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?
It’s actually a pretty tasty coffee.
GIVE US YOUR DATA GIVE US YOUR DATA GIVE US YOUR DATA
PLEASE HERE TAKE IT
(Just please stop yelling at me)
xcancel.com ftw
…wat is that?
One of the few surviving nitter instances
Cancel X period brbgoatftw
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.
It took long enough but the pop-ups evolved into new pop-ups.
I have a very hard time believing that these companies are unaware of how auful this shit makes their webpages.
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).
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.
Common language used to dismiss bad decisions like this:
- We need to track and meet our metrics for the quarter
- Engagement for $FEATURE is down, so we have to take measures to get people to take notice
- It’s opt-in/opt-out, so it’s the right thing to do
- It’s only a one time thing and then the system remembers1 what the user selected
- Only new users are affected - our power users will put up with it
- It’s just a minor inconvenience, really
- It’s just a website
1 - Oh, did you turn off cookies or clear your cache? Sorry about that.
Pretty sure you just triggered every developer and/or person who had to sit through a product meeting.
Though you missed the last bullet point: Our user surveys showed that people would actually prefer these changes
I mean, they kinda don’t. Companies are entities made out of policies guiding how people split up objectives into smaller parts. The more people involved and the more indirect it is, the less coherent it gets
Legal says you need one popup for compliance. Marketing or analytics say you need more users to log in. Elon wants to remind people to call it Twitter.
By the time it filters through managers to the devs, they probably know it’ll be a horrible experience, but what are they going to do? It’s not their job. They’ll get brushed off. There might even be a compelling reason to do it in this way - with this in particular, annoying and intrusive popups are malicious compliance with the EU cookie laws. But everyone seems to be doing it this way - that’s probably what legal is going to recommend rather than interpreting the law themselves
So the problem is the structure. If you want a hierarchy of obedient replaceable cogs, you’ve made sure no one sees the full picture
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
Well, unless you’re a nerd, you only see those messages once
on top of what others have said - directing you to the app and login - it’s also likely just that teams don’t talk and make decisions that solve their local issue without too much for the whole, and then say “ugh team x solved this so inelegantly! we were forced to do our thing that wasn’t as nice!”
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.
I barely see them pop up, if they do it’s for a fraction of a second before a browser extension nukes them.
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.
Oh they’re aware, they just don’t care 99% of the time.
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.
This is so common it has a name, it’s called banner blindness.
One of the important aspects of interface design is supposed to be not showing alerts for everything, so that when they pop up you feel compelled to pay attention.
Not long ago a nurse killed an older woman by giving her the wrong medicine; she took accountability but called out that the software they use provides so many alerts that (probably unofficial) policy was to just click through them to get to treating the patient. One of those alerts was a callout that the wrong dosage was selected and she zoomed right by it out of habit.
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?
Same when setting up Nagios, after a time you learn fewer alerts is better
The absolute lack of any kind of consistency with layout or alignment makes me cringe too.
It’s just shows how they’re just glued onto the page with no care or planning. Especially no consideration to the user or user experience.
The absolute lack of any kind of consistency with layout or alignment makes me cringe too.
My guess is they’re all built by different teams that didn’t reuse any of the code written by the other teams. Ideally you’re supposed to have a design system with standards for this, but I think all the good developers left (or were fired from) Twitter when Musk took over.
I’ve been saying the same for tv commercials. I’ve always hated them but they were built into the episodes, now they jump scare mid sentence and come back to another speaking.
I sail quite often but the wife likes the convenience, so.
It all sucks and getting suckier!
That screenshot looks like the old screenshots from the early browser wars with 20 toolbars stacked.
And dancing desktop buddies with 350 tray icons.
Anyone else missing Bonzi Buddy?
Google and YouTube are pretty fucking bad without an ad-blocker installed. From someone who has worked in jobs where I may as well have called myself a ‘Professional Googler’ and where I do not have permissions to install an ad-blocker on my work computer, the amount of ads I get buried with really sours the experience.
Also, a lot of news sites (particularly anything owned by Reach PLC such as the Mirror) are now flipping the middle-finger at GDPR by forcing users to pay to reject tracking cookies. Here’s a screengrab from the Daily Mirror website…
How will Daily Mirror remember I paid if they are not storing any cookies for me as they promise? Also,asking to pay just for valuing your privacy, I don’t assume this payment will lead to removal of ads or any more exclusive benefits.
How do you not have permission to install an ad-blocker? lol
Hahaha I had the exact same reaction and made an almost identical screenshot of this eyecancer…
Why are you all on X/Twitter? It’s utter trash, I just avoid the whole thing.
As evidenced by all the prompts, we aren’t! But it’s still the best place to get the latest info from some companies
I’m not on Twitter, or any social platform, but sometimes a link leads met to a post or an account. Et voilà!
This kind of thing getting worse and worse at all levels of tech is increasingly pushing me to the fringes of tech solutions (with all of the handicaps that come with that) as those are getting to be the only places where this kind of thing is not pervasive.
- No apps on phone, if the mobile site doesn’t work it can wait until I am in front of a desktop/laptop
- No NFC payments as that requires the phone to be blessed by lord Google or father Apple
- No set top streaming boxes on the TV, just a small Linux powered PC and a cheap Logitech wireless keyboard/trackpad
- Only Linux OSes on desktop/laptop
Yup, I’m in exactly the same boat. I just got a new phone and decided to not install any banking apps whatsoever. I got a check in the mail, and instead of giving in and installing the app, I just drove a mile to an ATM. NBD, and I don’t have to see endless nags about banking features, credit scores, etc.
I’m not part of your system… MAN!, but actually serious.
I have found that local banks like credit unions, and such, seem to have nicer mobile apps from my experience.
I have worked as a software engineer for a smaller bank like this, and the development was a lot more honest. These kind of banks normally just want a pleasant user experience for their customers, unlike bigger banks that want to deploy all sorts of dark patterns to collect user data and sell extra stuff to their customers.
At least you can force desktop mode on most sites. No mobiles apps, desktop mode on phone. Usually.
I’m headed in that direction.
- Minimal apps on my phone, most of them foss apps to access my self hosted services
- Raspberry pi 4 running osmc connected to our TV. TV itself has no internet connection
- Want to move to graphene os, but riding this iphone 12 mini until it dies
- Linux on my server and my primary computer. Have an M1 Mac Mini that my wife primarily uses (too many papercuts for her with asahi linux. We tried and switched back), and iPadOS on the iPad Pro that I have that I’m also riding until it dies.
Tax all captured data @40 dollars per field per year. First name, 40 bucks, last name 40 bucks, etc.
Just gotta love what Elon did with the place. Not that it was great before, but now it looks and feels like a seedy Thai hooker palace
This is something I like to use ublock origin for. Like, blocking ads is nice, but I also love just clearing out clutter from websites.
Ublock, doesnt block the google login, th cookiebanner and the shitty login question of twitter itself. I looks exactly like that with ublock.
Yeha but it’s very easy to set up filters for those kind of elements
I’m not on Twitter so I haven’t tried cleaning it up, but it’s super easy to select additional elements to block, I do it all the time to clean visuals rather than block ads.
