Every Fucking Website (2020)
lxe.github.ioActually big tech is to blame: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
- https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/subjects...
I had a discussion with my CFO about removing the cookie banner from our website (because we don't set any tracking cookies, and cookies for things like login are exempted) and he said "yeah, but it makes the site seem less legitimate.
Companies could stop selling and storing your data. They could only use cookies when absolutely essential. They could use lots of kinds of UX.
This is the equivalent of businesses who put a big visible "20% the state says we have to give our employees healthcare" fee on their bill to throw a hissy fit and hope customers get angry at the government for protecting them instead of the business for exploiting them.
As many have said before:
it's basically malicious compliance. They're supposed to be super annoying ... Instead of complying, they choose this obnoxious practice so they could continue ... monitoring every action a visitor does.
You don't need a cookie banner to be allowed to create Cookies. You only need them if you're using them for something like tracking. [1]
Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance. When you complain about them, you are doing the lobbying work of ad companies for free. The correct solution is to just not spy on people, and the problem is that the EU didn't go far enough and just ban the behavior altogether. [2]
Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers [3]
We are just conditioned to see it without difference in basic tracking and tracking all your clicks across site and selling it to advertisers.
There's a reason you don't hear about people "maliciously complying" with HIPAA or PCI laws. Because that's just called compliance.
No excuses for poorly done EU regulations.
A comparison would be a store who was angry the law says you have to be 21 to buy alcohol and starts requesting everyone, even people not buying alcohol, to show ID or be kicked out. That's not a bad law, that's a bad business maliciously complying.
It's like those warnings in cigarettes packages saying they will kill you. I know cigarettes are bad, but the warnings also make me believe there's at least "some" control in how bad they are. Now if I buy one without the warnings, I will worry those in particular are extra-shady and likely to kill me even faster.
Oh how I miss those warnings. Nowadays the packages are covered in graphic body horror pictures. And there's no branding on them any more, just white text on a black background, so I have to carefully check that the illiterate teenagers at the store gives me the correct ones.
Do anyone else hear circus music?
One of the best indicators that something was not spam was the unsubscribe button.
Most small business owner's I've spoken to are keenly aware they are only one bad lawsuit away of closing down. Almost no one care's about the cookie banner. Most just mindlessly click to allow cookies and go on with their life. There's almost no cost to having it.
When I see these dialogs listing they have 1289723 gazillion vendors they share data with, I know that whoever is in charge of analytics, privacy or both at the company is incompetent.
Back in the day, this is how we introduced AWS at a large company. We just did it. And once done, they couldn't deny that it cost a fraction of what we were paying our supplier and that things took minutes to set up rather than weeks. And that they worked a lot better.
Yes, there was shouting in meeting rooms. And yes, people said "you can't do this". Turns out they were wrong. A few years later I mentioned this to Werner Vogels. During a meeting. Where my CEO and CTO were present. And where everyone was feeling very good about us being one of AWS' biggest customers in our region.
So when someone says "you can't do that", sometimes you should make them prove it.
(At the time AWS was a good idea. Today dependence on a US service provider is a harder sell in Europe. The _first_ question you get today is if we can host it ourselves if we need to or if we can use a local service provider.)
So how would you do ePrivacy Directive compliance/risk avoidance in a non-obnoxious way?
Completely eliminates the need for a cookie permission bar.
If you want to remember dark mode with a cookie, then you can just gate that setting behind a “allow functional cookies” toggle.
Getting consent for functional cookies doesn’t have to be done with an intrusive cookie bar on landing. You can request consent as it becomes needed. There’s other ways of complying that aren’t dark patterns.
In any case here is a plain text interpretation from the EU (https://gdpr.eu/cookies/):
"Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user.
Preferences cookies — Also known as “functionality cookies,” these cookies allow a website to remember choices you have made in the past, like what language you prefer, what region you would like weather reports for, or what your user name and password are so you can automatically log in."
Farther down:
"To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:
Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies. ..."
