I happened to click a link that took me to the associated twitter X account for something I was interested in and was greeted by not one, not two, but four modern day web popups.
I know it’s nothing new. I’ve got a couple of firefox plugins that are usually quite good at hiding this sort of nonsense, but I guess they failed me today (or, I shudder to think, there were even more that were blocked, and this is what got through)
What’s the worst new/not-signed-in user experience you’ve encountered recently?
Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed
(grumble, unblock, reload)Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
https://privacypass.github.io/ has helped somewhat
Privacy Pass will generate a number of random nonces that will be used as tokens
British people making a double take
Privacy Pass just randomly generated Prince Andrew and now my browser is all sweaty.
You forgot:
Click all the pictures of buses.
(clicks)…spin…spin…spin…
Click all the pictures of bicycles.
(clicks)…spin…spin…spin…
Click all the pictures of traffic lights.
(clicks)…spin…spin…spin…
Click all the objects heavier than this one
…spin…spin…spin…
The web. It was good while it lasted.
robots.txt is the perfect summary of the web era. A plain text file that politely asked web crawlers not to do certain things. Such an innocent time.
I have a very hard time believing that these companies are unaware of how auful this shit makes their webpages.
They know exactly. Once you create a Twitter account, consent to cookies and link your Google account (AKA give them all your data) you’ll never see these pop-ups again.
Basically extortion.
If you ever want to read anyone’s tweets somewhat chronologically or see someone’s latest tweet, you’re gonna create an account.
Tweets as view on people’s profiles are totally scrambled (presumably to thwart LLM-feeding scrapers).
It’s intentional, they want you logged in so they can track what you’re doing
iT’s bEtTeR iN tHe aPp
Oh they’re aware, they just don’t care 99% of the time.
Anyone can make a good website. It takes a real engineer to make a horrible website that people will use just enough while suffering.
That’s a very good quote.
Inspired from the quote “Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
Source: Unknown
GIVE US YOUR DATA GIVE US YOUR DATA GIVE US YOUR DATA
We can sell 80 percent of the screen without inducing seizures!
*without reaching statistically relevant levels of seizure induced deaths.
*without being sued for more than we would make from seizure induced deaths
*without being successfully sued for more than we would make from seizure induced deaths.
*without being successfully sued for more than we would make from seizure induced death, outside of an arbritration court thank to our ToS
If this was your webpage 15 years ago, you’d be almost certain that you’d been infected with malware.
There was a screenshot I once saw of a Chinese netizen’s web browser in the late-2000’s, using Internet Explorer 6 and tonnes of third-party toolbars. I think I saw it back when Digg was still a thing. We’ve now reached the age where major websites are more cluttered with notifications than a malware-infected browser was 15 years ago, and where everybody is tracking everything that you do online.
25 years ago, we legitimately drove RealNetworks into the ground for a lot less than what we’re allowing Google, Microsoft, Meta, X, etc to get away in the modern day.
X gon give it to ya
I LOATHE that fucking google sign in overlay.
This is the digital equivalent of walking through an open air market and having salespeople harass and follow you trying to sell something
The rare Gigachad double top level comment. Well played sir.
Reminds me of screenshots of internet explorer with 20 search bar addons from the 2000s 🤣
EU: “You can’t just collect people’s data, you have to ask permission first and give people the opportunity to decline.”
Site Developers: “Fine, but we’re going to comply in the most malicious manner possible.”
HEY DO YOU WANT COOKIES ARE YOU SURE PLEASE HIT THE BIG BLUE BUTTON FOR COOKIES THEY ARE HELPFUL AND GOOD PLEASE GIVE COOKIES!!!
It’d be fun if the EU started policing any use of the phrase “We are required to show this dialog”.
They’re not. They choose to show that dialog so that they can try to apply commercial tracking cookies. Anything for website function is already covered by EU laws.
There have been a couple of changes to the rule since it came into effect. Originally, the pop up could effectively occlude the “Do Not Enable Cookies” button behind a maze of “Optional” settings. The end result was a big colorful “I Consent” button and a tiny little gear button with a thousand manual checkboxes to uncheck every time you visited the site.
The regulations were updated since. Now these annoying pop-ups at least tend to have a clearly defined “Yes, I Consent” / “No, I Do Not” at equal scale and opposite color, allowing you to bypass it without going into the weeds on a configuration screen.
Gemini is an attempt at trying to bring the old web back, although with some technical limitations.
I heavily disagree with this. Stepping back to “walls of text with hyperlinks” is a bad idea that’ll service no one and will never succeed in any reasonable capacity.
Current web technology is not what caused bad web. The exception would be too powerful js where js should only provide interactivity and extra flavor to the page rather than run a full application which can fingerprint and punish user agents.
Javascript, embeded images and audio are awesome things that can improve content readability a thousand fold. Just look at best docs on the web - all of them use these features to tend their users. Even wikipedia added js flavoring like hover pop ups. Because it works.
I actually prefer a mostly text web. If the trade off for ditching JavaScript is not getting hovering pop ups, I’m fine with that. I think that while JavaScript can help with usability, it’s main use right now is being a pain in the ass. Images and video are useful, don’t get me wrong, and that will always be the most popular “use” of the internet, but most of the time I just want to go on the Internet and read cool shit without fifty different corporations trying to fuck me over with the promise of “enhanced usability”. Like a link has to have some floating bullshit for me to click it. Absolute madness.
For me, multimedia is a non-negotiable part of the web experience.
Yes, I get as annoyed as the next guy when I want, say, a simple tutorial written in a couple paragraphs, but the only ones anyone seem to want to make are eight minute long videos filled with fluff. That sucks. But purposefully excluding it from your protocol because it burned you a fee times is a gross overcorrection in my view.
I appreciate the Gemini project, I respect its goals, and I am happy that it meets the needs of several people such as yourself. But for me, and I think for a great majority of people who would be potentially interested in its broader goal of simplifying the web but are dealbroken by lack of multimedia capabilities, Gemini will never be anything more than a toy. A quirky little curiosity that will never expand beyond a tiny clique of people who accept Gemini for what it is and are content to only ever see content from that same small pool of people.
But lack of ability does not prevent any of that. Entrepreneurs who want to monetize stuff will find a way to spam and game the system.
As someone whos responsible for docs and public facing material I’d never push text only content these days. There’s just way too much UX value left out with this limitation. Sometimes more is more.
Additionally I’d argue that people who only want text are have advantage in the current system as you can strip and reformat everything on the front end and nobody will ever know or bully you into accepting their system. Just like nobody cared about ad blockers before they were widely adopted.
Anybody know why google has a popup on every major website now? And more importantly, how to get rid of that without creating an account?
Disable all third party JS in uBlock origin
That can cause the page to fail to load in some instances.
Some specific websites might need tweaking but from anecdotal evidence about 90% of websites work just fine. YMMV though because I don’t visit twitter
A number of the more tech savvy online newspapers have begun enforcing client-side scripts as a means of preventing people from reading articles without a subscription.
I will say that the Google Auth prompt in particular is just this huge nuisance and a horrible experience. People should feel stupid for including it in their web experience.
Wait, people choose to put it in their website??
Yes. How else would it get there?
Given how intrusive google is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was kinda forced by them along with some other functionality
