I happened to click a link that took me to the associated twitter X account for something I was interested in and was greeted by not one, not two, but four modern day web popups.
I know it’s nothing new. I’ve got a couple of firefox plugins that are usually quite good at hiding this sort of nonsense, but I guess they failed me today (or, I shudder to think, there were even more that were blocked, and this is what got through)
What’s the worst new/not-signed-in user experience you’ve encountered recently?
Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed
(grumble, unblock, reload)Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
https://privacypass.github.io/ has helped somewhat
Privacy Pass will generate a number of random nonces that will be used as tokens
British people making a double take
Privacy Pass just randomly generated Prince Andrew and now my browser is all sweaty.
Interesting. A quick look at the description makes me think it could help with the inconvenience problem, but probably not with the allowing javascript problem. Still, I’ll have to take a closer look. Thanks for the link.
Edit: Turns out it requires installing a browser extension. From Cloudflare. No thanks, but I’ll give it another look if the protocol ever gets implemented by browsers.
You forgot:
Click all the pictures of buses.
(clicks)…spin…spin…spin…
Click all the pictures of bicycles.
(clicks)…spin…spin…spin…
Click all the pictures of traffic lights.
(clicks)…spin…spin…spin…
I didn’t forget; I just chose to highlight Cloudflare’s awful captcha instead of Google’s awful captcha. :)
Click all the objects heavier than this one
…spin…spin…spin…
… Spin … Spin … Spin …
… Remember that you turned off your VPN
… Turn it on
… CF: OK, only humans use VPN, no need to show the challenge
I will say that the Google Auth prompt in particular is just this huge nuisance and a horrible experience. People should feel stupid for including it in their web experience.
Wait, how can I get rid of google auth pop-ups? I got Ublock but they still come up whenever I go to a reddit page.
Thanks man, the ublock filter in the first link works like a charm :-)
Wait, people choose to put it in their website??
Yes. How else would it get there?
Given how intrusive google is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was kinda forced by them along with some other functionality
But it acts as a Login for the page instead of registering a new account? How would Google do that without the page owners permission?!
The web. It was good while it lasted.
robots.txt is the perfect summary of the web era. A plain text file that politely asked web crawlers not to do certain things. Such an innocent time.
I have a very hard time believing that these companies are unaware of how auful this shit makes their webpages.
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.
It’s intentional, they want you logged in so they can track what you’re doing
iT’s bEtTeR iN tHe aPp
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.
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.
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).
Oh they’re aware, they just don’t care 99% of the time.
Anyone can make a good website. It takes a real engineer to make a horrible website that people will use just enough while suffering.
That’s a very good quote.
Inspired from the quote “Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
Source: Unknown
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
Visiting the corpse of Twitter was your first mistake
Digital necrophilia…
It took long enough but the pop-ups evolved into new pop-ups.
It’s kind of bothersome how almost blind I am to them now. I habitually find a way to close them without having to read or focus my eyes on anything. That’s not to say it isn’t still an annoyance.
deleted by creator
Another term I seen in the context of healthcare is alert fatigue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
Alarm fatigue or alert fatigue describes how busy workers (in the case of health care, clinicians) become desensitized to safety alerts, and as a result ignore or fail to respond appropriately to such warnings.[1] Alarm fatigue occurs in many fields, including construction[2] and mining[3] (where vehicle back-up alarms sound so frequently that they often become senseless background noise), healthcare[4] (where electronic monitors tracking clinical information such as vital signs and blood glucose sound alarms so frequently, and often for such minor reasons, that they lose the urgency and attention-grabbing power which they are intended to have), and the nuclear power field. Like crying wolf, such false alarms rob the critical alarms of the importance they deserve. Alarm management and policy are critical to prevent alarm fatigue.
Automation engineer here: alarm management is a hugely important part of making a plant operable.
It is also a project that is never done, you must always review alarms that come in and see if they are providing useful information and what the operators are supposed to do with said information.
If the operators are not supposed to do anything with the information, then what is the point of having the alarm?
If this was your webpage 15 years ago, you’d be almost certain that you’d been infected with malware.
There was a screenshot I once saw of a Chinese netizen’s web browser in the late-2000’s, using Internet Explorer 6 and tonnes of third-party toolbars. I think I saw it back when Digg was still a thing. We’ve now reached the age where major websites are more cluttered with notifications than a malware-infected browser was 15 years ago, and where everybody is tracking everything that you do online.
25 years ago, we legitimately drove RealNetworks into the ground for a lot less than what we’re allowing Google, Microsoft, Meta, X, etc to get away in the modern day.
I really really do miss old school internet and feel kinda bad for people who never get to experience it. I know i sound like a cunt, and maybe it’s just nostalgia, but when the internet was bound to a computer and it was mainly “nerds” using it, it was such a better time. I remember a time where the internet was fast enough for pictures and small videos, but having your own picture somehow on the internet was witchcraft to me. Scanner, cameras who are digital whaaat? Now most of the internet is ads and pictures of people who i don’t give a shit about. People’s opinion, picture of people, fuck off bring back the time where the internet was either forums or someone’s weird website, where you only stumbled upon because you typed in a web adress i. The hopes it leads you somewhere.
I had a girlfriend who was truly fascinated by the fact that i don’t have social media and that i’m not “on the internet” like she didn’t find me and my stupid face anywhere on the web. She was often wondering what i was doing on the internet if i don’t have social media, because that was the internet to her. Facebook, instagram, tiktok and youtube.
She was often wondering what i was doing on the internet if i don’t have social media, because that was the internet to her
~ shudders ~
Whenever I get to a webpage that looks a decade old (like most recently Ventoy) I get hit with a wave of nostalgia. Yeah, it might not look great or be very responsive to my actions, but my god does it feel great to just get thebinfo you need front and center.
GIVE US YOUR DATA GIVE US YOUR DATA GIVE US YOUR DATA
PLEASE HERE TAKE IT
(Just please stop yelling at me)
web 1.0 wasn’t flashy but it got the point across. bring it back.
As you wish: https://wiby.me/surprise/
being back walkmans and discmans too
That white text on gray background. What a design choice.
Aesthetic > readability. The user can just select all on the page if they want to actually read it, right?
Edit: It was pointed out to me that this brings up a random URL every time someone clicks it, so everybody is not seeing the same thing. Whoops.
Every time you click that link you will get a different web page… so…
Oh, I see now. I’m dumb. I didn’t realize this just brings up random URLs to web 1.0 pages. Thanks for pointing that out!
Although if you click through a few of them, your comment is probably applicable!
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.
I just set all the twitter and meta domains to localhost in my hosts file; no accidental clicks that go through for me :)
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.
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.
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 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.
If they don’t allow you to reject in two clicks then they’re violating the EU regulation.
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.
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.
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.
