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.
I know! Isn't it lovely? I used that to break my reddit addiction. Haven't been on for a while.
The 'Fuck You' Pattern
381–390 of 619 posts
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#382"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…
The bait and switch. You used to be able to view links of public post.
The bigger the userbase grows, the bigger the fuckyous they can give the rest. It’s no longer “hey join us, we have cool stuff”, it’s “fuck you, we already got your friends, whatcha gonna do”. We can complain about that, right?
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#383I 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…
Regarding reddit, you can replace "www" with "old" i.e. https://old.reddit.com and it is still functional. There is also a firefox (perhaps chrome too) extension that replaces it automatically.
I don't know how long it will last, but if it's gone I think I'll be off reddit. I tried to use regular UI few times, and the experience is absolutely off putting. It reminds me of digg right before people flew to reddit.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#384My favorite example is "login before you know what's here". I'm always amazed by this. I hear about a new website, open it up, and there's a sign up pop-up.
100% close and go away.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts! Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC w…
I feel for this. I run a free website, I sell physical books and give away the digital books for free.
The content on the website requires in person data collection, it's very expensive. Yet after a few years the data has changed and could use updating. Sometimes people send rude emails that the data is old. I explain that I can get it updated for $30, and there's a donation button.
I'm personally not interested in updating the data, the prices are similar to before, everything went up in price, the best values are still the best.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 someth…
Even with IPFS, you're pushing off infrastructure to someone who probably has some hidden incentive to provide that infrastructure.
Why not just charge the 100th visitor per minute or something? Someone will be motivated to pay the cost. And, if people don't want to pay? Well, even those with less motivation will find a way to the content somehow.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Once upon a time Google Search was there to help you find those small online communities.
You're moving the centralization problem to google, then.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#388Reddit 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?
The answers to questions like this are always extremely simple - it is better for their business.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#389Reddit 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.
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...
You'd hate the iPhone. Wayyyy more updates, ad ridden app store, creepy relationship with China and the US government (PRISM).
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#390I'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…
Twitters new-ish feed refresh with out ask on mobile is a good example of this. While reading a tweet your feed will refresh shoving you anywhere between 10 and 100 tweets up on your feed. If I really wanted to see what I am reading I have to scroll back down through my already witnessed feed.