So a preference cookie is categorized differently than "strictly necessary" by the ePrivacy rules predating, but now part of, GDPR. But elsewhere in this thread someone asserted that a cookie that is placed and the data never sent back to the server is exempt, so if you handle dark mode entirely client side you might be ok?
I'm beginning to understand why the lawyers in the EU just say "fuck it, put a banner up"
You are correct that people keep stating such things. But it is incorrect.
That example would be an essential cookie, also known as a strictly necessary cookie.
A shame this FUD is still being spread.
I suggest actually reading the GDPR if you think it applies to you. The EU put it up on a website for everyone to see. Here's the most relevant section: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/
Notice how cookies are not mentioned, popups are not mentioned, and strictly necessary is not mentioned. Those are requirements the data harvesting industry invented out of whole cloth. They are not the actual requirements.
I'll just repeat that one more time: the GDPR does not mention cookies or popups. Let that sink in. It's all cargo-cult.
The GDPR also doesn't give a shit about dark mode preference. Literally nothing in it has any relevance to a dark mode preference, even (and especially) if you store it in a cookie.
In short: the GDPR doesn't mention it but it is covered by the ePrivacy directive/regulations which does cover cookies very specifically, and which is enforced through GDPR.
Have a good day.
What's more, if the 'cookie' is entirely local (i.e. it's never sent back to your own server, e.g. you're using the local storage API and the javascript on your page never puts that information into a request), like how this would normally be implemented nowadays, then these requirements don't apply at all (because a cookie according to the law is just something your server gives to the user's device and then the device gives back later).
At least for GDPR...
The only ways to actually track without a consent pop-up are:
(1) stay off the device entirely and process server-transmitted data under legitimate interests with a privacy notice, or
(2) confine any device storage to what's strictly necessary for the service the user requested
in fact. you probably don’t need to track users.
It would be extremely beneficial to businesses to put a clause in their terms and conditions that limit damages to 1 cent in the event of any dispute. For obvious reasons we don't allow anything like that to be enforced.
I'm not saying whether tracking should or shouldn't exist, but "the business can make more money" is not a valid argument in my book.
He may be right, sadly. I’ve seen the lack of a cookie banner used to suggest that a site was doing something shady or not complying with the law.
Most people don’t have knowledge about the finer details of cookie laws. They’ve been trained to believe that legitimate sites who comply with the laws will implement the cookie banner, and not seeing it feels suspiciously unprofessional.
I have yet to head that cookie prompts are a sign of legitimacy. What business has customers that would think that way?
Although if you've ever worked retail, you'll know that plenty of customers are idiots.
Whatever "Surely no one is that stupid!" assumptions you make will be proven wrong no matter what you do.
The obvious conclusion is that when you try to regulate something like this you arent going to get the behavior you want.
It's trivial to make a site that doesn't need a cookie banner: don't set any cookies. Modern web devs have probably forgotten, but this is actually the default behavior. Cookies don't get set unless you do something to make it happen.
And cookies that you actually need for functionality don't need a banner either. If you're setting a session cookie for logged in users so they stay logged in when navigating between pages, you don't need one.
Why, then, does practically every site in existence now have one? Because they set unnecessary cookies. Because they choose to set unnecessary cookies in order to track you for purposes that are not necessary to the actual functionality of the site.
Every single cookie banner you see is a big sign that says, "We value our ability to track you for marketing purposes more than we value your time."
Apparently they're willing to say that. I still see it as a win. No tracking and no banners would be ideal, but at least the regulation forces them to be honest and up front about what they're doing. I'd rather have tracking and cookie banners announcing it than tracking with zero indication of tracking.
They could have instead targeted it, and applied it, to third party ad providers only, like Google. And, btw, Google is big enough they could have just outright named it. They're worth as much as the GDP of Germany. Why not just make a Google law?
So yeah, maybe good intentions but it clearly shows the EU parliament is still too young and inexperienced.
And if you decide you need them, you can do them server side. That's not as good? Oh well. See above about want vs need.
