I had an experience like this today when I tried to use GlassDoor for the first time. As a student making my first ever job applications, I wanted to see what salaries and work environments were like at particular employers.
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.
This can be automated with stylish (or fork) or tampermonkey. I've used to run a userscript on every page to prevent it from intercepting ESC, thanks to squarespace making ESC navigate you away from the current page to the site login. Thankfully the site I used to visit is no longer hosted by squarespace and they seem to have gotten it together to stop intercepting it elsewhere.
You've experienced why Glassdoor is the opposite of useful. Ironically, I think this is actually the opposite of what Glassdoor was originally meant to achieve, and I still think the original creators had the best of intentions.
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."
They're getting sneaky about where the overflow:hidden is applied these days, and one site I encountered had JS that polled that attribute and reapplied it if it was modified.
Array.from(document.body.querySelectorAll('html,body, body > *, body > * > *')).forEach(e=>e.style.overflow='default!important')
Adjust number of levels as necessary. Adjust overrides as necessary. Array.from is probably overkill, but allows for more advanced queries like `e.parentNode.textContent.trim().toLowerCase().indexOf('sponsored')==0`
I've got a few different ways to handle these nag sites, but the annoying part is that I need to remember each separate approach for each site.
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.
Glassdoor is comically broken. It didn't even work with Firefox for months. You can't log in, sometimes you get stuck in a cloudflare authentication loop, random info tabs on company pages crash. It's so bad I don't even know if they have people working there, like they aren't aware of how non-functioning the website is.
It's slightly better on Chrome but some of the above issues still persist.
Your expectation was that this information was free, and you got offended when you realised they trade in information and you have to pay with giving some back?
This is not a dark pattern any more than giving a company like GlassDoor this information is a dark deed.
The dark pattern is not mentioning this requirement and instead position account creation as the only friction to see data, and then springing the new requirement after.
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.
Beyond not disclosing the requirement up front being a clear dark pattern, I'd think this is self-defeating. The only time I need Glassdoor is when I'm contemplating changing jobs. Leaving a review for my current employer feels extremely risky, as the no. 1 type of users of Glassdoor are HR departments.
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.
You've overlooked a key element of my complaint: I'm a student. I have never been employed in any capacity. Thus, I have no information with which to trade.
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.
I was about to say that levels blocks too but as long as you hit the "I've shared my salary" twice they let you through. Which I find acceptable since they depend so much on that a little friction is okay.
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.
It’s fairly trivial to detect bad data, especially when you know what good data looks like. And once you’re in, they can still get useful data even if you lied.
For one, how carefully did the user input information into fields. If you're making it up, it will be much faster and less hesitant than a legitimate entry.
That and a hundred other data points help create a ML model that reliability identifies illegitimate activity.
Sadly "giving up" on using "their" services is inconvenient to you a lot more than it's hurting them.
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.
> 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.
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.
>Few people are deluded enough or so engaged with self-love that they think their ideas and behavior are world-changing.
...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.
That's a remarkably moralistic and simplistic view that ignores the realities and mechanics of large-scale power. Simply LARPing as though we're world-changing with our banal existence isn't helpful, it's pure self-indulgence.
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.
Individual contributions may be negligible at a large scale in the short term but they have the potential for global impact if you give them enough time, not talking about a few years but generations.
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 feel the same burning hate like a thousand suns for FB/Meta, Google/YT and other platforms that monetize their users.
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...
It’s a Trojan Horse pattern, really. They give away the service for free membership with billions of VC until their competitors collapse or fade away, then they start becoming more aggressive with ads and/or charging for premium access which used to be free.
I think Nestlé wins the most egregious example; where they gave free baby formula in developing countries for just long enough for the mothers to stop producing milk and then started charging them for the right to feed their babies.
Did they stop? It used to be every guy got a razor for their 18th birthday, which was creepy as nobody even signed up for it(unsure about women?). Myself and all my classmates got one.
I tried Googling this, and the last article I found was from 2019...
Loss Leader is not the same economically as Dumping. Gillette is the former, VC-backed companies are the latter. Loss Leader tactics are sustainable in a competitive market, but Dumping is profit negative until someone (hopefully your competition) goes out of business.
