The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)
cedwards.xyz
cedwards.xyz
GlassDoor did the same scroll-locking tactic (so an element zapper like Ublock Origin's wouldn't resolve the issue), instructing me to register or sign in to view any information. So I registered an account. Only, it still covered the screen and locked the scroll position, now telling me that I needed to leave a review for my current employer if I wanted to use the website for information gathering.
I find this particularly egregious, particularly for a company ostensibly founded around the notion of transparency and freedom of information (in regards to workplace compensation and culture). Evidently one is only entitled to make informed decisions after first experiencing the potential consequences of making uninformed decisions. Joyous.
Suffice to say I will not be using GlassDoor in the future.
Perhaps you'd like to join as a disgruntled GlassDoor employee?
This is not a dark pattern any more than giving a company like GlassDoor this information is a dark deed.
Honesty would mean telling the user upfront that the info they are looking for will be available after the set up an account and leave a review of their current employer.
When I looked up an employer I’d joined recently, I gave a review as someone who had just started. Their most recent negative review was quite negative and easily traceable to the person who had most recently quit and was on their last days.
So reviews are either dishonest or not anonymous when they have to be recent; this pattern appears to incentivise some degree of pollution or self-incrimination.
The review I gave before leaving was much more informed and honest, in part because I timed it and in part because there were several people with my profile leaving at the same time.
But whether it's a dark pattern is not what makes this particular instance egregious in my mind. I find it egregious as it places me in a situation where I have to either lie by providing false information and misusing the platform, or make an uninformed decision I may not otherwise have made to consequences that could potentially have been avoided were the decision in fact informed.
Consider a workplace culture rife with harassment. That's a harmful situation to enter. Reading reviews of an employers workplace culture on a platform like GlassDoor isn't going to make it impossible to encounter such environments, but it will make it easier to avoid them. But I'm forbidden from doing so because I cannot trade for it. As I indicated in my original comment, the implication here is that I'm only entitled to seek safe work environments if I can afford to pay for the privilege.
Per their own About page:
> Every day, we’re inspired by a vision to make positive workplace change through radical transparency. Through the products we make and the communities we create, we’re breaking down barriers that lead to discrimination, pay gaps, and toxic work environments.
This tactic of demanding upfront payment (in the form of a review) is antithetical to their stated goal and philosophy. As a user I think my other complaints are fair, but my offense, as you say, comes from this.
Anyway, just wanted to say thanks.
I was impressed at their commitment to dickery.
Array.from(document.body.querySelectorAll('html,body, body > *, body > * > *')).forEach(e=>e.style.overflow='default!important')
You’ll cave eventually, they know this.
Even when you know the true distribution (in which case why ask for more data) you can only remove outliers. But outliers exist.
There are techniques for when someone enters many numbers but I don't know any for 1 number.
That and a hundred other data points help create a ML model that reliability identifies illegitimate activity.
I caved in years ago and registered. Only to find out that the site was still horribly broken and it was impossible to get any information out of it. Truly a 'Fuck You' pattern.
Sure you can refuse to use Facebook and Glassdoor and Amazon and Google account authentication, but then you might as well grow a beard, puton some rags and go live in the woods as a hermit. World doesn't change coze some guy decides to stop talking showers because the water company is an abusing asshole.
The correct response is not to flee from them but fuck them back. I have a throwaway Google account that I use for this purpose. Glassdoor wanted me to register an account? Sure! Review my employer? You bet! I worked as a Principal Engineering Architect at Google making 1.5 million base plus bonus.
There's no requirement to provide the pay stub so I can and will dream up something. And I get the feeling that most figures I see reported by these sites are just that: delirious.
This is a bizarrely extreme form of black and white thinking, and not one I understand. Most of what we do in life isn't about changing the world, it's about managing our experience of it.
Few people are deluded enough or so engaged with self-love that they think their ideas and behavior are world-changing.
So don't have a defeatist attitude all the time, but once in a while try to actually have an impact. We will all be much better for it.
...And everyone walking around with an attitude like that is exactly why the world is as shitty as it is. The world is the sum of all of us. Think better of yourself and your time, and do everything you can to make life harder for those that would try to sell you on cheapening it, and you just might make the world a better place for everyone.
Unless you're very wealthy, very violent, or very committed to a cause (often to the point of entering politics or raising/moving money) your individual contribution is negligible.
An uneducated mechanic and his wife decide to give an unwanted child a home, dad builds a workbench for his son and teaches him how to use tools to break, fix and build things, inadvertently setting in motion the beginning of Apple.
Sure, there were other events Jobs parents had absolutely no control over, like those that led Bill Fernandez to the same school as Jobs.