Why not just make a Google law? Because Google is far from the only abuser. Using a VPN that routes through Europe is a real eye-opener. At least whatever country I got routed through apparently required that cookie banners include a list of every single partner who got your data. Pretty much every site had hundreds of them. One was literally over a thousand. No, the entire industry is rotten. And the epidemic of cookie banners just shows how rotten it is. They can't even be shamed into behaving.
E.g. "we don't set any tracking cookies, so we're already compliant with the law even without banner, so there's nothing to decline or agree to".
The only mistake EU policymakers made was underestimating how willing companies were to deface their websites.
Copy pasting an older comment because it’s really coming up all the time…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060456
===
That's not true and is a very common misinformation people repeat online. You can save user preferences in cookies without any consent banner, if the cookie isn't used for tracking. See here[0], page 6: > As stated in Article 5(3) ePD: ‘This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.’ 0: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2024-10/ed... As long as you do not share that info with 3rd party, and the user requested it, you can store via cookies pretty much whatever you want without the need for a consent screen
Let's check what "Opinion 04/2012 on Cookie Consent Exemption" [0] says under section 3.6:
"""
3.6 UI customization cookies
User interface customization cookies are used to store a user’s preference regarding a service across web pages and not linked to other persistent identifiers such as a username. They are only set if the user has explicitly requested the service to remember a certain piece of information, for example, by clicking on a button or ticking a box.
...
These customization functionalities are thus explicitly enabled by the user of an information society service (e.g. by clicking on button or ticking a box) although in the absence of additional information the intention of the user could not be interpreted as a preference to remember that choice for longer than a browser session (or no more than a few additional hours). As such only session (or short term) cookies storing such information are exempted under CRITERION B. The addition of additional information in a prominent location (e.g. “uses cookies” written next to the flag) would constitute sufficient information for valid consent to remember the user’s preference for a longer duration, negating the requirement to apply an exemption in this case.
"""
See that you need to provide provide "information in a prominent location (e.g. “uses cookies” written next to the flag)" to be able to store user preferences in persistent cookies. You don't need consent banner for that (which I didn't say you need), but you need to clearly inform the user. The act of setting a preference together with clear information about persistence counts as a valid consent.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...
Settings are not mentioned. Cookies are not mentioned.
See section 3.6:
https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...
Yes and that is a MASSIVE mistake for a policymaker to commit. They should absolutely be pilloried for their incredible lack of foresight and understanding of how internet companies handle compliance. The policy has set back humanity by further desensitizing internet users around the world to the terrible, endemic use of cookies by most websites.
Just like websites also give zero fcks about accept-language header... sure do geoip lookup, so much easier... not
“Oh you want consent involved in this interaction? Then we’ll annoy you about it constantly instead of respecting the intent of the regulation.”
It’s simplest just to put the bullshit everywhere and the dipshit bureaucrats will leave everyone alone.
If every webdev who would say no can be trivially replaced by webdevs who won't say no, then yes, it is webdevs.
Be it the EU for regulating disclosure and consent requirements, users for being "lazy" and usually just accepting all, or the webdev for not staking their livelihood on denying the banner - I'm sure they'll all get blamed before someone sees the ones actually demanding it be done can be the problem.
I'm going to risk months of unemployment and explain to my family why this is more important than eating when I get home. The internet is serious business, they'll understand."
-- the hypothetical webdev in that scenario, I guess?
Mate, it's just a cookie on a site.
It is an important fight for our future with our tech overlords. But sure - some will be happy owning nothing.
This is really one of those "First They Came" moments.
Unfortunately convenience trumps all. So for many "its just a cookie".
I used to have long conversations with frontend developers that "no, when I log on I don't want to be forced through a look-at-the-new-feature-we-made" sequences. And then they went ahead and did it anyway. And usually whatever flag they tried to set to make sure you only saw it once would malfunction, so next time you'd get to click through it all over again.
(If you want to tell users about new features, show a unread flag on a notification icon and make it a one-click affair to make it go away. Don't get in users' face with stuff they don't want)
It feels similar to how CA environmental regs become the national standard simply because the market is so large it’s not worth splitting on it. So they just slap a cancer warning on everything
2. If you are a purely US entity with no actual business presence in the EU, you only need to comply with US laws and nothing else. If the EU doesn't like a purely-foreign website, it's on them to set up a national firewall and block it.
