The 'Fuck You' Pattern
cedwards.xyz
cedwards.xyz
"Well, fuck you, too. We're here to sell ads."
It's not about dark patterns, that's just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns.
This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't. And if you don't, I guess you haven't been on the web in the past decade or something.
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? No, they have your attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.
I think the point you are trying to make is that people are demanding free (as in beer) content, a la WinAmp of the 1990's. In the past 20 years, we've come around out of that greedy phase and have come to accept a certain amount of advertising for content. But when the non-free content dominates the free content (e.g. pinterest's SEO), it's a fuck you pattern and not consumer greed.
EDIT: IMHO
Once you get into actual hosting, it's very hard to get past a small number of users without a lot of funding. And since a lot of users don't want to pay, well...
The surveillance part still creeps me the hell out, but if they're gonna do it anyway they might as well use that data to benefit my life.
(On that note, I often find myself wishing I could ask the NSA for a copy of an old message or photo...)
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.
But yeah, joking aside, Instagram was the one of few places I actually saw ads of things I wanted to buy. Sure, the ads tried to rip my eyes out for those products ($50 for a product I found for $5) but still...
Asian artists are an even safer bet: they only post art. How refreshing!
Any artists in particular you'd recommend?
The Remarkable website uses the Facebook tracking javascript. If you had visited the Remarkable website then it would know to advertise to you.
In the early days of facebook, they sent me an email to join with 20 people I might know. I knew 19 of them. I have no illusions , facebook knows a ton about me. Even without a profile.
I found the ads on instagram quite intrusive and not relivant (they're the same size as a post), but that's just me ( I don't have a facebook so they can't correlate). I also find quite a few news sites almost unreadable with all the ads.
All these technology companies are making assumptions about the type of person I am, and then molding me into that person. I can't learn about topics I don't see, so if the tech giants are convinced I like technology and computers, that's all I will ever learn about.
Maybe I'd be happier if I took up ballet dancing, or basket-weaving, or something else I can't begin to imagine. That seems much less likely to happen when I'm trapped in an algorithmic box, that assumes my past will dictate my future.
On some level the way company's advertise is basically an argument against them having my data being a threat, because they can't manage to come up with anything better then that, in a product space where there's a whole massive ecosystem of technology which might be useful to me.
And thats...really just me complaining about the ads not targeting well. Like, I am quite interested in knowing if my nascent desktop audio management could be better! I don't know what's out there, and I've given you a price range estimate through how long I searched before spending!
Choice is good. I've certainly groaned at my share of ads on traditional television, and so I can understand why someone might find targeted ads preferable. I just don't share that desire!
Amazon in particular irks me because they don't give you a choice, no matter how deep you dig into settings! You can turn off browsing history, but it's stored in a cookie per-device and also seems to randomly come back on sometimes. Even then, they'll still use your purchase history for recommendations. I used to manually go through and mark everything I bought as a gift, and this worked for a while—but then Amazon apparently decided I'd given to many gifts and started ignoring the signal.
I think life in a big city can be your "social feed" without any bias. A big city can offer so many things and ideas if you just go out, meet random people and listen to what they say.
I always feel a little depressed when someone describes being more effectively manipulated as "benefiting."
Joke's on them either way, they somehow haven't figured out I'm broke! But the difference is between "spying + garbage ads" and "spying + a bunch of cool shit I didn't even know existed" I'm gonna go for the latter.
Obviously the correct answer is neither: just use Adblock and/or pay for services you use and enjoy. For example I paid for YouTube premium so I could get an ad-free experience on mobile (because YouTube ads are somehow both horribly intrusive and horribly irrelevant, despite Google's apparent omniscience!).
By all accounts Google should know much more about me than Facebook does, but somehow their ads invoke a response somewhere between mild irritation and outright rage and disgust. Meanwhile on Instagram: "hey, I really like this backpack", "wtf they're selling psilocybin in capsules now? And I can just buy it? Nobody even told me that existed! Thanks Instagram!" Like I said, that was a pretty surreal moment for me.
This is such a defeatist narrative, and it isn't even accurate. They in fact don't have your data, that is half why they run these services. Each service you don't use is another piece of you they don't have. It isn't an all or nothing proposition. Throwing up your hands and granting them powers they don't have short circuits the more meaningful deliberation of "is this service worth the cost?"
If I had to guess, I might say that these companies enjoy the strong men we have built them into, because people give in.
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 goto place for pictures of cats is BigTechCo instead of a ton of smaller forums and communities each of which is relatively inexpensive to operate.
This is the equivalent of running a taxi business vs running an airline. Sure, a taxi can fulfill several transportation needs but it could never replace what an airline does.
For a short time, and the overwhelming majority of people would have no idea that content exists. Then some enterprising startup founder would realize that there's a huge market for those exact services, and history would slowly repeat (rhyme with?) itself.
This free content, sans big tech pipedream is just that. Sorry if that makes you sad.
People on this site continually underestimate the ability of users.
My mother is not going to set up a RSS feed for herself of a list of forums that interest her. She does know how to log on to Facebook and look at the feed.
- See interesting page -> click the Facebook follow button to get it added to your FB feed
- See interesting page -> click the RSS button to get it added to your RSS feed
Say you're talking to someone who can teleport instantly across the globe. If you tell him where he can see the Mona Lisa, that's OK. If you grab the Mona Lisa and wave it in his face, that is very un-OK.
Before someone replies with the "but digital items can be copied, it's not stealing", that's the argument most piracy enabling forums and websites are able to get away with. If you host, EG, Nintendo ROMs on your website, you'll get shut down quickly. If you just save links (URL or Magnet), you might get a DMCA for a specific item maybe, but won't get shut down entirely, probably.
As always, there are a lots of exceptions and alternative interpretations though.
