" an image into a thread, and after enough
| people started viewing/forwarding that link around it would
| break because the image hoster's account would get suspended
| by their host for going over their bandwidth limit, or the
| original hoster would panic at their bandwidth costs and
| delete it and/or try to block hotlinking going forward. Maybe
| something like IPFS could solve this problem soon, but right
| now freely available image hosting on these centralized
| providers is the most reliable it's ever been.
| xfalcox wrote:
| On Discourse (open source forum software) we default new
| install to downloading hotlinked images so we can prevent
| this very specific problem.
| tmearnest wrote:
| I always loved it when someone hotlinked to an image on
| someone else's server and instead of taking the image down,
| they'd replace it with something funny (or more frequently,
| horrible).
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Aggregation and distribution are virtues of large
| communities, not small ones. The sophistication of Facebok's
| business is what allows the creation and distribution of
| content. I agree that if Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, Reddit,
| Nextdoor, Twitter etc, didn't exist, small communities would
| fill that void... But they would do through a fragmented and
| siloed user experience that is hardly discoverable for the
| majority of the connected world.
|
| This is the equivalent of running a taxi business vs running
| an airline. Sure, a taxi can fulfill several transportation
| needs but it could never replace what an airline does.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| Once upon a time Google Search was there to help you find
| those small online communities.
| w0de0 wrote:
| "All of this is for the very best end, for if there is a
| volcano at Lisbon, it could be in no other spot; for it is
| impossible but things should be as they are, for everything is
| for the best."
| meepmorp wrote:
| Pangloss knew what was up
| teawrecks wrote:
| "X is self evident, but maybe not to you," seems to me like a
| fundamentally flawed argument.
| omgwtfbbq wrote:
| Of course it is and if you can't see that you probably work
| there implementing dark patterns.
| e12e wrote:
| > You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in
| technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home
| and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have
| your attention and they're going to connect you to
| organizations who will pay for it.
|
| "The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts. It's
| the addictive dark patterns and montezation/tracking that costs
| millions. That's the irony.
| cyrux004 wrote:
| Shouldnt you include engineers compensation in "The
| infrastructure" thats where a lot of money goes.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| A bloated payroll to support a bloated advertising platform
| with a bloated AI-based recommendation algorithm when all
| it should be doing is loading a descending-order list of
| most recent submissions meeting the category criteria....
|
| Don't talk about costs, this crap is self-inflicted
| saurik wrote:
| The hosting and bandwidth costs of images and especially
| video is non-trivial. I agree that the vast majority of
| the costs of these overly-large companies comes from what
| happens while trying to make them profitable, and then
| all of the engineering work that goes into that... but
| that all starts because running the site in the first
| place wasn't free and you have to do _something_ to make
| them at least sustainable, with your "obvious" options
| being to either: 1) ask for donations (which likely won't
| pay for the site if you get popular: I know this from
| experience); 2) require people to pay some small
| subscription fee (which will make the site less fun for
| everyone); 3) pray ubiquitous micropayments eventually
| happens (i work on this problem as part of Orchid, but it
| still hasn't happened ;P); 4) sell "something else" to
| whales, like t-shirts or the ability to "guild" messages
| (the strategies reddit was trying to do as they resisted
| ads for a long time... maybe these work well enough?); or
| 5) start trying to sell ads and become the thing you
| hate. The only other strategies I have seen tend to
| either drag you towards #5 or simply cause other dark
| patterns, such as taking a cut of "tips" (what TikTok and
| Twitch do), which at bare minimum incentivizes the "don't
| you dare talk about alternative payment systems in our
| ecosystem: all payments must go through us" model sin
| (which can be fought against if you have a lot of
| willpower and remain private--I never required this with
| Cydia as I considered it the original sin my entire
| market existed to undermine--but I see the motivation and
| it feels kind of inevitable). I personally bet the only
| real "correct" solution is essentially #3... if we ever
| get to the point where the fees for that are as easy to
| pay and as low as the fees you pay for electricity (which
| works on a similar model).
| tomc1985 wrote:
| How about running ads but not letting them dominate your
| product? I see nothing wrong with running a costs-plus
| business model but VC comes in and demand all these
| stupid companies dominate the world so they can get their
| 500x return or whatever. Then they go public and now the
| only thing that matters is shareholder value, fuck the
| users and OG supporters...
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| You make a great point that I hadn't considered before.
|
| It's like rocket fuel! The faster you want to go, the more
| fuel you need. Which adds weight, so now you go slower, so
| you need more fuel...
|
| I want to serve a cat picture, which would cost 1/100 of a
| cent. But at scale, it adds up. So now I show adds that
| generate 1.2/100 of a cent in revenue but add .5/100 cents in
| serving cost, which I can optimize with user data to add an
| additional .7/100 cents in revenue, but which adds .4/100
| cents in serving costs....
| user123456780 wrote:
| > "The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts
|
| lol at this. Go setup that infrastructure and see how far you
| get for peanuts.
| symlinkk wrote:
| I honestly don't think it would be hard, especially with
| AWS abstracting away all scaling issues from you.
| jopsen wrote:
| A single server can host an awful lot of cat pictures.
| Especially if you apply a little compression.
|
| In fact: I'm sure there are many cat image sharing sites
| out there. A random search landed me here:
| https://www.funnycatpix.com/_pics/Hmmmmmm890.htm
|
| Seems like a high-quality HN-like website, hehe :)
| panny wrote:
| >You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in
| technical infrastructure
|
| You almost had me, right up to this point. Then I realized you
| are posting pointed sarcasm about instagram's owners.
| andai wrote:
| Kinda offtopic but Instagram's ads changed my attitude towards
| ads, and my attitude towards Facebook's creepy level of insight
| into my life and personality. If they have that data anyway --
| and hundreds of companies do -- I might as well benefit from
| it, and Instagram's ads were the first ones that I actually
| found interesting. First of all, it was obvious when something
| was an ad. Second, they weren't intrusive or obnoxious. And
| third, they showed me cool stuff I actually wanted to buy! It
| was actually an enjoyable experience and that's so weird to say
| about ads.
|
| The surveillance part still creeps me the hell out, but if
| they're gonna do it anyway they might as well use that data to
| benefit my life.
|
| (On that note, I often find myself wishing I could ask the NSA
| for a copy of an old message or photo...)
| derangedHorse wrote:
| I second this, the only ads I've ever willingly
| clicked/tapped on with the intention of buying were from
| Instagram
| eitland wrote:
| And that is quite a feat given how little information I
| hace willingly given Facebook compared to how I - until a
| few years ago - more or less volunteeres my data to Google.