Case in point 1: It's not on you to comply with China's laws, it's on them to block it if they want to
Case in point 2: China's local businesses with no EU presence do not follow GDPR and do not display cookie banners even if accessed from the EU
1. When is the last time you saw China enforcing its laws outside their borders? Why would EU be any different?
2. China has laws that are directly contradictory to GDPR laws; you may be required to retain data regardless of consent; if your website is based in China you have to follow local laws first before you follow contradictory foreign laws that have no jurisdiction over you.
Check out: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
It’s only broken to the extent that it collided with a messed up world where websites track even when they don’t need to and then send that to 2000 partners for more profit extraction on top of what the website does commercially.
Something is deeply fucked up there and it’s not the EU part. They just make a good scapegoat because the banner is what users see
Let's not paint the policymakers naïve when they're in fact incompetent.
Bold thing to say.
t. European
Are you sure?
It would be your payment information, which is orthogonal to most of the tracking data.
The black market demand for leaked advertising-related tracking data is basically nil, except maybe in cases where it’s related to something else exploitable or usable for blackmail like if someone frequents cryptocurrency exchanges or porn sites. Nobody cares to pay for black market data about you shopping for towels on Amazon or things like that.
99% percent of them intentionally turn the "decline" choice into a 5 - 10 step game of dark patterns even though the EU policy says it should be equally easy to decline. They know its bullshit but they also know the chance that someone will drag them through court is low.
Because the industry really respected DNT[0]?
Regulations are needed when the kids cannot play nice in the school yard.
GDPR is actually not that bad if you read it rather than subscribing to much of the malicious compliance we see.
No harvest data to 936 partners? No need for a banner!
Here's what it actually says: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/
Note that cookies aren't even mentioned. (You're in the right)
There’s a perfectly valid and simple way to comply with the EU policies, including GDPR, and not impose annoying popups on your users: just don’t set cookies (if you need to have a login, you can ask for permissions at login time) and don’t collect personal data. That a lot of sites elect not to do that is an indication of how they treat the user, not of the brokenness of EU law.
You could still travel to the EU though. Only your business would have to comply before doing business there.
(AIUI "I agree" gets people to give explicit consent with good success and the subscribe modals are quite effective too)
Also when I checked NoScript, it's only loading js from lxe.github.io
I expect there to be at minimum 8 domains, but often 12-18.
youtube people I know you are in here. Fix your stupid PIP thing.
We can debate the specifics, maybe it's only in effect for X seconds after you stop moving the cursor, maybe it creates a 100px diameter disk of stability, I don't know. Just let me interact with the stuff I see.
Alternatively, we could disable clicking/selecting anything that wasn't visible for at least 200 or 300 ms at that location. So if you try to click on a button and it's shifted down or something pops up in front, and you end up clicking on that instead, your cursor would just blink red.
Similarly, if a button has recently moved, wait a little while before activating it. (Better yet, arrange for things not to move around as the page is loading.)
I’ve lost count of the number of modal dialogs I’ve “accepted” because they popped up out of nowhere milliseconds before I pressed enter coincidentally.
The message is always something inane like 'markets go brrr¹', and it's never something I need at the moment on that page (or anywhere else). I can dismiss the message (hooray?) but it always comes back the next time, so that isn't actually helpful at all.
1: Obviously they use carefully blandified corporate bank language for those messages.
news sites are the worst for this. bloomberg, nbc, etc. have 20+ domains, and as you click "temporarily allow" on one, it loads in a few more.
foxnews loads 36 domains before temporarily allowing any, which probably approaches 50 once you start allowing.
Too many people working on evil dark pattern bullshit
Man, I need to unplug.
If you log out, and then (in Firefox) close the window... oh wait, you're not really logged out. Try again.
If you log out in Firefox, wait until the window is quiet, then delete the cookie... LinkedIn creates a new cookie... which still sometimes logs you back in but not as often.
