i hope this is a gimmick and not something that'll stay long term
Why our website looks like an operating system
241–250 of 504 posts
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you like things the way they were before the law, just answer yes to all cookie banners you see. It does not take time if you don’t care to read it. Yours click yes, and they will remember you want to be tracked.
How many billions of human hours of productivity have we collectively wasted with these cookie banners?
Under German law, the BGB (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, German civil law book defining most private laws) provides very specific and concrete provisions for liabilities and duties in most business transactions and commercial exchanges of goods and services and even employment. It's not necessary to agree to formal contractual obligations in writing for most service agreements unless you want to add additional obligations or explicitly waive ones prescribed by the BGB (and some in fact can't be waived or not entirely) - if you can prove an agreement was made that falls under the BGB's laws, those laws apply to it regardless of the existence of a written and signed contract. And yet it's extremely uncommon not to have a written contract for serious business relations and most contracts explicitly insist on signatures (in fact in German contract law, the legal phrase "in Schriftform", literally "in writing", is defined in such a way it specifically requires a document signed by both parties whereas for "in Textform", literally "in text", even an e-mail or text message would be sufficient).
It's not cookie banners that are wasting productivity, it's mutual distrust and the need to protect against it. "Cookie banners" (or more correctly: consent forms) are legal contracts. The reason they are often so annoying to navigate is that the companies that built them want to try to trick you into agreeing to things you have no interest in agreeing to or might even have an interest in not agreeing to. Technically the law forbids this but it's still more profitable to risk the fine than to abide by the law.
Or to put it another way: there's no honest reason to require a consent form to let you read an article. The consent form isn't for reading the article, it's for what the site wants to do to you (or your data - which includes all data collected about you because the GDPR defines that as being yours, too) while you're reading the article.
The GDPR doesn't make you waste time on cookie banners. The GDPR grants you ownership of all personally identifiable information of you and about you - it creates legal rights and protections you previously didn't have. Cookie banners exist because companies want to infringe upon those rights. Most cookie banners are difficult to navigate because most companies don't want you to understand what you're agreeing to (and on second order because they want you to blame the law granting you rights rather than them for infringing upon those rights).
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. If they indeed only use the cookie for essential functionality, this kind of joke banner only makes their choice to respect visitors' privacy equally annoying. Even worse: because it makes it seem like the EU law is just meritless pestering of people, they are actually fighting for the right for worse sites to spy on their visitors. It's baffling.
> EU law is just meritless pestering of people It is that. It has done literally nothing to improve anything whatsoever, in any country. And most of the "cookie management" scripts that people use, barely even work. Both the law and the way it's complied with in practice are a dumb solution to a problem that the EU should have forced browser vendors to solve. Only the user's browser can choose not to send back cookie…
> the EU should have forced browser vendors to solve. Only the user's browser can choose not to send back cookies
This is only an option if you limit tracking to using cookies. But neither tracking technologies, nor the current EU law, are limited to tracking via cookies. It also kills functionality for many web applications without also accepting all tracking. Some browser-flavors went to extreme lengths to prevent tracking through other means (eg fixed window size, highly generic header settings, ...).
Maybe I am mistaken, but it seriously frustrates me how much people within the relevant field make this mistake of conflating tracking and cookies and come to this "it would be so simple" solution.
A welcome update to the law would be to allow a header flag to opt out/in (or force the do-not-track header to have this functionality) preventing the banner from showing.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#244Why this feels so incredibly appealing compared to prevailing designs is probably something for a psychologist / cognitive scientist / neurologist (?) to answer -- there is certainly something here that warrants better study than what we in the software industry do in rushed blog posts. But I can personally speak to at least one aspect, having worked for a company that does high end web sites and strategy for large S…
I would be more cautious in generalizing this feeling. To me that interface feels daunting and cognitively taxing, compared to a CLI or command palette.
[dead]
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many billions of human hours of productivity have we collectively wasted with these cookie banners?
