What about going back to paying for stuff instead then?
Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
181–190 of 217 posts
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I think this is the fundamental problem. Too many people trying to increase conversion in their onboarding funnels, crowding out people who want to put i…
> other than farming people for money Which is a beautiful way to live life. Until you quit your job and build some indie thing and try to make money and fuck, that’s difficult. And you’re broke. And you worked really hard on this thing. Turns out ‘farming people for money’ = ‘paying rent’. And you realise, shit man, if I make it a bit worse according to my ethics and taste, I’ll actually make money. And I won’t have…
Yeah well my life would be sweeter if I conned pensioners out of their savings. It's always easy to follow how people explain their unethical decisions - but it doesn't make them an inch less unethical though and people that use your line of thought to do harmful things are scum.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> other than farming people for money Which is a beautiful way to live life. Until you quit your job and build some indie thing and try to make money and fuck, that’s difficult. And you’re broke. And you worked really hard on this thing. Turns out ‘farming people for money’ = ‘paying rent’. And you realise, shit man, if I make it a bit worse according to my ethics and taste, I’ll actually make money. And I won’t have…
Yeah well my life would be sweeter if I conned pensioners out of their savings. It's always easy to follow how people explain their unethical decisions - but it doesn't make them an inch less unethical though and people that use your line of thought to do harmful things are scum.
Sign-up popups are annoying, but not inherently unethical. Nobody's on the street because one dev tried to convert people.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would it be better if I hold off until you scroll? After all, you’re more engaged then!
I would prefer if you during page load first rendered the most obvious call for action and then, at the exact moment I try to click it you dynamically render another action button at the exact position of the first, bringing me to instead go to the register newsletter form while making me feel extremely enraged, sry, engaged. Happy, no. Engaged (in rage), very much so.
The good news is so many people are signing up for our email!
The bad news is for some reason email reads and click through just dropped off a cliff, is like the emails no longer arrive or something.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#185As the author mentions PNG to SVG conversion, there is Potrace [1]. I think you need to convert to BMP before. It's a pretty nice tool. I have used it a couple of times.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of big tech is checking phone numbers against sophisticated databases to determine if it is possible for an individual to have that number associated with their cell phone device. If it isn't a real mobile number you are not getting in.
Where do these databases even get their data? IIRC the phone network is very opaque compared to IP addresses and internet routing.
CoD (or some similar game, sorry I don't keep up) won't even let you register with a prepaid phone number so there must be more granularity than it seems.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Confirmed. I needed to purchase something from Amazon Spain and was put into Prime despite choosing "not now". I just cancelled (after hunting thousands of options) and now all the cancellation I have is that "my free period won't be renewed". So I actually have to wait until September 1st to verify I am actually out of the subscription and that no charge is made to my card. Extremely slimy and awful if you ask me.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#188We desperately need a browser plugin that gardens search results to exclude websites that use dark patterns and allows a user to add a dark pattern website to the globally-shared list. Like ublock origin but for different categories of shady crap like content farms, AI-generated blogs, "product comparison" sites that slant results to the highest bidder, Cloudflare "checking your browser for security" sites, etc.
SEO experts and conversion seekers need to become very afraid of their sites getting on that list.
Of course then the problem becomes vetting the people who add sites to the list and making sure they're not just trying to shitcan their competitors. And ensuring that the maker of the plugin doesn't sell out and take $$$ to remove a site from the list.
If those problems could be solved I'd pay $5/month for such a signal-to-noise improver for search results.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
The faster a web site asks me for an email address determines how fast I bail on even looking at their product/tool, or if I have no choice I put in a bogus email address to get past it, if it is one of those damn forms that sends you a link I use one of the various public inbox/temporary email address sites so I don't have to deal with the attempts to bring me back into the conversion funnel when I was just seeking…
This has been a pet peeve of mine as well. I avoid sites that require logins. I’ve been experimenting with alternate authentication/authorization mechanisms. It’s a major reason why I created https://prose.sh to explore what’s possible. We don’t require an email and only ask for it on https://feeds.sh because it’s an rss-to-email notification service. Read only websites and write SSH apps are pretty congruent to the…
I avoid apps that require logins too, unless there's some obvious reason why they need them. I shitcan most new apps I download now because:
1. They insist on a login for a utility that clearly runs locally on my phone.
2. They require permissions like location or contacts that they clearly don't need.
3. They start sending me upsell notifications once an hour, forever when even once a year is too much. I know I can turn off notifications but it's a PITA to do it manually every time I install a new app.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would prefer if you during page load first rendered the most obvious call for action and then, at the exact moment I try to click it you dynamically render another action button at the exact position of the first, bringing me to instead go to the register newsletter form while making me feel extremely enraged, sry, engaged. Happy, no. Engaged (in rage), very much so.
The good news is so many people are signing up for our email! The bad news is for some reason email reads and click through just dropped off a cliff, is like the emails no longer arrive or something.
Side issue but it still amuses me that companies think they can accurately measure email reads. I'm not talking about mass marketers where it doesn't matter but banks, which are required by law to switch you back to paper mail if they think your email address isn't working.
The reason you think I'm not reading my emails is that my email client doesn't autoload images, and I keep it that way because it turns off a malware infection vector, you dim bulbs.