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.
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!"
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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!".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
>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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadSeriously, no honor among thieves! :p
[0] https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
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.
Or maybe it is just me and Google profiling algorithms finally realized that I don't like Pinterest results.
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.
probably bots have a way to bypass this.
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.
contacting support used to work after a few days, but not recently.
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.
Most likely. IG has pretty effective fraud detection heuristics and you probably appeared as a bot due to UEBA deviation.
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.
Meta likes tracking you even outside their own walled jail-platforms, too.
https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/17/facebook_admits_to_tr...
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.
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!
Until now … https://qbix.com/communities
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.
Isn't there a website that simple records a GIF of the said tiktok/ IG reel and lets you share that instead?
https://www.picuki.com/
Don't know exactly how much it captures, but you can toss the page it gives you into archive.ph at least.
Is it really so hard to just say "Gah, sorry, I don't have an IG account"?
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.
It takes next to no effort to throw your menu as a photo on google maps for example.
You’re free to not do it, but the market will push you out in favor of businesses that do.
I personally don’t expect anything. I’ll just not go to places that don’t have information. That’s the market in action.
We sometimes get some customers who hate the QR's, or claim not having phone/signal/whatever.
I'll lend them my phone to check...
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.
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'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.
Come on, you can get one for under $100
Each day, they had new paper menus ( https://menucuisine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Fish-... - note the top)
Their menu is now also at https://order.online/store/the-fish-market-palo-alto-723242/...
I'm not sure if they still have paper menus or what the expense of those menus were.
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.
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.
Obviously a YT vid doesn't hack anything, but it does scare the companies out of complacency when it's trivial to swap to real malware.
You can be doing all this nonsense to an owner serving you.
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.
People do not care at all whatsoever about their privacy being invaded, generally.
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.
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.
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.
> "If someone is nice to you but rude to the waiter, they are not a nice person."
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.
It is annoying when a transaction that for ages has been all-paper gets bumped into the panopticon.
What kind of dystopian city do you live in? QR codes are on the decline again¹, fortunately.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/may/23/off-the-menu-wh...
I'm an old guy with bad eyes I'm not going to try to read your menu on a 5" phone screen in a dim restaurant.
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?
Not like they can see where the camera is pointing, let alone locate the code in the first place.....
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?
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.
Because it sure doesn't seem like you know the first thing about the issue....
And when we don't actually know what we're talking about what are we supposed to do?
Really, there's not a single thing that can be said to make it less stupid.
https://www.afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-technolog...
They don't put them in the same spot always and there's often a no smoking or other stick as well, often several.
I could go on but really....
https://www.afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-technolog...
you'll lose out on special events and deals, but that's probably an okay compromise.
though there are some special cases where their hours on social media are more accurate than maps...
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.
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.
Like, if IG forced you to login to see anything, you might dislike that, but it wouldn't feel manipulative.
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).
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?
Usually when sites show a modal they also set CSS on the html / body element to disable overflow scrolling, so you'd have to find and remove that too.
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.
It gives me:
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
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
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.
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.
It's very profitable, and it's more profitable the more you destroy the lemon.
This fuck you pattern feels like a variation of that trick so in my opinion it should be heavily penalized.
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...
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.
Nope. They chose to.
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.
I feel like we as internet users are a big part of the math here.
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.
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.
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.
A privately owned company can do as it (that is: its owner(s) without state oversight) wishes.
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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.
They only have to do what the shareholders demand if the shareholders actually vote to make them.
The meme of the "fiduciary duty" meaning that profit must be maximized at all costs has been debunked so many times by now it's really not funny.
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.
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.
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.
It seems almost impossible to run a public company without having the place be taken over by bean counters these days.
There are probably quite a few ways such a company would be vulnerable to takeover.
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.
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.
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.
It’s just more “in your face” now.
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.
I tried Googling this, and the last article I found was from 2019...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Legislation around mergers and acquisitions. Enforcement of existing anti-trust legislation.
you say that like we don't all know it already. Most readers of this site likely work at these places.
No kidding they have to do this, if they exist. Their existence is the problem, whatever the cause.
We can start with a law that applies to all social media systems that have more than 1M users.
Either you pay or you are the product.
You either control the software, or you are the product. No amount of Danegeld will buy you freedom.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/10/22323790/lg-oled-tv-...
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.
Once you do that, you become harder to monetize.
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.
In your mind, who should bear the cost of building and maintaining large services like Instagram?
The whole system rewards maximization of profits, and all else is an up hill battle.
When I criticize Google, or some other company, I am not forgetting that they are motivated by making money.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, read some Ted Kaczynski.
If your answer is non-zero, maybe you would have a point, but let's be honest, statistically it's highly unlikely that you do.
Poor pnt12, wants people to work for them for free, and insult them while you're at it.
Plans are described on Google's website.
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)
In case you're misunderstanding what we're discussing here - the feature in question is https://developers.google.com/identity/gsi/web/guides/offeri... .
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.
It looks slightly different than the one in your link, but no less annoying: https://i.imgur.com/GvIExQT.png
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.
https://developers.google.com/identity/gsi/web/guides/itp seems to be their doc on this.
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.