Why not just charge the 100th visitor per minute or something? Someone will be motivated to pay the cost. And, if people don't want to pay? Well, even those with less motivation will find a way to the content somehow.
"The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts. It's the addictive dark patterns and montezation/tracking that costs millions. That's the irony.
Don't talk about costs, this crap is self-inflicted
Every one of these companies start with a nice mission and it ends up getting perverted into the hellscape that is tech today. Every damn time.
Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Laws like GDPR and CCPA have to be followed by the business.
Isn’t this ironic? The government is people. I guess this just moves the onus of people doing the right thing, up to government. If you’re right, that destabilizes government. Which I guess is what happens when it stops corps; corps then need to take it over.
I know plenty of founders who would be happy with lower constant profits, less employees, in order to have a company which doesn't actively psychologically harm its users, a less stressful working environment.
Gumroad is the perfect example of this.
The problems come from VC money, which force a company to chase 500x returns or die trying. More in general, whenever there is centralisation of resources, problems ensue at some point later on.
Regulations are not the answer - established companies find a way to arginate them (look at Google playing with cookies), smaller companies trying to go live and compete have a slower time to market and die, benefiting the established companies.
On top of this regulations introduce a different set of problems. What if I'm okay being on a website which doesn't respect my privacy? What if I care more about reading a news article and never visit that website again more than I care about them respecting some rules regarding what kind of tracking they do?
Instead of assuming we, the lawmakers, are omniscient and perfect, I think we should just get out of the way of the market and limit governmental influence to reduce the number of monopolies and corruption that gets into the real world - and then bubbles up in various ways, chasing infinte growth being one of them.
To 100 more Gumroads.
It's like rocket fuel! The faster you want to go, the more fuel you need. Which adds weight, so now you go slower, so you need more fuel...
I want to serve a cat picture, which would cost 1/100 of a cent. But at scale, it adds up. So now I show adds that generate 1.2/100 of a cent in revenue but add .5/100 cents in serving cost, which I can optimize with user data to add an additional .7/100 cents in revenue, but which adds .4/100 cents in serving costs....
lol at this. Go setup that infrastructure and see how far you get for peanuts.
In fact: I'm sure there are many cat image sharing sites out there. A random search landed me here: https://www.funnycatpix.com/_pics/Hmmmmmm890.htm
Seems like a high-quality HN-like website, hehe :)
My company has grown 15x in the last few years and our total infra costs continue to go down, because we pay attention to them.
If it was so simple to host Instagram for peanuts I wonder why no one has done it.
Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC will just wait longer. Or run your servers from two regions, it just takes duplicating your collection of cat pictures, should be peanuts.
Then, you need to store these terabytes of cats. On rather fast disks because else the disks will be the bottleneck, and cats will load very slowly for some users. It would be terrible were something to happen to the collection, so you need some backup for peanuts, like some Backblaze, and maybe a second copy because Backblaze has no^W limited redundancy.
Then, well, you need to monitor all that and sometimes fix issues, because cloud infra is highly available but not highly reliable.
Then, where do the cat pictures come from? Allow anonymous uploads! Or register users and allow uploads.
Now analyze each picture so that it's an actual cat picture and not child porn or a warez archive. Resize them to match your standards. Yes, this is simple, just run a RNN that detects cats.
Then, curate the incoming pictures so that they are actually reasonably interesting. Just maybe hire a few people to do that for peanuts somewhere in Africa.
Ah yes, you want to also deduplicate images; run some image hashing algorithms; use maybe just one or two GPU instances to do that efficiently. And you gonna need a DB, a simple one, that will never need any administering or fixing, won't it?
Well, yes, now you can run that site for just several grand a month, making it your day job, because you're well-qualified to maintain every part of it. Enjoy the peanuts.
p2p cats for teh win
Then people could easily navigate to cat pictures.
That does not seem to be the case.
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217667468-B2-Se...
They don't have the cross-DC redundancy like S3 does. If a DC goes offline, so does your data.
I'm updating my comment.
Don't put data you don't want to loose in a single location.
[0] https://www.ovh.com/world/news/press/cpl1787.fire-our-strasb...
Anyway, you can do anything the hard way, but what’s your point? That serving millions of cats per second requires big investment that must be recouped? I see most of this as rent seeking, and the infrastructure is economy of scale. Maybe you use tensor flow and Kafka inside Kubernetes, I dunno…
I agree that one can expect lame websites to act lame, but it’s out of sheer churlishness rather than necessity
It's the picture intake pipeline that eats most of the resources. If you only want to serve the same collection, or a collection you personally increase by 1-2 cats a day, then it's fine.
How so? Let's say you want to be somewhat competitive with imgur and handle a million images per day, and also that the peak rate is 4x your average. That comes out to 50 images per second. A thumbnail or few shouldn't really take more than a CPU-second, so you can handle that with 2-6 cheap servers. Let alone using spare cores on storage-optimized servers. And it's next to zero database load.
You think they wouldn’t rather have the cash?
Then you can have a local copy and be sure you have every standard cat in existence!
But being an asshole about insisting that everyone log in so you can target them individually isn't actually a requirement for the business model to work and be profitable.
At most, you can justify being an asshole about insisting that the user not be using an ad-blocker (with the user having the option of logging in with a paid account for an ad-free experience).
Years ago everyone had to use an image-host (Photobucket, lol…) because all those phpBB instances on shared hosting accounts didn’t support direct image uploads or greatly limited attachments and most people didn’t have their own web hosting account to use instead.
With the rise of Web 2.0, it became important for sites to control their content - I remember the days of hotlinked images being swapped-out with obscene or vomit-inducing content as an act of revenge on bandwidth leeches - and cheap storage meant it wasn’t a problem to host hundreds of gigabytes of content by oneself. Can you image if Facebook and Instagram didn’t host the images posted to them?
