It's not about dark patterns, that's just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns.
This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't. And if you don't, I guess you haven't been on the web in the past decade or something.
What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.
So how does this explain why Windows 10, which I have paid like $150 for per license, is now infested with ads, tracking and online presence - and close to impossible to buy without that. They aren't even trying to put a $ figure on what they think it's worth - because they can't be stopped from doing it.
There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.
What I don't undestand, even Win 10 Pro has XBox and candys all over the place .. serious in a pro version?!? With the terrible EULA it all felt just like a joke to me and I deleted all my Windows installations and I'm Linux only now at home. I'm not using Linux because it is free. I have 4 unused Win10 Pro licenses at home now. But I just can't say yes to the EULA. So I dumped them all. In the late 90s I also bought Linux distros, because I was not able to donwload those over a 33.4kb modem. So it is not because it free or it cost something. It is about freedom.
I guess someone could argue that it only costs $150 because of the ads. Windows 95 cost well over twice that when it was launched (inflation adjusted). Maybe in the same way that airfares are way cheaper than they were in the 90s, but with much crappier included service.
That's the real fuck you pattern right there. When they make you pay for it handsomely, build a moat with questionable practices so third parties have a hard time, make it part of the cultural context so that people expect it to be the "normal" or "baseline" system, and then there's still ads.
While I don't like Windows 10 telemetry and other shady diagnostics services that lurk in the background, I've never seen any ads "infesting" the OS at all, and I'm online almost all day. Which part of Windows displays ads?
The company you purchased from decided to do it that way. If you don’t agree just don’t buy into it, or create a competitor.
Did the license you bought said it would have no ads?
Facebook and/or Microsoft can choose to charge you for their content as well as serve you ads. Serving you ads doesn't exclude you from paying for content if that's that's what they choose to do. I believe there's versions of Kindle and other such devices that are cheaper because they have ads. Windows would be more expensive if they didn't serve ads.
> You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.
"The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts. It's the addictive dark patterns and montezation/tracking that costs millions. That's the irony.
Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts!
Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC will just wait longer. Or run your servers from two regions, it just takes duplicating your collection of cat pictures, should be peanuts.
Then, you need to store these terabytes of cats. On rather fast disks because else the disks will be the bottleneck, and cats will load very slowly for some users. It would be terrible were something to happen to the collection, so you need some backup for peanuts, like some Backblaze, and maybe a second copy because Backblaze has no^W limited redundancy.
Then, well, you need to monitor all that and sometimes fix issues, because cloud infra is highly available but not highly reliable.
Then, where do the cat pictures come from? Allow anonymous uploads! Or register users and allow uploads.
Now analyze each picture so that it's an actual cat picture and not child porn or a warez archive. Resize them to match your standards. Yes, this is simple, just run a RNN that detects cats.
Then, curate the incoming pictures so that they are actually reasonably interesting. Just maybe hire a few people to do that for peanuts somewhere in Africa.
Ah yes, you want to also deduplicate images; run some image hashing algorithms; use maybe just one or two GPU instances to do that efficiently. And you gonna need a DB, a simple one, that will never need any administering or fixing, won't it?
Well, yes, now you can run that site for just several grand a month, making it your day job, because you're well-qualified to maintain every part of it. Enjoy the peanuts.
You make a great point that I hadn't considered before.
It's like rocket fuel! The faster you want to go, the more fuel you need. Which adds weight, so now you go slower, so you need more fuel...
I want to serve a cat picture, which would cost 1/100 of a cent. But at scale, it adds up. So now I show adds that generate 1.2/100 of a cent in revenue but add .5/100 cents in serving cost, which I can optimize with user data to add an additional .7/100 cents in revenue, but which adds .4/100 cents in serving costs....
> What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free?
Is that really fair? Would there be nowhere to see pictures of cats without their millions of dollars in infrastructure and staffing? Or could it be that their millions of dollars in infrastructure and staffing for selling ads is the reason the goto place for pictures of cats is BigTechCo instead of a ton of smaller forums and communities each of which is relatively inexpensive to operate.
Ahhh, I remember the good old days of forums where people would "hotlink" an image into a thread, and after enough people started viewing/forwarding that link around it would break because the image hoster's account would get suspended by their host for going over their bandwidth limit, or the original hoster would panic at their bandwidth costs and delete it and/or try to block hotlinking going forward. Maybe something like IPFS could solve this problem soon, but right now freely available image hosting on these centralized providers is the most reliable it's ever been.
Aggregation and distribution are virtues of large communities, not small ones.
The sophistication of Facebok's business is what allows the creation and distribution of content. I agree that if Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, Reddit, Nextdoor, Twitter etc, didn't exist, small communities would fill that void...
But they would do through a fragmented and siloed user experience that is hardly discoverable for the majority of the connected world.
This is the equivalent of running a taxi business vs running an airline. Sure, a taxi can fulfill several transportation needs but it could never replace what an airline does.
They can still have ads for people that don't create an account.
I think the point you are trying to make is that people are demanding free (as in beer) content, a la WinAmp of the 1990's. In the past 20 years, we've come around out of that greedy phase and have come to accept a certain amount of advertising for content. But when the non-free content dominates the free content (e.g. pinterest's SEO), it's a fuck you pattern and not consumer greed.
An important point is that WinAmp was not hosting content, so the cost was limited to the relatively small development cost. And there's still lots of that around.
Once you get into actual hosting, it's very hard to get past a small number of users without a lot of funding. And since a lot of users don't want to pay, well...
Kinda offtopic but Instagram's ads changed my attitude towards ads, and my attitude towards Facebook's creepy level of insight into my life and personality. If they have that data anyway -- and hundreds of companies do -- I might as well benefit from it, and Instagram's ads were the first ones that I actually found interesting. First of all, it was obvious when something was an ad. Second, they weren't intrusive or obnoxious. And third, they showed me cool stuff I actually wanted to buy! It was actually an enjoyable experience and that's so weird to say about ads.
The surveillance part still creeps me the hell out, but if they're gonna do it anyway they might as well use that data to benefit my life.
(On that note, I often find myself wishing I could ask the NSA for a copy of an old message or photo...)