But it is undeniable that without Paul and Clara Jobs adopting Steve there would be no Apple and the world would look completely different today.
So through our small, individual contributions we can definitely nudge the world to follow a particular direction, and if enough people do it, it is expected that once in a while one of us actually ends up changing the world.
I think it's interesting that despite thousands of years of existence, we as a species still can't do better at "quickly and accurately evaluate how well you'd match an employer/group" than "do you know someone at the group that honestly says it's good."
It's slightly better on Chrome but some of the above issues still persist.
the conclusion would be that us devoted FF users are all happy employees. Considering usage stats I'd say that tracks.
javascript:var r="html,body{overflow:auto !important;}"; var s=document.createElement("style"); s.type="text/css"; s.appendChild(document.createTextNode(r)); document.body.appendChild(s); void 0;
I bookmarked the script and click it whenever uBo blocks the site popup but not enabling the scroll. It works most of the time in my quite long usage.
Though I agree that we have a bigger problem than the scrolling on hand.
I think they removed my review, but they still let me in afterwards.
For example, for the daily beast, I set the debugger to pause on subtree changes. They remove the article from the dom when you scroll, and the debugger stops that before that happens.
Other sites I just remove the modal popup from the dom and disable the class that prevents scrolling. Some sites I open in archive.is.
What I want is a browser that remembers all these fixes for me and applies them automatically.
But, let's be frank here: They monetize you and me, us, the users because 1 they can and, 2, they have to.
Yes, they have to.
Imagine they provided access to their platforms for free. How would the shareholders (your retirement funds included) respond when less profit was made?
You see, we view them as public utilities, as a shared park or public garden or nice riverside picnic area, but they are not anything like that at all. They are companies that have a responsibility to the paying user, that is to the advertisers who want to track you as a viewer, to know if/how much their ads work.
The closest thing to a "public utility" on the internet to this day is email, good old SMTP/IMAP email. It's open, everybody who's not yet on Hotmail's or Gmail's spam-list can use it, and you can even develop an app for it yourself if you so wish.
The closest thing to a social open protocol is: the fedi-verse on Mastodon or the relay-based Nostr system. You don't want to be the product of a mega corp? Try these open platforms instead...
Investor-backed platforms offer the illusion of "free public utility," but they were never meant to serve us in the first place. Their goal has always been to cash out.
they sure had a good trajectory before huffman fucked that up and bought moonshot projects and hired 2,000 employees and did everything possible to mess up that trajectory so they could pump and dump for an ipo.
Nope. They chose to.
Do some incentives encourage them in this direction? Sure. That's different than them "having to". Actual people are doing this, and they actually made choices toward maximum exploitation of human weakness. They are morally responsible for those choices.
I agree that people should leave those platforms and move to open solutions. That would be some good choice-making. But that possibility doesn't diminish the responsibility of the monetizers for their choices.
I feel like we as internet users are a big part of the math here.
With very few exceptions (mostly arising out of expedience), I do not pay for software. I honestly do wish the dynamics of the software ecosystem were different, so that there would be any software worth paying for. But the harsh reality is that there is a stark divide between software that represents my interests aka Libre software, and proprietary software for which it's only a matter of time of when it will betray my interests, if it isn't already doing so out of the gate. And if I'm using software that is set up to betray me, such that I have to sandbox it to mitigate it (isolated VMs etc), then why the hell should I also be paying for the privilege of that hostile relationship?
This is the underlying divide that the user surveillance industry attempts to arbitrage. Startups offer what appears to be convenient software that mostly represents users, but then once users become dependent on it, cranks up the abuse and extraction. Instead of the shareware nag screen, it's a nag dopamine drip of habituated dependency.
One of the things that really needs to happen is anti-trust enforcement to stop this bundling of hosted services with software. Any company offering a service should be required to make that service available in a programmatic way to every authorized user, such that users can always use "third party" clients. This would drastically curtail the current bait and switch dynamic.
Speaking of opportunity costs - yes, you do pay an opportunity cost to find, set up, and learn software that represents your interests. But then down the line, you continually save on opportunity costs from hostile software not continually having you over a barrel. Because while you're correct that the value comes from using the software, outsourcing the operation of it is a trap that will continually try to capture more and more of the surplus value you'd otherwise gain from using it.
At a certain point, who cares? A company can exist indefinitely with any level of long term profit. They don't need to constantly be maximizing profit in the short term which is where these "fuck you" patterns generally arise. We have designed a system that has convinced everyone to never be satisfied or say they have enough. But there is no reason why that needs to be the case. Companies don't need to grow every quarter forever. It is both impossible and ends up degrading the lives of both employees and customers.
A privately owned company can do as it (that is: its owner(s) without state oversight) wishes.
