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Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

iamvishnu.com

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Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#51

Post by _jal »

ianlevesque wrote: post #18
nickthegreek wrote: post #9

My biggest current peeve is not allowing me to see shipping costs until I’ve given basically all my information to a company before I’ve checked out.

This is why Amazon is still winning. The competition needs to compete better.

Amazon is at least as awful.

I cancelled Prime about a year ago - delivery sucks at my location with their logistics and I just don't want to deal with it. I still occasionally order some things that are hard to find elsewhere, I just ship it to an address where things won't be immediately stolen.

And after the huge "subscribe prime" interstitial with the tiny "not now" button, they still add prime to the order, not as a regular line-item, but as something you have to hunt around for to remove. They're cramming, just like telecom used to.

Amazon is awful if you have the temerity to fail to tithe them as they believe they are due. Fuck them.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#53

Post by CamJN »

63 wrote: post #11
scohesc wrote: post #7

Adobe's web-based JPG to PNG converter is exactly like this. Upload a JPG, hit convert - it uploads the file, processes it on their end, and then refuses to give you the result until you "sign up for a free adobe account that we conveniently didn't tell you about until now!" Similar enough - some shopping websites will grab your email address when you start doing a guest checkout but eventually decide not to purchase…

This is a little tangential, but your post reminded me that I've struggled with converting images at work because our vpn blocks a lot of those file conversation sites (presumably for good reason, but I'm not privy). Converting common file formats seems like such a common use case that I really feel like there should be a tool built into modern operating systems for it. It seems like an obvious add to me, but then ag…

MacOS can convert between pretty much any reasonable combination of formats using its automation/shortcuts framework. RTF→HTML→word or HEIC→jpg→png, whatever.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#54

Post by janalsncm »

frfl wrote: post #32
WirelessGigabit wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Including your email address. And then you abandon the cart, because it doesn't make sense for you to pay $50 for shipping. But then you get those emails 'you forgot something'. No I didn't.

Solution to this is to use a masked email or at the very least add a `+` tag so you can block it easily or know who's the source of the junk mail. Fastmail offers this feature, and I think 1password might. The `+` tag should be possible with any provider, `me+hn@example.com` Of course now you have to have a way to keep track of what email you gave to what company. I usually do `firstname_company/website@` to make it…

Email alias is the only reliable way. If I was writing an email spam service the first thing I would do is strip off everything after the plus sign.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#56

Post by falcolas »

fishtoaster wrote: post #43

I hate those too. On the other hand, I've been adjacent to the decision to add them before. You're under a lot of pressure to increase conversion in your onboarding funnel, so you test out moving your email capture up a bit in your conversion flow (ie to before you deliver results) and it works! Conversion increases throughout the funnel! So you keep it. Dark patterns like this persist because they measurably work. S…

Just because a psychological trick works doesn’t mean you must use it.

Have some respect for your users, developers. ‘Cause you’re one of them.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#58

Post by rjbwork »

Modified3019 wrote: post #38
badwolf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're forever on their "mailing list" because they don't process unsubscribes, since they probably just manually upload a .csv of everyone every time they want to send something to you, whether you ever opted in, or not.

I just got done switching from gmail to fastmail, and it solves this problem beautifully with a nifty feature allowing me to create a new proxy (“masked”) email address for every website but have the mail show up in my mail address. There’s a limit, but it’s like 600+ or something. So when the email gets sold and I start getting spammed, I can easy kill it, and also know who the culprit was. This one is paid, but I’m…

I do this on gmail myself. I have my own domain and pay for gmail on it. I have a wildcard set to go to my mailbox and wildcard stuff gets sorted per usual. So for instance, if I buy something at target, I use/sign in w/ target@mydomain.com.

I know I should probably get off of gmail, but it's a really good service for my needs.

It's also reasonably priced and there's no limit for those email addresses since it just captures every email sent to my domain.

Downside is I can't send from those addresses but that's generally okay for me.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#59

Post by janalsncm »

gruez wrote: post #36
frfl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solution to this is to use a masked email or at the very least add a `+` tag so you can block it easily or know who's the source of the junk mail. Fastmail offers this feature, and I think 1password might. The `+` tag should be possible with any provider, `me+hn@example.com` Of course now you have to have a way to keep track of what email you gave to what company. I usually do `firstname_company/website@` to make it…

Isn't it trivial for websites to strip out the +? I feel like between this, and the various sites that don't support + in email addresses for whatever reason, this trick isn't worth doing.

Yes, and any spammer will do this anyways. This is the digital equivalent of spelling your name backwards for anonymity. I don’t know why people still suggest it.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#60

Post by matthiaswh »

I've been trying to order from non Amazon sites as a habit lately. A large percentage of them use the same platform, maybe it's Shopify?

During checkout, they have a checkbox asking if you also want to receive promotional emails. It's annoying that this is checked by default, but I can tolerate it to some degree since I still have the ability to opt out.

I always uncheck it. Always.

Almost without fail, I end up receiving marketing emails from these companies. (And not just followups from my purchase or even review requests, which would be bad enough.)

I never buy from those brands again.

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