Personally, I don't particularly care if companies have my data. However, I vehemently don't want them to use it for algorithmic recommendations—including ads—because it puts me in a filter bubble.
All these technology companies are making assumptions about the type of person I am, and then molding me into that person. I can't learn about topics I don't see, so if the tech giants are convinced I like technology and computers, that's all I will ever learn about.
Maybe I'd be happier if I took up ballet dancing, or basket-weaving, or something else I can't begin to imagine. That seems much less likely to happen when I'm trapped in an algorithmic box, that assumes my past will dictate my future.
> If they have that data anyway -- and hundreds of companies do -- I might as well benefit from it, and Instagram's ads were the first ones that I actually found interesting.
I always feel a little depressed when someone describes being more effectively manipulated as "benefiting."
Anecdotal evidence, but my experience with IG ads was very different. I ordered stuff (mostly clothing) a few times (4 or 5) from IG ads and was very disappointed with the quality and service every single time. I now refuse to fall for IG ads ever again.
Funnily, I always had the impression that Instagram main (maybe only?) purpose was to watch ads ("influencers" as they call them these days), so I figured out they must be pretty good ads since people are coming there just for them ;)
> The surveillance part still creeps me the hell out, but if they're gonna do it anyway they might as well use that data to benefit my life.
This is such a defeatist narrative, and it isn't even accurate. They in fact don't have your data, that is half why they run these services. Each service you don't use is another piece of you they don't have. It isn't an all or nothing proposition. Throwing up your hands and granting them powers they don't have short circuits the more meaningful deliberation of "is this service worth the cost?"
If I had to guess, I might say that these companies enjoy the strong men we have built them into, because people give in.
Ads are fine. The "fuck you" pattern is letting you see the cat picture for 5 seconds before covering it up and requiring you to create an account and share your data with Facebook before you can see it.
The bait and switch. You used to be able to view links of public post.
The bigger the userbase grows, the bigger the fuckyous they can give the rest. It’s no longer “hey join us, we have cool stuff”, it’s “fuck you, we already got your friends, whatcha gonna do”. We can complain about that, right?
"No, fuck you. The internet was never meant to be this."
I understand how this shitty agreement came to be but that doesn't mean that I like having my experience online be a metaphorical middle finger.
They spent billions in infrastructure and staffing to hijack the free internet where I could look at cat pictures on cat picture websites that had cat pictures as the goal, all so they could show me ads, and they have the nerve to say that I'm in the wrong for not being happy about that?
That's quite a ridiculous claim. Surely they can display ads to anonymous users, That's not hard at all. But then they can't track you and profile you, which is a big no.
Now is it fair for a company to track and shape the behavior of millions of people?
Facebook/Mark Zuckeberg didn't spend $1B on the infrastructure of Instagram. He bought the network effect that he knew is impossible to beat by a better product.
"All of this is for the very best end, for if there is a volcano at Lisbon, it could be in no other spot; for it is impossible but things should be as they are, for everything is for the best."
I'm pretty sure that if they had non-targeted (or at least targeted not based on tracking), unobtrusive ads, and zero dark patterns, they would've been still earning enough money to cover their expenses and then some. Unfortunately, they've set out to earn all the money in the world for no benefit to anyone at all.
Either you're the customer or you're the product. Recognizing that nearly all internet companies do this allows you to identify what level you're comfortable with and duck out or move on if needed. It's always good to review your social media habits and scale back.
I recommend doing this the same time you're spring cleaning or after you prep for winter. Also go through and unsubscribe from emails and update passwords.
How is Instagram's profitability? Like the OP sometimes I'd like to look at a feed anonymously. Why can't they still serve ads based on content?
Similarly, it use to be that going to the app showed me "my feed". Sometime in the last 6 month it changed to only show me the newest post of people I'm following and then only posts of random "popular" people of which I have zero interest.
If they want to make money from me, I'd use the app more with the old style of showing me only posts from people I follow with an ad every few posts, like say 1 ad 2 3 ad 4 5 6 ad 7 8 9 ad. As it is now I barely use the app anymore. Of course I'm not the target audience.
Don't believe the lie that ads and dark patterns are the only way to run the internet. I remember the internet of the 90s, we had ways to look at cat pictures, too. And ads back then were way less obstrusive and tracking basically nonexistant.
The issue is that FB+Insta try very hard to become the first/default go-to place for people to post content, just to lure in others and extract value out of them.
Okay, then they need to SAY THAT. All of them need to be CLEAR about what their business model is and how it works, and do not give any mess about "free markets" or "trade secrets" here, they have captured too much attention to be treated with kid gloves.
This company neither has these cats, nor creates a content with them. Sites with images are full of cats and ads, but only instagram is arrogant enough to demand your ids. It’s easy to fuck the instagram, really, because it barely has anything of value that is not reposted elsewhere, or just similar. I’d even have a profile on it if it weren’t such a moron (judging by other sites with cats, where I register eventually after some lurking). They don’t know basic internet rules and deserve everything said above and below.
> This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't.
I'm fine with businesses who use that model and make it clear. Those kinds of tactics are galling coming from a company whose literal mission statement is "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
If you want people to make an account, make a more compelling business proposition. Gatekeeping seems like the most vulnerable, monopolistic position to take.
Nah sorry. The reason companies that own social media don’t offer ad and tracker free versions is because then they’d have to say to their userbase what they’ll remove, and thereby what’s in the regular product. Their business model depends upon the ignorance of their userbase of what they’re doing, and they’re holding their network as hostage for those who don’t wish to participate.
Unfederated and (forced) open systems is the only way out of this.
It's not just about ads .. they can just show them to this visitor if it was. It's about targeted ads. They have slightly limited ability to target if the viewer doesn't sign in .. for which the viewer needs to accept their T&C .. which is needed for them so someone doesn't sue them for invading their privacy without their consent.
IANAL so I'm not sure whether such a suit will stand in any court.
There seem to be many non tech savvy people who were shocked by docos like Social Dilemma and don't understand they are the product. They think they are 'just looking at cats'. Maybe these companies should clearly display on their front page they in personal data collection and targeted advertising business.