--
If you want me to comment on the philosophy or morals of it though, I suppose I think 'meh, whatever' - a private company is free to spring up and compete, free of public shareholders and free to maximise customer satisfaction instead. Of course it's easy to say 'free to spring up', and really there are all sorts of barriers to entry in many almost monopolistic markets, but that's rather a separate issue I think - it's just as much an issue for any less customer-oriented, perhaps public or wannabe public, company trying to compete.
They only have to do what the shareholders demand if the shareholders actually vote to make them.
The meme of the "fiduciary duty" meaning that profit must be maximized at all costs has been debunked so many times by now it's really not funny.
The "fiduciary duty" rule that actually exists simply means (as I understand it) that execs can't legally enrich themselves at the company's expense beyond their agreed-upon compensation, without the approval of shareholders/the board.
So no; "every for-profit company" should not and does not have to take steps to maximize profit at the expense of their employees, their customers, and the public at large. Frankly, many of the ways they currently do this either are already or should be illegal, and are definitely immoral and detrimental to a healthy and functioning society and economy.
Companies changed up the way they did things starting in 2008 in order to survive, but sticking to that short term panic survival tactic is coming to a head. They've done almost everything possible in order to ensure growth, but the public just can't handle it and things are starting to collapse under the weight of near maximum monetization.
In that context, "profit" is the idea that earnings above cost are distributed to shareholders. The stock market mechanism then guarantees that companies unconcerned with that sort of profit will see someone gobble up the shares once they dip low enough (and they will), install a new board of directors, and dismantle the company for parts or some other endeavor-ending inevitability.
From a stock price perspective, it will just be too tempting.
Nonprofits are disallowed from distributing earnings above cost or any other profit mechanism. While they might have their own set of pathologies, they're immune to the one I've described, to the best of my understanding.
It seems almost impossible to run a public company without having the place be taken over by bean counters these days.
There are probably quite a few ways such a company would be vulnerable to takeover.
There are all sorts of ways to defend against a hostile takeover like this. I already mentioned Zuckerberg having majority control of the voting shares despite the company being public. There was also the attempted takeover of Netflix a decade ago that was prevented with a poison pill to issue more shares.
Companies are not mindless money machines, they're run by people who make decisions. I feel like post-80s Americans totally lost the concept that a company can exist for more than five years and without constantly chasing a buyout or merger for an easy exit.
We need more founders to start companies with the intention of keeping them going 10, 20, 30+ years. Just my two cents.
Instagram being a startup, their user's goals were aligned with their own while they were growing. The happier the user the better the growth metrics, the better they are playing the VC game. Now that they need to be solvent, they need to balance two goals, user happiness and profit per user. If you aren't contributing to ad rev or data acquisition you're no longer aligned with their goals, so log in or bugger off is the message we get.
I think there is something to be said about how a business will form as well, it's unlikely a business that formed all it's goals and policies in a glut of money and a growth mindset, never having to make the dollars make sense, will suddenly pivot to profitability without turbulence once the bills come due.
It’s just more “in your face” now.
In todays terms the equivalent would be an invite to a closed Gillette page/group/discord that has exclusive videos from the latest influencers (or whatever teenagers like and talk about).
For example OOP could get their daily cat based dopamine fix from a myriad of online sources, most open or easily bypassed but they want to see this one particular cat which is behind Meta’s wall and requires additional payment (in terms of data) from them.
I tried Googling this, and the last article I found was from 2019...
Imagine shared park or public garden owners that buys all other shared parks in country and actively prevent creation of new public parks. And then started to put loud and bright advertisement boards on every tree, near every gil and on every picnic place. And punish you for wearing headphones.
Maybe that is side effect of age. I certainly do not see YouTube that way. Maybe growing up with it is different.
And when they started it seemed like a fools errand—copyright issues, giant costs (OMG, so much money down the drain), no real way to monetize at all at the time.
In other words: giant heap of risk. I had a friend that was a competitor to them (but was more on top of copyright issues, thus their downfall). This was not for the faint of heart, and the exact opposite of a public utility.
Now everyone wants everything for free, but won’t give anything in return. And they also want market returns on their stocks, 401ks, etc at the same time.
That being said, Meta/Google could implement a guaranteed privacy-first, ad-free option for something like $10-20 a month to give people the option to be a “customer” instead of “product”.
And as you said there is the whole mastodon/pixelfed/lemmy network that people could use, although many mastodon instances seem to be running into financial problems lately.