|
| Google knew everything about it and yet couldn't manage to
| serve anything but the sleaziest ads.
|
| Instagram got the table scraps and yet convinced me to buy
| at least one thing that I'm actually happy with.
| mszcz wrote:
| Yep, seconded. Stopped using FB years ago and I use
| Instagram for two of my passions - tiny houses and boobs.
| And, somehow, Instagram figured out that I wanted to buy
| a Remarkable 2 ;)
|
| But yeah, joking aside, Instagram was the one of few
| places I actually saw ads of things I wanted to buy.
| Sure, the ads tried to rip my eyes out for those products
| ($50 for a product I found for $5) but still...
| andai wrote:
| As an aside, people complain that Twitter is a toxic
| place, but if you exclusively subscribe to art accounts
| _, it 's one of the most beautiful places on the
| internet.
|
| _ Asian artists are an even safer bet: they only post
| art. How refreshing!
| tablespoon wrote:
| > If they have that data anyway -- and hundreds of companies
| do -- I might as well benefit from it, and Instagram's ads
| were the first ones that I actually found interesting.
|
| I always feel a little depressed when someone describes being
| more effectively manipulated as "benefiting."
| andai wrote:
| Subjectively it's the difference between "why am I getting
| ads for pregnancy tests and skirts, I'm a basement-dwelling
| troglodyte" and "wtf, they're actually showing me things
| I'd want to buy (if I had money)".
|
| Joke's on them either way, they somehow haven't figured out
| I'm broke! But the difference is between "spying + garbage
| ads" and "spying + a bunch of cool shit I didn't even know
| existed" I'm gonna go for the latter.
|
| Obviously the correct answer is neither: just use Adblock
| and/or pay for services you use and enjoy. For example I
| paid for YouTube premium so I could get an ad-free
| experience on mobile (because YouTube ads are somehow both
| horribly intrusive and horribly irrelevant, despite
| Google's apparent omniscience!).
|
| By all accounts Google should know much more about me than
| Facebook does, but somehow their ads invoke a response
| somewhere between mild irritation and outright rage and
| disgust. Meanwhile on Instagram: "hey, I really like this
| backpack", "wtf they're selling psilocybin in capsules now?
| And I can just buy it? Nobody even told me that existed!
| Thanks Instagram!" Like I said, that was a pretty surreal
| moment for me.
| forty wrote:
| Funnily, I always had the impression that Instagram main
| (maybe only?) purpose was to watch ads ("influencers" as they
| call them these days), so I figured out they must be pretty
| good ads since people are coming there just for them ;)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Personally, I don't particularly care if companies have my
| data. However, I _vehemently_ don 't want them to use it for
| algorithmic recommendations--including ads--because it puts
| me in a filter bubble.
|
| All these technology companies are making assumptions about
| the type of person I am, and then _molding me_ into that
| person. I can 't learn about topics I don't see, so if the
| tech giants are convinced I like technology and computers,
| that's all I will ever learn about.
|
| Maybe I'd be happier if I took up ballet dancing, or basket-
| weaving, or something else I can't begin to imagine. That
| seems much less likely to happen when I'm trapped in an
| algorithmic box, that assumes my past will dictate my future.
| afc wrote:
| Anecdotal evidence, but my experience with IG ads was very
| different. I ordered stuff (mostly clothing) a few times (4
| or 5) from IG ads and was _very_ disappointed with the
| quality and service every single time. I now refuse to fall
| for IG ads ever again.
| driverdan wrote:
| Instagram ads are the most obnoxious out of all social media.
| When looking at stories they often come up every other user.
| The volume alone is absurd.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Facebook/Mark Zuckeberg didn't spend $1B on the infrastructure
| of Instagram. He bought the network effect that he knew is
| impossible to beat by a better product.
| hhs wrote:
| Seems this would fit with surveillance capitalism:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
| grishka wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that if they had non-targeted (or at least
| targeted not based on tracking), unobtrusive ads, and zero dark
| patterns, they would've been still earning enough money to
| cover their expenses and then some. Unfortunately, they've set
| out to earn all the money in the world for no benefit to anyone
| at all.
| bbarnett wrote:
| If you manage to build a large enough empire, then... and
| only then, can you make the world a better place.
| thesausageking wrote:
| Ads are fine. The "fuck you" pattern is letting you see the cat
| picture for 5 seconds before covering it up and requiring you
| to create an account and share your data with Facebook before
| you can see it.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Everyone everywhere has realized throughout the ages that
| conversion of anything is higher when you get a demo of the
| product.
|
| This isn't a "fuck you" pattern. They gave you a social media
| Costco food sample.
| Falling3 wrote:
| Except Costco is very upfront and honest about what a
| sample is and how it works. The food-based analogy would be
| they offer you an entire meal then slap you after you take
| your first small bite letting you know you have to pay to
| continue eating.
| thesausageking wrote:
| I have no doubt it converts better. Facebook are masters at
| using little dopamine hits and denials to get users to do
| whatever they want.
|
| It's still an obnoxious thing to do, which is the point of
| the article.
| pnt12 wrote:
| That's quite a ridiculous claim. Surely they can display ads to
| anonymous users, That's not hard at all. But then they can't
| track you and profile you, which is a big no.
|
| Now is it fair for a company to track and shape the behavior of
| millions of people?
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Just looking at how this post got 400 points in an hour says a
| lot about how people feel about this. Internet fame isn't the
| arbiter of truth, but practically everyone here knows and relates
| to this post at one point or another on the web these days.
| skillpass wrote:
| I use a Vim extension in my browser which converts 'j' and 'k'
| into scroll keys. I've found that on many sites which employ the
| modal overlay and suppress scrolling I can still scroll around
| using these keys even when arrow keys and mouse scrolling don't
| work.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter also do this, and I wish I could
| exclude them from Google search results.
|
| The worst offense IMO is that even if you do take their bait to
| "use the app", they punt you to the App Store page, losing the
| URL you were on in the process, so even though I have all of
| those apps installed, it's not possible to click through from a
| Google result then open that same post in the app. At that point,
| I don't try to search for the same thing in the app, I just
| convince myself that it's not worth it and abandon any attempt to
| access that content. They can keep it.
| kderbyma wrote:
| for the areas where you may not want to use profanity, we could
| also call this a 'Hold-Up' or Bank Robbery pattern - essentially
| they are holding you at gunpoint for your data which we know they
| will immediately sell regardless of if you want to use their
| platform for anything other than that one link
| baby wrote:
| I feel like most websites used to be like that. And then suddenly
| we got a load of great websites that just gave us what we wanted
| without ads. Facebook, youtube, reddit, google maps, gmail, etc.
| Now things are changing once again.