Under German law, the BGB ( Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch , German civil law book defining most private laws) provides very specific and concrete provisions for liabilities and duties in most business transactions and commercial exchanges of goods and services and even employment. It's not necessary to agree to formal contractual obligations in writing for most service agreements unless you want to add additional obligatio…
You also can't have capitalism without bureaucracy. There's no such thing as stateless capitalism because states allow for capital to exist. Without states, you'd have to justify your claims to your peers and anything in excess of what you can justify for personal needs would be considered hoarding and wasteful. And in order to have a state, you need bureaucracy to structure the operation of that state for it to act as a cohesive entity.
Rights don't make sense without bureaucracy because they only have meaning when you deal with them at that layer of abstraction. You can't respect and infringe "rights" interpersonally. You can act ethically or unethically, you can be nice or a bit of a dick, you can harm or help. But rights only become necessary as a concept when you have processes that need to interact with them and abstract entities that uphold and enforce them. Rights allow you to sue or call the police. But without rights you can't have capitalism. States enforce property rights literally at the end of a gun (and this includes "state property" too in case you were wondering about so-called "communist" states).
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#246It's neat but it runs like a dog. I opened a couple of things and tried to move the window... I'd take a statically generated bunch of webpages over this. If you're going to make one of those multi window webpages looking thing, make it good. To note, in the past, this was a big no-no because SEO was important. You had to have good SEO for search engines to index your content efficiently and show up well ranked in se…
What are you using that's causing performance issues? It runs like a dream when playing with the first window. When opening a second window and dragging it around it stutters for a second then resumes back to full speed and every window after is full speed. (I'm assuming that's the browser going: "Oh wait, they really are using those functions every frame, let me spend a moment to optimize them so they're as fast as…
M4 MacBook Pro running safari, in general it's running at about 10 fps when dragging windows around. Chrome seems to perform better but I still get quite a few dropped frames. Most of those long frames are spent deep in the React internals so I'm guessing that's the cause.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
in what way is it malicious compliance? the law just requires you ask for consent. that’s exactly what companies do. some companies violate the law by asking for consent in a way that is misleading or incorporates dark patterns. but if the law says “you must ask for consent before you do X” and companies ask for consent before they do X, that is just compliance, not malicious compliance. As an example of true malicio…
The malicious compliance is more that they all refused to add the one-click opt-out until a high-profile enforcement against Google brought them to heel.
that’s just noncompliance. and the one-click opt-out still implies one click, which implies the cookie banners
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#248Why this feels so incredibly appealing compared to prevailing designs is probably something for a psychologist / cognitive scientist / neurologist (?) to answer -- there is certainly something here that warrants better study than what we in the software industry do in rushed blog posts. But I can personally speak to at least one aspect, having worked for a company that does high end web sites and strategy for large S…
i can remember a discussion with Cory (who built this with Eli, the front end eng) on the topic of "why do all websites consist of a collection of long scroll-y pages / is that appropriate for our business?" and we concluded it wasn't optimal.
at the time, we were trying to figure out how to add more products in without it becoming messy, and we concluded we're trying to do a lot more than just what would work well for a 1 product company (we have very extensive content for example) - we feel quite multidimensional. thus a flatter design was proving hard to do. we wanted something that could enable us to offer a very wide variety of things (like 10+ products, handbook, job board, newsletter etc)
a lot of existing websites are trying to convey what they do in as a project, it looked fun and we knew it'd stand out a lot as a way to justify it. it's much nicer and more cost effective for us to ship something 10/10 cool than go down the outbound-y sales route. we run at a 3 month cac payback period if you're into startup stats. the proviso is that only works if you go _really_ deep, so that your work actually stands out.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#249More correctly, "our website looks like a desktop environment".
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
For that specific question, none; I'm extrapolating from past experience, mostly not mine but other people's (who told me stories). For regulators in general doing dumb things? Lots and lots of examples all over the place. Talk to any small-business owners you know, get them drunk, and encourage them to rant. You'll hear some stories.
For that specific question, none. End.
So you don't believe in extrapolating from past experiences elsewhere? Good luck with that as you go through life. Personally, I don't do anything so formal as calculating Markov chains, but I certainly think that patterns of past behavior allow you to guess what other people are likely to do.