This is the most vile dark pattern I have seen in recent times.
On loading this page, there is an auto-playing, muted video. When you press its pause button, it is unmuted and keeps playing. Only when you press the pause button AGAIN does it actually stop playing.
At some point when implementing that feature someone said "Sure, I'm OK with that". What went wrong there?
nothing out of the ordinary, probably some team had to increase some company wide KPI of engagement, and likely every team has their own spin on it.
it was ab tested and provided statistically significant increase on video engagement, which was likely defined as "people interacting with the player", in the end you see a chart with engagement growing due to experiment x,y,z.. and everybody is happy and convinced they are doing the right thing.
There will be thousands of startups rushing to fill the gap.
I think the friction of getting started, both as creator and as contributor is still too high. I created a proof of concept site about this as well (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20448087), but I don't think that's an ideal solution either, just maybe a little easier to get started. Any feedback is welcome, of course.
Force banks to accept micro-payments (In 2019, for God's sake! That's not rocket science! That's a database transaction!) and I'd be fine with it.
I always thought that was incompetence and not malice, but maybe apparent interface glitches are a significant profit center.