The 'Fuck You' Pattern | Hacker News Reader

The 'Fuck You' Pattern

cedwards.xyz

1,202 pointscedws594 comments

"Wow, fuck you. I just wanted to look at cats."

"Well, fuck you, too. We're here to sell ads."

It's not about dark patterns, that's just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns.

This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't. And if you don't, I guess you haven't been on the web in the past decade or something.

What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.

So how does this explain why Windows 10, which I have paid like $150 for per license, is now infested with ads, tracking and online presence - and close to impossible to buy without that. They aren't even trying to put a $ figure on what they think it's worth - because they can't be stopped from doing it.

There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.

What I don't undestand, even Win 10 Pro has XBox and candys all over the place .. serious in a pro version?!? With the terrible EULA it all felt just like a joke to me and I deleted all my Windows installations and I'm Linux only now at home. I'm not using Linux because it is free. I have 4 unused Win10 Pro licenses at home now. But I just can't say yes to the EULA. So I dumped them all. In the late 90s I also bought Linux distros, because I was not able to donwload those over a 33.4kb modem. So it is not because it free or it cost something. It is about freedom.

I guess someone could argue that it only costs $150 because of the ads. Windows 95 cost well over twice that when it was launched (inflation adjusted). Maybe in the same way that airfares are way cheaper than they were in the 90s, but with much crappier included service.

Windows 11 is more invasive than 10. Why? Because all the anti-privacy bullshit on Windows 10 worked and nobody complained...

We can call this situation the "Fuck yourself" pattern, where you give money to companies so they can innovate in new ways of fucking you.

Or my $1600 LG OLED which takes screen captures by default and sends them to ad tracking cloud servers.

That's the real fuck you pattern right there. When they make you pay for it handsomely, build a moat with questionable practices so third parties have a hard time, make it part of the cultural context so that people expect it to be the "normal" or "baseline" system, and then there's still ads.

While I don't like Windows 10 telemetry and other shady diagnostics services that lurk in the background, I've never seen any ads "infesting" the OS at all, and I'm online almost all day. Which part of Windows displays ads?

The company you purchased from decided to do it that way. If you don’t agree just don’t buy into it, or create a competitor. Did the license you bought said it would have no ads?

What part of windows is infested with ads?

Facebook and/or Microsoft can choose to charge you for their content as well as serve you ads. Serving you ads doesn't exclude you from paying for content if that's that's what they choose to do. I believe there's versions of Kindle and other such devices that are cheaper because they have ads. Windows would be more expensive if they didn't serve ads.

The single killer feature of windows, unrivaled by Mac or Linux, is playing video-games.

Expensive professional software is often available on Mac.

Probably the target market for windows evolved to become people who tolerate advertising (or at least that's what PMs at M$ think).

Half the price is paid in the license fee. The other half is a lifetime of ads exposure.

Why do I see no ads in windows 10? Have you tried using WPD?

> You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.

"The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts. It's the addictive dark patterns and montezation/tracking that costs millions. That's the irony.

Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts!

Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC will just wait longer. Or run your servers from two regions, it just takes duplicating your collection of cat pictures, should be peanuts.

Then, you need to store these terabytes of cats. On rather fast disks because else the disks will be the bottleneck, and cats will load very slowly for some users. It would be terrible were something to happen to the collection, so you need some backup for peanuts, like some Backblaze, and maybe a second copy because Backblaze has no^W limited redundancy.

Then, well, you need to monitor all that and sometimes fix issues, because cloud infra is highly available but not highly reliable.

Then, where do the cat pictures come from? Allow anonymous uploads! Or register users and allow uploads.

Now analyze each picture so that it's an actual cat picture and not child porn or a warez archive. Resize them to match your standards. Yes, this is simple, just run a RNN that detects cats.

Then, curate the incoming pictures so that they are actually reasonably interesting. Just maybe hire a few people to do that for peanuts somewhere in Africa.

Ah yes, you want to also deduplicate images; run some image hashing algorithms; use maybe just one or two GPU instances to do that efficiently. And you gonna need a DB, a simple one, that will never need any administering or fixing, won't it?

Well, yes, now you can run that site for just several grand a month, making it your day job, because you're well-qualified to maintain every part of it. Enjoy the peanuts.

You make a great point that I hadn't considered before.

It's like rocket fuel! The faster you want to go, the more fuel you need. Which adds weight, so now you go slower, so you need more fuel...

I want to serve a cat picture, which would cost 1/100 of a cent. But at scale, it adds up. So now I show adds that generate 1.2/100 of a cent in revenue but add .5/100 cents in serving cost, which I can optimize with user data to add an additional .7/100 cents in revenue, but which adds .4/100 cents in serving costs....

Shouldnt you include engineers compensation in "The infrastructure" thats where a lot of money goes.

> "The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts

lol at this. Go setup that infrastructure and see how far you get for peanuts.

You need content, which means you need to become popular.

This drives up complexity of the business operation overall, not just the infrastructure.

> What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free?

Is that really fair? Would there be nowhere to see pictures of cats without their millions of dollars in infrastructure and staffing? Or could it be that their millions of dollars in infrastructure and staffing for selling ads is the reason the goto place for pictures of cats is BigTechCo instead of a ton of smaller forums and communities each of which is relatively inexpensive to operate.

Ahhh, I remember the good old days of forums where people would "hotlink" an image into a thread, and after enough people started viewing/forwarding that link around it would break because the image hoster's account would get suspended by their host for going over their bandwidth limit, or the original hoster would panic at their bandwidth costs and delete it and/or try to block hotlinking going forward. Maybe something like IPFS could solve this problem soon, but right now freely available image hosting on these centralized providers is the most reliable it's ever been.

Aggregation and distribution are virtues of large communities, not small ones. The sophistication of Facebok's business is what allows the creation and distribution of content. I agree that if Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, Reddit, Nextdoor, Twitter etc, didn't exist, small communities would fill that void... But they would do through a fragmented and siloed user experience that is hardly discoverable for the majority of the connected world.

This is the equivalent of running a taxi business vs running an airline. Sure, a taxi can fulfill several transportation needs but it could never replace what an airline does.

So, which do you want? A go-to place to see <insert arbitrary interest here>, or a ton of smaller forums and communities?

They can still have ads for people that don't create an account.

I think the point you are trying to make is that people are demanding free (as in beer) content, a la WinAmp of the 1990's. In the past 20 years, we've come around out of that greedy phase and have come to accept a certain amount of advertising for content. But when the non-free content dominates the free content (e.g. pinterest's SEO), it's a fuck you pattern and not consumer greed.

EDIT: IMHO

An important point is that WinAmp was not hosting content, so the cost was limited to the relatively small development cost. And there's still lots of that around.

Once you get into actual hosting, it's very hard to get past a small number of users without a lot of funding. And since a lot of users don't want to pay, well...

Kinda offtopic but Instagram's ads changed my attitude towards ads, and my attitude towards Facebook's creepy level of insight into my life and personality. If they have that data anyway -- and hundreds of companies do -- I might as well benefit from it, and Instagram's ads were the first ones that I actually found interesting. First of all, it was obvious when something was an ad. Second, they weren't intrusive or obnoxious. And third, they showed me cool stuff I actually wanted to buy! It was actually an enjoyable experience and that's so weird to say about ads.

The surveillance part still creeps me the hell out, but if they're gonna do it anyway they might as well use that data to benefit my life.

(On that note, I often find myself wishing I could ask the NSA for a copy of an old message or photo...)

Personally, I don't particularly care if companies have my data. However, I vehemently don't want them to use it for algorithmic recommendations—including ads—because it puts me in a filter bubble.

