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The 'Fuck You' Pattern

cedwards.xyz

431–440 of 619 posts

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#431
post #377

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Isn’t this ironic? The government is people. I guess this just moves the onus of people doing the right thing, up to government. If you’re right, that destabilizes government. Which I guess is what happens when it stops corps; corps then need to take it over.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#432
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

another possibility is to increase traffic, which I guess also increases ad revenue. It's a lot easier to tap an icon on your home screen than it is to open a browser and type in reddit and whichever subreddit you want to browse. The less friction there is, the more likely you are to be a daily user, driving their revenue.

This is my guess — phone-screen real estate and the potential for push notifications.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#433
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda offtopic but Instagram's ads changed my attitude towards ads, and my attitude towards Facebook's creepy level of insight into my life and personality. If they have that data anyway -- and hundreds of companies do -- I might as well benefit from it, and Instagram's ads were the first ones that I actually found interesting. First of all, it was obvious when something was an ad. Second, they weren't intrusive or o…

Personally, I don't particularly care if companies have my data. However, I vehemently don't want them to use it for algorithmic recommendations—including ads—because it puts me in a filter bubble. All these technology companies are making assumptions about the type of person I am, and then molding me into that person. I can't learn about topics I don't see, so if the tech giants are convinced I like technology and c…

My recent Amazon experience when I bought a stereo audio mixer: "Here, look at 50 other stereo audio mixers even though we know you already bought one! And also have data showing you viewed all of these and didn't buy them!"

On some level the way company's advertise is basically an argument against them having my data being a threat, because they can't manage to come up with anything better then that, in a product space where there's a whole massive ecosystem of technology which might be useful to me.

And thats...really just me complaining about the ads not targeting well. Like, I am quite interested in knowing if my nascent desktop audio management could be better! I don't know what's out there, and I've given you a price range estimate through how long I searched before spending!

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#434
post #213
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…

> From TFA: "Since I’m a technical person, I tried to simply remove the modal in the browser Inspector. It sort of worked, but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page." You need to not only remove the modal, but remove the "overflow:hidden;" in the tag. After that you should be able to scroll. I have CSS/JS injectors that do this for me already, I really fucking hate popups and scrolling impediments of any so…

This!

edit: Sometime they add "pointer-events: none;" to the , should check that too.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#435
post #9
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?

They get a lot more data more reliably from the app and have a lot more control of the ad surfaces and how they are served.

This is more or less "social network publisher side monetization" SOP.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed about old.reddit.com. I feel pretty old saying this, but I really miss the days of straightforward web design. Everything now is so chaotic that I'm never really sure what clicking anything will do. It feels like design for the sake of design, not for the sake of the users.

I'm still shocked Craigslist has survived, virtually unchanged, since 1996. It's may not be the cleanest interface, but it's a nice reminder of the more utilitarian days.

It's still privately owned and the owners actively refuse to "modernize" it AFAIK.

Why would they? It works.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#437
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 is worse, is that even though I installed the official app to squelch this nonsense (the Fuck You Pattern is effective) the mobile site still prompts with "Open in the Reddit App". When I click it my iPhone opens the App Store. The App Store then has a big blue "Open" button to launch the app, but of course all context is lost and opening from there brings you to your Reddit front page.

Use Apollo or (better) quit reddit, IMHO.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#438
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.

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

I just used ublock origin to delete it. They still think they serve it, but I never see it.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#439
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because reddit and google have the same political bent, and aren't competitors.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldnt you include engineers compensation in "The infrastructure" thats where a lot of money goes.

A bloated payroll to support a bloated advertising platform with a bloated AI-based recommendation algorithm when all it should be doing is loading a descending-order list of most recent submissions meeting the category criteria.... Don't talk about costs, this crap is self-inflicted

Shhh! Some people are trying to justify their jobs as a service to mankind.
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