| hnarn wrote:
| Funnily enough the Instagram link in the blog post worked fine
| for me, because I use the "Privacy Redirect" extension which sent
| me to https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official
| fleddr wrote:
| The dark patterns are not a sign of misunderstanding good UX, nor
| are they a sign of pure evil by their makers.
|
| Big social networks only come into existence via an aggressive,
| exponential roll-out. The main feature of such a network is
| having your friends on there. None of the other features matter
| as its plain to see how they copy concepts from each other all
| the time. It's about getting you in there.
|
| Once in existence, producing revenue means keeping you in the
| experience for as long as possible. Which is best done in an app
| and preferably logged in. This allows for the personalization and
| notifications.
|
| Put another way, publishing all of this on the open web, with
| many users using ad-blockers, just doesn't cut it. Further, you
| don't want to give away all content to the open web
| (cough...Google).
|
| We gave them this power. None of us want to surf the open web. We
| want 3 apps that do everything. And we won't pay for it, not a
| penny.
| polartx wrote:
| Oh, I've got a perfect example of a 'Fuck You' pattern in the
| wild, and it's served with a side of 'user gas-lighting'.
|
| The gun.deals app, (specifically the iOS version, though I
| suspect android is engineered the same way), is your typical
| design of stacked rows of links for deals on, you guessed it, gun
| stuff.
|
| As with these apps, the user scrolls down the list by dragging
| their finger upward. Except on gun.deals, the app will
| [intentionally] misinterpret the first contact of the finger as a
| 'click' on the row item. This causes the user to have to back out
| of the item they had intended to scroll past. (While almost
| certainly delivering fraudulently obtained 'impressions' that the
| app maker can represent to advertisers and vendors they are
| selling data and screen share to).
| inostia wrote:
| I haven't used Facebook or Instagram in about 3 years.
| Occasionally I'll get sent a link to something on Instagram
| before having this exact experience. Whatever I'm missing out on,
| it hasn't been enough to convince me to make another account, my
| quality of life has significantly improved ever since I
| extricated myself from the social media hellscape.
|
| Indeed, "fuck you" Facebook.
| rusk wrote:
| It's a good one actually cause even if it's falsely triggered e.g
| by users on NAT sharing the same address it's only going to tell
| them "fuck you" but they can still login
| edem wrote:
| This is the reason why I don't use Instagram...and that it also
| tries to force you to install an app instead of using the browser
| because you know...they can spy more from a phone.
| Q1312 wrote:
| bnb1kaz843ecm0qnsp5gvpk6fjkca789hr3xa62lyg
| shmiga wrote:
| I would say - fuck Mark!!!
| avalys wrote:
| This seems like an anti-scraping measure to me, they are limiting
| how much content you can access on the site without an account?
|
| Seems like if they did not have protections like this, another
| group of people would be complaining about easy FB makes it for
| nefarious actors to violate your privacy, etc. and how careless
| they are in not locking down access better.
| pjerem wrote:
| No because the first thing they do is to show you all of the
| content, ready to be scraped. Then they add their modal and
| then, after three reloads they store in your browser storage,
| they stops to show you the content.
|
| So they don't protect any data, they just leak it all. Then
| they hide it.
| draw_down wrote:
| The inability to scroll is from a body-level element that has
| `overflow: hidden` set. Set that to visible and you should be
| able to scroll
| Y_Y wrote:
| Maybe it's time for shit like hiding scrollbars to be opt-in. I
| bet there are great use-cases for messing with scrolling, or
| right-click, or the back button, or whatever else. I bet there
| are benevolent websites that make downright acceptable use of
| these things. But this is not the hot path. There is far more
| abuse than good-use, yet I don't know any browser that does the
| right thing.
| oneshoe wrote:
| My challenge with this is that, I believe, you think instagram is
| a free service. It isn't, you pay for the service by selling your
| data to advertisers and using your data for advertisement. If
| they don't have your data, you aren't paying for the service.
|
| I hate this and also, I don't use their service - same for
| facebook.
| tonymet wrote:
| It's a cynical way to interpret it . The desktop experience is
| only 30% of mobile. Brand perception is tarnished if people use
| the reduced experience .
|
| Think of web as a preview experience and mobile is the complete
| product.
| qwertox wrote:
| Yesterday I wanted to see something on Instagram. I think it was
| inside Relay for Reddit, where a WebView would open the Instagram
| page.
|
| Not only was there this delay, but the cookie consent was
| ridiculous. I now checked and it's the same on the Desktop in
| Chrome.
|
| I have no option to reject/disable cookies. Usually you get to
| choose which things you want to reject, like user tracking,
| personalized ads, but you usually need to keep the functional
| cookies.
|
| This popup only has one button "Accept All" and one "Manage Data
| Settings". The latter would be the one where I get to choose what
| to accept. But all I get there is an explanation telling me that
| "your browser or device may offer settings that allow you to
| choose whether browser cookies are set and to delete them. These
| controls vary by browser, and manufacturers may change both the
| settings they make available and how they work at any time."
|
| What is wrong with them? Honestly, Facebook is the worst disease
| on the internet, even Pinterest doesn't reach their degree of
| hostility.
| loosescrews wrote:
| I don't understand why Zoom doesn't get more flak for this. Their
| web version is intentionally crippled and broken in an attempt to
| force users to download their app. They won't even show the link
| to join a meeting with the web version until you have failed to
| join with the app (it used to require 3 failed attempts, but they
| seem to have dropped that to a single failed attempt).
| icco wrote:
| Their API is the same way. Instagram really hates its users and
| developers.
| rexyg wrote:
| Ah, the classic "bait-and-switch"
| kristopolous wrote:
| The pattern is real but in this instance they're blocking bots
| and scrapers.
| alpb wrote:
| My theory is that Instagram is probably trying to prevent bots
| capable of rendering pages and making changes on the DOM (e.g.
| Selenium or chromedp) from harvesting their unauthenticated
| access rights to Instagram's frontend to crawl/collect images.
|
| Hence, as the author tried to circumvent it, they probably got
| IPbanned.
| sneak wrote:
| I have all Facebook properties (fb, instagram, whatsapp, all of
| it) blocked by DNS via NextDNS on my router.
|
| You're encouraged to try it.
| pentagrama wrote:
| Instagram have a paywall, to be able to see the content you must
| pay with your data by creating an account, and later hopefully
| become addicted to the platform to give _more_ data _and_ eat as
| many ads as possible.
| vimax wrote:
| Where are the developers implementing this stuff on large social
| media, especially Reddit who had such a user friendly founding?