It’s 2021 now, web-forums are dead - if people want to share photos to a small circle they’ll likely use Dropbox or OneDrive - or just copy+paste between Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp…
Do guide question: who uses your service and where’s the opportunity for profit? Serving images directly means people can’t see any ads, and browsers now block more and more third-party cookies (until all of them by 2023, I understand) so using image-hosting as a way to track users across the web is gone - is your frontpage traffic enough? Savvy users who use image hosts also tend to the ones to adblock too, even on mobile.
So, well, my estimate of a few grand a month was not completely off.
How do you deal with moderation? Is it automated, I see you even have comments? Or is it just report buttons and your takedown form? How is the support load?
What is your tech stack? PHP? Python? C#? Java? Golang?
Smells like seven figures already.
Well, I was responding to "millions", so maybe "a handful of peanuts" might be more accurate...
I belive there was an open company/OCI post by neocities.org a good while back, detailing their budget - but I can't seem to find it again.
http://web.archive.org/web/20160310015118/https://blog.neoci...
> Our (rough) budget for 2015
(...)
> We have upgraded a lot of our infrastructure to provide for faster, more reliable service with more features, space, and bandwidth capabilities, which has pushed our operating bill to around $300/month (...) To prevent unexpected costs, we have made agreements with our providers to make this a fixed rate, so a sudden flood of traffic shouldn't change this dramatically.
(...)
> In order to become self sustaining with the current system, we will require approximately $3600 in annual recurring revenue. I think this is an achievable goal with our new site (we're almost 1/3 of the way there), and we have plenty of runway incase this takes longer than expected. We also have the ability to scale back on some of our expenses, as I believe I can shave off at least $100-150 from our monthly recurring expenses should we need to without too many problems.
> (...) We can scale a lot (~500k+ sites) with what we have now, and the scaling options we have are simple, predictable and affordable.
This drives up complexity of the business operation overall, not just the infrastructure.
This isn't a "fuck you" pattern. They gave you a social media Costco food sample.
It’s still an obnoxious thing to do, which is the point of the article.
Apparently not video games. Not many game companies offer demos anymore because they actually hurt sales.
> Apparently not video games. Not many game companies offer demos anymore because they actually hurt sales.
That's interesting. Is that because the demo cannibalizes sales (ie. people have enough fun just playing the demo they don't feel compelled to buy the game), or because the demo undermines the game's value proposition (ie. people don't buy the crappy game because the demo makes the crappiness evident)?
Letting you glance at it then making it disappear is not a demo.
I recommend doing this the same time you're spring cleaning or after you prep for winter. Also go through and unsubscribe from emails and update passwords.
Or you're both. Or perhaps none.
I kinda like that we have now such a big, visible and studied echosystem where we'll see any pattern working at a significant scale.
Any kind of dichotomy just doesn't cut it anymore I think.
Now is it fair for a company to track and shape the behavior of millions of people?
I'm fine with businesses who use that model and make it clear. Those kinds of tactics are galling coming from a company whose literal mission statement is "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
If you want people to make an account, make a more compelling business proposition. Gatekeeping seems like the most vulnerable, monopolistic position to take.
This apologies for any unethical practice by companies in Reddit/HNs are really interesting. They side completely with the authorities. Properly trained.
So sometimes it is true, but most of the time it is not and BigCo-s have to push users to do things.
2/ Well fuck you even further and go to hell for defending such behaviours.
3/ ps. Their infra is ridiculous. A team of 100-120 engineers can do way better. They can’t get their user base though because of 1/
You almost had me, right up to this point. Then I realized you are posting pointed sarcasm about instagram's owners.
The bigger the userbase grows, the bigger the fuckyous they can give the rest. It’s no longer “hey join us, we have cool stuff”, it’s “fuck you, we already got your friends, whatcha gonna do”. We can complain about that, right?
There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.
- Windows 95 was $210 in 1995: $370.94 in today's dollars.
- Windows XP was $199 in 2002: $297.78 in today's dollars.
- Windows 7 was $159.99 in 2009: $200.75 in today's dollars.
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19950607&slug...
This magazine from 1995 had a CD full of stock images for sale for $18.98
https://the-avocado.org/2018/03/16/lets-read-pc-magazine-jul...
So I don't think the physical distribution was a large percent of the price.
..."for 100 stunning photos on each CD-ROM. $18.98 each" [1], just in case anyone else wanted to square the comparison in proper context.
[1] https://i0.wp.com/the-avocado.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03...
I find it hard to accept the explanation that in-app advertising is the tradeoff I get when buying a tech product at a given price. Either it's free and it serves me ads, or I pay for it and I get to opt-in to ads if I choose.
It's the same argument for Smart TVs. These companies know they can have their cake and eat it too.
FWIW, I have Linux Mint on all laptops at home, including the ones used by the kids and the elderly, even though I've already paid for the Windows 10 license by virtue of having purchased them default installed.
That's the classical problem with ad-free subscription models: You remove all the people with cash to spare from your advertising pool, thus decreasing its value. At that point you might as well make the product ad-free for the people not paying as well.
Expensive professional software is often available on Mac.
Probably the target market for windows evolved to become people who tolerate advertising (or at least that's what PMs at M$ think).
Half the price is paid in the license fee. The other half is a lifetime of ads exposure.
The difference being air travel is highly regulated, as should be surveillance marketing.
I mean, he's got a point here. Surely if we actually wanted plane passengers to survive crashes they'd have something more substantial than lap belts? I'd have thought, as a simple laymen, facing the seats backwards would make any impact far more survivable than crouching in the insane way that the "safety pamphlet" suggests?
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/travel/ryanair-ceo-seat-bel...
I just want my corporate overlords to at least pretend not to have a wanton disregard for human life. Is that so much to ask?
[edit] on the other hand, the best thing for the Spanish about having a standing section on Ryan Air flights would be the passengers would get their brawling out of the way before they make it to the pub.
