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The 'Fuck You' Pattern

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Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#341

Post by jude- »

klyrs wrote: post #67
tgtweak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinterest and Reddit are not better these days. The amount of things you can view on reddit on your phone without creating an account or installing the app is dwindling daily. Every time my wife sends me a Pinterest link I just ask her to screenshot it as I can't see shit on the default mobile page. I don't even know why Google continues to allow them in the results when there is clear-cut policies around showing som…

> 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

Pretending to be a robot, in order to not get caught by robots. Kinds makes sense. In a sci-fi dystopian way.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#342

Post by ljm »

bserge wrote: post #88
jandrese wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit's new UI is still hilariously terrible. The day they remove old.reddit.com is the day I stop using the site. Who the hell thinks what I want when I click on an article is to bring it into a related article feed with 1.5 comments showing? If I accidentally click outside of the article area the whole thing vanishes with no way to get back where I was. I had thought these issues would be obvious and they would cl…

The back button is broken, too. Was it that hard to bring you back to the comment you were reading when you clicked the link? Guess so.

And their video player is utterly fucked. The video will load and reload about 3 times before it becomes playable, on the desktop. On the mobile site, usually the video freezes and the audio track plays. Gifs will overflow and play under the UI, and that's not been fixed for over a couple of years.

And now it renders Gifs inside replies and every single fucking thread has the "omg gifs!" thread voted to the top.

The modern Reddit UI is a complete and utter tragedy of design and engineering. But it serves ads, so who cares.

They only redesigned it so that they could make ads first-class.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#343

Post by yur3i__ »

axbytg wrote: post #5

Reddit is full of these patterns in order to drive users from mobile web to app. Reddit mobile web really sets the bar for user-hostile UI in my opinion.

The cookie prompt on old.reddit.com is so obnoxious now. You can't close it and the "continue" button takes you to the new.reddit.com homepage

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#344

Post by thesausageking »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #237
thesausageking wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are fine. The "fuck you" pattern is letting you see the cat picture for 5 seconds before covering it up and requiring you to create an account and share your data with Facebook before you can see it.

Everyone everywhere has realized throughout the ages that conversion of anything is higher when you get a demo of the product. This isn't a "fuck you" pattern. They gave you a social media Costco food sample.

I have no doubt it converts better. Facebook are masters at using little dopamine hits and denials to get users to do whatever they want.

It’s still an obnoxious thing to do, which is the point of the article.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#345

Post by tmearnest »

maccam94 wrote: post #268
tshaddox wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? Is that really fair? Would there be nowhere to see pictures of cats without their millions of dollars in infrastructure and staffing? Or could it be that their millions of dollars in infrastructure and staffing for selling ads is the reason the go…

Ahhh, I remember the good old days of forums where people would "hotlink" an image into a thread, and after enough people started viewing/forwarding that link around it would break because the image hoster's account would get suspended by their host for going over their bandwidth limit, or the original hoster would panic at their bandwidth costs and delete it and/or try to block hotlinking going forward. Maybe someth…

I always loved it when someone hotlinked to an image on someone else’s server and instead of taking the image down, they’d replace it with something funny (or more frequently, horrible).

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#346

Post by seanp2k2 »

avalys wrote: post #22
Groxx wrote: post #11

Yeah - this is why I stay out of Instagram. They're repeatedly, blatantly hostile to any non-user use. At least they're not as bad as Pinterest, which has done this for years, plus their million alternate domains polluting search results.

What exactly is a “non-user use”?

“Non-member use”

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#347

Post by axguscbklp »

867-5309 wrote: post #320
tgtweak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinterest and Reddit are not better these days. The amount of things you can view on reddit on your phone without creating an account or installing the app is dwindling daily. Every time my wife sends me a Pinterest link I just ask her to screenshot it as I can't see shit on the default mobile page. I don't even know why Google continues to allow them in the results when there is clear-cut policies around showing som…

for Reddit, you can "sign up" with a bogus email address and still interact (browse, join, comment, vote, message) freely. the only possible downside is it asks you to verify your email address every launch, but I don't see this as a downside since I am using Reddit anonymously, and it is easily dismissed. been doing this for over a year now

You can actually just click "Next" on the sign-up screen without having entered any email address at all. It works fine, for now at least.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#348

Post by saurik »

tomc1985 wrote: post #328
cyrux004 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldnt you include engineers compensation in "The infrastructure" thats where a lot of money goes.

A bloated payroll to support a bloated advertising platform with a bloated AI-based recommendation algorithm when all it should be doing is loading a descending-order list of most recent submissions meeting the category criteria.... Don't talk about costs, this crap is self-inflicted

The hosting and bandwidth costs of images and especially video is non-trivial. I agree that the vast majority of the costs of these overly-large companies comes from what happens while trying to make them profitable, and then all of the engineering work that goes into that... but that all starts because running the site in the first place wasn't free and you have to do something to make them at least sustainable, with your "obvious" options being to either: 1) ask for donations (which likely won't pay for the site if you get popular: I know this from experience); 2) require people to pay some small subscription fee (which will make the site less fun for everyone); 3) pray ubiquitous micropayments eventually happens (i work on this problem as part of Orchid, but it still hasn't happened ;P); 4) sell "something else" to whales, like t-shirts or the ability to "guild" messages (the strategies reddit was trying to do as they resisted ads for a long time... maybe these work well enough?); or 5) start trying to sell ads and become the thing you hate. The only other strategies I have seen tend to either drag you towards #5 or simply cause other dark patterns, such as taking a cut of "tips" (what TikTok and Twitch do), which at bare minimum incentivizes the "don't you dare talk about alternative payment systems in our ecosystem: all payments must go through us" model sin (which can be fought against if you have a lot of willpower and remain private--I never required this with Cydia as I considered it the original sin my entire market existed to undermine--but I see the motivation and it feels kind of inevitable). I personally bet the only real "correct" solution is essentially #3... if we ever get to the point where the fees for that are as easy to pay and as low as the fees you pay for electricity (which works on a similar model).

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#349

Post by recursive »

specialist wrote: post #133
klyrs wrote: 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 organize a puppy meetup. Right now via a group SMS. Sub-optimal. Sharing event pics is flakey (mix of android and ios). The responses (LOL, hearts, etc) become their own text messages (?!). Etc. Since some of us have Instagram, I thought to try it, if only to share pics. Sign up was brutal. I can't figure out how to use my phone account on my desktop. Sharing existing pics sucks . Taking pics with Instagram sucks .…

Is this way I always get text messages from one of my friends that say > Liked "{$ENTIRE_CONTENTS_OF_PREVIOUS_MESSAGE}"

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#350

Post by jandrese »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #330
collinvandyck76 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed about old.reddit.com. I feel pretty old saying this, but I really miss the days of straightforward web design. Everything now is so chaotic that I'm never really sure what clicking anything will do. It feels like design for the sake of design, not for the sake of the users.

I'm still shocked Craigslist has survived, virtually unchanged, since 1996. It's may not be the cleanest interface, but it's a nice reminder of the more utilitarian days.

IMHO Craigslist is a good example of a design that nailed it right from the start and avoided the temptation to redesign year after year. Choose a region, choose the category, enter your search and bam, there are your listings. It's all bookmarkable too. What a great website.
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