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The 'Fuck You' Pattern

cedwards.xyz

151–160 of 619 posts

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#152
The dark patterns are not a sign of misunderstanding good UX, nor are they a sign of pure evil by their makers.

Big social networks only come into existence via an aggressive, exponential roll-out. The main feature of such a network is having your friends on there. None of the other features matter as its plain to see how they copy concepts from each other all the time. It's about getting you in there.

Once in existence, producing revenue means keeping you in the experience for as long as possible. Which is best done in an app and preferably logged in. This allows for the personalization and notifications.

Put another way, publishing all of this on the open web, with many users using ad-blockers, just doesn't cut it. Further, you don't want to give away all content to the open web (cough...Google).

We gave them this power. None of us want to surf the open web. We want 3 apps that do everything. And we won't pay for it, not a penny.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#153
post #13

I love instagram. It's the best social media site. Last time I checked, I couldn't even make an account from my desktop computer. I'm not gonna even try to install their app on my G-free phone. When a friends sends me a link to Instagram, I know that I don't need to click on it -- the thumbnail contains all the information that I'd ever see without creating an account. When news articles consist of a bunch of embedde…

I'll stick my head above the parapet and say that as a content consumer I really like Instagram and it genuinely is my favourite social media platform. I'm probably an atypical user but now that I'm well out of my 20's the friends I still connect with online I have real connections with so it's a joy to see what they're up to. My interests (food, 70's sci-fi, cats, modern art) are well catered to and I've done a good job of curating the accounts I follow to get a good mix of interesting content. Even my promoted posts are mostly local restaurants and businessess so I've never really felt aggrieved that I'm getting controlled by big corporates. I've also found my experience mostly apolitical with the advantage that because commenting is so tacked on I don't feel the urge to interact with anything beyond liking images or sharing the ocasional post with my friends and family

I understand it's mindless, but I dont want it to be anything else. It's a toy platform for looking at device sized images and short videos on my mobile and that's all I want it to be.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#154
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear. This is hilarious and makes so much sense. God, the internet is broken

This should help: https://sumtips.com/software/browsers/set-user-agent-on-a-pe...

Hm, nothing for Android - for either ff or chrome?

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#155
Yesterday I wanted to see something on Instagram. I think it was inside Relay for Reddit, where a WebView would open the Instagram page.

Not only was there this delay, but the cookie consent was ridiculous. I now checked and it's the same on the Desktop in Chrome.

I have no option to reject/disable cookies. Usually you get to choose which things you want to reject, like user tracking, personalized ads, but you usually need to keep the functional cookies.

This popup only has one button "Accept All" and one "Manage Data Settings". The latter would be the one where I get to choose what to accept. But all I get there is an explanation telling me that "your browser or device may offer settings that allow you to choose whether browser cookies are set and to delete them. These controls vary by browser, and manufacturers may change both the settings they make available and how they work at any time."

What is wrong with them? Honestly, Facebook is the worst disease on the internet, even Pinterest doesn't reach their degree of hostility.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#156
post #4

Q: But what about the unauthenticated existing users we might alienate? A: There’s no way to gather data on that so it’s not a thing. This is the problem with “data driven” decision making in a nutshell. It has annoyed me to no end at every company I’ve worked for.

Who says you can't collect user metrics from unauthenticated users?

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

old.reddit.com is still around, for now, and does not have any of this garbage.

It'll eventually be removed with the reasoning that its hardly used and most traffic uses the new Reddit and now they can focus on improvements without having to support this legacy code.

I wonder what their relative market share is. Lots of the people that have been on Reddit for years may user old.reddit. I certainly do.

I really can't stand their hostility to no using their app on mobile though. The UX seems purposely difficult to drive users towards the app, for the obvious reason of greater access to user data most likely.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#158
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda offtopic but Instagram's ads changed my attitude towards ads, and my attitude towards Facebook's creepy level of insight into my life and personality. If they have that data anyway -- and hundreds of companies do -- I might as well benefit from it, and Instagram's ads were the first ones that I actually found interesting. First of all, it was obvious when something was an ad. Second, they weren't intrusive or o…

I second this, the only ads I’ve ever willingly clicked/tapped on with the intention of buying were from Instagram

And that is quite a feat given how little information I hace willingly given Facebook compared to how I - until a few years ago - more or less volunteeres my data to Google.

Google knew everything about it and yet couldn't manage to serve anything but the sleaziest ads.

Instagram got the table scraps and yet convinced me to buy at least one thing that I'm actually happy with.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#159
post #101

Speaking of fuck you patterns, has anyone else been part of the A/B test where navigating to an Instagram page prevents you from using the back button? They somehow clean my tab history so that I can’t go back to Google. It’s been happening to me for months!

I'm glad you mention this, thought I was the only one. I've been experiencing this on facebook.com, for years.

I'm puzzled how this is even technically possible. A website isn't supposed to be able to clear the history of where I came from?

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#160
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you just KNOW it's going to disappear. Not immediately of course, some slight visual breakages here and there. Then some hotshot manager is going to point out how it doesn't bring any "value" to the company and how in fact it actually hurts reddit's image. Then it will be gone.

And then somebody makes a substitute UI that calls the api, then reddit tries to take it down, then someone builds an open source version, then github gets a C&D letter and the creator makes blog post about it that reaches the front page of HN. I'm looking forward to the journey.

The first part happened: https://teddit.net ;-)
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