All these technology companies are making assumptions about the type of person I am, and then molding me into that person. I can't learn about topics I don't see, so if the tech giants are convinced I like technology and computers, that's all I will ever learn about.

Maybe I'd be happier if I took up ballet dancing, or basket-weaving, or something else I can't begin to imagine. That seems much less likely to happen when I'm trapped in an algorithmic box, that assumes my past will dictate my future.

> If they have that data anyway -- and hundreds of companies do -- I might as well benefit from it, and Instagram's ads were the first ones that I actually found interesting.

I always feel a little depressed when someone describes being more effectively manipulated as "benefiting."

Anecdotal evidence, but my experience with IG ads was very different. I ordered stuff (mostly clothing) a few times (4 or 5) from IG ads and was very disappointed with the quality and service every single time. I now refuse to fall for IG ads ever again.

I second this, the only ads I’ve ever willingly clicked/tapped on with the intention of buying were from Instagram

Funnily, I always had the impression that Instagram main (maybe only?) purpose was to watch ads ("influencers" as they call them these days), so I figured out they must be pretty good ads since people are coming there just for them ;)

> The surveillance part still creeps me the hell out, but if they're gonna do it anyway they might as well use that data to benefit my life.

This is such a defeatist narrative, and it isn't even accurate. They in fact don't have your data, that is half why they run these services. Each service you don't use is another piece of you they don't have. It isn't an all or nothing proposition. Throwing up your hands and granting them powers they don't have short circuits the more meaningful deliberation of "is this service worth the cost?"

If I had to guess, I might say that these companies enjoy the strong men we have built them into, because people give in.

Instagram ads are the most obnoxious out of all social media. When looking at stories they often come up every other user. The volume alone is absurd.

Ads are fine. The "fuck you" pattern is letting you see the cat picture for 5 seconds before covering it up and requiring you to create an account and share your data with Facebook before you can see it.

Everyone everywhere has realized throughout the ages that conversion of anything is higher when you get a demo of the product.

This isn't a "fuck you" pattern. They gave you a social media Costco food sample.

The bait and switch. You used to be able to view links of public post.

The bigger the userbase grows, the bigger the fuckyous they can give the rest. It’s no longer “hey join us, we have cool stuff”, it’s “fuck you, we already got your friends, whatcha gonna do”. We can complain about that, right?

"No, fuck you. The internet was never meant to be this."

I understand how this shitty agreement came to be but that doesn't mean that I like having my experience online be a metaphorical middle finger.

They spent billions in infrastructure and staffing to hijack the free internet where I could look at cat pictures on cat picture websites that had cat pictures as the goal, all so they could show me ads, and they have the nerve to say that I'm in the wrong for not being happy about that?

That's quite a ridiculous claim. Surely they can display ads to anonymous users, That's not hard at all. But then they can't track you and profile you, which is a big no.

Now is it fair for a company to track and shape the behavior of millions of people?

Facebook/Mark Zuckeberg didn't spend $1B on the infrastructure of Instagram. He bought the network effect that he knew is impossible to beat by a better product.

"All of this is for the very best end, for if there is a volcano at Lisbon, it could be in no other spot; for it is impossible but things should be as they are, for everything is for the best."

Pangloss knew what was up

I'm pretty sure that if they had non-targeted (or at least targeted not based on tracking), unobtrusive ads, and zero dark patterns, they would've been still earning enough money to cover their expenses and then some. Unfortunately, they've set out to earn all the money in the world for no benefit to anyone at all.

If you manage to build a large enough empire, then... and only then, can you make the world a better place.

Either you're the customer or you're the product. Recognizing that nearly all internet companies do this allows you to identify what level you're comfortable with and duck out or move on if needed. It's always good to review your social media habits and scale back.

I recommend doing this the same time you're spring cleaning or after you prep for winter. Also go through and unsubscribe from emails and update passwords.

> Either you're the customer or you're the product.

Or you're both. Or perhaps none.

I kinda like that we have now such a big, visible and studied echosystem where we'll see any pattern working at a significant scale.

Any kind of dichotomy just doesn't cut it anymore I think.

1/ They bait people in to destroy any sane competition. Then they milk them.

2/ Well fuck you even further and go to hell for defending such behaviours.

3/ ps. Their infra is ridiculous. A team of 100-120 engineers can do way better. They can’t get their user base though because of 1/

How is Instagram's profitability? Like the OP sometimes I'd like to look at a feed anonymously. Why can't they still serve ads based on content?

Similarly, it use to be that going to the app showed me "my feed". Sometime in the last 6 month it changed to only show me the newest post of people I'm following and then only posts of random "popular" people of which I have zero interest.

If they want to make money from me, I'd use the app more with the old style of showing me only posts from people I follow with an ad every few posts, like say 1 ad 2 3 ad 4 5 6 ad 7 8 9 ad. As it is now I barely use the app anymore. Of course I'm not the target audience.

Don't believe the lie that ads and dark patterns are the only way to run the internet. I remember the internet of the 90s, we had ways to look at cat pictures, too. And ads back then were way less obstrusive and tracking basically nonexistant.

The issue is that FB+Insta try very hard to become the first/default go-to place for people to post content, just to lure in others and extract value out of them.

If that's the case then Instagram should not entice people in by temporarily granting access. It should be upfront about requiring an account.

And furthermore all the content should be delisted from Google for cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

Okay, then they need to SAY THAT. All of them need to be CLEAR about what their business model is and how it works, and do not give any mess about "free markets" or "trade secrets" here, they have captured too much attention to be treated with kid gloves.

"X is self evident, but maybe not to you," seems to me like a fundamentally flawed argument.

People constantly think that Facebook/Insta/Google is trying to do good things for the users or that whatever is good for users is good for BigCo-s.

So sometimes it is true, but most of the time it is not and BigCo-s have to push users to do things.

This company neither has these cats, nor creates a content with them. Sites with images are full of cats and ads, but only instagram is arrogant enough to demand your ids. It’s easy to fuck the instagram, really, because it barely has anything of value that is not reposted elsewhere, or just similar. I’d even have a profile on it if it weren’t such a moron (judging by other sites with cats, where I register eventually after some lurking). They don’t know basic internet rules and deserve everything said above and below.

> This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't.

I'm fine with businesses who use that model and make it clear. Those kinds of tactics are galling coming from a company whose literal mission statement is "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."

If you want people to make an account, make a more compelling business proposition. Gatekeeping seems like the most vulnerable, monopolistic position to take.

Nah sorry. The reason companies that own social media don’t offer ad and tracker free versions is because then they’d have to say to their userbase what they’ll remove, and thereby what’s in the regular product. Their business model depends upon the ignorance of their userbase of what they’re doing, and they’re holding their network as hostage for those who don’t wish to participate.

Unfederated and (forced) open systems is the only way out of this.

It's not just about ads .. they can just show them to this visitor if it was. It's about targeted ads. They have slightly limited ability to target if the viewer doesn't sign in .. for which the viewer needs to accept their T&C .. which is needed for them so someone doesn't sue them for invading their privacy without their consent.

IANAL so I'm not sure whether such a suit will stand in any court.

There seem to be many non tech savvy people who were shocked by docos like Social Dilemma and don't understand they are the product. They think they are 'just looking at cats'. Maybe these companies should clearly display on their front page they in personal data collection and targeted advertising business.

You can advertise without abusing the user.

Same thing happened with cable TV back in the day. It is about extracting as Mich value as most people will tolerate. There is no escaping ads if a company isn't principally opposed to them and charges directly for their product

> "Well, fuck you, too. We're here to sell ads."

Go fuck your self. Internet was never meant to be sell ads for you. Companies found loop hole and now you think you are entitled to it. Snap out of it asshole

Wait, ad click through tracking now only works for registered users? When did that change? More importantly, what are all these ads doing on pages that don't require me to login?

