59 ms·

The 'Fuck You' Pattern

1202 points by c7DJTLrn 5y ago

draw_down 5y ago
The inability to scroll is from a body-level element that has `overflow: hidden` set. Set that to visible and you should be able to scroll
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Maybe it's time for shit like hiding scrollbars to be opt-in. I bet there are great use-cases for messing with scrolling, or right-click, or the back button, or whatever else. I bet there are benevolent websites that make downright acceptable use of these things. But this is not the hot path. There is far more abuse than good-use, yet I don't know any browser that does the right thing.
colordrops 5y ago
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.
- binarymax 5y ago
  IMDB is doing this now too. Infuriating.
  - stevenwoo 5y ago
    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.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Wait wha? What’s the flow here to produce this? 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.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Are you on Android? You have to tap search icon, then the search bar, after which the keyboard pops up then disappears, then tap the search bar again.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      I’m on iOS so I don’t think that’s supposed to happen. Definitely wouldn’t be the first time Android gets the shaft in terms of app quality from large companies. Looking at you Google whose iOS apps are better than their Android apps for some reason.
      - colordrops 5y ago
        Perhaps iOS doesn't allow it. It's a valuable "bug" for Instagram, so they have no incentive to fix it. Otherwise the app is relatively bug free, and this issue has existed for years, so I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt. Facebook absolutely doesn't deserve it.
        owlninja 5y ago
        My Android device works the same as the iOS user described.
        colordrops 5y ago
        I've seen it on multiple android devices. But even if only one tap on the search bar is necessary, it's still an antipattern, as the user clearly wants to search, and the keyboard should come up right away. Recommendations and suggestions should not be conflated with search, or at least shouldn't override search.
- burlesona 5y ago
  Wow, I don’t use Instagram so I haven’t seen this, but that’s a very nasty pattern.
nkingsy 5y ago
Q: But what about the unauthenticated existing users we might alienate? 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- saba2008 5y ago
  Users are not consumers, but product. And untracked users are lower quality, so culling them can be beneficial. So no problem here.
- turtletontine 5y ago
  ... 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.
  - Groxx 5y ago
    You can still collect (a lot) more information than classical advertising in print or on TV gets, and that seems to work alright.
    - Traster 5y ago
      Actually I think it's the opposite - online advertising is so ineffective all this micro-targetting is the minimum required to persuade people to throw their money away. In reality how do I target someone in New York? I buy an ad in the NYT.
      - Groxx 5y ago
        It's frequently ineffective because it's frequently done mindlessly, because it's possible to do so at enormous scale for low cost. The equivalent in the online world would be to pay site X to show ad Y at times Q-Z. And then you just trust that they'll do so, like you have to do for print/TV ads, and pay the site. That does happen, and you can find quite a lot of company blog posts out there saying that it works, but it's much more manual so yeah. It isn't the majority.
axbytg 5y ago
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.
- mulmen 5y ago
  What I don’t understand is why Reddit wants us to use the app so badly. Is it just for ads? Is it data collection?
  - notjustanymike 5y ago
    Likely both. It sure as hell ain't to make your experience any better.
  - ornornor 5y ago
    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.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      They deliberately make their mobile web experience awful, so I don’t think that’s why (how can you trust a metric that you’re deliberately sabotaging?). I suspect mobile apps just allow for more data collection than web apps.
    - busterarm 5y ago
      I think it's time for lawmakers to start drafting up an "engagement tax" and start penalizing companies for demanding peoples' attention.
  - Cicero22 5y ago
    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.
marklubi 5y ago
Pinterest is another one that exhibits this pattern. Infuriating.
pjerem 5y ago
Ah ah ! I had the exact same issue with an Instagram account I wanted to see because it was mentioned in some newspaper. I have no problem with private content but here it’s not even that : the content is shown then hidden. Of course it’s their site, their rules. But it says a lot about the engineering of frustration and the respect they show to potential users.
Groxx 5y ago
Yeah - this is why I stay out of Instagram. They're repeatedly, blatantly hostile to any non-user use. At least they're not as bad as Pinterest, which has done this for years, plus their million alternate domains polluting search results.
- avalys 5y ago
  What exactly is a “non-user use”?
  - Groxx 5y ago
    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.
  - insomniacity 5y ago
    Anyone who hasn't signed up for various tracking!
  - seanp2k2 5y ago
    “Non-member use”
- suzzer99 5y ago
  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.
- B4CKlash 5y ago
  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.
klyrs 5y ago
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.
- bserge 5y ago
  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.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  I don't know if it's just me or what, but I can no longer view Instagram posts while logged out. Other people report being able to, but it just sends me straight to a login page.
  - muixoozie 5y ago
    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.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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inostia 5y ago
I haven't used Facebook or Instagram in about 3 years. Occasionally I'll get sent a link to something on Instagram before having this exact experience. Whatever I'm missing out on, it hasn't been enough to convince me to make another account, my quality of life has significantly improved ever since I extricated myself from the social media hellscape. Indeed, "fuck you" Facebook.
rusk 5y ago
It’s a good one actually cause even if it’s falsely triggered e.g by users on NAT sharing the same address it’s only going to tell them “fuck you” but they can still login
avalys 5y ago
