Every Fucking Website (2020)

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.

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.

Repeat (without rinsing).

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.

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.

I would possibly be a terrible salesperson, because these all give me the ick. Your product should provide an offer of genuine value.

I guess it's the inevitable parable of anything started by '70s hippies: sooner or later, we all sell out.

"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 fwiw it seems rational to think what we have less today is than what we'll have tomorrow. The main reason is likely that we simply didn't know about these tricks yet and/or hadn't yet developed the required tools for better tricking, 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 "inability to convince 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.

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.

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.

youtube people I know you are in here. Fix your stupid PIP thing.

The obvious conclusion is that when you try to regulate something like this you arent going to get the behavior you want.

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.

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.)

One of the best indicators that something was not spam was the unsubscribe button.

I have yet to head that cookie prompts are a sign of legitimacy. What business has customers that would think that way?

So how would you do ePrivacy Directive compliance/risk avoidance in a non-obnoxious way?

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.

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

Let's not paint the policymakers naïve when they're in fact incompetent.

It’s simplest just to put the bullshit everywhere and the dipshit bureaucrats will leave everyone alone.

“Oh you want consent involved in this interaction? Then we’ll annoy you about it constantly instead of respecting the intent of the regulation.”

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.

Actually big tech is to blame: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/

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?

zooming in should cause a full page refresh