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?
Reminds me of screenshots of internet explorer with 20 search bar addons from the 2000s 🤣
Gemini is an attempt at trying to bring the old web back, although with some technical limitations.
While the web is looked at as a superstore rather than a library, function will dictate form.
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.
It’s actually a pretty tasty coffee.
deleted by creator
just fork chromium again; why use a toolbar when you can have the whole browser!
What the fuck is this post? fuck off back to your X/fagbook retard.
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.
And they get to deal with a combo of NoScript and UBlock origin from my Librewolf instance. If I really can’t get in, I’m going to HackerNews
this comment will not get any upvotes from anyone who follows it 😁
Why? It’s how I browse every day
It’s really interesting, I hadn’t tried this in a long long time. Some sites are simply broken, others drag themselves along half broken, but lemmy seems to be doing alright weheee
I use uBlock’s “Medium mode” that (for some reason) is hidden behind several obscure steps: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode
Anyway, yeah, it pretty much breaks every website the first time you visit. Well, every domain at least. But once you figure out which scripts to allow to get it functioning, you can save individual settings for each site/domain that load automatically every time you visit afterwards.
uBlock Filter:
||smartlock.google.com
||accounts.google.com/gsi/$3p
||id.google.com^It works 🫡 thank you 😊
You mean uBlock Origin, right?
Yes, that’s the only one you should use
I set 2 different people up with revanced over the weekend. I thought I’d typed in the wrong URL because I’m on Firefox mobile and both of them are on Chrome mobile. Literally looks like an entirely different site. On Chrome it’s got a big fancy logo at the top, ads…fucking…everywhere…
On Firefox(with various blockers and anti trackers etc etc) it’s a plain white page with a bold title and small blurb then links to the various apks. Took me a minute to even figure out where the link for the manager was…Might be better to install it through Obtanium by adding this link https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager
Cheers
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.
It’s hilarious on a widescreen setup how many websites aren’t adaptive but that cookie pop-up blocks 3/4 in 5000% font size.
The different popups just show how bad design the web is today.
Ask cookie question is required.
Login? Always create an account and proceed with all signup questions.
Agreement? Read them 1 hour until you have understood everything.
Webbrowser: can I get your location? And please the mic and video too!
Finally, don’t forget the ads!
Agreement? Read them 1 hour until you have understood everything.
I one time for fun (cause I’m insane) read the entire Windows license agreement, MSA (Microsoft Services Agreement), and privacy policy. It took me 1 hour and 45 minutes, I timed it.
Thank you for your sacrifice
Back on my Xbox 360 I decided to scroll through the agreement just to see how long it would take. I didn’t read it: I just held down the stick to see how long it would take.
I gave up after 40 minutes of scrolling.
I could imagine they’d be interested in you over here: Tosdr.org
What a great site, I’ll definitely be sharing it with some (naive) friends and colleagues :)
Ask cookie question is required.
Thank the European bureaucrats that don’t understand technology.
Sure, but can we at least agree that 800 “partners” is a tad too much?
Of course, the problem is they shouldn’t have gone for a warning, they should have gone against the practice of having 800 partners, or do we think the average user clicks “refuse”?
What they did is almost like nothing with extra steps.
No, it’s the website’s fault. You only need explicit consent if you’re tracking users beyond what your service obviously requires to function, the problem is these sites are stalking you.
And if it’s even slightly harder to decline than to accept they’re likely not in compliance anyway so it’s definitely not the EU’s fault.
Of course it’s the website fault, but just like government don’t let companies do whatever they want (all the time) the have to force websites to not do certain things, a warning certainly doesn’t do much when people keep clicking “accept”.
It’s the EU’s fault that there is that warning in the pages(which is what the OP is talking about in how clean websites are) a warning that doesn’t fix the real problem, just puts a sign on it.
“WET FLOOR!” instead of fixing the leaking pipe.
It’s not just a warning, it’s also an option to reject.
It’s not just a warning, it’s also an option to reject.
Some don’t give you an option, but actually have a much cleaner interface imo.
Whether or not it’s better since you still have to click OK, some don’t let you reject them at all.
If they don’t allow you to reject in two clicks then they’re violating the EU regulation.
I wish I could get my EU representatives to act on those! Oh right, I live on a different continent in a country that lets businesses run amuck
I’m aware of that, but I’m just pointing out many websites do not give you the consent options as stated above which imo are much more annoying.
Also, some researchers found out that nearly two thirds of the top 1000 websites don’t even honor your selection. If you say only necessary cookies they ignore it and still track you. Shocker.
No fuggin doubt.
