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Say there is this new law that forbids to smoke inside public places (read: restaurants, bars, pubs). For the sake of the metaphor, say these places received so
by j1elo 6y ago
Say there is this new law that forbids to smoke inside public places (read: restaurants, bars, pubs). For the sake of the metaphor, say these places received some benefit from tobacco companies from having people smoke, so naturally they react to this law by remembering in the most annoying ways how you cannot smoke inside because of those pesky lawmakers (and not because people really voted in favor of less smoking in public places). For example, by creating smoke-friendly spaces where allowed, leaving less and more cluttered space for the smoke-free tables; and giving priority to the orders that come from smoker areas.
This is the cookie modal. It's the pages that show obtuse cookie modals the ones choosing to follow an aggressive anti-user approach. The fact that seemingly ALL of them are aggressive or use obscure techniques only shows how ingrained this smoking problem was all around.
EDIT -- the thing about this comparison is that those things happened when they implemented the anti-smoking laws in my country. You would see smoke-preferential areas, or in most places which didn't make the cut to have one, customers were all angry because they weren't able to smoke a cigarette after their lunch. But give it time, and years later most if not all restaurants and customers have accepted the new situation, offering an overall better experience for everybody involved. And I think that's what will eventually happen with the cookie law now that the GDPR has made more obvious and annoying the whole process.
- johnisgood 6y agoI had no idea what you were talking about until I read other comments about annoying modals and whatnot. I do not get these with uBlock Origin, and uMatrix installed. You should install uBlock Origin at least. If I disable it, I get that modal people are talking about.
- j1elo 6y agoI definitely don't see 99% of them, thanks to uBlock Origin with the "Fanboy's Annoyance" (which itself includes "EasyList Cookie List"). The other 1% is from websites which do break miseraby when the cookie modal has not been actually accepted or rejected by the user, in which cases the uBlock filter needs to be disabled in order to be able to reject the thing.
- johnisgood 6y agoI found that I often have to disable uBlock Origin to access a website. Most of the time I just avoid the website, but there are times when I cannot do that (must access the site). Sometimes I can disable, get on the website, then enable again, and it works (after refresh). I use it to block elements on Discord, for example, which did not run with uBlock Origin enabled initially (from what I recall, that is).
- xg15 6y ago> But give it time, and years later most if not all restaurants and customers have accepted the new situation, offering an overall better experience for everybody involved. And I think that's what will eventually happen with the cookie law now that the GDPR has made more obvious and annoying the whole process. I really hope that, but right now, I'm not optimistic. With smoking and restaurants, even if the tobacco industry was involved to some extent, it was not singlehandedly funding the whole restaurant business. The main business model of restaurants - people pay to have great food, drinks and a good time in general - is independent of smoking. In contrast, a large part of the modern web seems to be built on ads and tracking as its very foundation.
- j1elo 6y agoI agree that's where the metaphor falls short... I wanted to talk about how these big changes in regulations, affecting how mostly everybody had been doing business until that moment, tend to be strongly rejected by affected parties, but they tend to be worth it on the long term, and people end up getting comfortable again under the new rules. But you're right that in this case the problem is that most websites have been "cheating" by supporting themselves on shady stuff, and now that rules and laws are being reviewed to cut this possibility out, here comes the crying.