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?
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
EU: “You can’t just collect people’s data, you have to ask permission first and give people the opportunity to decline.”
Site Developers: “Fine, but we’re going to comply in the most malicious manner possible.”
HEY DO YOU WANT COOKIES ARE YOU SURE PLEASE HIT THE BIG BLUE BUTTON FOR COOKIES THEY ARE HELPFUL AND GOOD PLEASE GIVE COOKIES!!!
It’d be fun if the EU started policing any use of the phrase “We are required to show this dialog”.
They’re not. They choose to show that dialog so that they can try to apply commercial tracking cookies. Anything for website function is already covered by EU laws.
There have been a couple of changes to the rule since it came into effect. Originally, the pop up could effectively occlude the “Do Not Enable Cookies” button behind a maze of “Optional” settings. The end result was a big colorful “I Consent” button and a tiny little gear button with a thousand manual checkboxes to uncheck every time you visited the site.
The regulations were updated since. Now these annoying pop-ups at least tend to have a clearly defined “Yes, I Consent” / “No, I Do Not” at equal scale and opposite color, allowing you to bypass it without going into the weeds on a configuration screen.
It’s hilarious on a widescreen setup how many websites aren’t adaptive but that cookie pop-up blocks 3/4 in 5000% font size.
*xitter
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 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.
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
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.
It’s intentional, they want you logged in so they can track what you’re doing
iT’s bEtTeR iN tHe aPp
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!”
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
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
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).
I barely see them pop up, if they do it’s for a fraction of a second before a browser extension nukes them.
Oh they’re aware, they just don’t care 99% of the time.
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
It’s not. It is up to the owner to code it into their website or not.
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?!
Honestly, I didn’t even know what it does until now. I get so annoyed by it that I just close it immediately after it pops up. Probably time to make a uBlock Origin filter for it I guess
I don’t know, but I also don’t know why would anyone willingly choose this UX for their website.
Writing sign-in and authentication can be difficult. Google handles it for you. They’ll also store all of the secret stuff that you don’t want to leak, like passwords, etc. So I can see some of the appeal for sites of a certain size, but not really Twitter.
I can understand that, and a user can also enjoy the simplicity of the process. However, I’m speaking about this very popup here. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of websites that allow you to sign in/up with Google (or another 3rd-party provider) that don’t have this problem. I see so many websites and mobile apps that make it very difficult to use them. I always wonder if anyone at the company is using their own website/app. Reddit is another great example.
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.
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. In any case, I’ll have to take a closer look. Thanks for the link.
… 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
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…
Visiting the corpse of Twitter was your first mistake
Digital necrophilia…
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!
Ask cookie question is required.
Thank the European bureaucrats that don’t understand technology.
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.
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.
Also, some researchers found out that nearly two thirds of the top 1000 websites don’t even honor your selection. If you say only necessary cookies they ignore it and still track you. Shocker.
No fuggin doubt.
And you know what irks me more is when you buy things from places like eBay or other third party seller websites (where you’ve consented to their cookies/terms) your email address you use with them is then in the hands of a goofball who’s had their
personalbusiness PC been compromised.The few times I use eBay the email addy I use on their sees my inbox flooded. Fucking shitshow.
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 wish I could get my EU representatives to act on those! Oh right, I live on a different continent in a country that lets businesses run amuck
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
Thank you for your sacrifice
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.
A porn site a friend of mine sometimes visits pops up a “sign in with Google” banner when you visit without annoyance blocker, and a “like this on Facebook” when you open a video.
Dont be a pussy, do it!
oops, forgot to sign out of the church account. This will be a learning opportunity!
Found Ted Cruz’s fediverse account?