A premium model also eventually creates two separate products. The free product is (at first) built for the needs of the users to attract them and get enough volume to support an advertisement model. Then, it is gradually built and focused toward the needs of the advertisers. That gradually shifts over time once the company has captured the market on both sides (this is a two-sided marketplace after all) to optimizing for the needs of the company. It’s harder to achieve this final end goal if you have a product that is optimized for the needs of the user, because you don’t have a two-sided marketplace anymore that can be exploited on both sides. Collecting money from businesses (advertisers) in bulk and providing them support can be easier and less costly than managing millions of premium users and supporting them.
My question is, what’s your solution?
The shareholders/stock market (largely represented by the board) will replace any CEO who doesn’t employ patterns (dark, fu, whatever) to maximize revenue. And private companies can’t raise capital easily nor can they give Options/RSUs to employees.
We are in the current state due to market equilibrium driven by people’s willingness to pay, and since I personally don’t like meta or Zuck I use Reddit on Brave + Mastodon + Dev.to for my social media dopamine hits. OOP could do the same.
I don’t know how old you are but growing up in the 90s I certainly remember (parents) paying for many of these things we now take for granted. The net negative result is that independent journalism is dead.
Legislation around mergers and acquisitions. Enforcement of existing anti-trust legislation.
you say that like we don't all know it already. Most readers of this site likely work at these places.
No kidding they have to do this, if they exist. Their existence is the problem, whatever the cause.
We can start with a law that applies to all social media systems that have more than 1M users.
Either you pay or you are the product.
You either control the software, or you are the product. No amount of Danegeld will buy you freedom.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/10/22323790/lg-oled-tv-...
Don't let them. No FB. No WhatsApp. No Instagram. I take entire IP blocks assigned to Meta and traffic to/from these IPs is simply dropped. I take their domains and nullroute them too, because I can.
Once you do that, you become harder to monetize.
This denial of responsability is a cancer on society. Poor devs, they can do no better because their manager ordered them to. Poor managers, they can do no better because they must reach their OKRs. Poor CxOs, they can do no better because they must please the board. Poor board, who must maximize the returns of the shareholders. Poor shareholders, who just want their retirement funds.
In your mind, who should bear the cost of building and maintaining large services like Instagram?
The whole system rewards maximization of profits, and all else is an up hill battle.
When I criticize Google, or some other company, I am not forgetting that they are motivated by making money.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok... We can easily live without them. Our lives might actually be better without them. Why are we spending time debating the ethics of these services? It is like fast food - just avoid.
When entities like banks, hospitals, insurance companies etc do shady shit, THAT is a problem. Those are necessary services, social media is not
I’m always surprised by just how insidious these private platforms are.
Eg I’ve seen signs in a local forest saying “dangerous work” would be announced only on the Forestry England facebook page.
Similarly, I’ve seen government bodies try to use WhatsApp as their official communication channel.
I’m not sure how publicly funded bodies sign off on exclusively using private platforms for coms but it happens and will probably require legal action to stop.
There is at least one college that I know of, where every announcement is made on Facebook, and Facebook only. Students are forced to have a FB account.
It is just pure laziness. There are some governments (Europe mostly) that are attempting legislation (banning Google Analytics on gov sites, for example). But law is slow to catch up, incomplete and ineffective.
This is not a problem that can be solved completely by law.
You've hit the nail on the head there. There's no great conspiracy here, it's just lazy people using what they know to get the job done.
The great shame is that IMHO it's a terrible outcome. I don't want a Facebook account but I still want to be able to take part in society on open platforms.
What I meant was: your and mine and everybodies retirement fund has shares of FB and Google in their portfolio, meaning, when we retire, we reap the benefits of the profits these companies made.
As others pointed out: The elite who own most of the share profit much more, of course.
Yes, read some Ted Kaczynski.
If your answer is non-zero, maybe you would have a point, but let's be honest, statistically it's highly unlikely that you do.
Poor pnt12, wants people to work for them for free, and insult them while you're at it.
Plans are described on Google's website.
I think this is an unproductive way to think about problems of collective action, which are capital H hard. We have three known mechanisms for solving collective action problems:
1. Culture
2. Changing incentives of existing actors (laws, taxes, etc.)
3. Creating new institutions with different incentives
No one really knows how to influence (1) very strongly on the scale of a decade. The others require government willing to govern in a very active way, the Republican movement has largely crippled this capability in the US over the past 40 years, roughly since Gingrich took the helm. (this is not meant as an attack per se, I only intend to say that the Republicans have been effective at achieving their stated goals, and like all political agendas it has a shortcoming like the one here)
Once upon a time there was a preference option to disable the popup, though it would periodically become unchecked on its own. Then the option to disable it disappeared. Then the popup started appearing not just on page load, but after a period of time while you’re partway down the page reading, instantly jumping your scroll position to the top and making you lose your place. The ultimate effect has been that I swore to never, ever install their stupid app, and I spend way less time there on my phone, which is probably a good thing anyway.