I don't really see an agreement here. It's also not Instagrams content they are hiding behind the implied paywall. Because that's the real hidden truth, they make you pay, not with money, but with your soul. They will stalk you everywhere to the end of your existence, try to learn everything about you and use it against you in every way they can that gains them something.

It's been bad a long time now, but not like this. You really want to tell me it was this blatant?

So yeah, fuck you, I just wanted to look at cats.

The users of Instagram create the value though. The ones posting the cat pictures.

>You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure

You almost had me, right up to this point. Then I realized you are posting pointed sarcasm about instagram's owners.

“Wow fuck you, I don’t.”

Seems this would fit with surveillance capitalism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

So did Instagram employ these fuck-you patterns from the start, or did they pretend to be friendly until they'd gotten enough market share and network effects?

That's called bait & switch, and is (if not legally in this case, then morally) rightly considered fraud.

Until they populate all the top search results with those patterns.

This apologies for any unethical practice by companies in Reddit/HNs are really interesting. They side completely with the authorities. Properly trained.

Reddit is full of these patterns in order to drive users from mobile web to app. Reddit mobile web really sets the bar for user-hostile UI in my opinion.

Reddit's new UI is still hilariously terrible. The day they remove old.reddit.com is the day I stop using the site.

Who the hell thinks what I want when I click on an article is to bring it into a related article feed with 1.5 comments showing? If I accidentally click outside of the article area the whole thing vanishes with no way to get back where I was. I had thought these issues would be obvious and they would clean it up, but here we are months later and it is still broken from a UX standpoint.

I guess all of the devs moved over to work on their bespoke media player? You know, the one that barely works half of the time.

Someone posted on HN within the last week that Reddit hired some product managers who pushed a lot of these dark patterns/anti-user features to increase conversions towards account signups and app installs. Nobody thinks you actually like all that broken shit. Though I fail to understand the business reason for hosting/serving videos through a custom media player.

Reddit doesn’t want you to lurk without an account or browse on mobile on a browser. They make less money that way. Eventually I am sure they will break old.reddit.com once they think they no longer need the holdouts (who I suspect are a lot of power users).

As someone who has used Reddit for probably 10 years at this point, it makes me sad that some place that I at times legitimately felt like a “member of a community” would break my use case like this (I have accounts but on mobile I sometimes just want to lurk/browse without logging in). But it’s their website and they can do what they want with it. Our only recourse is to complain and try alternatives.

Agreed about old.reddit.com. I feel pretty old saying this, but I really miss the days of straightforward web design. Everything now is so chaotic that I'm never really sure what clicking anything will do. It feels like design for the sake of design, not for the sake of the users.

Reddit's aggressive push to login , to use app, and the new web UI : together, these nudged me away from reddit and helped me stop my huge timesucking & mindless reddit habit. Happy ending. Thanks reddit !

What is really boggling is people paying to 'gild' posts, which is very profitable, while the company also employs all these dark patterns / user tracking / data selling

The new Reddit on desktop is quite bearable if you do 3 things:

- Be logged in.

- Set the view to "classic".

- Always open threads into a new tab. Never just do a left click to open them, use a middle click.

Just commenting to say that there are third-party reddit apps that are pretty good. Boost for Android is the only way I browse reddit anymore.

The back button is broken, too. Was it that hard to bring you back to the comment you were reading when you clicked the link? Guess so.

It's gotten to the point where if I saw "Software Engineer - Reddit" on a candidate's resume, I would seriously question this person's chops, even if it's just one small signal in an otherwise great background. How did this site's quality to get so poor? Why couldn't you do anything about it? It's so bad that you have to believe it was deliberately made bad.

What is worse, is that even though I installed the official app to squelch this nonsense (the Fuck You Pattern is effective) the mobile site still prompts with "Open in the Reddit App".

When I click it my iPhone opens the App Store. The App Store then has a big blue "Open" button to launch the app, but of course all context is lost and opening from there brings you to your Reddit front page.

I'll one up this - I use an alternative, unofficial app for reddit. Until recently the 'open' button on their website would take me into that specific app - as you would expect - but since last week or so it's started sending me to the Google Play store page for the official app instead.

Reddit's app registers itself as a uri handler for reddit links but (thanks to google) AMP or iframe results don't prompt the actual system uri handler that would take you to the app.

So much this. Now that I know it works this way, I just try to ignore any promising-looking search results from any of the sites that do this, because I don’t feel like trying to search for the same thing in their app because they broke their mobile site and broke the “open in app” by assuming I don’t already have it.

I use Baconreader on Android and its great. I've heard loads of great things about unofficial reddit apps and nothing good about the official app.

Use Apollo or (better) quit reddit, IMHO.

What browser are you using on your phone?

I don't have a Reddit account, and every time I use it I am reminded why. Their patterns have taken me from "I should create an account one of these days" to "there is nothing on the Internet that I need to see so badly that I would let Reddit see anymore about me than my IP address." It's almost as if they are taunting users: "give up and create an account, or go home. Oh, and use the fucking mobile app while you're at it, or the suffering will continue."

OTOH, once I get there, a lot of Reddit content makes me wonder why I bothered. :-)

Sadly, it's a humongous amalgamation of forums that has taken all the users from niche forums I used to frequent.

Reddit is diverse, there still are some good corners here and there. You need to know where to look.

Use the old interface available at old.reddit.com. Its mostly fine. There are some really good corners of reddit, though the popular subs have been infected with the well washed masses.

What I don’t understand is why Reddit wants us to use the app so badly. Is it just for ads? Is it data collection?

My guess is because it’s harder to block ads through the app than it is in the browser-based version (at least in iOS). Whatever the actual reason is, the asshole design (which ironically they have an entire subreddit for) actually discourages me from using Reddit, so I’ve been using it a lot less in the past couple of years.

It’s like the Nigerian Prince email scam but the other way around : 99% of the people who receive such an email will identify the scam and ignore it. This is totally fine for the scammers. Working as expected.

Now, in the Reddit scenario 99% of the Reddit users don’t mind downloading an app. It’s just us, techies, that 1% who cares. This is totally fine for Reddit. Working as expected.

I suspect it’s all that and their metrics show that mobile users are the most “engaged” so they want more mobile users to have an even higher count of engaged users. Also, it’s harder to spam notifications without a mobile app.

They get a lot more data more reliably from the app and have a lot more control of the ad surfaces and how they are served.

This is more or less "social network publisher side monetization" SOP.

I suspect it's for neither. It's to fulfil some metric. They either want investor money or IPO money and either way, they want people in their app because their app is way over-valued compared to monthly impressions.

Likely both. It sure as hell ain't to make your experience any better.

Ads, tracking, notifications, with higher overall engagement due to faster and more content available.

another possibility is to increase traffic, which I guess also increases ad revenue. It's a lot easier to tap an icon on your home screen than it is to open a browser and type in reddit and whichever subreddit you want to browse. The less friction there is, the more likely you are to be a daily user, driving their revenue.

The answers to questions like this are always extremely simple - it is better for their business.

Gmail webmail too. I’ve hit « I’m not interested » to their app prompt around 500 times in a row. Will i change the 501st? No.

Then again, my ATM machine still asks me which language I want service in. It’s my hope if I choose something other than English, it calls 9-1-1, slows down the prompts and does nothing irreversible.

Reddit's usefulness has waned dramatically and continues to do so.

The web reddit is just awful. Leave a thread open for some time, and navigation even breaks.

The Reddit AMP implementation on top of Reddit Web is even worse. For the first few times I encountered it, I assumed there was a bug or something that would be fixed soon.