| Surely they're here on HN. I'd love to hear their thinking in
| going along with this, assuming it's something better than "fuck
| the users I want to get paid." How do you join the dev team for a
| service you like and use, and then knowingly destroy it?
| bserge wrote:
| Hey, I would if 1. I got paid for it; 2. I'd justify it with
| "fuck this platform, everyone should go back to individual
| websites/blogs/forums".
| jraph wrote:
| Sabotage by executing the given orders?
| fleddr wrote:
| The word "destroy" is questionable. These types of user-hostile
| patterns may in fact be needed to secure revenue or to exist at
| all.
|
| The standard internet user doesn't pay for anything and
| increasingly blocks ads. That's why these patterns exist.
|
| Surely it would feel uneasy to developers with a passion for
| UX, but there's nothing you can do about it. Go ahead and quit,
| it's not going to be very hard to find another developer
| willing to do it for 200K.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > How do you join the dev team for a service you like and use,
| and then knowingly destroy it?
|
| You start with priorities that are fucked up before you even
| interviewed for the job.
|
| The world of today is not like the world of 10+ years ago. In
| 2001, if you met a developer, there was an exceptionally high %
| chance that they were fundamentally into technology in a very
| deep & personal way. In 2021, you will find that most people in
| technology see it for the cash cow that it is and utilize it
| accordingly.
|
| I would say that maybe 10-20% of the tech employees today
| actually give a fuck about these sorts of things. The rest just
| want their paycheck and as many other benefits as they can
| obtain. Raising a stink over dark patterns is not a good idea
| if you don't bring a whole lot of other meaningful value to the
| table.
| shrimpx wrote:
| I think this is because "tech" is quickly becoming a business
| utility, and every company is becoming a "tech company" just
| by augmenting its business with an app stack. "Tech" has
| become watered-down by proliferating everywhere, and
| accordingly developers have grown in number and diminished in
| average passion and skill.
|
| Coupled with this, everyone knows these tech-driven ad-
| distribution companies posing as "social media" are pretty
| shady, because they're based on coyly mining user attention
| for $. So I you get a job there, your moral bar is low enough
| that a dark pattern here and there is no big deal.
| VRay wrote:
| Good news, my friend, you can see their sentiment right here in
| this very thread! Scroll up or down and feast your eyes.
|
| My personal story: When I interviewed for a job at Amazon many
| years ago, all the recruiter e-mail kept going into my trash. I
| finally realized that I'd just directed *@amazon.com into my
| trash years earlier because they kept filling my inbox with so
| much useless bullshit, and I'd always hated the company. Turned
| out, though, that when presented with the chance to make twice
| as much money by working half as hard, those feelings became
| very malleable.. "Well, we're a bunch of assholes, but nice
| guys finish last"
|
| Really, I'm just following orders every day at my job
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| There you go, an idea for business :) - an "mutual" account that
| will crawl pages on those sites - then share them without login
|
| I am to sleepy and this idea is stupid as hell ...
| rglover wrote:
| It sounds like they disabled the scroll event on the body by
| setting overflow: hidden;.
| colordrops wrote:
| Another fuck you pattern from Instagram is hiding the keyboard
| when you go to search for a user to encourage you to get
| distracted and tap on a suggestion rather than what you were
| searching for. You have to tap search three times to actually see
| the keyboard. It has to be intentional because it's been
| happening for years.
| Spivak wrote:
| Wait wha? What's the flow here to produce this?
|
| I open IG, tap into the search tab, tap the search bar,
| keyboard appears, type in user, tap result.
|
| Do you want tapping into the search tab to autofocus the search
| bar and open the keyboard. I can totally understand that but
| IG's search tab is more a discovery thing now. Which like
| evil's of social media aside was a sorely needed feature since
| finding people to follow has always been hard on Twitter and
| IG.
| colordrops wrote:
| Are you on Android? You have to tap search icon, then the
| search bar, after which the keyboard pops up then disappears,
| then tap the search bar again.
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm on iOS so I don't think that's supposed to happen.
| Definitely wouldn't be the first time Android gets the
| shaft in terms of app quality from large companies. Looking
| at you Google whose iOS apps are better than their Android
| apps for some reason.
| colordrops wrote:
| Perhaps iOS doesn't allow it. It's a valuable "bug" for
| Instagram, so they have no incentive to fix it. Otherwise
| the app is relatively bug free, and this issue has
| existed for years, so I'm not giving them the benefit of
| the doubt. Facebook absolutely doesn't deserve it.
| owlninja wrote:
| My Android device works the same as the iOS user
| described.
| colordrops wrote:
| I've seen it on multiple android devices. But even if
| only one tap on the search bar is necessary, it's still
| an antipattern, as the user clearly wants to search, and
| the keyboard should come up right away. Recommendations
| and suggestions should not be conflated with search, or
| at least shouldn't override search.
| owlninja wrote:
| Yea fair enough - and that page is always incredibly
| jarring at first.
| burlesona wrote:
| Wow, I don't use Instagram so I haven't seen this, but that's a
| very nasty pattern.
| binarymax wrote:
| IMDB is doing this now too. Infuriating.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I scrape imdb for some personal web pages and imdb has the
| weirdest things now to prevent scraping like custom media
| viewers and obscuring most of plain text inside deep, almost
| indistinguishable hierarchies.
| rav wrote:
| I just tried in a private browsing window: Without refreshing the
| page (to trigger the "forced HTTP redirect to login") I could
| delete the modal and disable the overflow:hidden on body and keep
| scrolling down quite a bit until I hit a post from January 18,
| 2019. So if you're prepared to try hard you can view a lot of cat
| pics without creating an account...
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| what dumb fuck visits instagram in the first place? serious
| question.
| swyx wrote:
| Linkedin has one of these too. Displays your full information to
| Google to index you, but if a human user visits, up comes the
| login wall.
|
| F you for treating bots better than humans, linkedin.
| tantalor wrote:
| There are some instagram mirrors you can use:
|
| https://dumpor.com/v/polite_cat_olli_official
|
| https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official
|
| Suffering the ads is preferable to whatever fb wants.
| np1810 wrote:
| Thanks for these mirrors... I used to visit picuki website
| which used to work great until recently...