It gives me:
"This is mature content and may not be appropriate for certain viewers. To continue, use the app to confirm you're over 18 and browse anonymously."It's really striking though that all of this hate for these terrible dark patterns invariably ends in a statement like, 'leaving would honestly improve my life'. These companies have become so ingrained and good at attention economy that most people feel like it makes their lives worse, and yet also cannot stop. I have a feeling this whole social media ship could go the way of the opium wars is we don't change course soon
You don't even need these extensions, you can set up a redirect rule in uBlock Origin (if you trust that).
I sent these extensions to remedy the stated need to manually rewrite the URL, I did not say that using these extensions is a better solution than Reddit turning off the Fuck You pattern.
I'm well aware that the reason you want me to download your app has nothing at all to do with the reason you're claiming, and as a user it just pisses me off.
It's very profitable, and it's more profitable the more you destroy the lemon.
It takes next to no effort to throw your menu as a photo on google maps for example.
You’re free to not do it, but the market will push you out in favor of businesses that do.
I personally don’t expect anything. I’ll just not go to places that don’t have information. That’s the market in action.
We sometimes get some customers who hate the QR's, or claim not having phone/signal/whatever.
I'll lend them my phone to check...
Restaurants already source their materials and equipment from other suppliers. They don't grow their own food; they don't need to print their own menus.
This defeats the whole purpose of a restaurant, which is to be convenient. If I wanted to be inconvenienced I would just buy groceries and cook them at home.
I'd add that the whole purpose of a restaurant isn't convenience for the customer. That's the purpose of going there for many customers, which should of course be honored. But the purpose of them for restaurateurs are generally on the order of "make an enjoyable living", which involves convenience for them too. As with almost anything social, the outcome must balance the desires of all involved.
Come on, you can get one for under $100
Each day, they had new paper menus ( https://menucuisine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Fish-... - note the top)
Their menu is now also at https://order.online/store/the-fish-market-palo-alto-723242/...
I'm not sure if they still have paper menus or what the expense of those menus were.
QR code links to menus are bad, sure. I'd still rather eat at ten places that have those than one place that has you.
If my making a scene makes other customers upset, then it's working. I know businesses hate it when people do this, and that's why I know it's an effective tactic. The whole point of the protest is to sabotage the business by making everybody else in the room upset.
Obviously a YT vid doesn't hack anything, but it does scare the companies out of complacency when it's trivial to swap to real malware.
You can be doing all this nonsense to an owner serving you.
And because the premise of a restaurant not having printed menus available is so absurd, I think I'd be compelled to stick around for a few minutes loudly insulting their business acumen before leaving (as I have done before at bars that didn't accept cash!) I consider this a service done for those who think like me but aren't brave enough to speak out themselves.
People do not care at all whatsoever about their privacy being invaded, generally.
Maybe you won't call the guy "Karen", but I'd be very surprised if you approved of the situation... Unless, of course, you think that insulting low paid workers loudly is something good and to be proud of.
That's okay. It's also okay to prefer a paper menu (I'm the same).
> I don't intend to learn how
I mean, no one is forced to learn, but knowing stuff is not a bad thing. It takes less time to read a QR code than to type that reply.
> I'd be compelled to stick around for a few minutes loudly insulting their business
What happened to calmly explain your position and then leave without giving that business your money? You don't have to be an asshole to the person serving you... in fact, they probably don't have a say on the matter.
Not to mention that the average person doesn't understand how online menus can be a problem. Most don't understand how tracking works, for example. So when you leave, things go back to normal because that was just one of those customers.
Menus on QR codes is a problem. People that behave like you are also a problem. I dislike both.
> "If someone is nice to you but rude to the waiter, they are not a nice person."
Increasingly commonly, that's a "nope". If I don't have an internet-connected device capable of dealing with a QR code about my person, eating out is no longer for me. Perhaps it's time to go back to the old people's home, the nurse has been searching for hours.
It is annoying when a transaction that for ages has been all-paper gets bumped into the panopticon.
What kind of dystopian city do you live in? QR codes are on the decline again¹, fortunately.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/may/23/off-the-menu-wh...
I'm an old guy with bad eyes I'm not going to try to read your menu on a 5" phone screen in a dim restaurant.
Reading a _paper_ menu in a dim room is a miserable experience, but you can zoom in as much as you want on a phone, and you control the brightness of it, and don’t have to angle the piece of paper to catch as much light as possible?
Not like they can see where the camera is pointing, let alone locate the code in the first place.....
Having a braille option is ideal, but not every vision impaired person can read braille and it puts a significant burden on every establishment. Readers provide a great alternative to that that restores a lot of autonomy to blind people.