I just use old.reddit.com on my mobile and laptop.

saved reddit for me: https://teddit.net/

The best part is clicking a link, loading a page, and it just says “Something broke”

Twitter does this too. How the fuck is it even possible?

I only use reddit.premii.com on mobile. That's what their mobile site should look like

I was initially annoyed by this, and then thankful. I have learned never to install apps of this kind, and thus the fact that Reddit has made itself unpleasant to use from a browser is a helpful little nudge away from a time-waster.

Microsoft Windows is even worse. Constant disruptive updates, forcing you to make an account during install, ads in the start menu, that creepy "Cortana" process that you can't kill...

This may have been true when Win10 just came out, but it isn't anymore. You can schedule your updates (and if you don't, they try to schedule them for you in non-use hours), there are ways to bypass the MS account creation and just use a local account, I haven't seen an ad in my start menu in ages, even after multiple large system updates and there is not a single reference to Cortana in my Task Manager or Services (I turned Cortana off in settings).

Granted, I'm aggressive at turning off startup items, managing what services run on boot, and so on, but my point is, each of the things you mention may have been true at one time, but they are not necessarily true today.

edit to note: I'm not defending Microsoft's use of dark patterns, they definitely do push them out and then sometimes back off if there is enough pushback. And that is bad, and should be called out. Just aiming for accurate information here.

From this perspective it's amazing. I ditched Windows completely for about 5 years (coinciding with my time in Software). And had to deal with none of these problems any more, I always remember that I hated windows for some reason but can't seem to pinpoint/remember, but now you've reminded me.

I disagree. Reddit is worse because if you don't have an account, you are constantly pushed to make one, or get pop-ups to download the ad. They also seem to limit functionality, like seeing all comments, unless you have an account.

The Windows installation process is annoying for sure, but once you get through it, you are able to disable or rework everything you mentioned. iOS honestly has everything you mentioned as well; in fact, it's installation process pushes even more services than Windows does, but I never see people complain about it. I find both process annoying, but I forget about them once I get everything setup because it goes away. I don't want a reddit account because I basically only visit the site when a friend sends me a link. I am guessing I can also have their stuff go away if I download the app and sign up, but it's not as essential to me as using Windows or iOS.

One of the few good things from Windows 11 is that Cortana has been evicted (the Bing stuff is still there though).

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...

These are the primary reasons I moved off Windows and onto a combination of macOS and *nix. Plus, macbooks have native Thunderbolt 3 support, which is essential for near-zero latency audio production.

I use Reddit is Fun app on android and haven't noticed any changes in UX for more than 5 years. When a I rarely go to reddit.com on my pc, I can't even recognize the original site.

The cookie prompt on old.reddit.com is so obnoxious now. You can't close it and the "continue" button takes you to the new.reddit.com homepage

I use this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

I just used ublock origin to delete it. They still think they serve it, but I never see it.

Try

https://libredd.it/

https://teddit.net/

I know! Isn't it lovely? I used that to break my reddit addiction. Haven't been on for a while.

I think they're trying to push it to just before the point where people actually consider how useful the content is (not very), or maybe past that point, after which they'll put out some superficial "we're sorry" bs.

I now use https://libredd.it with Privacy Redirect browser extension.

I don't even need to use old.reddit.com for daily browsing now. (Unless need to comment)

I never use reddit on mobile, but also there the whole new reddit design thing is so terrible I just don't bother going there anymore. It's sad, there were a few really nice communities there.

I get around this by not using their app or website at all and using an alternative Reddit client (Apollo for iOS). Wonder if they'll do the Twitter and shut down third party clients eventually.

old.reddit.com is acceptable, with uBlock Origin and the like, and on mobile Relay for Reddit is a nice app.

I love instagram. It's the best social media site. Last time I checked, I couldn't even make an account from my desktop computer. I'm not gonna even try to install their app on my G-free phone.

When a friends sends me a link to Instagram, I know that I don't need to click on it -- the thumbnail contains all the information that I'd ever see without creating an account. When news articles consist of a bunch of embedded Instagram crap, it doesn't even load on vanilla firefox. That's cool, those stories are usually celebrity gossip that I don't actually want to read but got baited into clicking on.

It's my favorite social media site, because their hooks just bounce straight off me.

Thanks, Instagram, for the consistent signalling. I never wanted to be your friend anyway.

Pinterest and Reddit are not better these days. The amount of things you can view on reddit on your phone without creating an account or installing the app is dwindling daily.

Every time my wife sends me a Pinterest link I just ask her to screenshot it as I can't see shit on the default mobile page. I don't even know why Google continues to allow them in the results when there is clear-cut policies around showing something different to the crawler than the user.

Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.

> Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.

This is hilarious and makes so much sense. God, the internet is broken

This was a dark pattern they launched almost a year ago, as a non user of mostly every social media site, instagram is probably the worst in terms of forcing users to login to view public content.

I wouldn't normally have a problem with this but public content should be just that, viewable by the general public and not being forced to install a tracke.. err, their app on my phone.

Where I have a huge problem with this is public health or other official announcements from community leaders or essential information and its being put out on facebook. So now I can't access a public message by a publicly elected entity for general consumption. It seems extremely slimy and it feels illegal on some level as I don't want to be forced to login to facebook to view local updates.

Is the way that Twitter links often fail to load on the first several tries (then finally, mysteriously, work as if nothing happened) one of these "force you to log in and use the app" dark patterns? It's been that way for years now, so I have to think it's not accidental.

I organize a puppy meetup. Right now via a group SMS. Sub-optimal. Sharing event pics is flakey (mix of android and ios). The responses (LOL, hearts, etc) become their own text messages (?!). Etc.

Since some of us have Instagram, I thought to try it, if only to share pics. Sign up was brutal. I can't figure out how to use my phone account on my desktop. Sharing existing pics sucks. Taking pics with Instagram sucks.

I can't even figure out how to simply browse a friend's feed.

I legit can't imagine why anyone uses Instagram, for any purpose.

I'll stick my head above the parapet and say that as a content consumer I really like Instagram and it genuinely is my favourite social media platform. I'm probably an atypical user but now that I'm well out of my 20's the friends I still connect with online I have real connections with so it's a joy to see what they're up to. My interests (food, 70's sci-fi, cats, modern art) are well catered to and I've done a good job of curating the accounts I follow to get a good mix of interesting content. Even my promoted posts are mostly local restaurants and businessess so I've never really felt aggrieved that I'm getting controlled by big corporates. I've also found my experience mostly apolitical with the advantage that because commenting is so tacked on I don't feel the urge to interact with anything beyond liking images or sharing the ocasional post with my friends and family

I understand it's mindless, but I dont want it to be anything else. It's a toy platform for looking at device sized images and short videos on my mobile and that's all I want it to be.

Thanks for this comment. I've been annoyed by the fact that click-baity articles don't load Instagram content in the past, but re-framing the issue as a bullet dodged and time saved is a surprisingly powerful shift of perspective.

Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok. Just... No. Funny enough, I was a big Imgur user until one day I somehow realized I'm wasting my life on the dumbest shit in the dumbest format possible.

Reddit on the other hand, is trying hard to push me away and I thank them for it, but a lot of info you can only find there. Like real measurements of graphics cards and just real information from real people.

Kind of sad, but Reddit has attracted all the people who used to frequent niche forms in one place.

Best part, it is all conveniently grouped on a single site unmarred by useful content so you can easily just ignore it all without anxiety you are going to miss out on something important.

> From TFA: "Since I’m a technical person, I tried to simply remove the modal in the browser Inspector. It sort of worked, but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page."

You need to not only remove the modal, but remove the "overflow:hidden;" in the <body> tag. After that you should be able to scroll.

I have CSS/JS injectors that do this for me already, I really fucking hate popups and scrolling impediments of any sort.

