The 'Fuck You' Pattern • Hacker News Board

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#61

Post by Spivak » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 8:23 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #3

Another fuck you pattern from Instagram is hiding the keyboard when you go to search for a user to encourage you to get distracted and tap on a suggestion rather than what you were searching for. You have to tap search three times to actually see the keyboard. It has to be intentional because it's been happening for years.

Wait wha? What’s the flow here to produce this?

I open IG, tap into the search tab, tap the search bar, keyboard appears, type in user, tap result.

Do you want tapping into the search tab to autofocus the search bar and open the keyboard. I can totally understand that but IG’s search tab is more a discovery thing now. Which like evil’s of social media aside was a sorely needed feature since finding people to follow has always been hard on Twitter and IG.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#62

Post by tyingq » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

glennvtx wrote: post #23

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 web reddit is just awful. Leave a thread open for some time, and navigation even breaks.

The Reddit AMP implementation on top of Reddit Web is even worse. For the first few times I encountered it, I assumed there was a bug or something that would be fixed soon.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#63

Post by fullstop » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

tgtweak wrote: post #48

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…

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…

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

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#64

Post by pram » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

glennvtx wrote: post #23

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 web reddit is just awful. Leave a thread open for some time, and navigation even breaks.

The best part is clicking a link, loading a page, and it just says “Something broke”

Twitter does this too. How the fuck is it even possible?

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#65

Post by lainga » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

nkingsy wrote: 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.

>US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara,[3] who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#66

Post by busterarm » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

ornornor wrote: post #16

mulmen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don’t understand is why Reddit wants us to use the app so badly. Is it just for ads? Is it data collection?

I suspect it’s all that and their metrics show that mobile users are the most “engaged” so they want more mobile users to have an even higher count of engaged users. Also, it’s harder to spam notifications without a mobile app.

I think it's time for lawmakers to start drafting up an "engagement tax" and start penalizing companies for demanding peoples' attention.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#67

Post by klyrs » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 8:26 PM UTC

tgtweak wrote: post #48

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…

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

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#68

Post by burlesona » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 8:26 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #3

Another fuck you pattern from Instagram is hiding the keyboard when you go to search for a user to encourage you to get distracted and tap on a suggestion rather than what you were searching for. You have to tap search three times to actually see the keyboard. It has to be intentional because it's been happening for years.

Wow, I don’t use Instagram so I haven’t seen this, but that’s a very nasty pattern.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#69

Post by mcbutterbunz » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 8:26 PM UTC

fullstop wrote: post #63

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…

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.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#70

Post by jandrese » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 8:27 PM UTC

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.

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 clean it up, but here we are months later and it is still broken from a UX standpoint.

I guess all of the devs moved over to work on their bespoke media player? You know, the one that barely works half of the time.