It's why if you're seated, it's recommended to be buckled in - the difference between one person slamming into the ceiling and 300 is pretty substantial.
Did you miss the GPs bit about facing the seats backwards? Then the whole backrest becomes your restraint. (I mean, most airplane crashes are forwards, right -- they don't get rear-ended all that often?)
1. What's wrong with recycled seats? If you live in a city you are drinking recycled water.
2. Comparing a trans-atlantic flight to a short-haul one (which all Ryanair flights are) is not correct. Short-haul Aer Lingus is not discernably different to Ryanair.
3. Michael O'Leary is the king of free publicity. The fact that you heard about his "coin operated toilet" plan says it all. No-one ever seriously entertained standing room on airplanes etc...
And none of this has any bearing on the recent hijacking. I've flown many times with Ryanair and otherairlines, with small kids in tow, and there is little difference, because most of the hassle is down to security theatre at the airports.
2. I've never been on a short Aer Lingus flight so can't comment. But I've been on lots of short Iberia and Air France flights and never dealt with the discomfort of Ryan.
3. Same reason I don't buy a Tesla.
4. I'd hope a pilot of the Irish flag carrier would have phoned in to ask whether diverting several hundred miles to Minsk was the wisest idea. Glassdoor shows the average Ryan Air pilot making €66k/year versus €91k for an Aer Lingus pilot. And no doubt the hours and schedules are hideous. If you choose to entrust your family members' lives to a company that requires defense with all the above caveats to save a few quid - I hope you're spending it on a decent hotel.
I'd buy it but I haven't been able to figure out how to.
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...
TIL how I'm going to be buying Windows from now on. I had no idea this was actually this accessible.
Pirating can sometimes be the simplest technical solution to some situations, but at the end of the day being able to point at a (set of) legitimately-acquired license key(s) is a bit like having a PhD, it squares everything off in a way that opens doors (or keeps doors open) that would otherwise be shut.
I'm on version 21H1 -- is this offered with the 2019 LTSC license? Or stuck with version 1909? I'm not sure that really matters for me personally - but sometimes it's confusing how this all works compared to the consumer editions. By confusing I just really just mean they don't seem offer this information upfront.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ads+in+windows+10&tbm=isch
Does that answer your question?
From your link, it seems most ads are on live tiles. It's really easy to turn that feature off. (No one likes live tiles anyway)
- Start Menu showing suggested apps (the infamous Candy Crush)
- Task bar shown weather and news
- Lock screen sometimes showing ads
- Sometimes, with updates, new things are installed that auto-launch and prompt you to, e.g., buy an Office subscription.
- Constantly nagging about using browsers other than Edge
Why don't you sell them?
We can call this situation the "Fuck yourself" pattern, where you give money to companies so they can innovate in new ways of fucking you.
I understand how this shitty agreement came to be but that doesn't mean that I like having my experience online be a metaphorical middle finger.
They spent billions in infrastructure and staffing to hijack the free internet where I could look at cat pictures on cat picture websites that had cat pictures as the goal, all so they could show me ads, and they have the nerve to say that I'm in the wrong for not being happy about that?
IANAL so I'm not sure whether such a suit will stand in any court.
That's called bait & switch, and is (if not legally in this case, then morally) rightly considered fraud.
Similarly, it use to be that going to the app showed me "my feed". Sometime in the last 6 month it changed to only show me the newest post of people I'm following and then only posts of random "popular" people of which I have zero interest.
If they want to make money from me, I'd use the app more with the old style of showing me only posts from people I follow with an ad every few posts, like say 1 ad 2 3 ad 4 5 6 ad 7 8 9 ad. As it is now I barely use the app anymore. Of course I'm not the target audience.
It's been bad a long time now, but not like this. You really want to tell me it was this blatant?
So yeah, fuck you, I just wanted to look at cats.
The issue is that FB+Insta try very hard to become the first/default go-to place for people to post content, just to lure in others and extract value out of them.
Unfederated and (forced) open systems is the only way out of this.
Go fuck your self. Internet was never meant to be sell ads for you. Companies found loop hole and now you think you are entitled to it. Snap out of it asshole
Now, in the Reddit scenario 99% of the Reddit users don’t mind downloading an app. It’s just us, techies, that 1% who cares. This is totally fine for Reddit. Working as expected.
This is more or less "social network publisher side monetization" SOP.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...
Granted, I'm aggressive at turning off startup items, managing what services run on boot, and so on, but my point is, each of the things you mention may have been true at one time, but they are not necessarily true today.
edit to note: I'm not defending Microsoft's use of dark patterns, they definitely do push them out and then sometimes back off if there is enough pushback. And that is bad, and should be called out. Just aiming for accurate information here.
it's just a matter of time at this point
The Windows installation process is annoying for sure, but once you get through it, you are able to disable or rework everything you mentioned. iOS honestly has everything you mentioned as well; in fact, it's installation process pushes even more services than Windows does, but I never see people complain about it. I find both process annoying, but I forget about them once I get everything setup because it goes away. I don't want a reddit account because I basically only visit the site when a friend sends me a link. I am guessing I can also have their stuff go away if I download the app and sign up, but it's not as essential to me as using Windows or iOS.
When I click it my iPhone opens the App Store. The App Store then has a big blue "Open" button to launch the app, but of course all context is lost and opening from there brings you to your Reddit front page.
Twitter does this too. How the fuck is it even possible?
Will Twitter ever have more than two 9s of reliability as measured from the user's POV?
OTOH, once I get there, a lot of Reddit content makes me wonder why I bothered. :-)
To make this more ergonomic, you can add the URL as a search engine with a keyword, e.g.
URL: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:reddit.com+%s
Keyword: red
In Firefox you most likely want to use a bookmark with a keyword instead of their new search engine crap.
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.
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.