I had the same experience. I wanted to watch someone's podcast Livestream that was being broadcasted on Instagram (I don't know why they didn't just use YouTube). But I couldn't even create an account. I tried with my desktop and phone on different networks. It wouldn't work.

Perhaps I'm "old" for this.

I don't "get" Instagram. I'm not on it, I don't use it, all that "I just don't just because".

I have a room mate // romantic partner who does use Instagram. OK, that's great, that's fine. They're younger than I am so perhaps they get something I don't; times change, I get that; I still don't get "The Insta".

Maybe some social media will ding on me the next time around. I'll wait.

I tried to create an Instagram account to be able to see some photos.

The first attempt stopped at "unexpected error" just after selecting a login name.

The second attempt with different email address in a different browser ended the same way.

Third attempt I tried from the third browser, via cellular data and gmail email. That one finished ok but still returned back to Sign up right after the last signup atep. Entering the same data in Sign up resulted in "there is account using this email". So I tried to log in and it was successful but it immediately showed "suspicious activity dialog" FORCING me to enter phone number and do SMS verification. After I did that, my shiny new Instagram account started working.

But I expect it will be blocked or deleted for inactivity soon unless I start submitting photos or generate enough ad impressions or ad clicks. I use adblock though..

My favorite feature is how when someone shares an Instagram post of Whatsapp it's blurred out. I realized this today and it just hit me that they don't care about making the apps actually good. All they care about is that you go back to the main app where they can advertise to you.

Also, it’s 2021 and their iPad app is just the non-iPad app where it’s just a scaled portrait-only version of the iOS app. Do they not have the resources to do a proper iPad app?

i don't do social media anymore, but I used to use instagram to browse favorite artists. I found chrome developer tools would let you change to mobile view and then you could browse instagram/upload photos/etc like normal.

Haven't tried it in a long time so maybe doesn't work anymore.

Instagram is terrible but I can defend forcing account creation via app only. It seems likely that such a route would draw a disproportionately large interest from scammers and disproportionately small interest from real customers.

I don't know if it's just me or what, but I can no longer view Instagram posts while logged out.

Other people report being able to, but it just sends me straight to a login page.

Instagram allows you to create an account in the browser.

https://www.instagram.com/accounts/emailsignup/

I don't understand this post and the blog author's comments about using desktop. I get the appeal of not having apps installed on your phone, but wasn't Instagram phone-first? I remember not having a smartphone in the early 10's and not being able to use Instagram because you couldn't use their site. I would argue the phone-based experience is far superior to the browser...

I run the web app on my google free phone quite easily. Just add to Home Screen.

you can make an account from desktop no problem

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

A UI pattern whereby content a user wants is provided, then yanked away before it can be consumed, to be replaced by a demand for something the site wants (log in, sign up, subscribe, pay, etc). It's distinct from merely providing a limited amount of content in the first place, as when a site offers 3 articles for free before requiring payment.

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

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

Thanks.

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

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

Pinttern?

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

Appwall? Subscribewall? Mailwall?

Q: But what about the unauthenticated existing users we might alienate?

A: There’s no way to gather data on that so it’s not a thing.

This is the problem with “data driven” decision making in a nutshell. It has annoyed me to no end at every company I’ve worked for.

>US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara,[3] who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

... but if you can't collect data on them, you can't target ads to them or sell their data elsewhere, and therefore they're worth nothing to you.

At the end of the day every company wants to make money, or will be bought out by cutthroats who think it's all there is, and this kind of thinking will take hold. Users you can't profit from = leeches.

Users are not consumers, but product. And untracked users are lower quality, so culling them can be beneficial. So no problem here.

Who says you can't collect user metrics from unauthenticated users?

Another fuck you pattern from Instagram is hiding the keyboard when you go to search for a user to encourage you to get distracted and tap on a suggestion rather than what you were searching for. You have to tap search three times to actually see the keyboard. It has to be intentional because it's been happening for years.

Wait wha? What’s the flow here to produce this?

I open IG, tap into the search tab, tap the search bar, keyboard appears, type in user, tap result.

Do you want tapping into the search tab to autofocus the search bar and open the keyboard. I can totally understand that but IG’s search tab is more a discovery thing now. Which like evil’s of social media aside was a sorely needed feature since finding people to follow has always been hard on Twitter and IG.

Are you on Android? You have to tap search icon, then the search bar, after which the keyboard pops up then disappears, then tap the search bar again.

IMDB is doing this now too. Infuriating.

I scrape imdb for some personal web pages and imdb has the weirdest things now to prevent scraping like custom media viewers and obscuring most of plain text inside deep, almost indistinguishable hierarchies.

Wow, I don’t use Instagram so I haven’t seen this, but that’s a very nasty pattern.

There are some instagram mirrors you can use:

https://dumpor.com/v/polite_cat_olli_official

https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official

Suffering the ads is preferable to whatever fb wants.

> https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official

Works for the Olli, but for another profile returns for me a "permanent error", blocked by Instagram.

See https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/cadence.moe/gemlog/2020-12-1... "Future of Bibliogram after restrictive IP blocking"

Thanks for these mirrors... I used to visit picuki website which used to work great until recently...

Thank you :D

Yeah - this is why I stay out of Instagram. They're repeatedly, blatantly hostile to any non-user use.

At least they're not as bad as Pinterest, which has done this for years, plus their million alternate domains polluting search results.

I was actually under the impression that what Pinterest does was against the ToS of Google. I can't find the link or reference, but I believe it was along the lines of 'You can't post images just to farm user account creation on your services' which is exactly what Pinterest does.

I would love if we could do away with these sites and those websites that insist I use their 'app' to view simple text data.

Pinterest is the absolute worst at this. I died a little inside when I finally gave in and made an account (using google login). But I needed to use an image for some research I was doing.

What exactly is a “non-user use”?

Oh, I’ve got a perfect example of a ‘Fuck You’ pattern in the wild, and it’s served with a side of ‘user gas-lighting’.

The gun.deals app, (specifically the iOS version, though I suspect android is engineered the same way), is your typical design of stacked rows of links for deals on, you guessed it, gun stuff.

As with these apps, the user scrolls down the list by dragging their finger upward. Except on gun.deals, the app will [intentionally] misinterpret the first contact of the finger as a ‘click’ on the row item. This causes the user to have to back out of the item they had intended to scroll past. (While almost certainly delivering fraudulently obtained ‘impressions’ that the app maker can represent to advertisers and vendors they are selling data and screen share to).

Fuck you patterns are everywhere on the web nowaday.

Some of the most annoying to me:

Twitch trying to discourage the use of the embedded player/non official players (like VLC) by replacing the content by a fullscreen purple picture asking you to watch on twitch.tv.

Reddit trying to force mobile user to use the reddit app as soon as the content is marked NSFW.

Instagram forcing me to login to view pictures.

Twitter asking me to see who someone is following.

Another one is the "can I help you" chat box that pops up. Intercom and the likes.

Thinking about making a Chrome plugin that intentionally asks some nonsense questions programmatically in the background to waste their time and disincentivize that behavior.

(To be clear, I love having chat channels for sales and support, just NOT unsolicited "Can I help you" popups.)

That just drives them toward using bots instead of humans.

I don't understand why Zoom doesn't get more flak for this. Their web version is intentionally crippled and broken in an attempt to force users to download their app. They won't even show the link to join a meeting with the web version until you have failed to join with the app (it used to require 3 failed attempts, but they seem to have dropped that to a single failed attempt).

Where are the developers implementing this stuff on large social media, especially Reddit who had such a user friendly founding? Surely they're here on HN. I'd love to hear their thinking in going along with this, assuming it's something better than "fuck the users I want to get paid." How do you join the dev team for a service you like and use, and then knowingly destroy it?