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Thank you :D
| zoomablemind wrote:
| > https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official
|
| Works for the Olli, but for another profile returns for me a
| "permanent error", blocked by Instagram.
|
| See
| https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/cadence.moe/gemlog/2020-12-1...
| "Future of Bibliogram after restrictive IP blocking"
| nkingsy wrote:
| Q: But what about the unauthenticated existing users we might
| alienate?
|
| A: There's no way to gather data on that so it's not a thing.
|
| This is the problem with "data driven" decision making in a
| nutshell. It has annoyed me to no end at every company I've
| worked for.
| lainga wrote:
| >US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told
| McNamara,[3] who was trying to develop a list of metrics to
| allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war,
| that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural
| Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in
| pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not
| measure it, so it must not be important.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
| jandrese wrote:
| Sentiment analysis is a real thing. Of course collecting poll
| data on questions like "How much do you approve of the US Air
| Force turning large parts of your country to a moonscape?
| Rate from 1 to 5" probably wouldn't have gone over so well.
|
| On the other hand, virtually every study of the Vietnam war
| said it was a huge mistake and Domino theory was bullshit.
| tantalor wrote:
| Who says you can't collect user metrics from unauthenticated
| users?
| [deleted]
| saba2008 wrote:
| Users are not consumers, but product. And untracked users are
| lower quality, so culling them can be beneficial. So no problem
| here.
| turtletontine wrote:
| ... but if you can't collect data on them, you can't target ads
| to them or sell their data elsewhere, and therefore they're
| worth nothing to you.
|
| At the end of the day every company wants to make money, or
| will be bought out by cutthroats who think it's all there is,
| and this kind of thinking will take hold. Users you can't
| profit from = leeches.
| Groxx wrote:
| You can still collect (a lot) more information than classical
| advertising in print or on TV gets, and that seems to work
| alright.
| Traster wrote:
| Actually I think it's the opposite - online advertising is
| so ineffective all this micro-targetting is the minimum
| required to persuade people to throw their money away. In
| reality how do I target someone in New York? I buy an ad in
| the NYT.
| Groxx wrote:
| It's frequently ineffective because it's frequently done
| mindlessly, because it's possible to do so at enormous
| scale for low cost.
|
| The equivalent in the online world would be to pay site X
| to show ad Y at times Q-Z. And then you just trust that
| they'll do so, like you have to do for print/TV ads, and
| pay the site. That _does happen_ , and you can find quite
| a lot of company blog posts out there saying that it
| works, but it's much more manual so yeah. It isn't the
| majority.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Use an app / webpage like ingramer
| (https://ingramer.com/downloader/instagram/photo/) :)
|
| Instagram will probably notice and break/ban them eventually but
| meanwhile, this works.
| axbytg wrote:
| Reddit is full of these patterns in order to drive users from
| mobile web to app. Reddit mobile web really sets the bar for
| user-hostile UI in my opinion.
| rescripting wrote:
| What is worse, is that even though I installed the official app
| to squelch this nonsense (the Fuck You Pattern is effective)
| the mobile site still prompts with "Open in the Reddit App".
|
| When I click it my iPhone opens the App Store. The App Store
| then has a big blue "Open" button to launch the app, but of
| course all context is lost and opening from there brings you to
| your Reddit front page.
| bo0tzz wrote:
| I'll one up this - I use an alternative, unofficial app for
| reddit. Until recently the 'open' button on their website
| would take me into that specific app - as you would expect -
| but since last week or so it's started sending me to the
| Google Play store page for the official app instead.
| lonbigtech wrote:
| What browser are you using on your phone?
| rescripting wrote:
| Safari, nothing fancy.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| So much this. Now that I know it works this way, I just try
| to ignore any promising-looking search results from any of
| the sites that do this, because I don't feel like trying to
| search for the same thing in their app because they broke
| their mobile site and broke the "open in app" by assuming I
| don't already have it.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Reddit's app registers itself as a uri handler for reddit
| links but (thanks to google) AMP or iframe results don't
| prompt the actual system uri handler that would take you to
| the app.
| rescripting wrote:
| Oh wow, is this what happens when multiple Fuck You
| Patterns collide?
| nxpnsv wrote:
| I think you just encountered the clusterfuck pattern
| [deleted]
| MikeDelta wrote:
| "Don't cross the streams."
| dmurray wrote:
| Isn't that a failure of the reddit devs rather than of
| Google? They could have the app register for amp.reddit.com
| links.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Whoa, is that what this is? I've been wondering for quite
| some time why in the world Reddit hasn't figured out how to
| make the "open in the app" links actually work. It's
| bonkers that they spend so much effort making the web site
| push you to the app, but don't even provide a working way
| to open a piece of content in the app.
| sixothree wrote:
| Reddit's usefulness has waned dramatically and continues to do
| so.
| jandrese wrote:
| Reddit's new UI is still hilariously terrible. The day they
| remove old.reddit.com is the day I stop using the site.
|
| Who the hell thinks what I want when I click on an article is
| to bring it into a related article feed with 1.5 comments
| showing? If I accidentally click outside of the article area
| the whole thing vanishes with no way to get back where I was. I
| had thought these issues would be obvious and they would clean
| it up, but here we are months later and it is still broken from
| a UX standpoint.
|
| I guess all of the devs moved over to work on their bespoke
| media player? You know, the one that barely works half of the
| time.
| collinvandyck76 wrote:
| Agreed about old.reddit.com. I feel pretty old saying this,
| but I really miss the days of straightforward web design.
| Everything now is so chaotic that I'm never really sure what
| clicking anything will do. It feels like design for the sake
| of design, not for the sake of the users.
| scrooched_moose wrote:
| I'm still shocked Craigslist has survived, virtually
| unchanged, since 1996.
|
| It's may not be the cleanest interface, but it's a nice
| reminder of the more utilitarian days.
| jandrese wrote:
| IMHO Craigslist is a good example of a design that nailed
| it right from the start and avoided the temptation to
| redesign year after year. Choose a region, choose the
| category, enter your search and bam, there are your
| listings. It's all bookmarkable too. What a great
| website.
| bserge wrote:
| The back button is broken, too. Was it that hard to bring you
| back to the comment you were reading when you clicked the
| link? Guess so.
| ljm wrote:
| And their video player is utterly fucked. The video will
| load and reload about 3 times before it becomes playable,
| on the desktop. On the mobile site, usually the video
| freezes and the audio track plays. Gifs will overflow and
| play under the UI, and that's not been fixed for over a
| couple of years.
|
| And now it renders Gifs inside replies and every single
| fucking thread has the "omg gifs!" thread voted to the top.
|
| The modern Reddit UI is a complete and utter tragedy of
| design and engineering. But it serves ads, so who cares.
|
| They only redesigned it so that they could make ads first-
| class.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's gotten to the point where if I saw "Software Engineer -
| Reddit" on a candidate's resume, I would seriously question
| this person's chops, even if it's just one small signal in an
| otherwise great background. How did this site's quality to
| get so poor? Why couldn't you do anything about it? It's so
| bad that you have to believe it was deliberately made bad.
| glennvtx wrote:
| The web reddit is just awful. Leave a thread open for some
| time, and navigation even breaks.
