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.
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
The 'Fuck You' Pattern
421–430 of 619 posts
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have many smaller ones and aggregate them by yourself with RSS feeds.
And the vast majority of the internet-using populace, who will never figure this out, can just go screw themselves?
Yeah, it's incredible complex to figure out. (/s)
People on this site continually underestimate the ability of users.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 equilibr…
I get that, but there is something very wrong with business culture if that is the only outcome guaranteed. There are lots of examples of successful companies whose business model is not based around the unrestrained pursuit of pure profit at the expense of customers... look at Nintendo, for example, or Disney.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#424Facebook's use of this pattern prevented me from attending my grandfather's funeral (live streamed on facebook because of COVID) earlier this year. I was to say the least... pissed. If not for my sister who re-broadcast it to me over discord I'd have missed it completely.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cl…
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.
In fairness, I see that on a lot of sites now and I almost want to say that's something browsers should be fixing. "Back" should take me to the exact page state, almost as if I had been following every page in a new tab (which is what they recommend now if you want to preserve where you were). It should be instant. But on most sites it hasn't been for a while.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#426"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…
[deleted]
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This sounds like a great case for a decentralized web infrastructure like Mastodon uses. Each cat server can be exactly as reliable as the owner feels like making it, and each user can choose a cat server based on their needs, and the whole thing is federated because it's based on open source and open standards. p2p cats for teh win
mastodon also downloads remote media from all known accounts with no real way to manage it, making it a nightmare to administer disk usage for any decent sized instance. they go the route of your instance being responsible for all remote media, not the other way around
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#428"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…
So how does this explain why Windows 10, which I have paid like $150 for per license, is now infested with ads, tracking and online presence - and close to impossible to buy without that. They aren't even trying to put a $ figure on what they think it's worth - because they can't be stopped from doing it.
There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cl…
Someone posted on HN within the last week that Reddit hired some product managers who pushed a lot of these dark patterns/anti-user features to increase conversions towards account signups and app installs. Nobody thinks you actually like all that broken shit. Though I fail to understand the business reason for hosting/serving videos through a custom media player. Reddit doesn’t want you to lurk without an account or…
The video player bit seems fairly straightforward if you imagine a monetization strategy involving video ads (which tend to have higher CPMs).
Likewise, the "1 comment displayed" thing seems like a "please consume the media and move on" effort potentially. Remember, they don't make money from you reading comments. They make money from you going back to other surfaces where ads are displayed. Namely your feed or another post.
Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern
#430Yes, Fuck Facebook, and fuck every other company that doesn't provide a net-positive for humanity. They may offer something convenient or useful, but if the mid/long-term cost is higher, then it's not a good thing for us or even for them.
People with short term vision (less than 50 years) are making poorly informed decisions. Granted, I would like to be fabulously wealthy. But if gaining my wealth meant the world would be worse in 2+ years (I give myself a year just to be selfish), then it's just not worth it. That 2 year cost will eventually kick my ass in 20-40 years.
So speaking very selfishly, if it has a net negative cost of greater than 1 year, then it likely will hurt me personally. So I (and everyone else) should pass on that option.
Backing up a bit, let's break down what insta and fb offer.
Very briefly, they offer some connection to close and unrelated humans. They offer some communication, some awareness, some entertainment. But their cost is SO high. Honestly, if we just budgeted $50/mo for services which didn't harvest our data, we'd probably be ahead. And our services would be less twisted in favor of "fuck you" patterns.