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Comment by jonobird1 | Hacker News Reader

This'll probably be an unpopular comment but I feel the need to point out that this is good (in the ways that made this post popular) and bad.

Bad because for the dot com company I work for, we use cookies to make sure we don't show users 'helper' tooltips more than once per 30 days and cookies is one of the better ways of doing this. It also helps us anonymously track a user location to show better search results, user currency etc.

There are many bad ways a website can use cookies, but by using a plugin like this, it'll ultimately just ruin your own user experience.

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For years ive been browsing with clear cookies after each session. What you describe with first visit notification is not common at all. And when sites actually do it, its usually very subtle and can be ignored like the notification bar on the top of stackoverflow. I can only name one website where I am annoyed by the lack of cookies and that is when youtube doesn't remember my preferred video resolution. Otherwise browsing with fresh ones has no degraded user experience for me.

Actually this is starting to become worse though after EU introduced the must notify about cookies law last year. The ones who do clear their cookies once in a while are punished by being notified about them time after time while the others will blindly click OK and never see the message again.

> when youtube doesn't remember my preferred video resolution

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-cente...

This is (IMHO) a bad UI approach on your side anyway.

If these tooltips are valuable, why are they visible (prominently displayed) only on the first visit? And if they are not valuable (most of the sites overvalue their content - visitors stats should help you assess that) you should just get rid of them anyway.

I am not saying cookies don't have their place, but being misused as they are I like keeping my cookie jar clean too.

As someone who has Firefox configured to never store history, cookies, session, whatever, basicly constant Private Browsing Mode, I blame your website for bad user experience.

In the mind of the your users it is never going to be their own fault that tooltips keep showing up on your website, they'll blame you.

One way of fixing it: Only show a tooltip if the user have a cookie older than a day. No one will get a tooltip on their first visit, but that seems acceptable.

Wait.. How is that acceptable? The first visit seems the time that you would need the tooltips the most!

Well it's up to the user whether they prefer privacy or better user experience.

You can easily whitelist sites you visit often/where you don't mind about them tracking you & prefer the better user experience..

Another example: even with standard browser settings and without that kind of plugin, I often get the annoying "we use cookies" warning mandated by European regulations, on the same website.

These users can hide 'helper' tooltips by their own.

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