I had an experience like this today when I tried to use GlassDoor for the first time. As a student making my first ever job applications, I wanted to see what salaries and work environments were like at particular employers.
GlassDoor did the same scroll-locking tactic (so an element zapper like Ublock Origin's wouldn't resolve the issue), instructing me to register or sign in to view any information. So I registered an account. Only, it still covered the screen and locked the scroll position, now telling me that I needed to leave a review for my current employer if I wanted to use the website for information gathering.
I find this particularly egregious, particularly for a company ostensibly founded around the notion of transparency and freedom of information (in regards to workplace compensation and culture). Evidently one is only entitled to make informed decisions after first experiencing the potential consequences of making uninformed decisions. Joyous.
Suffice to say I will not be using GlassDoor in the future.
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...
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a bigger beef with other Fuck You patterns.
1. The increasingly high number of sites that will show a blank page when I disable Javascript.
2. The increasingly high number of sites that will show a blank page when I disable cookies even if I have no intention to login and often the site doesn't even involve any kind of membership.
3. Sites that refuse me their content because my browser "is no longer supported" but wil gladly open up to me as soon as I tell my browser to lie about its brand or version.
I especially love the websites that tell me I need to be using the latest version of Firefox when.... I'm using the latest version of Firefox. I'm just on Ubuntu
1 and 2 I have noticed accelerate quite a bit over the past years. While annoying I've found it is a very good metric for deciding who will never get my money/data.
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.
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.
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!"
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 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.
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, 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.
I noticed a particularly dark pattern when I used Keeps, by Thirty Madison. They tell you, that you can cancel or pause at anytime but that is a lie. They over-prescribe their medication, and if you try to pause delivery, they automatically resume it after 3 months. You cannot pause, for longer than 3 months. If you want to cancel, you have to call them where they harass you into staying.
This is not how you should do customer retention. This is fraud. You are making intentionally difficult pathways for your customers to leave you so that you can report falsely propped up retention number to your investors, Thirty Madison. If you IPOd today, I would short the shit out of you.
This is why I reported Thirty Madison to the FTC in a consumer trade complaint and it is why I notified their investors of potential fraud over LinkedIn.
Thirty Madison is committing fraud against their investors, in my opinion and you should absolutely stay away from them as a consumer.
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.
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.
Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn redirect me to the login page without ever showing me the content. I guess they don't like my ISP. Since I'm not going to create an account, now I just avoid their links when searching for something.
Last year (I think) Twitter started showing a login/registration popup as soon we started scrolling. Not as bad, but the popup wasn't dismissible (now it is), so for a while I also stopped clicking on Twitter links.
Reddit also hides some subs on mobile and requires us to install the app... that same sub is available on old.reddit.com (or the now discontinued i.reddit.com).
I started using extensions that redirect these services to better front ends. Twitter → Nitter, Reddit → Old Reddit or Teddit/Libreddit, etc. I do the same on my phone (Android and Firefox, I don't think you can do the same on iOS).
FB regularly ‘fails’ when I attempt to log out - I don’t use the app. Recently it’s been extreme using Safari. It’s so bad it can’t be accidental. Why would the ever optimize logging out?
I don't agree with this at all. I do concede that some of these patterns use manipulation and visual trickery to send you down a particular (typically more profitable) path. That said, we all enjoy these services for free. The companies that provide them are for profit. I feel the intense hatred people have for these companies is extremely biased.
As a person who avoids Meta products for the most part, I still benefit from them greatly. I pay $0 and get a lot of conveniences. I do agree that it's not a nice feeling that they own the things I may post, but it's the deal that gets us what's app, facebook and instagram with near unlimited access to really nice social networking tools.
I similarly pay for YouTube premium because I don't want adds. I enjoy hours of video content ad free - often watching it more than I'd watch netflix or whatever other streaming service.
I agree that they're monetizing user content, but they're also providing access to compelling and often high quality content for free.
I only ever look at IG posts that show up in chats as parts of conversations and IG appears to have banned my phone from viewing their content at all. Fine with me, as there is zero chance I will ever create a login on their site anyway, but I tell the people in the chats that IG links don't work for non-users, and so they share less of the content. I call this the, "Fuck me? Fuck you!" pattern.
Nothing quite says "hemorrhaging MAU," like dark patterns to get people to login, and "urgent account information" emails to get those same logins. Someone should take a hard look at those numbers, as I'd suspect they're a bit soft.
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.
This is an important insight.
What is the correct response when someone says “fuck you”? The answer is obvious.
“No, you”
The correct thing to do is to acknowledge the relationship they have expressed by their distain for you. That relationship is adversarial, other. It’s “you’re nothing to me” if you’re nothing to them they probably oughta be nothing to you.
For me “fuck you” patterns are a signal you should have no relationship with that company.
As are:
nag forever patterns
and
hard nudges
(a hard nudge is a shove, I don’t like being shoved — google maps uses a hard nudge to force login so they can bypass US data privacy rules. Thanks, but no thanks)
Delete your account, add to your pihole block list and use wireguard to teleport your mobile home so you benefit from that while out and about.
You’ll be surprised at how liberating it feels to be able to forever sever ties with products that express “fuck you” patterns.
I hate this so much. I don't want a Facebook account but there are several accounts on Instagram that post things I'd like to view.
There's some kind of shady black market for Instagram scrapers that bypass the hard wall the OP describes and publish the content with their own ads injected. I can't vouch for anything about these sites other than the fact that they do work. I highly recommend using noscript or ublock at the very least before checking them out.
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.
I walk a lot, drink wine, and listen to podcasts and audio books.
You probably don't need much social media to keep yourself sane.