Veering off topic, I started using safety razors for just as good a shave, for 10cents a blade. At ten cents each, I use a new blade every shave and it's so much nicer than a 2nd use top-of-the-line gillette.
Exactly! This is a strategy that works even for markets without network effects. It just gets even more amplified (and profitable) when network effects exist.
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.
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.
We can keep debating this all day long, nothing is going to change. The best thing to do is stop using these services.
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.
Similarly, I’ve seen government bodies try to use WhatsApp as their official communication channel.
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.
> This denial of responsability is a cancer on society
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)
Major institutional shareholders for most companies is a small cabal of financial institutions, like Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corp. The people in those institutions often known to interact with each other socially and their role is to protect the wealth, activities and identities of their clients.
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.
You can get a Google Workspace account, which is the counterpart service to Microsoft Office/365 just for comparison. You pay per user, unless you want a specific deal, then you go for Enterprise, which is not very likely at a 1 person workspace.
The idea that everyone involved in the economic system of app development simply lacks moral character is a pretty weak take. Most apps/companies exist within a capitalistic framework. They likely wouldn’t exist without early external capital providing upfront funding for R&D.
In your mind, who should bear the cost of building and maintaining large services like Instagram?
>How would the shareholders (your retirement funds included) respond when less profit was made?
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.
Exactly. You think Nintendo prioritizes quarterly growth at the expense of everything else? No.
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.
Startups are an interesting case since the incentives are not aligned to building long term businesses.
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.
A nonprofit that wasn't a publicly traded company would a viable alternative model. It wouldn't need to have the same insane up-and-to-the-right incentives and drive to toxic monetization.
It doesn't have to be a nonprofit. There is nothing wrong with turning a profit. The problem is when the company's only goal is ever-increasing profit and they are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of their employees, customers, and community to achieve it.
In the context you are using it, "profit" has a very specific meaning that's a little incongruent with what you're trying to say.
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.
Isn’t it possible to maintain ownership among founders and initial investors and maintain a minority share (<50%) of public stock? Although there’s nothing wrong with staying entirely private either.
It seems almost impossible to run a public company without having the place be taken over by bean counters these days.
> 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.
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.
This is relatively new behaviour that only showed up around fifteen years ago, during the crash. Before then publicly traded companies such as DuPont or IBM would settle for a very gradual increase if it meant they had a stable market and dependable revenue stream. Especially if they had majority control of that market, since they could already squeeze customers for whatever amount they wanted, as Bell and Microsoft did. It was the smaller volatile companies like Keurig that disregarded five and ten year market projections and went for massive market expansion and quarterly or yearly profit increases because they were competing against giants in their respective or adjacent industries and needed to grow big enough fast enough not to be squashed. Between 2000 and 2008 the DOW and NASDAQ indexes stayed around the same level, then they cratered in 2008, and by 2011 they just started going up and up and up like they had back between 1982 and 1989. Except so far we're twelve years in and it hasn't slowed down, unlike the slowdown that started in 1987.
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.
Why should they? Why does there need to be a dichotomy between doing something good and living in poverty, or else do everything possible to squeeze out the next short-term dollar. It strikes me as a profound failure of imagination to think there's no possible way to structure our economy where more companies could pursue profit in balance with other goals that can not directly be translated into next quarter's P&L statement.
Hence the '/have to', I'm not saying they philosophically or morally 'should' - I'm not commenting on that at all - I'm saying they have a duty to 'maximise shareholder value', a legal obligation to owners to (aim to) make as much money for them as possible, basically.
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.
The idea that execs of public companies have a legal requirement to maximize profit for shareholders, which is false and based on some misunderstandings of actual requirements, has been frequently stated (at least by commenters and pundits) as justification for companies taking awful and inhumane actions. ("Frequently repeated" makes it a meme; the word doesn't just mean image macros.)
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.
No, it doesn't have to be every public company either. Meta might be a for-profit public company, but Zuckerberg still has the majority of voting shares. If he wanted to get rid of the annoying IG "feature" that this blog describes, no one could stop him. He could prioritize the long term health of the company over their quarterly results. He is the one that is ultimately making the decision, not the public shareholders.
Wikipedia "donate now" campaigns can get pretty front and center. Maybe not quite the same level; but non profits also have a tendency to push hard on donations.