Why have ADA at all? Just have every disabled person wait for an able-bodied person to just help them with whatever it's they need, right?
Since your standard seems to be one of jumping on people and painting with a broad brush - I'm left wondering if you've ever been to a restaurant? It's generally an interactive social process where you're repeatedly prompted if you're ready to order, often with the goal of speeding up your visit. Many times other people at your table will be ready but you won't be, so you'll say things like "Okay, but I'll go last" accepting a little bit of unnecessary stress to help you decide. It's a lot of social give and take compared to the unilaterality of say message board commenting.
Back to the objective topic - sure, I do agree with the idea that there should be as many options as possible, web menus are a necessity in this day and age, and putting a link to the web menu at the restaurant only increases choice.
But the topic under discussion is restaurants deprecating paper menus in favor of websites only. A theory was put forth this is due in part to ADA compliance - presumably due to some perverse logic that if there is a printed menu there also has to be a braille version of the paper menu, but if there is no printed menu then a braille version isn't required. So the existence of web menus isn't really being questioned (I'll acknowledge having fallen into the incorrect comparison as well). Rather what is being questioned is whether it makes sense to deprecate the overwhelmingly most popular option (printed paper menu) due to questionably-inferred legal requirements to have a third type of accessible menu (braille) in addition to web menus and verbal interaction.
Because it sure doesn't seem like you know the first thing about the issue....
And when we don't actually know what we're talking about what are we supposed to do?
Really, there's not a single thing that can be said to make it less stupid.
https://www.afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-technolog...
They don't put them in the same spot always and there's often a no smoking or other stick as well, often several.
I could go on but really....
https://www.afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-technolog...
you'll lose out on special events and deals, but that's probably an okay compromise.
though there are some special cases where their hours on social media are more accurate than maps...
1. The increasingly high number of sites that will show a blank page when I disable Javascript.
2. The increasingly high number of sites that will show a blank page when I disable cookies even if I have no intention to login and often the site doesn't even involve any kind of membership.
3. Sites that refuse me their content because my browser "is no longer supported" but wil gladly open up to me as soon as I tell my browser to lie about its brand or version.
4. Oh, almost forgot! Cloudflare.
I agree centralization is bad, but with Cloudflare (compared to Google), their main business model is this specific service (CDN, security, privacy, etc.). If they don't accomplish it, their business will die.
That being said, if such accusations turn out to be true, then the reputation of Cloudflare should quickly degrade over time and people will stop using it.
Seriously, no honor among thieves! :p
[0] https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
I can report a general positive impact on 98% of my searches. In the remaining 2% of cases (where I'm typically looking for some hyper-specific image I stumbled upon months or years ago), I can temporarily disable the filter with a single click.
Adding domains to the list is also as simple as clicking "Block this site" next to a result. In theory, if you diligently block lots of crappy websites, you could gather a collection of domains that de-crapifies your searches extensively. But for me, results from Pinterest and Quora were the biggest gripes by far, and this has worked beautifully just for that.
You can even subscribe to blacklists created by others, although I haven't explored that option so far. And your lists and/or settings can sync across devices with Google Drive. Available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
* I'm not affiliated to the project in any way, just promoting what's, in my eyes, quite a useful browser extension.
Or maybe it is just me and Google profiling algorithms finally realized that I don't like Pinterest results.
It comes off as extreme and insulting to a regular user, but it is also one of the few methods that scrapers can’t trivially dodge (it’s fairly easy to maintain a roster of IPs, but that is merely easy, while e.g. changing your user agent to pretend to be a different browser is trivial).
The above is obviously my words and not from a direct quote, but I am using that strategy - for me Facebook is great for finding things that happens around here and so I visit it for a few minutes a couple times a week. Sadly most of my friends are on messenger, so I have that installed on my phone.
I haven't seen a need for Instagram, so I don't use it. I used to use it as a strictly photo posting place, but I stopped that hobby.
This is not how you should do customer retention. This is fraud. You are making intentionally difficult pathways for your customers to leave you so that you can report falsely propped up retention number to your investors, Thirty Madison. If you IPOd today, I would short the shit out of you.
This is why I reported Thirty Madison to the FTC in a consumer trade complaint and it is why I notified their investors of potential fraud over LinkedIn.
Thirty Madison is committing fraud against their investors, in my opinion and you should absolutely stay away from them as a consumer.
Similarly Instagram can only get away with this behavior because of their level of following as a social media platform. So many people use it that people want to use it to follow others, and will consequently put up with this bullshit, and consequently to they can get away with whatever they want because 'fuck you', people will keep coming anyway.