Opening a new window, deleting the LinkedIn window (fuck watever it's doing), and THEN delete the cookie in the NEW window... then it seems to stay gone at least as of today.
How about an email popup. My browser will happily auto-populate it.
I generally wanted web 1.0 simplicity, lots of contrast, but also a soft gentle colours and modern vibe. I also have a general design for use in dashboards/apps etc: https://frost-e.com/design-system/
The positives about covid and AI is that we don't hear anymore about blockchain and crypto (well, except one boomer oligarch holding onto it). Just please make the next two big things happen already for God's sake.
+-----------------+
|2" of vestigial |
|COVID messaging |
+-----------------+
|1.5" of actual |
| content |
+-----------------+
|2.5 of EU |
| cookie banner |
+-----------------+
+---------------------+
|2" of COVID messaging|
+---------------------+
|1" of undismissable |
| "our app is gone; |
| use the mobile site |
| that you're on now" |
+---------------------+
|0.5" of content |
+---------------------+
|2.5" of EU cookie |
| banner, despite |
| being a US-only corp|
+---------------------+I swear NYT do this in their games app, the play button gets replaced with a subscribe as the late loaded subscribe element shifts the page exactly the amount to put subscribe under your finger. I wonder how well it worked?
Every news website does it and, in the UK, the local news outlets are amongst the worst.
The thing I don’t get: many of these sites are running Google Adsense, amongst other ad networks. Adsense Ts & Cs specifically forbid site behaviour that deliberately causes users to misclick on ads.
So why aren’t these sites being banned by Adsense?
The answer, I suspect, is follow the money: it seems likely that they bring in too much money for Google to ban them even though they’re overtly and outrageously breaking the rules.
zooming in should cause a full page refresh
Seriously how did we get to this point? I remember growing up in the 2000’s and all the marketing about computers was “it’s fast!” and “get results instantly!” that kind of thing. Now everything it gated by multiple spinners, then it loads a skeleton, then it partially loads your actual content, then, when you go to click on something, more content loads and the existing content jumps to a new place and you end up clicking on something else, meaning now you have to go back (if they haven’t hijacked the back button), wait for it all to load again, wait for the second “real” load, and then click on what you actually meant to click on in the first place.
Also, where is the unrelated autoplaying video that will unmute if you actually click it, that follows your scrolling and only becomes smaller when you dismiss it? Plus, it should probably have text that cuts off letting you know you can have access for just $10/month.
Plus, isn't this website undissmissably "better in the app" after a few minutes of attempting to use it on a phone? Where's that at?
edit: Oh shoot! I forgot, too. This modal needs to also ensure there is absolutely no way to scroll. If you could scroll you might be able to accidentally get to the address bar of your browser to fix the URL to xcancel or even close the page, which isn't using the app as you are intended to do.
Also, it doesn't attempt to hijack the back button to give me stuff I clearly wanted to see before I leave the page.
A lot of work left to do here before it's a "real" website. Although, it has about as much substance as the average website so far, so good work on that.
This is the most annoying thing on the internet. There’s a site I’d like to use, but “try the app” takes up the entire page (and appears to be impossible to dismiss?). Actually, is there a way to permanently request the desktop site for all future visits to a domain on iOS? There is no reason to visit this full-page app advertisement.
It’s just some random job board that happens to be popular in my niche for whatever reason.
For Reddit, my choice for now is safereddit. If I need to view a Reddit link on mobile and old Reddit is blocked as it sometimes is, I just swap the domain to safereddit.com.
For Twitter, my choice has been xcancel for ages. I have no idea how that manages to stay up in spite of Twitter's hostility but it is a Nitter instance that seems to just work.
You can also run these frontends yourself, too, but I assume it requires accounts.
(edit: Also I hope it goes without saying that I don't really have any specific trust that my activity is necessarily more "private" with these frontends, although honestly if I was forced to bet I would have to bet that they are much more respectful to my privacy than Twitter or Reddit are. I just use them for functionality.)