Yep, and Reddit in particular is the culmination of over a billion dollars' worth of VC funding. The changes we're seeing are unsurprising when you take that into account—even though Reddit has never been profitable, those investors are still expecting their return, which forces Reddit to either start bringing in serious revenue or have a promising IPO (or both). None of this has ever been for users; we're merely a driver of growth/profit to them.
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.
Isn‘t that a problem of shareholder thinking? A problem that imo should be meanwhile singled out as a bad way to handle a company. Shouldn‘t it be handled with thinking of all stakeholders? This would result in better management decisions, or not?
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.
> But, let's be frank here: They monetize you and me, us, the users because 1 they can and, 2, they have to.
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.
Just to add: these arguments are good and valid until company become monopoly. And until company start to actively shutdown, integrate, prevent any other company from becoming competitor.
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.
Great point, in the 90s people used to spend a fortune (relatively speaking) on taking, sharing and discovering pictures, consuming media and getting their news.
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.
If giving people the choice of an ad-free premium subscription was more profitable, they would do it. The issue with doing that is the users who pay are also the most desirable audience for advertisers.
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.
I understand how the market works and how the Gompertz curve looks for new product lifecycles. I have a (professionally useless) masters degree in that.
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.
I'm happy paying for a few personal cloud servers, more than I need perhaps. I'm happy paying for a solid Internet connection, electricity, computers, hard drives, UPSs, etc. I'm happy for paying for VOIP PSTN connectivity, mobile connectivity, etc.
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.
Do you currently pay for much or any of the libre software you use? Of course many published libre software packages have no workable monetization scheme attached, but many of them have a facility for donations, and then there are major foundations and aggregators (of which I regrettably do not have a good list compiled at the moment).
Most of the time in the current era you're not paying for software. You're paying for software as a service. You're paying someone to take on the operational aspects of running a service because to you the value is in using the software, not in operating it. It's all opportunity cost.
Sure, reframing the terminology further onto the paradigm of centralization doesn't change what I said. I don't pay for software, nor services aimed at replacing what can be self-representing software.
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.
So you said it yourself, it's not really a 100% utility as "someone" decides what is a spam and what's not. Try running an email service yourself. Being open protocol still gives leverage to someone to decide who can and cannot use the service, and who can monetize ads.
What _does_ count as a utility, then? I expect anything that is considered (or even legally classified) as a utility is going to have rules and "someone" to decide who to kick out; e.g., the electrical grid, or the water supply, or the telephone system, or council rubbish collection, etc.
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.
They can monetize by presenting ads, and they can identify you with cookies when you don't log in (or later when you do). They don't need to restrict their content to monetize. It's more likely that they are restricting their content to prevent scraping and/or indexing.
It's definitely to prevent scraping. Used to be you could scrape and hydrate any profile or hashtag. It was sort of a cat and mouse thing a couple years ago and now the Instagram website is locked down tight.
We've seen too many times how bogus this saying is. You can pay top dollar for a high-end TV, and it'll still spy on you and show you ads in the menus [1].
You either control the software, or you are the product. No amount of Danegeld will buy you freedom.
Reddit’s mobile web experience really embraces this–even as a logged in user there is a frequent “Use our app!” popup that has been made progressively more obnoxious.
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.
If you open any post with a lot of comments and you want to load more comments you must create an account - no option to disable. They really want to smother all mobile but the app.
This is even worse. You can't trust either Mozilla or Google to vet the extensions they publish for spyware. So you have to trust and/or verify that this extension does what it says and no more. But worse, you have to vigilantly watch the extension for any changes, even if you trust the developer today he may sell it to a spyware company at any time.
This is an open source extension, as stated in the description on both pages. The repository is linked in both, feel free to build it from source and install it locally.
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.
To install an extension locally in Firefox you have to be using a special build or jump through other hoops. All of this goes back to the point; that Reddit is employing the "fuck you" pattern when they force you to jump through such hoops to use the version of their website that actually works.
What platform are you using to write this very comment? If it is open source (Linux etc.), have you gone through the millions of lines of code for each program installed on it?
If they are then so are my days on reddit. The whole API debacle is already pretty rough for them. I can't imagine removing old.reddit could possibly be a good decision for them now. I have an account but only i choose when to use that account. If reddit removes choice, I'll remove reddit.