But you have to test it for yourself, and for some months.
Good luck with your experimentation.
We evolved to be physically social or loners.
We have not evolved to anything new in the last few thousand years, including reading and written languages :)
Stick to the older stuff, like honesty.
[+] [-] TheAngush|2 years ago|reply
GlassDoor did the same scroll-locking tactic (so an element zapper like Ublock Origin's wouldn't resolve the issue), instructing me to register or sign in to view any information. So I registered an account. Only, it still covered the screen and locked the scroll position, now telling me that I needed to leave a review for my current employer if I wanted to use the website for information gathering.
I find this particularly egregious, particularly for a company ostensibly founded around the notion of transparency and freedom of information (in regards to workplace compensation and culture). Evidently one is only entitled to make informed decisions after first experiencing the potential consequences of making uninformed decisions. Joyous.
Suffice to say I will not be using GlassDoor in the future.
[+] [-] janandonly|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] guestbest|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnt12|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slg|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spondylosaurus|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wpietri|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] deely3|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jitix|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] duxup|2 years ago|reply
I feel like we as internet users are a big part of the math here.
[+] [-] amelius|2 years ago|reply
We can start with a law that applies to all social media systems that have more than 1M users.
[+] [-] des1nderlase|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sroussey|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] naikrovek|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anonymousiam|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|2 years ago|reply
Either you pay or you are the product.
[+] [-] macNchz|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] totallywrong|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Luctct|2 years ago|reply
1. The increasingly high number of sites that will show a blank page when I disable Javascript.
2. The increasingly high number of sites that will show a blank page when I disable cookies even if I have no intention to login and often the site doesn't even involve any kind of membership.
3. Sites that refuse me their content because my browser "is no longer supported" but wil gladly open up to me as soon as I tell my browser to lie about its brand or version.
4. Oh, almost forgot! Cloudflare.
[+] [-] malfist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrps|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] I_am_uncreative|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isametry|2 years ago|reply
[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.
[+] [-] wpietri|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ranting-moth|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|2 years ago|reply
Or maybe it is just me and Google profiling algorithms finally realized that I don't like Pinterest results.
[+] [-] fwlr|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] roughly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vbo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nocoiner|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] faangsticle|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kitanata|2 years ago|reply
This is not how you should do customer retention. This is fraud. You are making intentionally difficult pathways for your customers to leave you so that you can report falsely propped up retention number to your investors, Thirty Madison. If you IPOd today, I would short the shit out of you.
This is why I reported Thirty Madison to the FTC in a consumer trade complaint and it is why I notified their investors of potential fraud over LinkedIn.
Thirty Madison is committing fraud against their investors, in my opinion and you should absolutely stay away from them as a consumer.
[+] [-] radarsat1|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marcosdumay|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] luuurker|2 years ago|reply
Last year (I think) Twitter started showing a login/registration popup as soon we started scrolling. Not as bad, but the popup wasn't dismissible (now it is), so for a while I also stopped clicking on Twitter links.
Reddit also hides some subs on mobile and requires us to install the app... that same sub is available on old.reddit.com (or the now discontinued i.reddit.com).
I started using extensions that redirect these services to better front ends. Twitter → Nitter, Reddit → Old Reddit or Teddit/Libreddit, etc. I do the same on my phone (Android and Firefox, I don't think you can do the same on iOS).
[+] [-] flybrand|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parentheses|2 years ago|reply
As a person who avoids Meta products for the most part, I still benefit from them greatly. I pay $0 and get a lot of conveniences. I do agree that it's not a nice feeling that they own the things I may post, but it's the deal that gets us what's app, facebook and instagram with near unlimited access to really nice social networking tools.
I similarly pay for YouTube premium because I don't want adds. I enjoy hours of video content ad free - often watching it more than I'd watch netflix or whatever other streaming service.
I agree that they're monetizing user content, but they're also providing access to compelling and often high quality content for free.
[+] [-] motohagiography|2 years ago|reply
Nothing quite says "hemorrhaging MAU," like dark patterns to get people to login, and "urgent account information" emails to get those same logins. Someone should take a hard look at those numbers, as I'd suspect they're a bit soft.
[+] [-] paddw|2 years ago|reply
Like, if IG forced you to login to see anything, you might dislike that, but it wouldn't feel manipulative.
[+] [-] throwaway1777|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TobyTheDog123|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] more_corn|2 years ago|reply
The correct thing to do is to acknowledge the relationship they have expressed by their distain for you. That relationship is adversarial, other. It’s “you’re nothing to me” if you’re nothing to them they probably oughta be nothing to you.
For me “fuck you” patterns are a signal you should have no relationship with that company.
As are: nag forever patterns and hard nudges (a hard nudge is a shove, I don’t like being shoved — google maps uses a hard nudge to force login so they can bypass US data privacy rules. Thanks, but no thanks)
Delete your account, add to your pihole block list and use wireguard to teleport your mobile home so you benefit from that while out and about.
You’ll be surprised at how liberating it feels to be able to forever sever ties with products that express “fuck you” patterns.
[+] [-] JeremyNT|2 years ago|reply
There's some kind of shady black market for Instagram scrapers that bypass the hard wall the OP describes and publish the content with their own ads injected. I can't vouch for anything about these sites other than the fact that they do work. I highly recommend using noscript or ublock at the very least before checking them out.
https://imgsed.com/
https://dumpoir.com/
https://wizstat.com/
There are likely others, these are just the ones I'm personally aware of.
[+] [-] Glyptodon|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] emmydee|2 years ago|reply
Scroll down, click "See more Jobs"...
'fuck you' pattern reveals itself :)
[+] [-] pcblues|2 years ago|reply