Same thing happened with cable TV back in the day. It is about extracting as Mich value as most people will tolerate. There is no escaping ads if a company isn't principally opposed to them and charges directly for their product
Go fuck your self. Internet was never meant to be sell ads for you. Companies found loop hole and now you think you are entitled to it. Snap out of it asshole
Wait, ad click through tracking now only works for registered users? When did that change? More importantly, what are all these ads doing on pages that don't require me to login?
I don't really see an agreement here. It's also not Instagrams content they are hiding behind the implied paywall. Because that's the real hidden truth, they make you pay, not with money, but with your soul. They will stalk you everywhere to the end of your existence, try to learn everything about you and use it against you in every way they can that gains them something.
It's been bad a long time now, but not like this. You really want to tell me it was this blatant?
So did Instagram employ these fuck-you patterns from the start, or did they pretend to be friendly until they'd gotten enough market share and network effects?
That's called bait & switch, and is (if not legally in this case, then morally) rightly considered fraud.
Until they populate all the top search results with those patterns.
This apologies for any unethical practice by companies in Reddit/HNs are really interesting. They side completely with the authorities. Properly trained.
Reddit is full of these patterns in order to drive users from mobile web to app. Reddit mobile web really sets the bar for user-hostile UI in my opinion.
Reddit's new UI is still hilariously terrible. The day they remove old.reddit.com is the day I stop using the site.
Who the hell thinks what I want when I click on an article is to bring it into a related article feed with 1.5 comments showing? If I accidentally click outside of the article area the whole thing vanishes with no way to get back where I was. I had thought these issues would be obvious and they would clean it up, but here we are months later and it is still broken from a UX standpoint.
I guess all of the devs moved over to work on their bespoke media player? You know, the one that barely works half of the time.
Someone posted on HN within the last week that Reddit hired some product managers who pushed a lot of these dark patterns/anti-user features to increase conversions towards account signups and app installs. Nobody thinks you actually like all that broken shit. Though I fail to understand the business reason for hosting/serving videos through a custom media player.
Reddit doesn’t want you to lurk without an account or browse on mobile on a browser. They make less money that way. Eventually I am sure they will break old.reddit.com once they think they no longer need the holdouts (who I suspect are a lot of power users).
As someone who has used Reddit for probably 10 years at this point, it makes me sad that some place that I at times legitimately felt like a “member of a community” would break my use case like this (I have accounts but on mobile I sometimes just want to lurk/browse without logging in). But it’s their website and they can do what they want with it. Our only recourse is to complain and try alternatives.
Agreed about old.reddit.com. I feel pretty old saying this, but I really miss the days of straightforward web design. Everything now is so chaotic that I'm never really sure what clicking anything will do. It feels like design for the sake of design, not for the sake of the users.
Reddit's aggressive push to login , to use app, and the new web UI : together, these nudged me away from reddit and helped me stop my huge timesucking & mindless reddit habit. Happy ending. Thanks reddit !
What is really boggling is people paying to 'gild' posts, which is very profitable, while the company also employs all these dark patterns / user tracking / data selling
It's gotten to the point where if I saw "Software Engineer - Reddit" on a candidate's resume, I would seriously question this person's chops, even if it's just one small signal in an otherwise great background. How did this site's quality to get so poor? Why couldn't you do anything about it? It's so bad that you have to believe it was deliberately made bad.
What is worse, is that even though I installed the official app to squelch this nonsense (the Fuck You Pattern is effective) the mobile site still prompts with "Open in the Reddit App".
When I click it my iPhone opens the App Store. The App Store then has a big blue "Open" button to launch the app, but of course all context is lost and opening from there brings you to your Reddit front page.
I'll one up this - I use an alternative, unofficial app for reddit. Until recently the 'open' button on their website would take me into that specific app - as you would expect - but since last week or so it's started sending me to the Google Play store page for the official app instead.
Reddit's app registers itself as a uri handler for reddit links but (thanks to google) AMP or iframe results don't prompt the actual system uri handler that would take you to the app.
So much this. Now that I know it works this way, I just try to ignore any promising-looking search results from any of the sites that do this, because I don’t feel like trying to search for the same thing in their app because they broke their mobile site and broke the “open in app” by assuming I don’t already have it.
I don't have a Reddit account, and every time I use it I am reminded why. Their patterns have taken me from "I should create an account one of these days" to "there is nothing on the Internet that I need to see so badly that I would let Reddit see anymore about me than my IP address." It's almost as if they are taunting users: "give up and create an account, or go home. Oh, and use the fucking mobile app while you're at it, or the suffering will continue."
OTOH, once I get there, a lot of Reddit content makes me wonder why I bothered. :-)
Use the old interface available at old.reddit.com. Its mostly fine. There are some really good corners of reddit, though the popular subs have been infected with the well washed masses.
My guess is because it’s harder to block ads through the app than it is in the browser-based version (at least in iOS). Whatever the actual reason is, the asshole design (which ironically they have an entire subreddit for) actually discourages me from using Reddit, so I’ve been using it a lot less in the past couple of years.
It’s like the Nigerian Prince email scam but the other way around : 99% of the people who receive such an email will identify the scam and ignore it. This is totally fine for the scammers. Working as expected.
Now, in the Reddit scenario 99% of the Reddit users don’t mind downloading an app. It’s just us, techies, that 1% who cares. This is totally fine for Reddit. Working as expected.
I suspect it’s all that and their metrics show that mobile users are the most “engaged” so they want more mobile users to have an even higher count of engaged users. Also, it’s harder to spam notifications without a mobile app.
I suspect it's for neither. It's to fulfil some metric. They either want investor money or IPO money and either way, they want people in their app because their app is way over-valued compared to monthly impressions.
another possibility is to increase traffic, which I guess also increases ad revenue. It's a lot easier to tap an icon on your home screen than it is to open a browser and type in reddit and whichever subreddit you want to browse. The less friction there is, the more likely you are to be a daily user, driving their revenue.
Gmail webmail too. I’ve hit « I’m not interested » to their app prompt around 500 times in a row. Will i change the 501st? No.