Unfortunate, but not sure what lessons can be taken from it for other players in the market, since (fortunately) few other platforms are in a position to get away with this kind of thing.
contacting support used to work after a few days, but not recently.
But the 'fuck you' monopolistic behavior will work only up to the point where you annoy enough people. It is an extremely non-linear thing, and nobody never has any idea of how much further you can go, or even how long you can keep it the same.
Last year (I think) Twitter started showing a login/registration popup as soon we started scrolling. Not as bad, but the popup wasn't dismissible (now it is), so for a while I also stopped clicking on Twitter links.
Reddit also hides some subs on mobile and requires us to install the app... that same sub is available on old.reddit.com (or the now discontinued i.reddit.com).
I started using extensions that redirect these services to better front ends. Twitter → Nitter, Reddit → Old Reddit or Teddit/Libreddit, etc. I do the same on my phone (Android and Firefox, I don't think you can do the same on iOS).
As a person who avoids Meta products for the most part, I still benefit from them greatly. I pay $0 and get a lot of conveniences. I do agree that it's not a nice feeling that they own the things I may post, but it's the deal that gets us what's app, facebook and instagram with near unlimited access to really nice social networking tools.
I similarly pay for YouTube premium because I don't want adds. I enjoy hours of video content ad free - often watching it more than I'd watch netflix or whatever other streaming service.
I agree that they're monetizing user content, but they're also providing access to compelling and often high quality content for free.
Nothing quite says "hemorrhaging MAU," like dark patterns to get people to login, and "urgent account information" emails to get those same logins. Someone should take a hard look at those numbers, as I'd suspect they're a bit soft.
Like, if IG forced you to login to see anything, you might dislike that, but it wouldn't feel manipulative.
TikTok has a much more elegant solution to this problem (while still being a nightmare for bots/scrapers), with ByteDacne moving bot checks to the client with a mixture of proof of work and fingerprinting.
probably bots have a way to bypass this.
The correct thing to do is to acknowledge the relationship they have expressed by their distain for you. That relationship is adversarial, other. It’s “you’re nothing to me” if you’re nothing to them they probably oughta be nothing to you.
For me “fuck you” patterns are a signal you should have no relationship with that company.
As are: nag forever patterns and hard nudges (a hard nudge is a shove, I don’t like being shoved — google maps uses a hard nudge to force login so they can bypass US data privacy rules. Thanks, but no thanks)
Delete your account, add to your pihole block list and use wireguard to teleport your mobile home so you benefit from that while out and about.
You’ll be surprised at how liberating it feels to be able to forever sever ties with products that express “fuck you” patterns.
There's some kind of shady black market for Instagram scrapers that bypass the hard wall the OP describes and publish the content with their own ads injected. I can't vouch for anything about these sites other than the fact that they do work. I highly recommend using noscript or ublock at the very least before checking them out.
There are likely others, these are just the ones I'm personally aware of.
They definitely attempt to detect frequent visits and circumvention of their walls to do harder blocks after. When they decided my account should be locked every visit to a business page started 404ing or something similar.
Scroll down, click "See more Jobs"...
'fuck you' pattern reveals itself :)
Most likely. IG has pretty effective fraud detection heuristics and you probably appeared as a bot due to UEBA deviation.
If they were just trying to wrangle a user into a simple adnetwork proposition, _why can't they do that with a webapp_.
It's because they want far more privacy invasive features.
Couldn't be happier with my decision.
This fuck you pattern feels like a variation of that trick so in my opinion it should be heavily penalized.
Regarding the block/redirect: technically they could have used the MutationObserver API to track your usage of the DevTools to remove the modal. Have had the same experience a while ago if I'm not misremembering. But I'd also assume they're just counting requests without login per IP, much simpler.
I mean, it is fine to complain, but I get where the company is coming from. They don’t make any money off those of us who block all their stuff. So, why do they want to do business with us?
I just refuse to deal with that kind of crap. I'm probably not the user they want on their platform and that's fine by me.
I guess more like signal.
The alternative will always be enshitification.
Recently, I got this treatment from Glassdoor, too. I've had a real account with GD, and had made some honest contributions in the past. I haven't made any contributions in a while, because I haven't had any. Now, what do I see when I go to look up something? An indismissable pop up that says "looks like you haven't contributed anything in a while. Make a contribution to continue browsing".
I didn't really wanted to, but now I'm going to get a burner account for GD, too.
Instagram and Twitter's login prompt might have been motivated by a desire to increase number of logged in users, and Twitter might have given up on that in recent months considering the increased ad load.
I made the account to look at a specific piece of content. Show me that content!!!
We're really good at holding a grudge
AND telling others why we have that grudge
Thus, we route around it, with some grumbling along the way.