> How do you join the dev team for a service you like and use, and then knowingly destroy it?

You start with priorities that are fucked up before you even interviewed for the job.

The world of today is not like the world of 10+ years ago. In 2001, if you met a developer, there was an exceptionally high % chance that they were fundamentally into technology in a very deep & personal way. In 2021, you will find that most people in technology see it for the cash cow that it is and utilize it accordingly.

I would say that maybe 10-20% of the tech employees today actually give a fuck about these sorts of things. The rest just want their paycheck and as many other benefits as they can obtain. Raising a stink over dark patterns is not a good idea if you don't bring a whole lot of other meaningful value to the table.

Good news, my friend, you can see their sentiment right here in this very thread! Scroll up or down and feast your eyes.

My personal story: When I interviewed for a job at Amazon many years ago, all the recruiter e-mail kept going into my trash. I finally realized that I'd just directed *@amazon.com into my trash years earlier because they kept filling my inbox with so much useless bullshit, and I'd always hated the company. Turned out, though, that when presented with the chance to make twice as much money by working half as hard, those feelings became very malleable.. "Well, we're a bunch of assholes, but nice guys finish last"

Really, I'm just following orders every day at my job

The word "destroy" is questionable. These types of user-hostile patterns may in fact be needed to secure revenue or to exist at all.

The standard internet user doesn't pay for anything and increasingly blocks ads. That's why these patterns exist.

Surely it would feel uneasy to developers with a passion for UX, but there's nothing you can do about it. Go ahead and quit, it's not going to be very hard to find another developer willing to do it for 200K.

Hey, I would if 1. I got paid for it; 2. I'd justify it with "fuck this platform, everyone should go back to individual websites/blogs/forums".

> Since I’m a technical person, I tried to simply remove the modal in the browser Inspector. It sort of worked, but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page.

^ try finding the container of the content that has its overflow set to 'hidden', and change it back to auto. Then you should be able to scroll again

Yes, Fuck Facebook, and fuck every other company that doesn't provide a net-positive for humanity. They may offer something convenient or useful, but if the mid/long-term cost is higher, then it's not a good thing for us or even for them.

People with short term vision (less than 50 years) are making poorly informed decisions. Granted, I would like to be fabulously wealthy. But if gaining my wealth meant the world would be worse in 2+ years (I give myself a year just to be selfish), then it's just not worth it. That 2 year cost will eventually kick my ass in 20-40 years.

So speaking very selfishly, if it has a net negative cost of greater than 1 year, then it likely will hurt me personally. So I (and everyone else) should pass on that option.

Backing up a bit, let's break down what insta and fb offer.

Very briefly, they offer some connection to close and unrelated humans. They offer some communication, some awareness, some entertainment. But their cost is SO high. Honestly, if we just budgeted $50/mo for services which didn't harvest our data, we'd probably be ahead. And our services would be less twisted in favor of "fuck you" patterns.

I haven't used Facebook or Instagram in about 3 years. Occasionally I'll get sent a link to something on Instagram before having this exact experience. Whatever I'm missing out on, it hasn't been enough to convince me to make another account, my quality of life has significantly improved ever since I extricated myself from the social media hellscape.

Indeed, "fuck you" Facebook.

Yesterday I wanted to see something on Instagram. I think it was inside Relay for Reddit, where a WebView would open the Instagram page.

Not only was there this delay, but the cookie consent was ridiculous. I now checked and it's the same on the Desktop in Chrome.

I have no option to reject/disable cookies. Usually you get to choose which things you want to reject, like user tracking, personalized ads, but you usually need to keep the functional cookies.

This popup only has one button "Accept All" and one "Manage Data Settings". The latter would be the one where I get to choose what to accept. But all I get there is an explanation telling me that "your browser or device may offer settings that allow you to choose whether browser cookies are set and to delete them. These controls vary by browser, and manufacturers may change both the settings they make available and how they work at any time."

What is wrong with them? Honestly, Facebook is the worst disease on the internet, even Pinterest doesn't reach their degree of hostility.

This seems like an anti-scraping measure to me, they are limiting how much content you can access on the site without an account?

Seems like if they did not have protections like this, another group of people would be complaining about easy FB makes it for nefarious actors to violate your privacy, etc. and how careless they are in not locking down access better.

No because the first thing they do is to show you all of the content, ready to be scraped. Then they add their modal and then, after three reloads they store in your browser storage, they stops to show you the content.

So they don’t protect any data, they just leak it all. Then they hide it.

I think this is partially correct.

I hate the FU patterns as well, but there are so many lame aggregator sites scraping for viral content.

I would say FU patterns are: 80% trying to keep people in the walled garden ecosystem, 20% trying to make it hard for scrapers.

I want plug-in which lets users highlight content on a page and mark it as "not malicious". It would use a CTPH algorithm to call out the non malicious bits from their context (same tech that virus scanners use). I call these annotations "brushstrokes".

Other users could "follow" my brushstrokes, so when they land on the page, instead of implicitly running whatever code it finds there it just fetches the known-non-malicious parts. I.e. the cat pictures.

I'd totally pay $5/month if $4 of it went to people who are annotating the web in this way. You could get paid in accordance with how popular and trustworthy your brushstrokes are, and together we can fix the web.

I guess the goal would be UURL's, where the both the reference and the referent are uniform--rather than a uniform reference to a who-knows-what-this-site-will-do referent.

Speaking of fuck you patterns, has anyone else been part of the A/B test where navigating to an Instagram page prevents you from using the back button? They somehow clean my tab history so that I can’t go back to Google. It’s been happening to me for months!

I'm glad you mention this, thought I was the only one. I've been experiencing this on facebook.com, for years.

I'm puzzled how this is even technically possible. A website isn't supposed to be able to clear the history of where I came from?

It's Firefox doing it to prevent Facebook (and Instagram) from scraping your history.

If you're not on Firefox, then I don't know.

Exactly this about Instagram and Facebook bother me a little bit too, and here is something that most people also don't experience:

I sometimes use a VPS from a popular cloud provider as a proxy for my web browsing. I frequently get asked to "Prove I'm not a robot". This happens on all kinds of sites, including Youtube, Paypal, some government sites, etc. It is annoying enough, but Facebook as well as Instagram won't let me see _anything_ without logging in (which I don't). So can't even check the Lunch menu for a local restaurant on Facebook over this proxy.

The same happens when you use Linux as your desktop OS together with an ad-blocker. I guess it trips off some anti-bot rules.

My favorite is Google's captcha where they let visitors solve their machine learning classification problem by asking them to classify images.

Ah ah ! I had the exact same issue with an Instagram account I wanted to see because it was mentioned in some newspaper.

I have no problem with private content but here it’s not even that : the content is shown then hidden.

Of course it’s their site, their rules. But it says a lot about the engineering of frustration and the respect they show to potential users.

Facebook does this too. I'll go to a link to a facebook page and be greeted some seconds later with nonsense about having to login. There's also that facebook login box that covers the bottom of the page.

Yeah unless it's a business, even then, you're pushed to sign up for an account to message the business. As a business, I would be weighing my options here as your Facebook page is often one of the first to show in the results. Not long until Facebook starts advertising other businesses over your business page.

Today I came across another type of "fuck you" pattern. I was buying a shirt (https://vindlr.com/collections/savings-guy/products/green-sa...). The first time I went to look at the page, it was $25. I closed it and came back several hours later it has risen to $30. I opened the site in private mode, and the price was $25 again.

The dark patterns are not a sign of misunderstanding good UX, nor are they a sign of pure evil by their makers.