| pahn wrote:
| saved reddit for me: https://teddit.net/
| tyingq wrote:
| The Reddit AMP implementation on top of Reddit Web is even
| worse. For the first few times I encountered it, I assumed
| there was a bug or something that would be fixed soon.
| pram wrote:
| The best part is clicking a link, loading a page, and it just
| says "Something broke"
|
| Twitter does this too. How the fuck is it even possible?
| NavinF wrote:
| Glad it's not just me. Twitter seems to break more often
| when a page is loaded from the browser cache, but I can't
| pin down any other pattern for the "Something broke" errors
| on both mobile and desktop.
|
| Will Twitter ever have more than two 9s of reliability as
| measured from the user's POV?
| handrous wrote:
| Oh, I just posted a question about this elsewhere in the
| thread. I've come to assume this is intentional and
| probably doesn't happen if you're logged in or using the
| app (though I don't know). It's been like this for years.
| Like every time I follow a link to Twitter I seem to get
| a random roll whether it works, and same random roll on
| each refresh. After n refreshes, where n may be 0-10, it
| works. _Browsing_ the site doesn 't do this.
| u801e wrote:
| I just use old.reddit.com on my mobile and laptop.
| navanchauhan wrote:
| It is better to use i.reddit.com on your mobile
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Same.
| Nition wrote:
| Try i.reddit.com on mobile, it's easier on small screens.
| Click the cog on the right for options like collapsing
| comments.
| jpe-210 wrote:
| The only way to browse Reddit nowadays is either through
| old.reddit.com or through a third-party application like
| Apollo. It's amazing how much content is _not_ displayed on the
| screen in their new clunky UI. Makes you wonder why they went
| in that direction.
| jpeter wrote:
| I only use reddit.premii.com on mobile. That's what their
| mobile site should look like
| qwertox wrote:
| old.reddit.com is acceptable, with uBlock Origin and the like,
| and on mobile Relay for Reddit is a nice app.
| sbayeta wrote:
| I use Reddit is Fun app on android and haven't noticed any
| changes in UX for more than 5 years. When a I rarely go to
| reddit.com on my pc, I can't even recognize the original site.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Gmail webmail too. I've hit << I'm not interested >> to their
| app prompt around 500 times in a row. Will i change the 501st?
| No.
|
| Then again, my ATM machine still asks me which language I want
| service in. It's my hope if I choose something other than
| English, it calls 9-1-1, slows down the prompts and does
| nothing irreversible.
| surround wrote:
| Try
|
| https://libredd.it/
|
| Or
|
| https://teddit.net/
| nxpnsv wrote:
| I never use reddit on mobile, but also there the whole new
| reddit design thing is so terrible I just don't bother going
| there anymore. It's sad, there were a few really nice
| communities there.
| mulmen wrote:
| What I don't understand is why Reddit wants us to use the app
| so badly. Is it just for ads? Is it data collection?
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Likely both. It sure as hell ain't to make your experience
| any better.
| ornornor wrote:
| I suspect it's all that and their metrics show that mobile
| users are the most "engaged" so they want more mobile users
| to have an even higher count of engaged users. Also, it's
| harder to spam notifications without a mobile app.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| They deliberately make their mobile web experience awful,
| so I don't think that's why (how can you trust a metric
| that you're deliberately sabotaging?). I suspect mobile
| apps just allow for more data collection than web apps.
| busterarm wrote:
| I think it's time for lawmakers to start drafting up an
| "engagement tax" and start penalizing companies for
| demanding peoples' attention.
| temporallobe wrote:
| My guess is because it's harder to block ads through the app
| than it is in the browser-based version (at least in iOS).
| Whatever the actual reason is, the asshole design (which
| ironically they have an entire subreddit for) actually
| discourages me from using Reddit, so I've been using it a lot
| less in the past couple of years.
| Cicero22 wrote:
| another possibility is to increase traffic, which I guess
| also increases ad revenue. It's a lot easier to tap an icon
| on your home screen than it is to open a browser and type in
| reddit and whichever subreddit you want to browse. The less
| friction there is, the more likely you are to be a daily
| user, driving their revenue.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| It's like the Nigerian Prince email scam but the other way
| around : 99% of the people who receive such an email will
| identify the scam and ignore it. This is totally fine for the
| scammers. Working as expected.
|
| Now, in the Reddit scenario 99% of the Reddit users don't
| mind downloading an app. It's just us, techies, that 1% who
| cares. This is totally fine for Reddit. Working as expected.
| manigandham wrote:
| Ads, tracking, notifications, with higher overall engagement
| due to faster and more content available.
| Traster wrote:
| I suspect it's for neither. It's to fulfil some metric. They
| either want investor money or IPO money and either way, they
| want people in their app because their app is _way_ over-
| valued compared to monthly impressions.
| mikestew wrote:
| I don't have a Reddit account, and every time I use it I am
| reminded why. Their patterns have taken me from "I should
| create an account one of these days" to "there is nothing on
| the Internet that I need to see so badly that I would let
| Reddit see anymore about me than my IP address." It's almost as
| if they are taunting users: "give up and create an account, or
| go home. Oh, and use the fucking mobile app while you're at it,
| or the suffering will continue."
|
| OTOH, once I get there, a lot of Reddit content makes me wonder
| why I bothered. :-)
| jalgos_eminator wrote:
| Use the old interface available at old.reddit.com. Its mostly
| fine. There are some really good corners of reddit, though
| the popular subs have been infected with the well washed
| masses.
| visarga wrote:
| Reddit is diverse, there still are some good corners here and
| there. You need to know where to look.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Appending "reddit" to google searches still produce better
| results than the alternative of 100% autogenerated
| listicles. For now, at least.
| bserge wrote:
| Sadly, it's a humongous amalgamation of forums that has taken
| all the users from niche forums I used to frequent.
| yur3i__ wrote:
| The cookie prompt on old.reddit.com is so obnoxious now. You
| can't close it and the "continue" button takes you to the
| new.reddit.com homepage
| JoeyBananas wrote:
| Microsoft Windows is even worse. Constant disruptive updates,
| forcing you to make an account during install, ads in the start
| menu, that creepy "Cortana" process that you can't kill...
| judge2020 wrote:
| One of the few good things from Windows 11 is that Cortana
| has been evicted (the Bing stuff is still there though).