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
That has the feel of hitting some regulatory issues (e.g. Utah's law) and/or having difficulty with porn in the App Store and the content rating of the app there.
Nah, you don't need to confirm anything except indicate you want to see NSFW content, just like you used to be able to in the website itself. It's just a dark pattern to convert porn viewers to the app.
No, if it isn't NSFW content the message just changes to something along the lines of "This content hasn't been reviewed and may not be appropriate...". It's an excuse to force users to download the app, not an implementation of a legal requirement.
I noticed this too! The reddit webapp on mobile was pretty much unusable before and would constantly ask me to download the app. Accidentally visited it a few days ago and was surprised it didn't happen.
Forcing you to download the app for any sub marked NSFW, whereas you previously only had to click to confirm your age, is bullshit.
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.
My favorite part of Reddit mobile on iOS is that when it prompts you to view in app, it redirects to the App Store, even though I have the app installed! Then when I open the app it doesn’t preserve the page I was trying to get to. So it doesn’t even work!
I decided to uninstall Reddit from my phone. I'm still reaching their website through my browser, read the content (replace URL with old.reddit.com), and if it still doesn't work I decide that the content is not worth the time.
It's most annoying when businesses make IG their actual website, or restaurants have their menus there, etc. I've never been on IG and can't access the content, so they don't get my business.
From my experience people making decisions on setting up these websites have no clue that such services are walled gardens. They saw an opportunity for free hosting with easy to use WYSIWYG editor and it looked like a no-brainer.
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.
Genuinely asking: wouldn’t a phone be _better_ for you?
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?
To read a piece of paper I only need glasses or magnifying glass, and the entire menu is still available; it's easy to jump from one place to another on it. Zooming in on a small screen restricts the amount of information I can readily access, and forces me to scroll around to find what I want
I have astigmatism and reflected light is a lot better than direct light. Reading on a phone or a laptop screen without glasses is a massive pain. But I don’t go everywhere with them, and I’d prefer using my phone flashlight to read the paper menu.
I too make the server tell me what's on the menu, because I grew up in the 8th century BCE when literacy hadn't yet overtaken the strong oral chanting tradition of preserving and transmitting information, and I believe that the written word is a debasement of human intellect.
I can think of a large number of restaurants in Richmond BC that are still this way. (And only Richmond; neighbouring Vancouver/Burnaby/New West/Surrey are fine.)
Or, I have no idea how these QR providers work, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was the sort of low-effort service that restaurants don’t want to pay for. So, maybe ad/tracking funded.
It is annoying when a transaction that for ages has been all-paper gets bumped into the panopticon.
QR codes can encode many things, including a url. If your restaurant already has a reasonable menu online, you can just link to that. No need to pay anyone, other than if you fancy print the qr code notices.
This. I've never scanned a QR code and I don't intend to learn how.
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.
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.
The point is to sabotage the business in a more impactful way than merely walking away. Harming employee morale, and consequently employee retention, is an effective means of protest. If the employees get a sour mood about it and give other customers worse service, all the better.
On the other hand, you're being an asshole to someone that has to stand there and take your shit because they have debts and a rent to pay. And, since they deal with people all day, they know that moving to another work place with a paper menu won't fix anything because there's always some asshole that will do their best to make them feel like crap.
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.
As someone who works in the industry I can assure you that you're not harming morale nor affecting employee retention in the slightest. Being an asshole doesn't make you relevant, it only makes you an asshole
The sad part is that practically all patrons that could hear you will just label you as a "Karen". The owners will not change their ways. It works for them, their client base and the vast majority of potential clients.
People do not care at all whatsoever about their privacy being invaded, generally.
Imagine you go out for launch and see this random guy "loudly insulting" the staff because of some random internet stuff you don't understand or care about.
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.
The point is not to persuade you of my point of view, the point is to ruin the mood of the workers and customers. So if I leave you fuming about the Karen (eg me, but wrong gender fyi), mission accomplished. If it were legal I'd pull the fire alarm on my way out.
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.
