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Comment by SeanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic, but this website has some pretty crazy dark-patterns!

I went to the user's profile and right-clicked their photo. The contextmenu action is intercepted and replaced with a custom menu mimicking the browser's context menu. This fake context menu has the option "Open in Window". I click it. The website doubles-down on the charade and opens a "popup" inside itself - maximize/minimize icons in the action bar and everything.

It's the sort of thing you're taught phishing websites do to lure you into inputting your credentials into the wrong website.

https://i.imgur.com/lMiH3uH.png

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That's not a "dark pattern", it's just the result of of making the browser a OS and giving websites free rein of anything inside.

There is an aptly named browser extension to help combat this called StopTheMadness [1] , I recommend it.

Let's try to save the term Dark Patterns for the things that that deserve it, where the goal is to steer the user to make a unfavourable choice at the benefit of someone else.

https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

Firefox has a built-in method to get around context menu blocking by holding down the "shift" key while right clicking. I wish there were similar built-in overrides for things like blocking selecting text and copying, you commonly find stuff like this on corporate blogs or lyric sites where they want to "protect" their text content, of course you can just get around it by opening the page HTML and copying from there.

TIL. Thanks for this tip.

There is!

You move on to another website.

Voting with your feet is the strongest veto we have as web users.

I think this is happening because we as a collective are using advertisement based websites with traffic funneled to them by advertisement network operators.

Don’t let Googles algorithms decide what website you visit. Find alternate search engines and indexes.

I still feel this is a dark pattern. It's attempting to keep engagement on the website and to prevent direct linking of underlying images. Direct linking images costs the server without providing sufficient marketing. You see a lot of different techniques employed to prevent image interaction. This is one such option.

The fact that they then implemented "Open in Window" rather than allowing the browser to handle it means they know they're affecting functionality the user wants and are choosing to provide an option that isn't the browser default. Why? It's certainly to their benefit. If it were to the user's benefit then it would be standard across all websites rather than provided by the browser by default.

It's not a website anymore. It's a web app.

Might be related: I recently joined a company using Flutter web and notices similar stuff. Yes, the software engineers are wondering: "Why do we reimplement browser stuff?" But the business ask for it and we don't hear complaints from the end user.

"We don't hear complaints" != "there are no complaints"

Even trying to long press and copy some of the domain names that the author mentioned, was impossible. They've (who is they here?) implemented a context menu that interpreted the wrong link and offers to open it in a new tab.

On Firefox shift+right-click forces regular contextmenu

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