Then again, my ATM machine still asks me which language I want service in. It’s my hope if I choose something other than English, it calls 9-1-1, slows down the prompts and does nothing irreversible.
The Reddit AMP implementation on top of Reddit Web is even worse. For the first few times I encountered it, I assumed there was a bug or something that would be fixed soon.
I was initially annoyed by this, and then thankful. I have learned never to install apps of this kind, and thus the fact that Reddit has made itself unpleasant to use from a browser is a helpful little nudge away from a time-waster.
Microsoft Windows is even worse.
Constant disruptive updates, forcing you to make an account during install, ads in the start menu, that creepy "Cortana" process that you can't kill...
This may have been true when Win10 just came out, but it isn't anymore. You can schedule your updates (and if you don't, they try to schedule them for you in non-use hours), there are ways to bypass the MS account creation and just use a local account, I haven't seen an ad in my start menu in ages, even after multiple large system updates and there is not a single reference to Cortana in my Task Manager or Services (I turned Cortana off in settings).
Granted, I'm aggressive at turning off startup items, managing what services run on boot, and so on, but my point is, each of the things you mention may have been true at one time, but they are not necessarily true today.
edit to note: I'm not defending Microsoft's use of dark patterns, they definitely do push them out and then sometimes back off if there is enough pushback. And that is bad, and should be called out. Just aiming for accurate information here.
From this perspective it's amazing. I ditched Windows completely for about 5 years (coinciding with my time in Software). And had to deal with none of these problems any more, I always remember that I hated windows for some reason but can't seem to pinpoint/remember, but now you've reminded me.
I disagree. Reddit is worse because if you don't have an account, you are constantly pushed to make one, or get pop-ups to download the ad. They also seem to limit functionality, like seeing all comments, unless you have an account.
The Windows installation process is annoying for sure, but once you get through it, you are able to disable or rework everything you mentioned. iOS honestly has everything you mentioned as well; in fact, it's installation process pushes even more services than Windows does, but I never see people complain about it. I find both process annoying, but I forget about them once I get everything setup because it goes away. I don't want a reddit account because I basically only visit the site when a friend sends me a link. I am guessing I can also have their stuff go away if I download the app and sign up, but it's not as essential to me as using Windows or iOS.
These are the primary reasons I moved off Windows and onto a combination of macOS and *nix. Plus, macbooks have native Thunderbolt 3 support, which is essential for near-zero latency audio production.
I use Reddit is Fun app on android and haven't noticed any changes in UX for more than 5 years. When a I rarely go to reddit.com on my pc, I can't even recognize the original site.
I think they're trying to push it to just before the point where people actually consider how useful the content is (not very), or maybe past that point, after which they'll put out some superficial "we're sorry" bs.
I never use reddit on mobile, but also there the whole new reddit design thing is so terrible I just don't bother going there anymore. It's sad, there were a few really nice communities there.
I get around this by not using their app or website at all and using an alternative Reddit client (Apollo for iOS). Wonder if they'll do the Twitter and shut down third party clients eventually.
I love instagram. It's the best social media site. Last time I checked, I couldn't even make an account from my desktop computer. I'm not gonna even try to install their app on my G-free phone.
When a friends sends me a link to Instagram, I know that I don't need to click on it -- the thumbnail contains all the information that I'd ever see without creating an account. When news articles consist of a bunch of embedded Instagram crap, it doesn't even load on vanilla firefox. That's cool, those stories are usually celebrity gossip that I don't actually want to read but got baited into clicking on.
It's my favorite social media site, because their hooks just bounce straight off me.
Thanks, Instagram, for the consistent signalling. I never wanted to be your friend anyway.
Pinterest and Reddit are not better these days. The amount of things you can view on reddit on your phone without creating an account or installing the app is dwindling daily.
Every time my wife sends me a Pinterest link I just ask her to screenshot it as I can't see shit on the default mobile page. I don't even know why Google continues to allow them in the results when there is clear-cut policies around showing something different to the crawler than the user.
Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.
Pinterest is by the far the worst because it takes content from the rest of the world and strips away all context. It's the anti-wikipedia, an information black hole.
> Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.
Hmmmm. Now that I think of it I'm fairly sure that serving different content to Googlebot compared to what you served ordinary users used to be a good way to call down the wrath of the SEO master upon your (or your clients) website.
Then again, that was before. Back when Google was a nice company and acted in the best interest of its users.
Reddit (the service) is tons better than Pinterest, facebook, instagram... I think it's totally out of line to group Reddit in with them. The new reddit website is total trash but you can use like 99% of reddit without ever visiting the website. I use Apollo for example, and there are many other apps you can use or develop your own. You can also use old.reddit.com. Access to reddit is much more open than any of these other networks that require you to use their app only.
Regarding reddit, you can replace "www" with "old" i.e. https://old.reddit.com and it is still functional. There is also a firefox (perhaps chrome too) extension that replaces it automatically.
I don't know how long it will last, but if it's gone I think I'll be off reddit. I tried to use regular UI few times, and the experience is absolutely off putting. It reminds me of digg right before people flew to reddit.
> Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.
I'm surprised sites this big are even relying on the user agent for determining Googlebot, given how easy (and common) it is to forge, when they could be checking the Googlebot IP ranges instead.
for Reddit, you can "sign up" with a bogus email address and still interact (browse, join, comment, vote, message) freely. the only possible downside is it asks you to verify your email address every launch, but I don't see this as a downside since I am using Reddit anonymously, and it is easily dismissed. been doing this for over a year now
> The amount of things you can view on reddit on your phone without creating an account or installing the app is dwindling daily.
Like what? The phone browser works just great. IIRC there's a nag dialog that prompts you once to install the app, then it caches the answer and shuts up.
This was a dark pattern they launched almost a year ago, as a non user of mostly every social media site, instagram is probably the worst in terms of forcing users to login to view public content.
I wouldn't normally have a problem with this but public content should be just that, viewable by the general public and not being forced to install a tracke.. err, their app on my phone.
Where I have a huge problem with this is public health or other official announcements from community leaders or essential information and its being put out on facebook. So now I can't access a public message by a publicly elected entity for general consumption. It seems extremely slimy and it feels illegal on some level as I don't want to be forced to login to facebook to view local updates.