Good luck fellow traveler. If there was more to do in real life, I'd probably had thrown my phone into the ocean by now. I'm about halfway there in spite of the lack of many appealing third spaces.
100% the worst experience. “Oh you don’t have the app? No big deal, let’s (maybe) play the video anyway but remove the audio, obscure half the screen, and make any interaction redirect and then bounce to the App Store. Why won’t you download our app already????”
But one is in a section called "Website actions", then there's another one in a section named "Website settings".
I didn't even notice it myself until now.
In earlier versions (before Liquid glass redesign I guess, which enlarged all dropdown paddings), the latter was called "always request Desktop site for xyz".
I wonder sometimes how the team doing the website feels about being treated as second class. Or if it’s the same team and they have to hold their noses to work on it.
The third dumbest smart person I had to work with obviously hated HTML and kept trying to get us to use a DSL instead. At least it wasn’t an in house one, but he had a couple other devs interested in his madness as well. But the two of us who were doing the bulk of the performance work and tricky bug fixes would have been absolutely sunk if we’d allowed that to happen. One of the worst things about React is trying to track back an HTML bug in someone else’s complex React project to the templates that are misbehaving together. The Grafana UI code is madness to debug.We would have been there very quickly and without the dev toolbox to help.
I think a lot of people get progressively worn down by things like this, but for me I actually get angrier each time it happens. It's probably good I no longer work at Google because I would probably feel genuinely enticed to find whoever is most responsible for this and engage in psychological warfare.
But I think it’s sometimes by management design. Scrum makes it pretty easy to keep devs permanently off balance so they can’t think about how wrong what we are building is. Maybe that person really is a piece of work, but maybe they just have never had time to think about how dumb that decision was and go fix it. Similar to you, I’m glad I don’t know where Ken Schwaber lives or when he’s presenting because I’d probably call him a traitor to his stupid face.
It’s such a small thing in the grand scheme of things but it’s just that final straw for me, someone made the decision to be this shitty to their users because they want to employ extra tracking/data collection / advertising in their app.
21! Blackjack,
"Hit me!"
"...but Austin!"
"I also like to live, dangerously."
The only winning move is not to play.
If I'm buying random funkis furniture or computer bits and bobs I can probably use Tradera, and if I want fancy furniture or jewlery or something then there are coalitions of auction houses like Auctionet out there - but as soon as something gets even mildly obscure then there's nothing that has the reach and coverage of eBay.
Starting a new online auction site sounds like a terrific way to throw money away.
And if nothing else, leaving a company whose service sucks doesn't need to send a message, it's just moving so the service you receive improves.
Repeat (without rinsing).
It's also effectively youtube premium for free as in beer. Lovely browser.
You’re right. It’s a good start, but there’s still a lot to do.
Or, at the very least, at a widely different speed/acceleration that you're accustomed to
(Not for this website, which is obviously a joke/telling commentary. I mean for real 'fucking websites'.)
Obligatory xkcd:
Just search for anything like "egg omelette recipe". Click *any* link for example [1].
Also 1.5gb of heap allocated minimum
If it's the design, not everyone is a web designer so the bootstrap theme is great to get up off the ground.
If it's the other stuff then, yeah, totally.
* according to the copyright notice, although, going by the mention of Covid, it could also be 2020?
Oh well.
Seems like the sort of site and person who should have a guestbook - I would have left an appreciative and encouraging comment there, but this will have to do:)
We didn't want it, it's like a megabyte of JavaScript. It's some third party service corporate forced on us.
I have to imagine a lot of websites are in the same boat, where they're just add crap they don't want to add by higher ups.
Me having to make a legal agreement with every website is absurd and totally predictable.
It turns out everything has a price, and in more recent times we started noticing that our time, attention and intelligence not being insulted also has value.
1) scroll hijacking (this should be a felony) 2) stupid cookie popups/banners 3) useless hero images (clients love them, users hate them)
I ended up trying it. Boosted conversion rate meaningfully. Worth the price I pay in mild self-loathing.
Chesterton's popup, I guess.
Now, I'll grant you that these may not become as successful as the clickbaity ones. Then again, the latter channels might as well not exist to me and like-minded people.