And which becomes more difficult when sites break middle-clicking and other shortcuts to open links in new tabs, or when the "links" ain't actually links but just something on which they tack on an onClick() and run a bunch of JS to reinvent the concept of a link.
What we need is something that locally duplicates the page state into another tab. But then, sites already break that by a) firing off requests that can be dangerous to duplicate (not idempotent) and b) synchronizing state across tabs (argh!) so you can’t have different state in different tabs for the same domain (or just session, idk).
Facebook is notorious about that last bit and won’t let you eg have one tab with your feed best visible and another with a conversation hovering over it all.
There was a Reddit tech lead on YC News a day or two ago who straight up admitted that they do this on purpose to drive up DAU/MAU. He also said that his options are up, so fuck you.
It's may not be the cleanest interface, but it's a nice reminder of the more utilitarian days.
- the categories page is cluttered.
- results page is messy and annoying to parse.
- the site only supports plaintext posts and has an annoying POSTing funnel.
I haven't looked but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a QoL extension made to cover all the holes left by the 'nailed design'. It's good but not great, as no web design lasts forever.
Why would they? It works.
Reddit doesn’t want you to lurk without an account or browse on mobile on a browser. They make less money that way. Eventually I am sure they will break old.reddit.com once they think they no longer need the holdouts (who I suspect are a lot of power users).
As someone who has used Reddit for probably 10 years at this point, it makes me sad that some place that I at times legitimately felt like a “member of a community” would break my use case like this (I have accounts but on mobile I sometimes just want to lurk/browse without logging in). But it’s their website and they can do what they want with it. Our only recourse is to complain and try alternatives.
Likewise, the "1 comment displayed" thing seems like a "please consume the media and move on" effort potentially. Remember, they don't make money from you reading comments. They make money from you going back to other surfaces where ads are displayed. Namely your feed or another post.
Oddly enough, the video player on old still works way better than the one on new.
- Be logged in.
- Set the view to "classic".
- Always open threads into a new tab. Never just do a left click to open them, use a middle click.
Then again, my ATM machine still asks me which language I want service in. It’s my hope if I choose something other than English, it calls 9-1-1, slows down the prompts and does nothing irreversible.
I don't even need to use old.reddit.com for daily browsing now. (Unless need to comment)
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 embedded Instagram crap, it doesn't even load on vanilla firefox. That's cool, those stories are usually celebrity gossip that I don't actually want to read but got baited into clicking on.
It's my favorite social media site, because their hooks just bounce straight off me.
Thanks, Instagram, for the consistent signalling. I never wanted to be your friend anyway.
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 something different to the crawler than the user.
Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.
Never, ever trust an incorporated company.
It’s a lot of what lead to Reddit’s popularity in the first place.
Surprisingly difficult to find a complete list.
There's 100% an opportunity for someone to bring on a bunch of subreddit admins into starting a new automotive forum network. Reddit and Facebook don't work well for car stuff.
https://old.reddit.com/r/4x4/comments/hw1p3a/vertical_scope_...
Also a bunch of tech and gun forums. Supposedly over 1000 properties, but it's not like I'm going to recognize that they own "mothering.com"
The redesign is still a slower, worse experience, especially on mobile.
If they ban those, then we'll see some major migrations methinks.
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.
If they fix the moderation story for new reddit, I'd imagine they have a pretty quick path towards obsoleting old reddit by just not caring about anyone else still on old reddit.
They've already 'fixed' modmail for new reddit. So I think they're actively working on that problem.
Though that has had some funny issues. One thing I noticed was the enrollment for the new modmail. It is on the settings page on old reddit for a sub, but I couldn't find it anywhere for the new reddit UI. Wacky.
Damn, I went to dig up the URL for reddit's source and it seems it is no longer open :-(
Chris Slowe is the hand guiding the ship day to day, with a bunch of really passionate hackers underneath him. They are maintaining like 4 different code bases and keeping feature parity as best they can with a team that could still comfortably go on a ski trip together (compare that to the 60k+ at Facebook). The users hate change while also demanding new features. The business makes no sense. Steve is off doing... something, to ads or something and make investors happy so they keep the ship afloat. UI is going to hell to drive DAU metrics for investors. Banning shitweasels brings down the wrath of the conservatives. Yet they are still working their assess off to keep a mound of spaghetti from bursting into flames with 1/10th the staff they need to do so.
So, while you can browse the place with the old interface, the nature and trends of Reddit are mostly driven by the new interface.
Which is fine, if they want to go that way, it's just a shame that what used to make it any good is dead or dying.
1. The new Reddit seems to have a different markdown parser which allows surrounding unindented code with ``` lines. This doesn't render on old Reddit.
2. New Reddit seems to be saving links with escaped underscores and correcting for it at render time? I've started to see people posting broken links like https://example.com/some\_path\_with\_underscores when it should be https://example.com/some_path_with_underscores
3. Posts with multiple images sometimes don't work? I haven't been inconvenienced enough by this yet to investigate.
I haven't fully tested what combinations don't work, but it feels like the beginning of the end of old.reddit.com.
This is hilarious and makes so much sense. God, the internet is broken
https://sumtips.com/software/browsers/set-user-agent-on-a-pe...
0 = https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-install-any-ad...
Maybe I’m just getting old.
Time to switch to another OS. Consider some newbie-friendly Linux, like Mint (linuxmint.com).
My guess is nobody cares about this issue at Google for whatever reason, either because no compensation is tied to it or they are getting paid to push Pinterest.
> Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.
You’d think they’d do something about it. Maybe it’s because Reddit doesn’t cloak necessarily, but when it straight up refuses to show without the app (sometimes), I’d call that cloaking (in spirit). News sites throwing up paywalls would fit that too.
[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
Half the reason I use Qwant is it works better than LinkedIn's paid search results. Google does much worse.