Big social networks only come into existence via an aggressive, exponential roll-out. The main feature of such a network is having your friends on there. None of the other features matter as its plain to see how they copy concepts from each other all the time. It's about getting you in there.

Once in existence, producing revenue means keeping you in the experience for as long as possible. Which is best done in an app and preferably logged in. This allows for the personalization and notifications.

Put another way, publishing all of this on the open web, with many users using ad-blockers, just doesn't cut it. Further, you don't want to give away all content to the open web (cough...Google).

We gave them this power. None of us want to surf the open web. We want 3 apps that do everything. And we won't pay for it, not a penny.

The article is a great example of blogspam:

- Inflammatory title

- Low effort content

- An invitation to hate on a favorite HN target

I pray for the day I won't have any reason to whine.

I use a Vim extension in my browser which converts 'j' and 'k' into scroll keys. I've found that on many sites which employ the modal overlay and suppress scrolling I can still scroll around using these keys even when arrow keys and mouse scrolling don't work.

Bibliogram is an unofficial front end to Instagram. Among other features, it won't prompt you to log in. Here's Ollie's page on Bibliogram:

https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official

Reddit on mobile is also beginning to require logging in to view certain pages, in which case you can use:

https://libredd.it/

https://teddit.net/

It’s a good one actually cause even if it’s falsely triggered e.g by users on NAT sharing the same address it’s only going to tell them “fuck you” but they can still login

> From TFA: "Since I’m a technical person, I tried to simply remove the modal in the browser Inspector. It sort of worked, but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page." You need to not only remove the modal, but remove the "overflow:hidden;" in the <body> tag. After that you should be able to scroll.

I have CSS/JS injectors that do this for me already, I really fucking hate popups and scrolling impediments of any sort.

Facebook was doing this for a while on business pages, but it looks like they've backed out of it now. Around 2 years ago you were only permitted to see content 'above the fold'. Scroll down to the second page of content and you saw an undismissable modal covering the entire page. Happily(!) you now have the option to dismiss the modal and continue scrolling, but the modal is shown for every new business page you visit.

Using a VPN, I'm completely locked out of any Facebook page, business or not. It just shows a login form.

I also like the mobile youtube website where they will ask you to create an account / login every 2-3 video views to "enhance user experience". This constant nudging (also a dark pattern) is clearly not about enhancing UX (commenting and playlists are not so much of use if you just watch links somebody posts in a chat or email) but clearly for youtube to serve better ads and track you more.

Just don't use these hostile sites. Your presence on them just adds to their credibility, and the rewards they offer are scant at best.

I just tried in a private browsing window: Without refreshing the page (to trigger the "forced HTTP redirect to login") I could delete the modal and disable the overflow:hidden on body and keep scrolling down quite a bit until I hit a post from January 18, 2019. So if you're prepared to try hard you can view a lot of cat pics without creating an account...

My challenge with this is that, I believe, you think instagram is a free service. It isn't, you pay for the service by selling your data to advertisers and using your data for advertisement. If they don't have your data, you aren't paying for the service.

I hate this and also, I don't use their service - same for facebook.

The Royal Bank of Canada ("RBC") perpetrated a FYP last summer.

Users were suddenly denied access to online banking, unless they agreed to switch all statement reporting from paper to electronic. This was a condition prior to being allowed to continue with the login; the option was given to refuse, but it was made clear that this choice meant losing access to online banking.

But, don't worry, the UI flow assured the user: once you log in you can set your statement reporting preferences.

Of course, it didn't show you what the current preferences are or save them anywhere!

I had just one or two things for which I had been getting paper statements, all else being electronic. I could not remember exactly which and since they didn't remember for me, I did the simplest thing and switched every single item to snail-mail paper statements.

Getting the user to resent you (even more) isn't how you bring about cooperation.

> …but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page

  * { 
    overflow: auto !important;
  }

You can go ahead and block FB before FB blocks you.

With a simple /etc/hosts update like that:

https://pastebin.com/FAV2f9eA

Several years without FB and its scripts anywhere. Never regret about such decision.

Just looking at how this post got 400 points in an hour says a lot about how people feel about this. Internet fame isn't the arbiter of truth, but practically everyone here knows and relates to this post at one point or another on the web these days.

What I don’t understand about most sites that do this is how QUICKLY they reach the “fuck you” state. It’s like a few clicks, or a few seconds, or whatever — nowhere near long enough to get any idea what the site is about, what it offers, whether it is valuable, etc. Therefore, what exactly is gained here? I just get annoyed and immediately leave.

Imagine if this happened elsewhere in life. You go into a grocery store, you grab a cart, you get 5 feet inside, grab one item, and then you are immediately blocked by 8 security guards and interrogated for your name before you can continue. Would you stay in the store?

> It sort of worked, but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page.

Just an FYI the author needed to remove the CSS attribute on the body? element "no-scroll"

I've noticed Instagram's A/B testing however only so far as it prevents users from seeing "too much" without logging in. The case OP mentions is the least fool proof as there are many images left on the page after you get rid of the obstacles (modal, dark modal screen covering page, and no scroll css attribute). The other more robust method I've seen involves Instagram only sending the amount of images to the browser they want you to see

Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter also do this, and I wish I could exclude them from Google search results.

The worst offense IMO is that even if you do take their bait to “use the app”, they punt you to the App Store page, losing the URL you were on in the process, so even though I have all of those apps installed, it’s not possible to click through from a Google result then open that same post in the app. At that point, I don’t try to search for the same thing in the app, I just convince myself that it’s not worth it and abandon any attempt to access that content. They can keep it.

I have been fascinated by this pattern lately. I don’t have an instagram account, but there are a few that I’ll browse occasionally. I usually browse in mobile Safari’s private mode. I can usually view one or two accounts before I get locked out. They’re incredibly good at locking you out! It’s not cookie-based, because I’m still locked out if I exit private mode or use a different browser on a different machine. I’m even locked out if I switch off wifi and browse from a tmobile ip. I’m not sure how they’re this good at fingerprinting, but it’s quite something.

My favorite example is "login before you know what's here". I'm always amazed by this. I hear about a new website, open it up, and there's a sign up pop-up.

100% close and go away.

This is the reason why I don't use Instagram...and that it also tries to force you to install an app instead of using the browser because you know...they can spy more from a phone.

I recommend trying to hit Reader mode button to defeat Fuck You patterns. This simple trick works on surprisingly many websites, because they need to conform with Google SEO rules.

Yep. Works on many paywall sites, too. Whenever you hit a paywall, turn on the reader mode, then refresh.

Pinterest is another one that exhibits this pattern. Infuriating.

On Firefox, when I load instagram, it deletes my history so I can't click back. I can't believe they'd deliberately be that shitty... is this some weird bug?

Firefox is doing that to keep Facebook from being able to access that tab's browsing history. You can disable this feature if you don't like it.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/

If you really want to browse cat pictures, just use this firefox add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/instagram-guest/

There are also proxy websites that allow you to browse instagram without login, but I don't like third parties learning about my browsing.

I've been using this expression for years, but I use it when a company purposely does not applies your explicit decision. In this case, you are the one trying to circumvent their policy.

https://mobile.twitter.com/XavierLava/status/108590014312636...

I don't like stikcy header,s so I use the Kill Sticky bookmarklet ( https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ )

When I do this, some websites do the same thing, i.e. don't let me scroll down.

I think calling this the Fuck You pattern is entirely appropriate.

Well, it's definitely a dark pattern.

But why do you use Instagram to view cat pictures?

Just use google image search to view as many cat pictures you want. Yes, google also serve ads - but it doesn't prevent you from viewing images. And ads can be easily blocked with an ad blocker.

Social media, specially the FB family, is all about dark patterns. Avoid using them - at least for viewing cat pictures.