And you know what irks me more is when you buy things from places like eBay or other third party seller websites (where you’ve consented to their cookies/terms) your email address you use with them is then in the hands of a goofball who’s had their
personalbusiness PC been compromised.The few times I use eBay the email addy I use on their sees my inbox flooded. Fucking shitshow.
If you can’t reject, they either don’t need the pop-up, or they’re not in compliance with the law. Either way it’s in no way the fault of the lawmakers.
I have a very hard time believing that these companies are unaware of how auful this shit makes their webpages.
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
It’s intentional, they want you logged in so they can track what you’re doing
iT’s bEtTeR iN tHe aPp
If this were a competent company, I’d say that they’re entirely aware of it and how fucking awful it is, but that there’s a mandate coming from somewhere that the page MUST include x, y and z and so they add x, y and z but usually try to at least make the site usable.
This being Twitter, though, I’m sure it’s because a screaming man-child threw a sink at someone and told them to do it or they’ll be fired and so they did it in the most half-assed obnoxious way they could manage.
Common language used to dismiss bad decisions like this:
- We need to track and meet our metrics for the quarter
- Engagement for $FEATURE is down, so we have to take measures to get people to take notice
- It’s opt-in/opt-out, so it’s the right thing to do
- It’s only a one time thing and then the system remembers1 what the user selected
- Only new users are affected - our power users will put up with it
- It’s just a minor inconvenience, really
- It’s just a website
1 - Oh, did you turn off cookies or clear your cache? Sorry about that.
Pretty sure you just triggered every developer and/or person who had to sit through a product meeting.
Though you missed the last bullet point: Our user surveys showed that people would actually prefer these changes
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).
I do a lot of my browsing from an iPhone 11. At least twice a day, a page will crash and reload halfway through whatever article I was trying to read. I get it’s a few generations old, but since when do you need state of the art tech to view what should be a static page.
Oh they’re aware, they just don’t care 99% of the time.
It’s diminishing customer experience creep, except the company doesn’t understand what the user data means. They run A/B tests of different layouts, seeing what kind of feedback each gets to learn more about design choices and users. Each version should get its own feedback and then that data is compiled by data scientists into actionable feedback, things that can be done to improve the website in the direction the company thinks is an “improvement”.
Twitter abandoned those data scientists with the initial layoffs. There is no one to tell them what works and what impacts the customer experience, which is why each time the internal question of “how do we open up for engagement?” they answer it the same way, “Use existing user bases by linking their account to Twitter.” The result is several login requests all looking for the same cookie.
It’s lazy or inexperienced management. Knowing the type of person Elon hires, it’s probably both.
I barely see them pop up, if they do it’s for a fraction of a second before a browser extension nukes them.
Well, unless you’re a nerd, you only see those messages once
I mean, they kinda don’t. Companies are entities made out of policies guiding how people split up objectives into smaller parts. The more people involved and the more indirect it is, the less coherent it gets
Legal says you need one popup for compliance. Marketing or analytics say you need more users to log in. Elon wants to remind people to call it Twitter.
By the time it filters through managers to the devs, they probably know it’ll be a horrible experience, but what are they going to do? It’s not their job. They’ll get brushed off. There might even be a compelling reason to do it in this way - with this in particular, annoying and intrusive popups are malicious compliance with the EU cookie laws. But everyone seems to be doing it this way - that’s probably what legal is going to recommend rather than interpreting the law themselves
So the problem is the structure. If you want a hierarchy of obedient replaceable cogs, you’ve made sure no one sees the full picture
on top of what others have said - directing you to the app and login - it’s also likely just that teams don’t talk and make decisions that solve their local issue without too much for the whole, and then say “ugh team x solved this so inelegantly! we were forced to do our thing that wasn’t as nice!”
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
Did someone say… cookies?
I can just tell that whenever Twitter’s user interface has weak attempts at humour, it was put there during the previous ownership, and that just makes me sad.
Like when you delete your account the final message says “#Goodbye”, I was tearing up, thinking, like, shit, Musk really fucked everything up, did he?
Musk made it even worse but Twitter was already shit before Musk
Musk really fucked everything up, did he?
Other than no longer being able to use an app to access twitter, I haven’t noticed anything else changing for the worse. They even made the “media” tab into grid rather than list which was a welcome update.
How about just the userbase? I’d say that changed for the worse. A lot worse. And if you don’t think so, I hope you enjoy yelling about Jews at your next khakis and tiki torches march.
It took long enough but the pop-ups evolved into new pop-ups.
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’ve become quite picky about what sites I visit because of this, and it’s why I don’t like opening links. I know you can block this crap, but it’s seldom worth the effort.