Maybe a place I can upload a HOSTS file?
Or an extension that adds this to every search?
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/personal-bloc...
I truly don’t understand how Pinterest is so popular when it’s also so awful. Tumblr was so much better until Verizon destroyed it with management incompetence.
All those robots sharing data among themselves with no humans needed or, apparently, wanted.
Like what? The phone browser works just great. IIRC there's a nag dialog that prompts you once to install the app, then it caches the answer and shuts up.
No, it is not. I can not access any subreddit without installing an app (which I am not going to do).
Hmmmm. Now that I think of it I'm fairly sure that serving different content to Googlebot compared to what you served ordinary users used to be a good way to call down the wrath of the SEO master upon your (or your clients) website.
Then again, that was before. Back when Google was a nice company and acted in the best interest of its users.
Can't believe I've never thought of this.
fyi - if you use old reddit, the mobile site is fine - I've never seen a subreddit blocked or threads truncated.
new reddit is a pile of steaming dogsh
i.reddit is better for that, but it doesn't support many content types inline and has issues showing comments in some cases.
teddit.net doesn't support loading more comments inline and the icon to unfold post content is tiny.
There's also an issue with going back to search once I am finally in the all context.
Ps: using android.
I prefer Sync for Reddit cause it provides a very HN-like UX if you set the view mode to smaller cards or compact.
I think it's unethical to intentionally design features that confuse users and force them to take roads they don't really want to take. Reddit crossed a line with the annoying pop-up that constantly asks you to download their app, for example. I don't care that the pop-up is less persistent than let's say Instagram. It's ill-intentioned design and it shouldn't exist.
Look, I don't work for reddit or have any skin in the game, other than I use it every day (it being the service - I RARELY use the official app or website). And granted, I'm not a typical Internet enjoyer, but it's easier for me to enjoy reddit than it is to enjoy facebook, instagram, linkedin, pinterest, tiktok, because of decisions reddit made to not do what all these other ones did.
Again I say - that's a very low bar. Reddit app and reddit website still suck. But reddit the service and the company is 10x better than the other networks (note I'm not commenting on the CONTENT here, that's for another day)
Cloudflare slaps you for this, though.
yes ....
Be sure to follow the site's robots.txt rules, though. Otherwise, you could end up getting googlebot banned! /s
I'm surprised sites this big are even relying on the user agent for determining Googlebot, given how easy (and common) it is to forge, when they could be checking the Googlebot IP ranges instead.
I don't know how long it will last, but if it's gone I think I'll be off reddit. I tried to use regular UI few times, and the experience is absolutely off putting. It reminds me of digg right before people flew to reddit.
Reddit on the other hand, is trying hard to push me away and I thank them for it, but a lot of info you can only find there. Like real measurements of graphics cards and just real information from real people.
Kind of sad, but Reddit has attracted all the people who used to frequent niche forms in one place.
Other people report being able to, but it just sends me straight to a login page.
In fact, I've always found it perplexing how little information or incentive there is on their landing page that would encourage me to make an account. I only even barely know what that site is for because of osmosis and image previews from sites that link to it. Makes me wonder how they got critical mass to even get started.
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.
I can't even figure out how to simply browse a friend's feed.
I legit can't imagine why anyone uses Instagram, for any purpose.
if it wasn't for them i would so delete this shit
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.
I wouldn't normally have a problem with this but public content should be just that, viewable by the general public and not being forced to install a tracke.. err, their app on my phone.
Where I have a huge problem with this is public health or other official announcements from community leaders or essential information and its being put out on facebook. So now I can't access a public message by a publicly elected entity for general consumption. It seems extremely slimy and it feels illegal on some level as I don't want to be forced to login to facebook to view local updates.
https://www.instagram.com/accounts/emailsignup/
I don't understand this post and the blog author's comments about using desktop. I get the appeal of not having apps installed on your phone, but wasn't Instagram phone-first? I remember not having a smartphone in the early 10's and not being able to use Instagram because you couldn't use their site. I would argue the phone-based experience is far superior to the browser...
You need to not only remove the modal, but remove the "overflow:hidden;" in the <body> tag. After that you should be able to scroll.
I have CSS/JS injectors that do this for me already, I really fucking hate popups and scrolling impediments of any sort.
edit: Sometime they add "pointer-events: none;" to the <body>, should check that too.
Haven't tried it in a long time so maybe doesn't work anymore.
I don't "get" Instagram. I'm not on it, I don't use it, all that "I just don't just because".
I have a room mate // romantic partner who does use Instagram. OK, that's great, that's fine. They're younger than I am so perhaps they get something I don't; times change, I get that; I still don't get "The Insta".
Maybe some social media will ding on me the next time around. I'll wait.
The first attempt stopped at "unexpected error" just after selecting a login name.
The second attempt with different email address in a different browser ended the same way.
Third attempt I tried from the third browser, via cellular data and gmail email. That one finished ok but still returned back to Sign up right after the last signup atep. Entering the same data in Sign up resulted in "there is account using this email". So I tried to log in and it was successful but it immediately showed "suspicious activity dialog" FORCING me to enter phone number and do SMS verification. After I did that, my shiny new Instagram account started working.
But I expect it will be blocked or deleted for inactivity soon unless I start submitting photos or generate enough ad impressions or ad clicks. I use adblock though..
A UI pattern whereby content a user wants is provided, then yanked away before it can be consumed, to be replaced by a demand for something the site wants (log in, sign up, subscribe, pay, etc). It's distinct from merely providing a limited amount of content in the first place, as when a site offers 3 articles for free before requiring payment.
Thanks.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwall_F.C.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_one_likes_us,_we_don%27t_ca...
Pinttern?
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.
At the end of the day every company wants to make money, or will be bought out by cutthroats who think it's all there is, and this kind of thinking will take hold. Users you can't profit from = leeches.