Is the way that Twitter links often fail to load on the first several tries (then finally, mysteriously, work as if nothing happened) one of these "force you to log in and use the app" dark patterns? It's been that way for years now, so I have to think it's not accidental.
I organize a puppy meetup. Right now via a group SMS. Sub-optimal. Sharing event pics is flakey (mix of android and ios). The responses (LOL, hearts, etc) become their own text messages (?!). Etc.
Since some of us have Instagram, I thought to try it, if only to share pics. Sign up was brutal. I can't figure out how to use my phone account on my desktop. Sharing existing pics sucks. Taking pics with Instagram sucks.
I can't even figure out how to simply browse a friend's feed.
I legit can't imagine why anyone uses Instagram, for any purpose.
I'll stick my head above the parapet and say that as a content consumer I really like Instagram and it genuinely is my favourite social media platform. I'm probably an atypical user but now that I'm well out of my 20's the friends I still connect with online I have real connections with so it's a joy to see what they're up to. My interests (food, 70's sci-fi, cats, modern art) are well catered to and I've done a good job of curating the accounts I follow to get a good mix of interesting content. Even my promoted posts are mostly local restaurants and businessess so I've never really felt aggrieved that I'm getting controlled by big corporates. I've also found my experience mostly apolitical with the advantage that because commenting is so tacked on I don't feel the urge to interact with anything beyond liking images or sharing the ocasional post with my friends and family
I understand it's mindless, but I dont want it to be anything else. It's a toy platform for looking at device sized images and short videos on my mobile and that's all I want it to be.
Thanks for this comment. I've been annoyed by the fact that click-baity articles don't load Instagram content in the past, but re-framing the issue as a bullet dodged and time saved is a surprisingly powerful shift of perspective.
Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok. Just... No. Funny enough, I was a big Imgur user until one day I somehow realized I'm wasting my life on the dumbest shit in the dumbest format possible.
Reddit on the other hand, is trying hard to push me away and I thank them for it, but a lot of info you can only find there. Like real measurements of graphics cards and just real information from real people.
Kind of sad, but Reddit has attracted all the people who used to frequent niche forms in one place.
Best part, it is all conveniently grouped on a single site unmarred by useful content so you can easily just ignore it all without anxiety you are going to miss out on something important.
> From TFA: "Since I’m a technical person, I tried to simply remove the modal in the browser Inspector. It sort of worked, but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page."
You need to not only remove the modal, but remove the "overflow:hidden;" in the <body> tag. After that you should be able to scroll.
I have CSS/JS injectors that do this for me already, I really fucking hate popups and scrolling impediments of any sort.
I had the same experience. I wanted to watch someone's podcast Livestream that was being broadcasted on Instagram (I don't know why they didn't just use YouTube). But I couldn't even create an account. I tried with my desktop and phone on different networks. It wouldn't work.
I don't "get" Instagram. I'm not on it, I don't use it, all that "I just don't just because".
I have a room mate // romantic partner who does use Instagram. OK, that's great, that's fine. They're younger than I am so perhaps they get something I don't; times change, I get that; I still don't get "The Insta".
Maybe some social media will ding on me the next time around. I'll wait.
I tried to create an Instagram account to be able to see some photos.
The first attempt stopped at "unexpected error" just after selecting a login name.
The second attempt with different email address in a different browser ended the same way.
Third attempt I tried from the third browser, via cellular data and gmail email. That one finished ok but still returned back to Sign up right after the last signup atep. Entering the same data in Sign up resulted in "there is account using this email". So I tried to log in and it was successful but it immediately showed "suspicious activity dialog" FORCING me to enter phone number and do SMS verification. After I did that, my shiny new Instagram account started working.
But I expect it will be blocked or deleted for inactivity soon unless I start submitting photos or generate enough ad impressions or ad clicks. I use adblock though..
My favorite feature is how when someone shares an Instagram post of Whatsapp it's blurred out. I realized this today and it just hit me that they don't care about making the apps actually good. All they care about is that you go back to the main app where they can advertise to you.
Also, it’s 2021 and their iPad app is just the non-iPad app where it’s just a scaled portrait-only version of the iOS app. Do they not have the resources to do a proper iPad app?
i don't do social media anymore, but I used to use instagram to browse favorite artists. I found chrome developer tools would let you change to mobile view and then you could browse instagram/upload photos/etc like normal.
Haven't tried it in a long time so maybe doesn't work anymore.
Instagram is terrible but I can defend forcing account creation via app only. It seems likely that such a route would draw a disproportionately large interest from scammers and disproportionately small interest from real customers.
Same. I've never had an account, and for as long as I can remember everytime I end up on their page I'm greeted with a login screen.
In fact, I've always found it perplexing how little information or incentive there is on their landing page that would encourage me to make an account. I only even barely know what that site is for because of osmosis and image previews from sites that link to it. Makes me wonder how they got critical mass to even get started.
I don't understand this post and the blog author's comments about using desktop. I get the appeal of not having apps installed on your phone, but wasn't Instagram phone-first? I remember not having a smartphone in the early 10's and not being able to use Instagram because you couldn't use their site. I would argue the phone-based experience is far superior to the browser...
I'm glad we now have a name for this. If I may take a stab at a more formal, reusable definition of the Fuck You pattern:
A UI pattern whereby content a user wants is provided, then yanked away before it can be consumed, to be replaced by a demand for something the site wants (log in, sign up, subscribe, pay, etc). It's distinct from merely providing a limited amount of content in the first place, as when a site offers 3 articles for free before requiring payment.
Hopefully if we call it what it is and keep the name "Fuck You" pattern, any boss that wants to implement it will realize how user hostile it is. More likely, the MBAs figure out a more colorful name for it and every single app on the planet starts to have it.
Twitters new-ish feed refresh with out ask on mobile is a good example of this. While reading a tweet your feed will refresh shoving you anywhere between 10 and 100 tweets up on your feed. If I really wanted to see what I am reading I have to scroll back down through my already witnessed feed.
unless you're logged in, pinterest is only this, has some searches essentially 'SE-Owned' and has been doing this for ~7 years. They're the OG of this.