I don't know if it was ever A/B tested, but AFAIK this feature has been enabled for all users (all IPs?) for years.
They're simply not part of my life.
That’s five more seconds than I ever got. I don’t have an Instagram account and can never look at any content. If someone sends me a link, it might render inside Messages but forget about trying to open it on the website.
Usually when sites show a modal they also set CSS on the html / body element to disable overflow scrolling, so you'd have to find and remove that too.
Say fuck you back. Don't use Instagram and other loginwalled software.
You're evil substack, I'm not going to give way to your shady tactics and login. I'd rather not read anything as a protest.
So now they implemented it on the back end too.
After all, why should they allow you to view the content on their servers?
In case you're misunderstanding what we're discussing here - the feature in question is https://developers.google.com/identity/gsi/web/guides/offeri... .
If you use extensions like Privacy Badger or other ads/tracking blocking extensions, it blocks that by default so you may not have seen this on the web, though if you use certain apps on mobile, you may still have seen it.
It looks slightly different than the one in your link, but no less annoying: https://i.imgur.com/GvIExQT.png
ITP 2.3 update a few years ago broke this feature, so on browsers with ITP - basically Safari and Firefox and Chrome on iOS - Google was essentially forced to change the UI, so that website owners implementing this feature now have the choice of either always displaying the unconditional dialog button like your screenshot, or not displaying at all on such browsers. Predictably, Google chose the default to be to display, and I would assume most website would not turn it off.
https://developers.google.com/identity/gsi/web/guides/itp seems to be their doc on this.
So both you and my original comment are conditionally correct. It works as I described on browsers without ITP 2.3, namely Chrome (except on iOS) and Edge (IIRC). On Safari and Firefox, it sounds like it would work as you described - I haven't tested this on those platforms yet myself but no reason not to trust the doc here.
Though to be fair, this might just be more Reddit incompetence.
grep '0\.0\.0\.0.*instagram' /etc/hosts | wc -l
387The term of art for "A/B testing" in the mental health industry is gaslighting.
Same reason why blacklist and whitelist, black hat and white hat. Dark != Bad.
Why?
I’m a coward to not allow not logged in user.
I’m a coward to not let Ollie have a day.
I’m a coward to not allow good UX judgement prevail.
Ah, but this is not what is happening. They do show content! It's just that basically any interaction whatsoever with this content immediately triggers the login prompt.
Meta likes tracking you even outside their own walled jail-platforms, too.
https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/17/facebook_admits_to_tr...
Remember Zuck was an open source bro who turned down M$ for $1M and ended up open sourcing Synapse. He built Wirehog, as a decentralized file sharing network.
I was attending TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 in NYC and personally heard Sean Parker speak proudly about how they “put a bullet in that thing” — because it threatened corporate profits and rent extraction.
Sean Parker learned not to mess with corporate profits, when his company Napster got sued into oblivion by the other “lock up the IP monopoly” industries — music and movies. MPAA and RIAA. So he started Plaxo and learned to be VC.
Then he brought Peter Thiel, the guy who seriously advocates “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. He gave Mark a lot of good advice and the VC industry turned him from an open source bro into a corporate golden boy who buys up the competition, the founders of which leave in disgust after their golden handcuffs are off (WhatApp, Oculus, and yes Instagram).
This isn’t an isolated story. Elon owns Twitter. Bezos owns Amazon. The nicer guys like Ohanian and Jack got out, after selling, though. And they all want decentralization now.
Moxie left WhatsApp and started an end-to-end encrypted messenger (Signal).
Also, hate the game, not the player. Bernie paying 100% taxes isn’t going to solve anything. Neither is a few people going vegan going to solve what happens on factory farms. We need an actual alternative that is good enough so people will switch. What the Impossible Burger is doing for meat eating, https://qbix.com can do for Big Tech exodus.
It happened 25 years ago, when the World Wide Web appeared, content creators very quickly left AOL, Compuserve and all those other walled gardens. In fact, FB, Google and Amazon could only come to exist because the Web was permissionless and didn’t extract rents! We need that again.
It’s other people’s content and they should make it available in places other than Meta.
All these Big Tech platforms should be DEMOTED to hosting trailers and teasers that link back to people’s sites where they host their own videos and community.
Why do you think people don’t just do that? Oh because the Big Tech companies have the infrastructure and no one stuck around long enough to build a good enough open source alternative, that’s why!
Until now … https://qbix.com/communities
No, the user doesn't know the price and isn't ever informed in clear terms about the consequences of using the site. Going with your analogy it's not payment, it's theft. We all know why Meta and others bury all the details in legalese somewhere in their terms of service - they know most users don't know how comprehensive and invasive the tracking is, and hope it stays that way.