The equivalent in the online world would be to pay site X to show ad Y at times Q-Z. And then you just trust that they'll do so, like you have to do for print/TV ads, and pay the site. That does happen, and you can find quite a lot of company blog posts out there saying that it works, but it's much more manual so yeah. It isn't the majority.
On the other hand, virtually every study of the Vietnam war said it was a huge mistake and Domino theory was bullshit.
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.
https://dumpor.com/v/polite_cat_olli_official
https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official
Suffering the ads is preferable to whatever fb wants.
Works for the Olli, but for another profile returns for me a "permanent error", blocked by Instagram.
See https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/cadence.moe/gemlog/2020-12-1... "Future of Bibliogram after restrictive IP blocking"
At least they're not as bad as Pinterest, which has done this for years, plus their million alternate domains polluting search results.
All of this has ensured that none of them like Instagram links, and do not want an account.
I would love if we could do away with these sites and those websites that insist I use their 'app' to view simple text data.
The gun.deals app, (specifically the iOS version, though I suspect android is engineered the same way), is your typical design of stacked rows of links for deals on, you guessed it, gun stuff.
As with these apps, the user scrolls down the list by dragging their finger upward. Except on gun.deals, the app will [intentionally] misinterpret the first contact of the finger as a ‘click’ on the row item. This causes the user to have to back out of the item they had intended to scroll past. (While almost certainly delivering fraudulently obtained ‘impressions’ that the app maker can represent to advertisers and vendors they are selling data and screen share to).
Some of the most annoying to me:
Twitch trying to discourage the use of the embedded player/non official players (like VLC) by replacing the content by a fullscreen purple picture asking you to watch on twitch.tv.
Reddit trying to force mobile user to use the reddit app as soon as the content is marked NSFW.
Instagram forcing me to login to view pictures.
Twitter asking me to see who someone is following.
Thinking about making a Chrome plugin that intentionally asks some nonsense questions programmatically in the background to waste their time and disincentivize that behavior.
(To be clear, I love having chat channels for sales and support, just NOT unsolicited "Can I help you" popups.)
You start with priorities that are fucked up before you even interviewed for the job.
The world of today is not like the world of 10+ years ago. In 2001, if you met a developer, there was an exceptionally high % chance that they were fundamentally into technology in a very deep & personal way. In 2021, you will find that most people in technology see it for the cash cow that it is and utilize it accordingly.
I would say that maybe 10-20% of the tech employees today actually give a fuck about these sorts of things. The rest just want their paycheck and as many other benefits as they can obtain. Raising a stink over dark patterns is not a good idea if you don't bring a whole lot of other meaningful value to the table.
Coupled with this, everyone knows these tech-driven ad-distribution companies posing as "social media" are pretty shady, because they're based on coyly mining user attention for $. So I you get a job there, your moral bar is low enough that a dark pattern here and there is no big deal.
The standard internet user doesn't pay for anything and increasingly blocks ads. That's why these patterns exist.
Surely it would feel uneasy to developers with a passion for UX, but there's nothing you can do about it. Go ahead and quit, it's not going to be very hard to find another developer willing to do it for 200K.
My personal story: When I interviewed for a job at Amazon many years ago, all the recruiter e-mail kept going into my trash. I finally realized that I'd just directed *@amazon.com into my trash years earlier because they kept filling my inbox with so much useless bullshit, and I'd always hated the company. Turned out, though, that when presented with the chance to make twice as much money by working half as hard, those feelings became very malleable.. "Well, we're a bunch of assholes, but nice guys finish last"
Really, I'm just following orders every day at my job
Bold strategy. Though I have to wonder if weaponizing your career in that way has dangerous implications for your self-esteem?
No, my friend, I put on my jackboots and my company logo t-shirt and give 100% every day
Really, people benefit when I rob them of their privacy
^ try finding the container of the content that has its overflow set to 'hidden', and change it back to auto. Then you should be able to scroll again
People with short term vision (less than 50 years) are making poorly informed decisions. Granted, I would like to be fabulously wealthy. But if gaining my wealth meant the world would be worse in 2+ years (I give myself a year just to be selfish), then it's just not worth it. That 2 year cost will eventually kick my ass in 20-40 years.
So speaking very selfishly, if it has a net negative cost of greater than 1 year, then it likely will hurt me personally. So I (and everyone else) should pass on that option.
Backing up a bit, let's break down what insta and fb offer.
Very briefly, they offer some connection to close and unrelated humans. They offer some communication, some awareness, some entertainment. But their cost is SO high. Honestly, if we just budgeted $50/mo for services which didn't harvest our data, we'd probably be ahead. And our services would be less twisted in favor of "fuck you" patterns.
Indeed, "fuck you" Facebook.
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.
Seems like if they did not have protections like this, another group of people would be complaining about easy FB makes it for nefarious actors to violate your privacy, etc. and how careless they are in not locking down access better.
So they don’t protect any data, they just leak it all. Then they hide it.
I hate the FU patterns as well, but there are so many lame aggregator sites scraping for viral content.
I would say FU patterns are: 80% trying to keep people in the walled garden ecosystem, 20% trying to make it hard for scrapers.
Other users could "follow" my brushstrokes, so when they land on the page, instead of implicitly running whatever code it finds there it just fetches the known-non-malicious parts. I.e. the cat pictures.
I'd totally pay $5/month if $4 of it went to people who are annotating the web in this way. You could get paid in accordance with how popular and trustworthy your brushstrokes are, and together we can fix the web.
I guess the goal would be UURL's, where the both the reference and the referent are uniform--rather than a uniform reference to a who-knows-what-this-site-will-do referent.
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?
If you're not on Firefox, then I don't know.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/facebookcontainer/
I'm not sure if it's built into some versions now?
It does it on my Windows computer but not my Linux laptop, and I don't remember explicitly installing this extension on either.