>US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara,[3] who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important.
Sentiment analysis is a real thing. Of course collecting poll data on questions like "How much do you approve of the US Air Force turning large parts of your country to a moonscape? Rate from 1 to 5" probably wouldn't have gone over so well.
On the other hand, virtually every study of the Vietnam war said it was a huge mistake and Domino theory was bullshit.
... but if you can't collect data on them, you can't target ads to them or sell their data elsewhere, and therefore they're worth nothing to you.
At the end of the day every company wants to make money, or will be bought out by cutthroats who think it's all there is, and this kind of thinking will take hold. Users you can't profit from = leeches.
Another fuck you pattern from Instagram is hiding the keyboard when you go to search for a user to encourage you to get distracted and tap on a suggestion rather than what you were searching for. You have to tap search three times to actually see the keyboard. It has to be intentional because it's been happening for years.
I open IG, tap into the search tab, tap the search bar, keyboard appears, type in user, tap result.
Do you want tapping into the search tab to autofocus the search bar and open the keyboard. I can totally understand that but IG’s search tab is more a discovery thing now. Which like evil’s of social media aside was a sorely needed feature since finding people to follow has always been hard on Twitter and IG.
I scrape imdb for some personal web pages and imdb has the weirdest things now to prevent scraping like custom media viewers and obscuring most of plain text inside deep, almost indistinguishable hierarchies.
I was actually under the impression that what Pinterest does was against the ToS of Google. I can't find the link or reference, but I believe it was along the lines of 'You can't post images just to farm user account creation on your services' which is exactly what Pinterest does.
I would love if we could do away with these sites and those websites that insist I use their 'app' to view simple text data.
Pinterest is the absolute worst at this. I died a little inside when I finally gave in and made an account (using google login). But I needed to use an image for some research I was doing.
E.g. sending links to your post to friends and family. Many family members don't have accounts, and some days all they see is a login prompt. Many times, my recipient is on a different device / using a different browser / cleared their cookies because their ISP tech support somehow thinks that helps - some days, all they see is a login prompt, and don't remember their password, and don't want to go searching for it.
All of this has ensured that none of them like Instagram links, and do not want an account.
Readit News
"Well, fuck you, too. We're here to sell ads."
It's not about dark patterns, that's just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns.
This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't. And if you don't, I guess you haven't been on the web in the past decade or something.
What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.
There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.
We can call this situation the "Fuck yourself" pattern, where you give money to companies so they can innovate in new ways of fucking you.
Expensive professional software is often available on Mac.
Probably the target market for windows evolved to become people who tolerate advertising (or at least that's what PMs at M$ think).
Half the price is paid in the license fee. The other half is a lifetime of ads exposure.
"The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts. It's the addictive dark patterns and montezation/tracking that costs millions. That's the irony.
Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC will just wait longer. Or run your servers from two regions, it just takes duplicating your collection of cat pictures, should be peanuts.
Then, you need to store these terabytes of cats. On rather fast disks because else the disks will be the bottleneck, and cats will load very slowly for some users. It would be terrible were something to happen to the collection, so you need some backup for peanuts, like some Backblaze, and maybe a second copy because Backblaze has no^W limited redundancy.
Then, well, you need to monitor all that and sometimes fix issues, because cloud infra is highly available but not highly reliable.
Then, where do the cat pictures come from? Allow anonymous uploads! Or register users and allow uploads.
Now analyze each picture so that it's an actual cat picture and not child porn or a warez archive. Resize them to match your standards. Yes, this is simple, just run a RNN that detects cats.
Then, curate the incoming pictures so that they are actually reasonably interesting. Just maybe hire a few people to do that for peanuts somewhere in Africa.
Ah yes, you want to also deduplicate images; run some image hashing algorithms; use maybe just one or two GPU instances to do that efficiently. And you gonna need a DB, a simple one, that will never need any administering or fixing, won't it?
Well, yes, now you can run that site for just several grand a month, making it your day job, because you're well-qualified to maintain every part of it. Enjoy the peanuts.
It's like rocket fuel! The faster you want to go, the more fuel you need. Which adds weight, so now you go slower, so you need more fuel...
I want to serve a cat picture, which would cost 1/100 of a cent. But at scale, it adds up. So now I show adds that generate 1.2/100 of a cent in revenue but add .5/100 cents in serving cost, which I can optimize with user data to add an additional .7/100 cents in revenue, but which adds .4/100 cents in serving costs....
lol at this. Go setup that infrastructure and see how far you get for peanuts.
This drives up complexity of the business operation overall, not just the infrastructure.
Is that really fair? Would there be nowhere to see pictures of cats without their millions of dollars in infrastructure and staffing? Or could it be that their millions of dollars in infrastructure and staffing for selling ads is the reason the goto place for pictures of cats is BigTechCo instead of a ton of smaller forums and communities each of which is relatively inexpensive to operate.
This is the equivalent of running a taxi business vs running an airline. Sure, a taxi can fulfill several transportation needs but it could never replace what an airline does.
I think the point you are trying to make is that people are demanding free (as in beer) content, a la WinAmp of the 1990's. In the past 20 years, we've come around out of that greedy phase and have come to accept a certain amount of advertising for content. But when the non-free content dominates the free content (e.g. pinterest's SEO), it's a fuck you pattern and not consumer greed.
EDIT: IMHO
Once you get into actual hosting, it's very hard to get past a small number of users without a lot of funding. And since a lot of users don't want to pay, well...
The surveillance part still creeps me the hell out, but if they're gonna do it anyway they might as well use that data to benefit my life.
(On that note, I often find myself wishing I could ask the NSA for a copy of an old message or photo...)
All these technology companies are making assumptions about the type of person I am, and then molding me into that person. I can't learn about topics I don't see, so if the tech giants are convinced I like technology and computers, that's all I will ever learn about.
Maybe I'd be happier if I took up ballet dancing, or basket-weaving, or something else I can't begin to imagine. That seems much less likely to happen when I'm trapped in an algorithmic box, that assumes my past will dictate my future.