Sure, the same is true of anything written. But much of that has shifted to digital media because it's more convenient. A print shop has much higher latency and change costs. The newer restaurants in my neighborhood mostly use flexible ways of conveying prices. QR codes, menus on big screens, chalkboards, or computer-printed paper menus on disposable paper.
More convenient for the restaurant, less convenient for the customer.
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 don't think it's "the customer". I think it's you and some other folks who are in a relatively narrow customer niche who are very big on convenience and grew up on paper menus, making those feel convenient.
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.
I'd refuse to touch your phone and insult you for the offer. If you don't have a paper menu the question of me giving you money is already off the table; the food is forgotten and my new mission in your restaurant is to punish you with my vindictive attitude. If enough waitresses complain about obnoxious boomers giving them grief, I think the business owner will eventually wisen up.
You don't know how the restaurant business works, for one thing. For another, acting like an asshole to waitstaff just makes you look like an asshole, and gratifying yourself in public over your supposedly principled stand in acting like an asshole doubly so.
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.
> 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.
Acting like an asshole is the means of protest I consciously choose. Another commenter here chooses to put stickers over the QR codes instead; I think that's pretty clever and I applaud that, but I prefer to keep it strictly legal. Stickers are technically vandalism, but ruining your day by acting like an asshole is completely legal and very effective.
...he said, to somebody who responds to such behavior by tipping double or triple, and by taking the manager aside to note that the best way in the world to retain my custom is to throw your ass out and make sure you stay that way.
At The Fish Market, they had menus printed out each day with the current market rates of all the fish that they had and modified it for that day's availability.
Part of the motivation is to avoid having to produce Braille menus. Force your customers to use a device with built in accessibility features and you don't pay extra for ADA compliance.
Great straw man, but luckily the solution is easy. Inform the restaurant to use one of the many dozens of menu services that are designed specifically with screen readers in mind. There are also PDF screen readers, but that's less ideal because the PDF needs to be designed with accessibility in mind.
Or they can touch and feel the QR sticker and scan it. QR and bar codes are also increasingly more embossed or have borders specifically for that reason. There are special QR reader apps for the blind that help with that more. It is generally the more recommended way by AFB for making your products accessible for the blind
This sounds like "compliance" attorneys gone crazy. It's appalling, but does check out with the bureaucratic cancer eating our society. Waitstaff or the cashier reading menu options sounds like wonderful accommodation. Certainly much more so than impersonally telling a customer to solve their own problem by turning their dining session into a web browsing session.
That's an extremely bigoted way of looking at it. Blind people deserve autonomy too as much as possible. How would you like it if the waitstaff just stood next to you to read the menu to you and wait for you to make a decision?
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?
> That's an extremely bigoted way of looking at it... How would you like it if the waitstaff just stood next to you ... and wait for you to make a decision?
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.
i found out the hard way about that network of scammers. recently a friend had a serious motorbike crash and the hospital where he was at had a QR code registration. i hadn't slept and wasn't thinking. i just downloaded the first free QR reader from the google app store and scanned it. there was tiny writing saying 'open this link in browser' then a big green box in the middle saying 'OPEN'. i didn't even see the first link and just hit the big button. and yeah that took me to a registration page asking me to enter my credit card to verify my identification, which i thought was the hospital. d'oh!
It was how restaurants worked for a long time. Of course, if you prefer the predictability of seeing the menu before you get there, that’s your preference, fair enough. But I wonder if you might miss out on some places run by cooks who put all their talent into cooking, and none into technology. Could be some good stuff…
Example of how this falls apart: you change your prices. You change your menu. You have different menus for different times of day. You have different menus for special occasions.
Good point. Also, once the customer is accessing the menu through their smartphone, modern ad tracking technologies also enable pricing to match the expected buying power of the customer. This way the hospitality industry and their adtech partners can extract more value from the transaction and thus increase the efficiency of the market.
AFIAK those pictures-of-menus don't come from the restaurant owner, but from the people dining there. I believe they're partly scraped from restaurant review sites like Zomato (where the pictures-of-menus are interspersed with pictures-of-the-food-itself) and partly the result of Google doing Google Lens things to your Google Photos to figure out that you took photos while inside a restaurant, and then asking you if it can use them.
Market forces are made of people. You can't just abdicate responsibility for your actions by saying "I'm making financial actions, therefore it's the invisible hand doing it, woooo!".