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/windows-11-specifica...
| Aperocky wrote:
| From this perspective it's amazing. I ditched Windows
| completely for about 5 years (coinciding with my time in
| Software). And had to deal with none of these problems any
| more, I always remember that I hated windows for some reason
| but can't seem to pinpoint/remember, but now you've reminded
| me.
| nousermane wrote:
| What OS did you switch to?
| Aperocky wrote:
| macOS and Linux.
| temporallobe wrote:
| These are the primary reasons I moved off Windows and onto a
| combination of macOS and *nix. Plus, macbooks have native
| Thunderbolt 3 support, which is essential for near-zero
| latency audio production.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| This may have been true when Win10 just came out, but it
| isn't anymore. You can schedule your updates (and if you
| don't, they try to schedule them for you in non-use hours),
| there are ways to bypass the MS account creation and just use
| a local account, I haven't seen an ad in my start menu in
| ages, even after multiple large system updates and there is
| not a single reference to Cortana in my Task Manager or
| Services (I turned Cortana off in settings).
|
| Granted, I'm aggressive at turning off startup items,
| managing what services run on boot, and so on, but my point
| is, each of the things you mention may have been true at one
| time, but they are not necessarily true today.
|
| edit to note: I'm not defending Microsoft's use of dark
| patterns, they definitely do push them out and then sometimes
| back off if there is enough pushback. And that is bad, and
| should be called out. Just aiming for accurate information
| here.
| redml wrote:
| they've lately been trying to get me to make a cloud
| account to login. i remember when i installed it i made an
| "offline account", but now after a few updates im
| occationally getting a nag to "finish setting up your
| computer" before i can start using it which leads to a
| place wanting me to make an account which I now have to
| cancel out of rather than have a permanent method of
| removing it.
|
| it's just a matter of time at this point
| ssully wrote:
| I disagree. Reddit is worse because if you don't have an
| account, you are constantly pushed to make one, or get pop-
| ups to download the ad. They also seem to limit
| functionality, like seeing all comments, unless you have an
| account.
|
| The Windows installation process is annoying for sure, but
| once you get through it, you are able to disable or rework
| everything you mentioned. iOS honestly has everything you
| mentioned as well; in fact, it's installation process pushes
| even more services than Windows does, but I never see people
| complain about it. I find both process annoying, but I forget
| about them once I get everything setup because it goes away.
| I don't want a reddit account because I basically only visit
| the site when a friend sends me a link. I am guessing I can
| also have their stuff go away if I download the app and sign
| up, but it's not as essential to me as using Windows or iOS.
| sixothree wrote:
| Additionally, the experience of using reddit is very
| different with an account versus without. The same argument
| cannot be made for Windows 10.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I want plug-in which lets users highlight content on a page and
| mark it as "not malicious". It would use a CTPH algorithm to call
| out the non malicious bits from their context (same tech that
| virus scanners use). I call these annotations "brushstrokes".
|
| Other users could "follow" my brushstrokes, so when they land on
| the page, instead of implicitly running whatever code it finds
| there it just fetches the known-non-malicious parts. I.e. the cat
| pictures.
|
| I'd totally pay $5/month if $4 of it went to people who are
| annotating the web in this way. You could get paid in accordance
| with how popular and trustworthy your brushstrokes are, and
| together we can fix the web.
|
| I guess the goal would be UURL's, where the both the reference
| and the referent are uniform--rather than a uniform reference to
| a who-knows-what-this-site-will-do referent.
| brudgers wrote:
| [I am not the market segmentation fairy]
|
| I can't buy anything from Amazon without an Amazon account.
|
| Can't use Facetime without two Apple accounts and two Apple
| devices.
|
| If it really matters, make an account. If it doesn't really
| matter, then it doesn't really matter.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| I have been fascinated by this pattern lately. I don't have an
| instagram account, but there are a few that I'll browse
| occasionally. I usually browse in mobile Safari's private mode. I
| can usually view one or two accounts before I get locked out.
| They're incredibly good at locking you out! It's not cookie-
| based, because I'm still locked out if I exit private mode or use
| a different browser on a different machine. I'm even locked out
| if I switch off wifi and browse from a tmobile ip. I'm not sure
| how they're this good at fingerprinting, but it's quite
| something.
| [deleted]
| tiborsaas wrote:
| The phenomenon he's seen is more likey the result of an overly
| paranoid and aggressive ant-bot algorithm. I've seen this too,
| but when using various devices and accidental (company machine)
| VPN connections.
| aendruk wrote:
| I used to be able to see photos that friends and family publish
| to Instagram, but then one day I was inexplicably cut off--no
| more access via open standard protocols.
|
| I'm sad about that.
| Flott wrote:
| Fuck you patterns are everywhere on the web nowaday.
|
| Some of the most annoying to me:
|
| Twitch trying to discourage the use of the embedded player/non
| official players (like VLC) by replacing the content by a
| fullscreen purple picture asking you to watch on twitch.tv.
|
| Reddit trying to force mobile user to use the reddit app as soon
| as the content is marked NSFW.
|
| Instagram forcing me to login to view pictures.
|
| Twitter asking me to see who someone is following.
| dheera wrote:
| Another one is the "can I help you" chat box that pops up.
| Intercom and the likes.
|
| Thinking about making a Chrome plugin that intentionally asks
| some nonsense questions programmatically in the background to
| waste their time and disincentivize that behavior.
|
| (To be clear, I love having chat channels for sales and
| support, just NOT unsolicited "Can I help you" popups.)
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| The article is a great example of blogspam:
|
| - Inflammatory title
|
| - Low effort content
|
| - An invitation to hate on a favorite HN target
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I pray for the day I won't have any reason to whine.
| dheera wrote:
| > From TFA: "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." You need to not
| only remove the modal, but remove the "overflow:hidden;" in the
| <body> tag. After that you should be able to scroll.
|
| I have CSS/JS injectors that do this for me already, I really
| fucking hate popups and scrolling impediments of any sort.
| bidirectional wrote:
| The alternative is that life is made very easy for dystopian,
| privacy-invading companies like Clearview AI. Really I find this
| a lot less galling than on somewhere like Reddit, where most
| content isn't so personal.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| I'm glad we now have a name for this. If I may take a stab at a
| more formal, reusable definition of the Fuck You pattern:
|
| A UI pattern whereby content a user wants is provided, then
| yanked away before it can be consumed, to be replaced by a demand
| for something the site wants (log in, sign up, subscribe, pay,
| etc). It's distinct from merely providing a limited amount of
| content in the first place, as when a site offers 3 articles for
| free before requiring payment.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Great, now my boss is going to ask me to implement this.
|
| Thanks.
| xmprt wrote:
| Hopefully if we call it what it is and keep the name "Fuck
| You" pattern, any boss that wants to implement it will
| realize how user hostile it is. More likely, the MBAs figure
| out a more colorful name for it and every single app on the
| planet starts to have it.
| abraae wrote:
| Maybe that should be the Yanker pattern, since there are
| certainly many more scummy behaviours that merit the Fuck You
| label.
| caf wrote:
| I suggest the Lucy pattern (as in the football running gag
| from Peanuts).
