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Comment by gnyman | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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.

TIL. Thanks for this tip.

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.

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