It's not that big of a risk to be honest. People did it all the time before the internet. Some people are not pathologically risk adverse and might even enjoy being surprised.
I have a bigger beef with other Fuck You patterns.
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.
I especially love the websites that tell me I need to be using the latest version of Firefox when.... I'm using the latest version of Firefox. I'm just on Ubuntu
1 and 2 I have noticed accelerate quite a bit over the past years. While annoying I've found it is a very good metric for deciding who will never get my money/data.
Among other possible criticisms, they hold too much power. So much of the web is behind their walls, if let's say you couldn't access them or decided you didn't want to communicate with CF, huge portions of the web would become off limits.
Unfortunately, as in math, there are such things as unsolvable problems. Unless and until everyone's running a bunch of formally verified OSes that can't be converted to botnets you have to pick your poison. I won't pretend it's a solution though, it's trading one problem for another. Who can say which is worse.
How big is the threat, though? What can even happen if someone takes control over Cloudflare? What if Cloudflare is malicious, what could they even do before people catch on it?
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.
I wasn't even really thinking about the security issue on their side. My concern is they end up in cahoots with the government who gives them a list of political dissidents who then get blacklisted from half the web which people will jump to defend with "They're a private company, they can do what they want!"
That's a good point, I didn't even consider that side, I was thinking more about the security part for either the user or Cloudflare, not the political part that, as you mentioned, it gives too much power to control the internet.
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.
they force you to enable javascript because they want to ensure that you are not bot. It's not for all sites, its for sites that have this feature enabled in cloudflare.
The Pinterest::Google interaction is the most annoying of these; it seems impossible to find an image result from Google on the page Pinterest shows you.
I've been running uBlacklist [0] for over a year now on all my devices for two sole purposes: blocking (1) Pinterest, and (2) Quora from my Google results.
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.
Which is especially funny given that Pinterest's business is basically one giant copyright violation. "We'll boost everybody's photos, but god forbid anybody take any of our stolen content from us!"
It seems that the situation has improved a bit lately, I still get the Pinterest links, but not only I tend to get the actual image a bit more often, but Pinterest results get lower ranks. Essentially "we couldn't find anything good, so here is a Pinterest link so that the result page is not empty".
Or maybe it is just me and Google profiling algorithms finally realized that I don't like Pinterest results.
The IP-level block you experienced after trying to get around the login modal is an anti-scraping measure. I doubt it is based on anything like “detecting that you’ve opened web inspector”, it’s much more likely that Instagram is running some heuristic that tries to bucket you into either “potential signup” or “scraper trying to download as many images as possible”, and once your behavior pattern fits into the second bucket they apply a (very) temporary IP block.
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).
Insta definitely uses IP blocks to force login walls, but I don’t think it’s anti-scraping, because the limit seems to be like 3 images before you get redirected to log in - it’s way too low and too much of a pain in the ass to normal users to be intentionally anti-scraping and unintentionally anti-logged-out-users.
The fact that it pushes anonymous viewers to log in or sign up is definitely a positive (for their conversion rate metric, if nothing else), and that might be the main reason the number of images is so low. But the specific mechanism of IP blocking that is used to achieve restriction - that is anti-scraping, pure and simple.
... except, that "pro" scrapers use parallelized calls from rolling ip addresses. It is one of the only ways to scrape things like Youtube... so I hear!
My fuck-you-right-back response is I don't sign up and give up using the app. I had an instagram account and deleted it years ago. I don't want a new one. Sadly instagram is sign up only, so good luck to them and good bye.
Yup, this is how I respond too. While occasionally it leads to missing content I used to enjoy (miss u, /r/dogelore), for the most part I wind up never noticing the absence and having more time in my day. Win win!
I think it was Carl Newport who wrote that you should only use social media for your intended purposes and that you should use what technology (I think he said tool) is most effective for your particular needs.
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.
Yup I have a friend that sends link to shorts(?) videos on ig and I usually open them in a private tab and accept only necessary cookies. The annoying part is that I only get to watch it once, if I miss something and want to watch it again I need to create an account... Nope! And it's usually just rehashed tiktok videos so I go there and search for it instead.