I sometimes use a VPS from a popular cloud provider as a proxy for my web browsing. I frequently get asked to "Prove I'm not a robot". This happens on all kinds of sites, including Youtube, Paypal, some government sites, etc. It is annoying enough, but Facebook as well as Instagram won't let me see _anything_ without logging in (which I don't). So can't even check the Lunch menu for a local restaurant on Facebook over this proxy.
My favorite is Google's captcha where they let visitors solve their machine learning classification problem by asking them to classify images.
I have no problem with private content but here it’s not even that : the content is shown then hidden.
Of course it’s their site, their rules. But it says a lot about the engineering of frustration and the respect they show to potential users.
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.
- Inflammatory title
- Low effort content
- An invitation to hate on a favorite HN target
https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official
Reddit on mobile is also beginning to require logging in to view certain pages, in which case you can use:
Or
I have CSS/JS injectors that do this for me already, I really fucking hate popups and scrolling impediments of any sort.
I hate this and also, I don't use their service - same for facebook.
Users were suddenly denied access to online banking, unless they agreed to switch all statement reporting from paper to electronic. This was a condition prior to being allowed to continue with the login; the option was given to refuse, but it was made clear that this choice meant losing access to online banking.
But, don't worry, the UI flow assured the user: once you log in you can set your statement reporting preferences.
Of course, it didn't show you what the current preferences are or save them anywhere!
I had just one or two things for which I had been getting paper statements, all else being electronic. I could not remember exactly which and since they didn't remember for me, I did the simplest thing and switched every single item to snail-mail paper statements.
Getting the user to resent you (even more) isn't how you bring about cooperation.
* {
overflow: auto !important;
}With a simple /etc/hosts update like that:
Several years without FB and its scripts anywhere. Never regret about such decision.
Imagine if this happened elsewhere in life. You go into a grocery store, you grab a cart, you get 5 feet inside, grab one item, and then you are immediately blocked by 8 security guards and interrogated for your name before you can continue. Would you stay in the store?
Just an FYI the author needed to remove the CSS attribute on the body? element "no-scroll"
I've noticed Instagram's A/B testing however only so far as it prevents users from seeing "too much" without logging in. The case OP mentions is the least fool proof as there are many images left on the page after you get rid of the obstacles (modal, dark modal screen covering page, and no scroll css attribute). The other more robust method I've seen involves Instagram only sending the amount of images to the browser they want you to see
The worst offense IMO is that even if you do take their bait to “use the app”, they punt you to the App Store page, losing the URL you were on in the process, so even though I have all of those apps installed, it’s not possible to click through from a Google result then open that same post in the app. At that point, I don’t try to search for the same thing in the app, I just convince myself that it’s not worth it and abandon any attempt to access that content. They can keep it.
100% close and go away.
There are also proxy websites that allow you to browse instagram without login, but I don't like third parties learning about my browsing.
https://mobile.twitter.com/XavierLava/status/108590014312636...
When I do this, some websites do the same thing, i.e. don't let me scroll down.
I think calling this the Fuck You pattern is entirely appropriate.
But why do you use Instagram to view cat pictures?
Just use google image search to view as many cat pictures you want. Yes, google also serve ads - but it doesn't prevent you from viewing images. And ads can be easily blocked with an ad blocker.
Social media, specially the FB family, is all about dark patterns. Avoid using them - at least for viewing cat pictures.
There's also an Android app available on F-droid for this purpose: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.austinhuang.instagrabber/
Instagram will probably notice and break/ban them eventually but meanwhile, this works.
Try this custom userstyle in a custom CSS plugin (like Stylus):
body,
html,
html body,
.overflow-hidden {
overflow: auto !important;
}
It just seems like the most obvious basic common sense approach?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=instagram+viewer&t=ffab&atb=v126-1...
I've done the same thing with my browser and had sites figure out ways to keep me out. I just quit going there.
Didn't really give it much thought though, aside from asking myself "why am I such a tightass?".
Its part of a social network, if everyone was lurking it would just be a bunch of creepers. The product shows who viewed a post/story/reel etc and can't do that if you arent logged in.
(It's an intentionally public page about cat pictures, by the way, so it wouldn't be creepy for anonymous internet users to look at. It's only private Instagram pages that would be creepy in that sense.)
Letting you browse public content for 5 seconds before asking you log in is a "fuck you" pattern.
A dark pattern is trying to trick you into something silly.
Like buying something extra you didn't even know about.
This is just them saying 'login' and when you try to get around it, they're saying 'login' again.
I can't buy anything from Amazon without an Amazon account.
Can't use Facetime without two Apple accounts and two Apple devices.
If it really matters, make an account. If it doesn't really matter, then it doesn't really matter.
Think of web as a preview experience and mobile is the complete product.
It's common on many websites.
Ublock doesn't remove that rule but you can add it for each site.
F you for treating bots better than humans, linkedin.
I am to sleepy and this idea is stupid as hell ...
I’m sad about that.
I call this solution “fuck you too”.
How about free trials with credit card submissions and having difficult “cancel subscription” work flows?
You're encouraged to try it.
They are banned on all my devices (and traffic to/from their shitty endpoints is actively banned on my networks). I call this the "fuck you too" pattern.
Do I like this behaviour - No. But am I not surprised from a company, as mentioned, hasn't exactly supported anything web/open over its existence. I mean look at the never-resolved feud between twitter and instagram that means you stillllll can't post pics to twitter from Instagram or see preview cards on twitter of IG links etc --all because of a spat like 10 years ago.
But not posting nerdy rants about how I have to use bots and shit to workaround logging into a site I am apparently interested in the content of, but don't want to actually use or participate in.
Hence, as the author tried to circumvent it, they probably got IPbanned.
Microsoft's old playbook, just done better, and against the web at large.
Instagram's free of charge.