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The 'Fuck You' Pattern

cedwards.xyz

301–310 of 619 posts

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#301

"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…

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.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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...

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?

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#305
post #121
post #92

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?

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/

Facebook Container is not pre-installed on Firefox. This probably isn't the issue.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#306
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 do…

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...

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#307
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…

you can make an account from desktop no problem

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#308
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

How are they not getting absolutely destroyed by the Google search algos, since that’s the definition of cloaking: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

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.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#309

"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…

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.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#310
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

How are they not getting absolutely destroyed by the Google search algos, since that’s the definition of cloaking: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

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.
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