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Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad we now have a name for this. If I may take a stab at a more formal, reusable definition of the Fuck You pattern:

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.

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Maybe that should be the Yanker pattern, since there are certainly many more scummy behaviours that merit the Fuck You label.

I suggest the Lucy pattern (as in the football running gag from Peanuts).

Oh, good reference! I like "Peanuts Pattern" myself.

Somehow Charles M. Schulz managed to perfectly capture the feeling of following a pinterest link from a search result, half a century before pinterest existed.

Tantalus pattern?

Brilliant name. We have a winner.

Great, now my boss is going to ask me to implement this.

Thanks.

Hopefully if we call it what it is and keep the name "Fuck You" pattern, any boss that wants to implement it will realize how user hostile it is. More likely, the MBAs figure out a more colorful name for it and every single app on the planet starts to have it.

Twitters new-ish feed refresh with out ask on mobile is a good example of this. While reading a tweet your feed will refresh shoving you anywhere between 10 and 100 tweets up on your feed. If I really wanted to see what I am reading I have to scroll back down through my already witnessed feed.

unless you're logged in, pinterest is only this, has some searches essentially 'SE-Owned' and has been doing this for ~7 years. They're the OG of this.

Pinttern?

Very well articulated. It's the digital equivalent of emotional blackmail.

Appwall? Subscribewall? Mailwall?

Millwall? A wall that wears you down until you comply?

That's already the name of a a soccer team[2] with the motto "No one likes us and we don't care"[3]. How poetic.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwall_F.C.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_one_likes_us,_we_don%27t_ca...

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