I noticed a particularly dark pattern when I used Keeps, by Thirty Madison. They tell you, that you can cancel or pause at anytime but that is a lie. They over-prescribe their medication, and if you try to pause delivery, they automatically resume it after 3 months. You cannot pause, for longer than 3 months. If you want to cancel, you have to call them where they harass you into staying.
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.
This is why I use one-time use CC numbers to sign up for most things. They can send me all the pathetic “hmm we’re having trouble renewing your subscription” emails they want, they just make me laugh.
It's actually not that bad a name for this if you think about the concept of 'fuck you' money, ie. that some people have so much money that 'fuck you' they'll do whatever they want.
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.
Well, absent some very serious events, your 'fuck you' money will be there independently of what everybody else thinks.
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.
Twitter has a different ‘fuck you pattern’ when you are trying to sign up a new account and they believe you are a spammer. They will force you through never ending captchas that are not meant to verify you, but annoy you until you give up.
I've only gotten a different sort of fuckery, where signup works fine until I follow a single account (or after a few seconds, sometimes) and then I'm banned until I give a phone number.
contacting support used to work after a few days, but not recently.
Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn redirect me to the login page without ever showing me the content. I guess they don't like my ISP. Since I'm not going to create an account, now I just avoid their links when searching for something.
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).
FB regularly ‘fails’ when I attempt to log out - I don’t use the app. Recently it’s been extreme using Safari. It’s so bad it can’t be accidental. Why would the ever optimize logging out?
I don't agree with this at all. I do concede that some of these patterns use manipulation and visual trickery to send you down a particular (typically more profitable) path. That said, we all enjoy these services for free. The companies that provide them are for profit. I feel the intense hatred people have for these companies is extremely biased.
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.
The "fuck you" isn't that they require you to login in order to view a page. It's that they tease you with the promise that you don't need an account, and when you try to take them up on that promise they slam the door in your face and say "nice try but you gotta create an account first".
I only ever look at IG posts that show up in chats as parts of conversations and IG appears to have banned my phone from viewing their content at all. Fine with me, as there is zero chance I will ever create a login on their site anyway, but I tell the people in the chats that IG links don't work for non-users, and so they share less of the content. I call this the, "Fuck me? Fuck you!" pattern.
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.
The reason for this (unjustified IMO) is bot/scraping prevention. On most VPNs you cannot browse profiles unless you're logged in.
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.
This is an important insight.
What is the correct response when someone says “fuck you”? The answer is obvious.
“No, you”
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.
I hate this so much. I don't want a Facebook account but there are several accounts on Instagram that post things I'd like to view.
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.
IG is evil. So many small businesses seem to mostly have Instagram. And you can't effectively browse without signing up, the sign up will decide you're not real and lock your account, etc.
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.
I walk a lot, drink wine, and listen to podcasts and audio books.
You probably don't need much social media to keep yourself sane.
But you have to test it for yourself, and for some months.
Good luck with your experimentation.
We evolved to be physically social or loners.
We have not evolved to anything new in the last few thousand years, including reading and written languages :)
Stick to the older stuff, like honesty.
I don’t wish to be too much of a fly in the ointment. I understand the darkness of dark patterns. But if we wish to not be secretly tracked (which is dark), then isn’t the alternative to openly ask if I want to exchange knowledge of my identity in exchange for the content I seek, so they can target the ads that pay for the content aggregation service I am using? The preceding question mark is not rhetorical. Maybe I am missing something? In the end though, Cat picture or not, the people that provide the service need to get paid.
Removed Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp from my life some years ago, and then promptly blocked them all from my local LAN (also dns sinkhole them on my Android device).
Instagram was like that for me ever since I know it, couldn't bother creating an account though. If it's important, there are scraping sites to visit Instagram profiles by name without an account.
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 don’t really mind blocking ads and that sort of stuff. The social contract for websites is that they’ll send me what they want and I’ll render it however I want. But if they don’t want to send me content because I don’t have an account, that’s fair game IMO.
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?
Because 90% of their userbase doesn't think about this stuff and doesn't block anything. Why waste effort trying to rope the last few people into your schemes, when they will just find some other way around it or get pissed, write blog posts that get posted to HN, and abandon your platform otherwise.
