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The 'Fuck You' Pattern

cedwards.xyz

501–510 of 619 posts

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#501
post #369
post #174

Earlier 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…

You’re overblowing an imageboard checklist into a pack of elephants. I wonder how much I’d earn if I disaggregated every “make us another site quick” in my company in such a way. Well, writing html is easy. But then webpack… and then you want editable content… postgres/orm… and browser coverage, .babelrc… and of course we don’t serve it from our office, now it’s vps management and deployment configuration… and version control, do you know how hard is to remember all git essentials? We have to register a plan on gitlab and enter a card into it!

Smells like seven figures already.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#502
post #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.

What I don't undestand, even Win 10 Pro has XBox and candys all over the place .. serious in a pro version?!? With the terrible EULA it all felt just like a joke to me and I deleted all my Windows installations and I'm Linux only now at home. I'm not using Linux because it is free. I have 4 unused Win10 Pro licenses at home now. But I just can't say yes to the EULA. So I dumped them all. In the late 90s I also bought Linux distros, because I was not able to donwload those over a 33.4kb modem. So it is not because it free or it cost something. It is about freedom.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#503

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.

AWS makes around 26% margins (not broken out, it’s markets best guess). At a medium size it can make more cost effect sense to run your own……with the understanding that you have to build a cattle farm, and pets are forbidden. If you every allow a pet, then just go to AWS, et.al.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#505

"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…

Wait, ad click through tracking now only works for registered users? When did that change? More importantly, what are all these ads doing on pages that don't require me to login?

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#506
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.

I get around this by not using their app or website at all and using an alternative Reddit client (Apollo for iOS). Wonder if they'll do the Twitter and shut down third party clients eventually.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#507

Earlier 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…

It's gotten to the point where if I saw "Software Engineer - Reddit" on a candidate's resume, I would seriously question this person's chops, even if it's just one small signal in an otherwise great background. How did this site's quality to get so poor? Why couldn't you do anything about it? It's so bad that you have to believe it was deliberately made bad.

It is absolutely deliberately made that way!

There was a Reddit tech lead on YC News a day or two ago who straight up admitted that they do this on purpose to drive up DAU/MAU. He also said that his options are up, so fuck you.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#508

Instagram is a mistake of the internet.

Instagram was fabulous until FB got their dirty fingers in there. I think Facebook and all their properties are cancer for the web.

They are banned on all my devices (and traffic to/from their shitty endpoints is actively banned on my networks). I call this the "fuck you too" pattern.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those niche forums were already being killed by VerticalScope and InternetBrands. It’s a lot of what lead to Reddit’s popularity in the first place.

I don't think I've hear of heard of VerticalScope but I aware of Internet Brands. What niche forums did they kill?

VS bought out a lot of the automotive forums. Also now owners of RedFlagDeals if you're a Canadian.

Surprisingly difficult to find a complete list.

There's 100% an opportunity for someone to bring on a bunch of subreddit admins into starting a new automotive forum network. Reddit and Facebook don't work well for car stuff.

https://old.reddit.com/r/4x4/comments/hw1p3a/vertical_scope_...

Also a bunch of tech and gun forums. Supposedly over 1000 properties, but it's not like I'm going to recognize that they own "mothering.com"

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#510
post #369

Earlier 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…

Hi. I run imgflip.com, a fine purveyor of cat pictures, among others. It serves ~100TB of bandwidth and hundreds of millions of image views per month with total infrastructure cost below 5k per month. I believe Imgflip completely avoids dark patterns because I abhor them and strive to provide positive value to humanity, although I would love for you to share your opinions to the contrary. Imgflip is also 80% profit.…

Thank you for the reality check!

So, well, my estimate of a few grand a month was not completely off.

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