I always feel a little depressed when someone describes being more effectively manipulated as "benefiting."
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This is such a defeatist narrative, and it isn't even accurate. They in fact don't have your data, that is half why they run these services. Each service you don't use is another piece of you they don't have. It isn't an all or nothing proposition. Throwing up your hands and granting them powers they don't have short circuits the more meaningful deliberation of "is this service worth the cost?"
If I had to guess, I might say that these companies enjoy the strong men we have built them into, because people give in.
This isn't a "fuck you" pattern. They gave you a social media Costco food sample.
The bigger the userbase grows, the bigger the fuckyous they can give the rest. It’s no longer “hey join us, we have cool stuff”, it’s “fuck you, we already got your friends, whatcha gonna do”. We can complain about that, right?
I understand how this shitty agreement came to be but that doesn't mean that I like having my experience online be a metaphorical middle finger.
They spent billions in infrastructure and staffing to hijack the free internet where I could look at cat pictures on cat picture websites that had cat pictures as the goal, all so they could show me ads, and they have the nerve to say that I'm in the wrong for not being happy about that?
Now is it fair for a company to track and shape the behavior of millions of people?
I recommend doing this the same time you're spring cleaning or after you prep for winter. Also go through and unsubscribe from emails and update passwords.
Or you're both. Or perhaps none.
I kinda like that we have now such a big, visible and studied echosystem where we'll see any pattern working at a significant scale.
Any kind of dichotomy just doesn't cut it anymore I think.
2/ Well fuck you even further and go to hell for defending such behaviours.
3/ ps. Their infra is ridiculous. A team of 100-120 engineers can do way better. They can’t get their user base though because of 1/
Similarly, it use to be that going to the app showed me "my feed". Sometime in the last 6 month it changed to only show me the newest post of people I'm following and then only posts of random "popular" people of which I have zero interest.
If they want to make money from me, I'd use the app more with the old style of showing me only posts from people I follow with an ad every few posts, like say 1 ad 2 3 ad 4 5 6 ad 7 8 9 ad. As it is now I barely use the app anymore. Of course I'm not the target audience.
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The issue is that FB+Insta try very hard to become the first/default go-to place for people to post content, just to lure in others and extract value out of them.
So sometimes it is true, but most of the time it is not and BigCo-s have to push users to do things.
I'm fine with businesses who use that model and make it clear. Those kinds of tactics are galling coming from a company whose literal mission statement is "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
If you want people to make an account, make a more compelling business proposition. Gatekeeping seems like the most vulnerable, monopolistic position to take.
Unfederated and (forced) open systems is the only way out of this.
IANAL so I'm not sure whether such a suit will stand in any court.
Go fuck your self. Internet was never meant to be sell ads for you. Companies found loop hole and now you think you are entitled to it. Snap out of it asshole
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It's been bad a long time now, but not like this. You really want to tell me it was this blatant?
So yeah, fuck you, I just wanted to look at cats.
You almost had me, right up to this point. Then I realized you are posting pointed sarcasm about instagram's owners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
That's called bait & switch, and is (if not legally in this case, then morally) rightly considered fraud.
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This apologies for any unethical practice by companies in Reddit/HNs are really interesting. They side completely with the authorities. Properly trained.
Who the hell thinks what I want when I click on an article is to bring it into a related article feed with 1.5 comments showing? If I accidentally click outside of the article area the whole thing vanishes with no way to get back where I was. I had thought these issues would be obvious and they would clean it up, but here we are months later and it is still broken from a UX standpoint.
I guess all of the devs moved over to work on their bespoke media player? You know, the one that barely works half of the time.
Reddit doesn’t want you to lurk without an account or browse on mobile on a browser. They make less money that way. Eventually I am sure they will break old.reddit.com once they think they no longer need the holdouts (who I suspect are a lot of power users).
As someone who has used Reddit for probably 10 years at this point, it makes me sad that some place that I at times legitimately felt like a “member of a community” would break my use case like this (I have accounts but on mobile I sometimes just want to lurk/browse without logging in). But it’s their website and they can do what they want with it. Our only recourse is to complain and try alternatives.
- Be logged in.
- Set the view to "classic".
- Always open threads into a new tab. Never just do a left click to open them, use a middle click.
When I click it my iPhone opens the App Store. The App Store then has a big blue "Open" button to launch the app, but of course all context is lost and opening from there brings you to your Reddit front page.
OTOH, once I get there, a lot of Reddit content makes me wonder why I bothered. :-)
Now, in the Reddit scenario 99% of the Reddit users don’t mind downloading an app. It’s just us, techies, that 1% who cares. This is totally fine for Reddit. Working as expected.
This is more or less "social network publisher side monetization" SOP.
Then again, my ATM machine still asks me which language I want service in. It’s my hope if I choose something other than English, it calls 9-1-1, slows down the prompts and does nothing irreversible.
Twitter does this too. How the fuck is it even possible?
Granted, I'm aggressive at turning off startup items, managing what services run on boot, and so on, but my point is, each of the things you mention may have been true at one time, but they are not necessarily true today.
edit to note: I'm not defending Microsoft's use of dark patterns, they definitely do push them out and then sometimes back off if there is enough pushback. And that is bad, and should be called out. Just aiming for accurate information here.
The Windows installation process is annoying for sure, but once you get through it, you are able to disable or rework everything you mentioned. iOS honestly has everything you mentioned as well; in fact, it's installation process pushes even more services than Windows does, but I never see people complain about it. I find both process annoying, but I forget about them once I get everything setup because it goes away. I don't want a reddit account because I basically only visit the site when a friend sends me a link. I am guessing I can also have their stuff go away if I download the app and sign up, but it's not as essential to me as using Windows or iOS.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...
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https://libredd.it/
Or
https://teddit.net/
I don't even need to use old.reddit.com for daily browsing now. (Unless need to comment)
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When a friends sends me a link to Instagram, I know that I don't need to click on it -- the thumbnail contains all the information that I'd ever see without creating an account. When news articles consist of a bunch of embedded Instagram crap, it doesn't even load on vanilla firefox. That's cool, those stories are usually celebrity gossip that I don't actually want to read but got baited into clicking on.