Just an hour ago I unfollowed a streamer precisely because he's been getting clickbaity. We've got to take some responsibility over the people we choose to watch.
I guess it's the inevitable parable of anything started by '70s hippies: sooner or later, we all sell out.
I would possibly be a terrible salesperson, because these all give me the ick. Your product should provide an offer of genuine value.
Does it work because you're taking advantage of a group of people who are extremely vulnerable to manipulation? People who already struggle with impulse control, who are prone to making bad financial decisions? The elderly, kids?
We have to escape this mentality that anything that makes money is valid, that the money itself is the validation of "rightness".
Some of us, just some think that maybe enterprises that prey on the vulnerable just don't deserve to be in business. Otherwise everything might as well be payday loans and online gambling. I'm not saying OP is definitely in that category, but I would encourage them to think long and hard about weather or not using dark patterns to goose their sales is really the kind of world we want to be fostering.
Hitting the nail on the head here-> know your target audience.
I think this is a gross over-exaggeration, otherwise dark patterns wouldn't work at the magnitude (majority of the buying population) they do.
I say this not disagreeing with your point:
> We have to escape this mentality that anything that makes money is valid, that the money itself is the validation of "rightness".
"Average" doesn't necessarily mean half way between two extremes - the average human might actually be all of:
- extremely vulnerable to manipulation
- struggling with impulse control
- prone to making bad financial decisions
- the elderly / kids (<16/>60)
Based on age demographics, rampant consumerism and social media addiction, especially in those age demographics, I'd be more inclined to guess the average human is all of those things.
I agree. But.
I run an online business. It's tough. I scrape by. GP noted that the skeezy popup "Boosted conversion rate meaningfully". So that's real money in GP's pocket that they presumably use to have a nicer life. At what cost? Some popup? I mean…
Would I take more money in my pocket? Boy, I'd like that. So far I haven't gone the skeezy popup route, but the day I try, and more money ends up in my pocket, it's gonna be hard to turn that thing off.
I'm not judging, is all I'm saying.
Silly obnoxious social proof popup is clearly on the ethical side in my view (my issue was never ethics, just that I personally find them very annoying). I'm not misleading anyone (it does in fact show real purchases) or forcing anyone to do anything. If that's the difference between you buying or not, I still feel perfectly comfortable that you made the choice of your own free will.
"You're never going to convince someone to stop doing something that is making them money." Reasonable, but I would soften from "never". There was less of it at one point—and it seems logical to guess we have less today than we'll have tomorrow. The main reason is likely that we simply didn't know about these tricks yet, but somewhere below that on the list of the reasons is that some people dropped off from doing it at lesser forms of misrepresentation. Or they made the case against it at work resulting in them either winning (and their projects perhaps did less well) or them losing and being overrun by those more willing. With losing possible also leading towards leaving, not getting promoted, or getting fired. This is just a way to say that there are people who do forgo money, they just might not be around or visible for various reasons. And, as implied by the difficulty of convincing people to not make money, their (former) coworkers prefer that on some level even if they don't believe they agree with stealing or lying. But losing or earning less money is not the same as having no choice.
Advertising should.be illegal.
I dislike advertising as much as the next guy but wouldn't go so far as making it illegal
Advertising is shitty but how would you realistically even make it illegal without violating free speech.
Also, advertising does have a good-faith purpose in functioning markets.
Failures in regulation IMO are mostly at entirely different levels.
E.g. monetization of public utilities and public space. Noise, brightness, and of course deceptive tactics could all be better regulated as well.
But advertising, including its diffusion into general pop culture and entertainment, is older than the printing press, and I think for a broad sense of "advertising", even a lot older.
Or only advertising in media?
Urban spaces? Sure I'd say, but what about your storefront?
Encouraging word of mouth?
Just another horror beyond our comprehension?
Five minutes later, “add to cart”. Etsy: “sold out; we weren’t lying!” So in this particular case it didn’t work. But it will next time.
