Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The 'Fuck You' Pattern

cedwards.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 619 posts

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#261

Post by xmprt »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #104
fishtoaster wrote: post #37

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 offe…

Great, now my boss is going to ask me to implement this. Thanks.

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.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#262

Post by lifeisstillgood »

tgtweak wrote: post #48
klyrs wrote: post #13

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 embedde…

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 som…

>>> when there is clear-cut policies around showing something different to the crawler than the user.

yes ....

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#263

Post by makecheck »

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?

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#264

Post by Traster »

mulmen wrote: post #9
axbytg wrote: post #5

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.

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?

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.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#265

Post by redml »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #35
JoeyBananas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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 (…

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

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#266

Post by LegitShady »

klyrs wrote: post #13

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 embedde…

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.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#268

Post by maccam94 »

tshaddox wrote: post #162
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #57

"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 i…

> 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 go…

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.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#269

Post by mdaniel »

beaconstudios wrote: post #146
marto1 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#270

Post by VRay »

vimax wrote: post #72

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?

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

Post reply on HN