It's my favorite social media site, because their hooks just bounce straight off me.
Thanks, Instagram, for the consistent signalling. I never wanted to be your friend anyway.
Every time my wife sends me a Pinterest link I just ask her to screenshot it as I can't see shit on the default mobile page. I don't even know why Google continues to allow them in the results when there is clear-cut policies around showing something different to the crawler than the user.
Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.
This is hilarious and makes so much sense. God, the internet is broken
Hmmmm. Now that I think of it I'm fairly sure that serving different content to Googlebot compared to what you served ordinary users used to be a good way to call down the wrath of the SEO master upon your (or your clients) website.
Then again, that was before. Back when Google was a nice company and acted in the best interest of its users.
All those robots sharing data among themselves with no humans needed or, apparently, wanted.
Cloudflare slaps you for this, though.
I don't know how long it will last, but if it's gone I think I'll be off reddit. I tried to use regular UI few times, and the experience is absolutely off putting. It reminds me of digg right before people flew to reddit.
I'm surprised sites this big are even relying on the user agent for determining Googlebot, given how easy (and common) it is to forge, when they could be checking the Googlebot IP ranges instead.
Be sure to follow the site's robots.txt rules, though. Otherwise, you could end up getting googlebot banned! /s
yes ....
Can't believe I've never thought of this.
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Like what? The phone browser works just great. IIRC there's a nag dialog that prompts you once to install the app, then it caches the answer and shuts up.
I wouldn't normally have a problem with this but public content should be just that, viewable by the general public and not being forced to install a tracke.. err, their app on my phone.
Where I have a huge problem with this is public health or other official announcements from community leaders or essential information and its being put out on facebook. So now I can't access a public message by a publicly elected entity for general consumption. It seems extremely slimy and it feels illegal on some level as I don't want to be forced to login to facebook to view local updates.
Since some of us have Instagram, I thought to try it, if only to share pics. Sign up was brutal. I can't figure out how to use my phone account on my desktop. Sharing existing pics sucks. Taking pics with Instagram sucks.
I can't even figure out how to simply browse a friend's feed.
I legit can't imagine why anyone uses Instagram, for any purpose.
if it wasn't for them i would so delete this shit
I understand it's mindless, but I dont want it to be anything else. It's a toy platform for looking at device sized images and short videos on my mobile and that's all I want it to be.
Reddit on the other hand, is trying hard to push me away and I thank them for it, but a lot of info you can only find there. Like real measurements of graphics cards and just real information from real people.
Kind of sad, but Reddit has attracted all the people who used to frequent niche forms in one place.
You need to not only remove the modal, but remove the "overflow:hidden;" in the <body> tag. After that you should be able to scroll.
I have CSS/JS injectors that do this for me already, I really fucking hate popups and scrolling impediments of any sort.
edit: Sometime they add "pointer-events: none;" to the <body>, should check that too.
I don't "get" Instagram. I'm not on it, I don't use it, all that "I just don't just because".
I have a room mate // romantic partner who does use Instagram. OK, that's great, that's fine. They're younger than I am so perhaps they get something I don't; times change, I get that; I still don't get "The Insta".
Maybe some social media will ding on me the next time around. I'll wait.
The first attempt stopped at "unexpected error" just after selecting a login name.
The second attempt with different email address in a different browser ended the same way.
Third attempt I tried from the third browser, via cellular data and gmail email. That one finished ok but still returned back to Sign up right after the last signup atep. Entering the same data in Sign up resulted in "there is account using this email". So I tried to log in and it was successful but it immediately showed "suspicious activity dialog" FORCING me to enter phone number and do SMS verification. After I did that, my shiny new Instagram account started working.
But I expect it will be blocked or deleted for inactivity soon unless I start submitting photos or generate enough ad impressions or ad clicks. I use adblock though..
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Haven't tried it in a long time so maybe doesn't work anymore.
Other people report being able to, but it just sends me straight to a login page.
In fact, I've always found it perplexing how little information or incentive there is on their landing page that would encourage me to make an account. I only even barely know what that site is for because of osmosis and image previews from sites that link to it. Makes me wonder how they got critical mass to even get started.
https://www.instagram.com/accounts/emailsignup/
I don't understand this post and the blog author's comments about using desktop. I get the appeal of not having apps installed on your phone, but wasn't Instagram phone-first? I remember not having a smartphone in the early 10's and not being able to use Instagram because you couldn't use their site. I would argue the phone-based experience is far superior to the browser...
A UI pattern whereby content a user wants is provided, then yanked away before it can be consumed, to be replaced by a demand for something the site wants (log in, sign up, subscribe, pay, etc). It's distinct from merely providing a limited amount of content in the first place, as when a site offers 3 articles for free before requiring payment.
Thanks.
Pinttern?
A: There’s no way to gather data on that so it’s not a thing.
This is the problem with “data driven” decision making in a nutshell. It has annoyed me to no end at every company I’ve worked for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
On the other hand, virtually every study of the Vietnam war said it was a huge mistake and Domino theory was bullshit.
At the end of the day every company wants to make money, or will be bought out by cutthroats who think it's all there is, and this kind of thinking will take hold. Users you can't profit from = leeches.
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I open IG, tap into the search tab, tap the search bar, keyboard appears, type in user, tap result.
Do you want tapping into the search tab to autofocus the search bar and open the keyboard. I can totally understand that but IG’s search tab is more a discovery thing now. Which like evil’s of social media aside was a sorely needed feature since finding people to follow has always been hard on Twitter and IG.
https://dumpor.com/v/polite_cat_olli_official
https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official
Suffering the ads is preferable to whatever fb wants.
Works for the Olli, but for another profile returns for me a "permanent error", blocked by Instagram.
See https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/cadence.moe/gemlog/2020-12-1... "Future of Bibliogram after restrictive IP blocking"
At least they're not as bad as Pinterest, which has done this for years, plus their million alternate domains polluting search results.
I would love if we could do away with these sites and those websites that insist I use their 'app' to view simple text data.
All of this has ensured that none of them like Instagram links, and do not want an account.