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You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

mastodon.technology

31–40 of 318 posts

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#31

How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…

Why stop there? Maybe websites you don’t like should have a crowdsourced assassin come to kill the relevant developers.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#32
post #19

How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…

Because why? Just don't visit these sites if they annoy you. I don't burn down jazz bars just because I don't like jazz.

What if you are trying to go to jazz bars but they inexplicably play an extremely loud high pitched tone over the jazz music?

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#33
post #32
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because why? Just don't visit these sites if they annoy you. I don't burn down jazz bars just because I don't like jazz.

What if you are trying to go to jazz bars but they inexplicably play an extremely loud high pitched tone over the jazz music?

I would go to jazz bars that didn't do that. Still wouldn't burn them down.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#34

How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…

that is vigilante justice and it will end about as well as Reddit trying to catch the Boston bomber.

What actually to do when you find someone's website annoying: Don't go there, it's not your site. Same thing I do when I don't like a bar, I leave, I don't start clogging the drain with toilet paper

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#35
The worst offender for this, in my opinion, is Wikia (sorry, "Fandom™"). There is zero attempt to make the autoplaying content at all relevant to the wiki in question, and it generally isn't even advertising anything, it's just... crap.

It seems like they're desperately trying to believe they have a social network on their hands rather than a collection of disparate knowledge bases, and they're trying to sell this non-existent 'fandom' culture to visitors.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#36

It's not just autoplaying video that's the problem, it's the fact that these videos then go on to autoplay something else completely unconnected to what you were reading without asking you first. You might argue this is to do with advertisers and so on, but this also happens on the BBC News website too. I recently clicked on a video story and after the video was finished I didn't notice there was a 5 second timer and…

BBC management has gone down the horrible path of mimicking social media companies because they think that's the modern thing to do.

But these companies have completely different goals than the BBC: they aim to abuse and exploit their users as much as possible.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#37
why are news/blogspam-news sites so eager to play videos? (Even if the video is just some intern reading the article with static pictures being shown) Is there extra ad revenue from this somehow? Is it an attempt to keep people on the page longer?

don't get it

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#38

How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…

This is a bit like the Blue Frog anti-spam project from years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#39

Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load . Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user…

I'd say the worst part is that Firefox has a feature for blocking auto playing video. But it never works.
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