Another user mentioned bibliogram.art as a front-end for anonymous IG browsing.

There's also an Android app available on F-droid for this purpose: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.austinhuang.instagrabber/

Funnily enough the Instagram link in the blog post worked fine for me, because I use the "Privacy Redirect" extension which sent me to https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official

for the areas where you may not want to use profanity, we could also call this a 'Hold-Up' or Bank Robbery pattern - essentially they are holding you at gunpoint for your data which we know they will immediately sell regardless of if you want to use their platform for anything other than that one link

Use an app / webpage like ingramer (https://ingramer.com/downloader/instagram/photo/) :)

Instagram will probably notice and break/ban them eventually but meanwhile, this works.

> but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page

Try this custom userstyle in a custom CSS plugin (like Stylus):

    body,
    html,
    html body,
    .overflow-hidden {
        overflow: auto !important;
    }

...I leave this on all the time, and use uBlock to snipe the SIGN UP NOW popovers, works wonders.

Thing is, Facebook just tipped over the $1T valuation and, presumably, could easily subsidise Instagram as an ad- and dark-pattern-free environment, generate tons of goodwill, and maybe ameliorate some of the current anti-trust coming their way.

It just seems like the most obvious basic common sense approach?

Facebook's use of this pattern prevented me from attending my grandfather's funeral (live streamed on facebook because of COVID) earlier this year. I was to say the least... pissed. If not for my sister who re-broadcast it to me over discord I'd have missed it completely.

Fortunately there are "instgram viewer" sites which proxy for you. For now.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=instagram+viewer&t=ffab&atb=v126-1...

Well I'm late to getting in on this but that blog post made me laugh.

I've done the same thing with my browser and had sites figure out ways to keep me out. I just quit going there.

Didn't really give it much thought though, aside from asking myself "why am I such a tightass?".

Im not sure why this person would expect to see the content while logged out. Shrug.

Its part of a social network, if everyone was lurking it would just be a bunch of creepers. The product shows who viewed a post/story/reel etc and can't do that if you arent logged in.

If so they should not even show the page to begin with. I'd be fine with that.

(It's an intentionally public page about cat pictures, by the way, so it wouldn't be creepy for anonymous internet users to look at. It's only private Instagram pages that would be creepy in that sense.)

Letting you browse public content for 5 seconds before asking you log in is a "fuck you" pattern.

Your contract with the platform when you get the content is, you're going to log in/use the app. Otherwise you couldn't get the content on an ad-supported basis. Any time you try to scrape the web page you're actually stealing content.

I don't think that's a dark pattern.

A dark pattern is trying to trick you into something silly.

Like buying something extra you didn't even know about.

This is just them saying 'login' and when you try to get around it, they're saying 'login' again.

It sounds like they disabled the scroll event on the body by setting overflow: hidden;.

[I am not the market segmentation fairy]

I can't buy anything from Amazon without an Amazon account.

Can't use Facetime without two Apple accounts and two Apple devices.

If it really matters, make an account. If it doesn't really matter, then it doesn't really matter.

I feel like most websites used to be like that. And then suddenly we got a load of great websites that just gave us what we wanted without ads. Facebook, youtube, reddit, google maps, gmail, etc. Now things are changing once again.

The alternative is that life is made very easy for dystopian, privacy-invading companies like Clearview AI. Really I find this a lot less galling than on somewhere like Reddit, where most content isn't so personal.

The phenomenon he's seen is more likey the result of an overly paranoid and aggressive ant-bot algorithm. I've seen this too, but when using various devices and accidental (company machine) VPN connections.

It’s a cynical way to interpret it . The desktop experience is only 30% of mobile. Brand perception is tarnished if people use the reduced experience .

Think of web as a preview experience and mobile is the complete product.

Have you tried hiding the div element with ublock, inspecting the html, and removing the y scrolling hidden rule?

It's common on many websites.

Ublock doesn't remove that rule but you can add it for each site.

We urgently need a functional P2P protocol for social media. Something where I can quickly and easily show my stuff to my friends - and vice versa. From my device to your device.

Linkedin has one of these too. Displays your full information to Google to index you, but if a human user visits, up comes the login wall.

F you for treating bots better than humans, linkedin.

There you go, an idea for business :) - an "mutual" account that will crawl pages on those sites - then share them without login

I am to sleepy and this idea is stupid as hell ...

I used to be able to see photos that friends and family publish to Instagram, but then one day I was inexplicably cut off—no more access via open standard protocols.

I’m sad about that.

The day instagram goes full Reddit is the day I probably stop using it. Thankfully I'm still just barely getting by with the website, but usually logged in.

Use ingramer.com or a similar tool/api, download all the images of your desired profile, and problem solved.

I call this solution “fuck you too”.

Do pay walls count as a “fuck you” pattern?

How about free trials with credit card submissions and having difficult “cancel subscription” work flows?

Author using "dark patterns" to describe anything he doesn't like (vendor upholding their side of the bargain)

I have all Facebook properties (fb, instagram, whatsapp, all of it) blocked by DNS via NextDNS on my router.

You're encouraged to try it.

I'm allowed to view approximately 20 images free per day before Instagram forces me to a login screen.

Instagram is a mistake of the internet.

Instagram was fabulous until FB got their dirty fingers in there. I think Facebook and all their properties are cancer for the web.

They are banned on all my devices (and traffic to/from their shitty endpoints is actively banned on my networks). I call this the "fuck you too" pattern.

Tiktok ?

this is not news about the content hidden behind login. Like come on. This is just a whiny post from a guy that for some reason didn't know this from like a 2 years ago! Nothing about a pattern or simply coming to the realization that IG wants only users of its platform who log in, to use it and see its content! Not really knew considering in the early days it was an APP only platform....we've only been lucky to have the web desktop version for a short number of years.

Do I like this behaviour - No. But am I not surprised from a company, as mentioned, hasn't exactly supported anything web/open over its existence. I mean look at the never-resolved feud between twitter and instagram that means you stillllll can't post pics to twitter from Instagram or see preview cards on twitter of IG links etc --all because of a spat like 10 years ago.

But not posting nerdy rants about how I have to use bots and shit to workaround logging into a site I am apparently interested in the content of, but don't want to actually use or participate in.

Marked as "Can't reproduce" :) e.g. I can browse the cat pictures just fine

My theory is that Instagram is probably trying to prevent bots capable of rendering pages and making changes on the DOM (e.g. Selenium or chromedp) from harvesting their unauthenticated access rights to Instagram's frontend to crawl/collect images.

Hence, as the author tried to circumvent it, they probably got IPbanned.

The pattern is real but in this instance they're blocking bots and scrapers.

Their API is the same way. Instagram really hates its users and developers.

I would say - fuck Mark!!!

Ban Mark Zuckerberg from the internet. He ruins everything he touches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Microsoft's old playbook, just done better, and against the web at large.

You get the level of service you pay for.

Instagram's free of charge.

Ah, the classic “bait-and-switch”

Wish I could upvote it 10 times!

Instagram have a paywall, to be able to see the content you must pay with your data by creating an account, and later hopefully become addicted to the platform to give more data and eat as many ads as possible.

If you think forcing to log in to consume content is a 'fuck you' pattern, then what do you think of paywalls?

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The inability to scroll is from a body-level element that has `overflow: hidden` set. Set that to visible and you should be able to scroll

Maybe it's time for shit like hiding scrollbars to be opt-in. I bet there are great use-cases for messing with scrolling, or right-click, or the back button, or whatever else. I bet there are benevolent websites that make downright acceptable use of these things. But this is not the hot path. There is far more abuse than good-use, yet I don't know any browser that does the right thing.

I like that name better. But something that means exactly the same thing that isn't considered a curse word would be even better.

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