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Brilliant name. We have a winner.
| thedailymail wrote:
| Tantalus pattern?
| scythmic_waves wrote:
| Oh, good reference! I like "Peanuts Pattern" myself.
| RandyRanderson wrote:
| unless you're logged in, pinterest is only this, has some
| searches essentially 'SE-Owned' and has been doing this for ~7
| years. They're the OG of this.
|
| Pinttern?
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Appwall? Subscribewall? Mailwall?
| e12e wrote:
| Millwall? A wall that wears you down until you comply?
| [deleted]
| makecheck wrote:
| What I don't understand about most sites that do this is how
| _QUICKLY_ they reach the "fuck you" state. It's like a few
| clicks, or a few seconds, or whatever -- nowhere _near_ long
| enough to get _any_ idea what the site is about, what it offers,
| whether it is valuable, etc. Therefore, what exactly is gained
| here? I just get annoyed and immediately leave.
|
| Imagine if this happened elsewhere in life. You go into a grocery
| store, you grab a cart, you get 5 feet inside, grab one item, and
| then you are _immediately_ blocked by 8 security guards and
| interrogated for your name before you can continue. Would you
| stay in the store?
| mercury_craze wrote:
| Facebook was doing this for a while on business pages, but it
| looks like they've backed out of it now. Around 2 years ago you
| were only permitted to see content 'above the fold'. Scroll down
| to the second page of content and you saw an undismissable modal
| covering the entire page. Happily(!) you now have the option to
| dismiss the modal and continue scrolling, but the modal is shown
| for every new business page you visit.
| commoner wrote:
| Using a VPN, I'm completely locked out of any Facebook page,
| business or not. It just shows a login form.
| xqw wrote:
| > but I wasn't able to scroll any further on the page
|
| Try this custom userstyle in a custom CSS plugin (like Stylus):
| body, html, html body, .overflow-hidden {
| overflow: auto !important; }
|
| ...I leave this on all the time, and use uBlock to snipe the SIGN
| UP NOW popovers, works wonders.
| DevKoala wrote:
| Use ingramer.com or a similar tool/api, download all the images
| of your desired profile, and problem solved.
|
| I call this solution "fuck you too".
| Black101 wrote:
| I like that name better. But something that means exactly the
| same thing that isn't considered a curse word would be even
| better.
| jbpnoy6fifty wrote:
| Do pay walls count as a "fuck you" pattern?
|
| How about free trials with credit card submissions and having
| difficult "cancel subscription" work flows?
| marklubi wrote:
| Pinterest is another one that exhibits this pattern. Infuriating.
| joelbondurant wrote:
| California brand tax cattle state property objects must be
| constantly tracked for terrorist activity.
| dorianmariefr wrote:
| Marked as "Can't reproduce" :) e.g. I can browse the cat pictures
| just fine
| abhinavsharma wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
|
| Microsoft's old playbook, just done better, and against the web
| at large.
| annadane wrote:
| Ban Mark Zuckerberg from the internet. He ruins everything he
| touches
| throw7 wrote:
| Facebook does this too. I'll go to a link to a facebook page and
| be greeted some seconds later with nonsense about having to
| login. There's also that facebook login box that covers the
| bottom of the page.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Yeah unless it's a business, even then, you're pushed to sign
| up for an account to message the business. As a business, I
| would be weighing my options here as your Facebook page is
| often one of the first to show in the results. Not long until
| Facebook starts advertising other businesses over your business
| page.
| yatz wrote:
| Wish I could upvote it 10 times!
| pjerem wrote:
| Ah ah ! I had the exact same issue with an Instagram account I
| wanted to see because it was mentioned in some newspaper.
|
| I have no problem with private content but here it's not even
| that : the content is shown then hidden.
|
| Of course it's their site, their rules. But it says a lot about
| the engineering of frustration and the respect they show to
| potential users.
| doc_gunthrop wrote:
| Another user mentioned bibliogram.art as a front-end for
| anonymous IG browsing.
|
| There's also an Android app available on F-droid for this
| purpose:
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.austinhuang.instagrabber/
| dash2 wrote:
| On Firefox, when I load instagram, it deletes my history so I
| can't click back. I can't believe they'd deliberately be that
| shitty... is this some weird bug?
| Zak wrote:
| Firefox is doing that to keep Facebook from being able to
| access that tab's browsing history. You can disable this
| feature if you don't like it.
|
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/
| commoner wrote:
| Facebook Container is not pre-installed on Firefox. This
| probably isn't the issue.
| [deleted]
| tbrock wrote:
| Im not sure why this person would expect to see the content while
| logged out. Shrug.
|
| Its part of a social network, if everyone was lurking it would
| just be a bunch of creepers. The product shows who viewed a
| post/story/reel etc and can't do that if you arent logged in.
| dheera wrote:
| If so they should not even show the page to begin with. I'd be
| fine with that.
|
| (It's an intentionally public page about cat pictures, by the
| way, so it wouldn't be creepy for anonymous internet users to
| look at. It's only private Instagram pages that would be creepy
| in that sense.)
|
| Letting you browse public content for 5 seconds before asking
| you log in is a "fuck you" pattern.
| stevespang wrote:
| Who turned the ZUCK loose with arrows and spears ?
|
| Yeah, sure, his security detail made 100's of video clips of him
| before he got one on target, they have jokes flowing between
| their texting each other how lame Zuck is . . . .
| ksangeelee wrote:
| Just don't use these hostile sites. Your presence on them just
| adds to their credibility, and the rewards they offer are scant
| at best.
| trey-jones wrote:
| Exactly this about Instagram and Facebook bother me a little bit
| too, and here is something that most people also don't
| experience:
|
| I sometimes use a VPS from a popular cloud provider as a proxy
| for my web browsing. I frequently get asked to "Prove I'm not a
| robot". This happens on all kinds of sites, including Youtube,
| Paypal, some government sites, etc. It is annoying enough, but
| Facebook as well as Instagram won't let me see _anything_ without
| logging in (which I don't). So can't even check the Lunch menu
| for a local restaurant on Facebook over this proxy.
| rdschouw wrote:
| The same happens when you use Linux as your desktop OS together
| with an ad-blocker. I guess it trips off some anti-bot rules.
|
| My favorite is Google's captcha where they let visitors solve
| their machine learning classification problem by asking them to
| classify images.
| antibland wrote:
| > ...but I wasn't able to scroll any further on the page
| * { overflow: auto !important; }
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