"Take back your web browser screen space with Kill Sticky" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
"Quick Tips For Making The Internet Suck Less" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/08/01/tips-for-making-th...
"Web browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/12/31/web-browsers-have-...
Steps to reproduce: Open terminal emulator and type;
$ w3m https://lxe.github.io/everywebsite/
I can read the same content as I can read in Firefox.
What I expected to happen: See content similar to the following;
Update your browser Your browser isn't supported any more. To continue your search, upgrade to a recent version. Learn more
The web is more than blogspam, SaaS, the most desperate cases of ecommerce, and the web versions of legacy newspapers/magazines.
good job though
- Paragraphs emerge from the background as you scroll, sometimes only after 3/4 of your screen is empty.
- Some paragraphs are hidden until you expand them. You can’t expand more than one at a time.
- Horizontal scrolling for some items, like e.g. meal categories in a restaurant. The buttons for the scrolling are different on each site, or are dots you must click on.
Firefox also has an extension called "Auto Reader View" in which you can set sites to automatically change to that mode.
Bootstrap.
That framework did more damage to web design than any other framework. Yeah, its nice that you can spin up a page in a second that looks like every other page on the internet, wait a minute...
Technical answer:
CSS
It was a nice idea, and it sure beat hand-designing each and every page (wait a second, weren't/aren't we doing that all over again?).
It did/does too much, and was mostly in lieu of a common repository of UI stuff, so people found One Way that it would work reasonably well on most browsers/devices, and so bootstrap was born...
I don't know if it would be better or worse.
Every SaaS under the sun, hell half the things here that end up with some sort of VC backing... the first thing they do is spin up a nothingburger landing page that says a whole lot of jack diddly squat that all have a familiar feel where everything's centered, there's meaningless bulletpoints and info cards, but no real meat or information that describes what you're after... that feeling = "how do i beat gd level 1 (this landing page) so i can find what im looking for" and yeah. This has bled into documentation spaces as well, somehow rendering documentation (the thing that is supposed to help you get oriented) feel like you can't actually find what you're looking for.
UX/UI in the past decade was blown way out of proportion and I can't help but feel like it's been shaped by way too many imperfect half theories / stupid market research and is way too heavily influenced by marketing and adspace to be taken seriously. In general there is certainly a taste for what makes a good UX and that to me is typically a blend of utility and looks-cool. But without any utility everything feels like a goddamn waste of time & I'm mostly assured that websites that sport pages like this have way too many financial strings attached driving their every move. They all try to drive you towards filling out a sales inquiry form. It's ironic and hilarious that a lot of times if I want to learn about some platform or product, the last place I can reliably go to is their own website. These days you just gotta go digging, ask claude to go collect a bunch of user feedback from around the net or something.
Of course, people are a part of the problem, never said they weren't. But when you ask how did Bobby from marketing commit murder, it's pertinent if he used a crowbar or a glock. Sure, neither are "evil" on their own, and I'm not saying that bootstrap is bad.
It's just the footgun that made it that much more likely...
If you want a "why" for the human side of the equation, well I'm not a marketing guy, the TV show Mad Men seems to offer an interesting perspective as to what makes a marketing department "good", vs just another latte drinking "vibe" shop. My hypothesis being, I have a strong suspicion certain parts of that culture no longer exist, and have mostly been replaced with number-seeking.
You get things rating accessibility, methodologies for building apps but nothing about standards for website quality?
And this is something which I learned which is surprising to me: github.com resolves to AWS. WTF? GH has its own netname and a /20. It's literally one hop, somehow, from my ISP. WTF? It's not MS and it's this shite? WTF?
[1] 1: https://xkcd.com/90/
damn
I mean, it should say something like, 'Sure thing, we don't just use cookies for our servers, but to track you through half the internet, to know exactly what you want even before you know it. Please feel free to accept it or piss off.'
I don't like those lawyers either, but they are not the primary problem. The problems are tracking systems that don't just track you across one website but across multiple sites, like those deployed by Google and Facebook. And since Cambridge Analytica, we know that those are not just hypothetical scenarios and that they actually have an impact on elections and where our society is heading.