I suspect they don’t want to serve anyone without an account, and just added the preview feature to get new users. So, I suspect the zero-effort response would go in the other direction; just block everyone without an account completely.
AFAIK Instagram was always like this? Whenever I get stopped I just hit the back button and thank for them saving me time. TikTok does it right - it annoys you with a pop up to login/open in app...you can dismiss it and watch the video. I believe if you want to do more than that it'll annoy you again - but I usually go back to what I was doing before (responding to someone who sent me that...)
I also despise this pattern, it's the same on yelp. I have friends who swear by yelp (I'm not sure why) but every time I get sent links by them their desktop website seems to be purposely absolute trash and nagging me every 10 seconds to download their app and sign in.
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.
This is beyond annoying. But this is directly a result of the dumbest and the most popular metric - number of users on the platform (which is directly fuelel but dumb VC environment)... it doesn't matter if you are profitable or not, but if you have lots of users then it means you are amazing (and it will give you more VC funding)...
Really what needs to happen is like a non profit SAAS movement to create minimal modern versions of these services that runs at minimal cost. Then they can basically be feature compete and like run off an endowment. More like roads or highways that just need maintenance.
Instagram doesn’t even work for me, any link someone sends me just goes to a white blanks screen. I refuse to make an account so I just tell people to stop sending me those links because it’s just a waste of time.
It's for this reason that I've burner accounts with burner emails.
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.
It’s not just you. Twitter has done this to me, when they assumed I was a spammer. Made me verify extremely difficult captchas that were intended not to verify me but to annoy me so I would give up.
Twitter doesn't do this anymore, probably because they don't want any popup to interrupt users scrolling through more ads, logged in or not.
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 thought this was going to be the "fuck you" software design pattern, where employees attempt to cement their job security by making the codebase extremely hard to learn or comprehend.
Try to delete your facebook account, then interrupt the process somehow. In my case the menus and deep links changed totally, and it took me 20 minutes to eventually navigate to the new delete account area. I was given a notice that some users may have different menu options as well as a message along the lines of “we are updating menus”. However, this has been a steady experience with facebook over the years. There is always a fuck you pattern waiting for you to behave differently than the herd.
I had something similar today with Microsoft. Just to use their OS, MS tried to force me to log into an account. After signing out and back in, I was able to bypass the prompt.
> I wanted to browse some pictures of Ollie anonymously on Instagram today, but to my dismay, Instagram would force me to login 5 seconds after navigating to Ollie’s Instagram page. Unless I’m part of an A/B test, you can give this a try and should get the same behaviour on desktop.
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.
> Instagram would force me to login 5 seconds after navigating to Ollie’s Instagram page.
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.
I’m really hating the signin with google on nearly every website. I don’t want you to know who I am, I might never even return to the site. Stop asking me to login so you can data mine me.
The automatic "sign in with Google" prompt only shows up if you're already signed-in. So if you're not signed-in, it doesn't (and can't) display - because there's no logged-in session, there's no existing user.
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.
I haven't been keeping as close an eye on this for the past few years, and apparently I am partially incorrect on this because my knowledge is not complete.
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.
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.
This is the same pattern Twitter uses today. If you are on a tweet anonymously it shows login page after x seconds. Basically, they are interested to know “who” is doing “what”.
The same from my side. Login-walled portals are second to pay-walled. And when you login, you pay, but with you and your data. So we can put them in one bucket
Dark meaning absence of light, and light being something you can see, makes plenty of sense (transparent patterns, visible patterns vs dark patterns, obscure patterns).
I don’t think this is a dark pattern per se. You don’t expect to walk into any restaurant and get free food. With meta products, you pay for content by being tracked. If you refuse to sign in, they refuse to show you content. It’s simple.
Except in a restaurant, the chef gets paid. In this platform, value is extracted from the chef, the waiter, the eater, the eaten, and their interaction, while tearing down societies. Not a fair comparison.
Welcome to shareholder capitalism, extracting rents from all sides of the market perpetually to enrich shareholders. This is why utility tokens were such a big game changer for me.
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.
> If you refuse to sign in, they refuse to show you content.
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.
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.
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!
isn't requiring signup/login like this a gdpr violation? I assume they're relying on the account being 'compliant' or thinking nobody would see it that way.
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.