[Banditoz]

LinkedIn has been employing a lot of strange dark patterns recently:

* Overriding scroll speed on Firefox Web. Not sure why.

* Opening a profile on mobile web, then pressing back to go to last page, takes me to the LinkedIn homepage everytime.

* One of their analytic URLs is a randomly generated path on www.linkedin.com, supposedly to make it harder to block. Regex rules on ublock origin sufficiently stop this.

Anyone know why they could be doing this?

[gabeh]

Giving them the benefit of the doubt here obviously, I know they're in an all out war with the contact database industry. Going from websoup to agents dialing out to rent-a-human services requires different tactics.

[duskdozer]

- scroll speed - unsure of ulterior motives, but i've seen this even on some foss things. i think some people just think it looks cool/modern/"responsive"/whatever

- back - hijacking it seems fairly common on malicious/dark-pattern sites to try to trap you on them. not sure why because you can just leave and it seems it would obviously piss someone off

- analytics paths - not everyone may know about/how to use regex rules for it or may use something else that doesn't support it (the stripped down ublock for chrome? i don't know if it can or not). sites seem to do this with malicious js code as well, presumably to prevent blocking

[rpigab]

I've been wondering why my scroll speed was off in LinkedIn, inspecting scroll-related css without finding an answer, I thought this was a bug. Anyone know what property does this? I might try to fix it with uBO scripts.

I think they want you to feel disoriented.

Why do they do all this bs and not fix the bug that happens when you insert Unicode U+202E in your name?

I've been having loads of fun with that but it's never been fixed. Anyone tagging me in a comment makes their input right-to-left unless they backspace the tag or insert newline. It also jumbles notification text because your name is concatenated to the notification static text.

You can also create an inverted link but it isn't clickable, just like other unicode links which aren't punycode-encoded on LinkedIn but aren't clickable (on the clients I've tried).

[ikr678]

I always assumed mobile webpage misbehavior was to force you to use the app.

[small_scombrus]

It could very much be confirmation bias, but I do feel like most "please use our app" popups appear after a mobile site breaks or refuses to load something