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The 'Fuck You' Pattern

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Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#371

Post by christophilus »

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…

The day they drop old.reddit.com is the day I stop using Reddit.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#372

Post by kwijibob »

avalys wrote: post #21

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.

I think this is partially correct.

I hate the FU patterns as well, but there are so many lame aggregator sites scraping for viral content.

I would say FU patterns are: 80% trying to keep people in the walled garden ecosystem, 20% trying to make it hard for scrapers.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#373

Post by dmoy »

ansible wrote: post #280
dmoy wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

For sure, it's not a perfect solution. Hence 'fixed' instead of fixed haha.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#375

Post by judge2020 »

nico_h wrote: post #370
xfalcox wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Discourse (open source forum software) we default new install to downloading hotlinked images so we can prevent this very specific problem.

But isn’t that copyright infringement?

Maybe? I'm not a lawyer and I would be surprised if they consulted one before implementing that feature. But unless the license for the file limits access it seems like they're just acting as an almost-proxy for these images, and not misrepresenting their ownership over them.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#376

Post by tofuahdude »

symlinkk wrote: post #362
user123456780 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts lol at this. Go setup that infrastructure and see how far you get for peanuts.

I honestly don’t think it would be hard, especially with AWS abstracting away all scaling issues from you.

Hard to abstract away the money that it'll cost - which is the original point here. They're doing something that costs money, and people want to use that something, so they're doing what it takes to make money from it.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#377

Post by pm90 »

tomc1985 wrote: post #356
saurik wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wit…

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... Every one of these companies start with a nice mission and…

Its really really hard for a company whose ultimate goal is profit, to give up opportunities to do so. Its just not gonna happen. You can have all the ethical people you want, but people change and it takes just one "smart" engineer/product manager to realize how much money is on the table, then use that to grab power and get the same changes everywhere.

Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Laws like GDPR and CCPA have to be followed by the business.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#378

Post by Spooky23 »

klyrs wrote: post #339
colejohnson66 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google not check for this at all? They could easily spoof their User-Agent to see if sites lie about what they show.

I dunno, folks might get salty if google's bots used misleading useragents. And it just escalates the existing cat&mouse game

Bing seems to have figured it out just fine.

My guess is nobody cares about this issue at Google for whatever reason, either because no compensation is tied to it or they are getting paid to push Pinterest.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#379

Post by ok123456 »

Today I came across another type of "fuck you" pattern. I was buying a shirt (https://vindlr.com/collections/savings-guy/products/green-sa...). The first time I went to look at the page, it was $25. I closed it and came back several hours later it has risen to $30. I opened the site in private mode, and the price was $25 again.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#380

Post by jarcane »

rcfox wrote: post #119
fullstop wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

old.reddit.com is still around, for now, and does not have any of this garbage.

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 h…

The report dialogue has also been broken for awhile now, and the new support for image+text posts was backported in a pretty ugly way too.
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