This seems like an anti-scraping measure to me, they are limiting how much content you can access on the site without an account? Seems like if they did not have protections like this, another group of people would be complaining about easy FB makes it for nefarious actors to violate your privacy, etc. and how careless they are in not locking down access better.
- pjerem 5y ago
  No because the first thing they do is to show you all of the content, ready to be scraped. Then they add their modal and then, after three reloads they store in your browser storage, they stops to show you the content. So they don’t protect any data, they just leak it all. Then they hide it.
- kwijibob 5y ago
  I think this is partially correct. I hate the FU patterns as well, but there are so many lame aggregator sites scraping for viral content. I would say FU patterns are: 80% trying to keep people in the walled garden ecosystem, 20% trying to make it hard for scrapers.
rglover 5y ago
It sounds like they disabled the scroll event on the body by setting overflow: hidden;.
rav 5y ago
I just tried in a private browsing window: Without refreshing the page (to trigger the "forced HTTP redirect to login") I could delete the modal and disable the overflow:hidden on body and keep scrolling down quite a bit until I hit a post from January 18, 2019. So if you're prepared to try hard you can view a lot of cat pics without creating an account...
aendruk 5y ago
I used to be able to see photos that friends and family publish to Instagram, but then one day I was inexplicably cut off—no more access via open standard protocols. I’m sad about that.
Flott 5y ago
Fuck you patterns are everywhere on the web nowaday. Some of the most annoying to me: Twitch trying to discourage the use of the embedded player/non official players (like VLC) by replacing the content by a fullscreen purple picture asking you to watch on twitch.tv. Reddit trying to force mobile user to use the reddit app as soon as the content is marked NSFW. Instagram forcing me to login to view pictures. Twitter asking me to see who someone is following.
- dheera 5y ago
  Another one is the "can I help you" chat box that pops up. Intercom and the likes. Thinking about making a Chrome plugin that intentionally asks some nonsense questions programmatically in the background to waste their time and disincentivize that behavior. (To be clear, I love having chat channels for sales and support, just NOT unsolicited "Can I help you" popups.)
  - EamonnMR 5y ago
    That just drives them toward using bots instead of humans.
deleted 5y ago
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mercury_craze 5y ago
Facebook was doing this for a while on business pages, but it looks like they've backed out of it now. Around 2 years ago you were only permitted to see content 'above the fold'. Scroll down to the second page of content and you saw an undismissable modal covering the entire page. Happily(!) you now have the option to dismiss the modal and continue scrolling, but the modal is shown for every new business page you visit.
- commoner 5y ago
  Using a VPN, I'm completely locked out of any Facebook page, business or not. It just shows a login form.
xqw 5y ago
> but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page Try this custom userstyle in a custom CSS plugin (like Stylus): body, html, html body, .overflow-hidden { overflow: auto !important; } ...I leave this on all the time, and use uBlock to snipe the SIGN UP NOW popovers, works wonders.
joelbondurant 5y ago
California brand tax cattle state property objects must be constantly tracked for terrorist activity.
abhinavsharma 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... Microsoft's old playbook, just done better, and against the web at large.
dash2 5y ago
On Firefox, when I load instagram, it deletes my history so I can't click back. I can't believe they'd deliberately be that shitty... is this some weird bug?
- Zak 5y ago
  Firefox is doing that to keep Facebook from being able to access that tab's browsing history. You can disable this feature if you don't like it. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/
  - commoner 5y ago
    Facebook Container is not pre-installed on Firefox. This probably isn't the issue.
    - Zak 5y ago
      Perhaps, but this is exactly the behavior of Facebook Container.
      - dash2 5y ago
        You're right. Thanks for telling me.
gabes 5y ago
Speaking of fuck you patterns, has anyone else been part of the A/B test where navigating to an Instagram page prevents you from using the back button? They somehow clean my tab history so that I can’t go back to Google. It’s been happening to me for months!
- fleddr 5y ago
  I'm glad you mention this, thought I was the only one. I've been experiencing this on facebook.com, for years. I'm puzzled how this is even technically possible. A website isn't supposed to be able to clear the history of where I came from?
  - greenshackle2 5y ago
    It's Firefox doing it to prevent Facebook (and Instagram) from scraping your history. If you're not on Firefox, then I don't know.
    - fleddr 5y ago
      That makes total sense, thanks!
    - commoner 5y ago
      Is there an announcement, help page, or issue/commit explaining this feature?
      - greenshackle2 5y ago
        There's this: https://www.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/facebookcontainer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/facebookcontainer/ I'm not sure if it's built into some versions now? It does it on my Windows computer but not my Linux laptop, and I don't remember explicitly installing this extension on either.
    - gabes 5y ago
      Ah of course. Shows how I hold my bias toward Facebook :facepalm:
hnarn 5y ago
Funnily enough the Instagram link in the blog post worked fine for me, because I use the "Privacy Redirect" extension which sent me to https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official
polartx 5y ago
Oh, I’ve got a perfect example of a ‘Fuck You’ pattern in the wild, and it’s served with a side of ‘user gas-lighting’. The gun.deals app, (specifically the iOS version, though I suspect android is engineered the same way), is your typical design of stacked rows of links for deals on, you guessed it, gun stuff. As with these apps, the user scrolls down the list by dragging their finger upward. Except on gun.deals, the app will [intentionally] misinterpret the first contact of the finger as a ‘click’ on the row item. This causes the user to have to back out of the item they had intended to scroll past. (While almost certainly delivering fraudulently obtained ‘impressions’ that the app maker can represent to advertisers and vendors they are selling data and screen share to).
edem 5y ago
This is the reason why I don't use Instagram...and that it also tries to force you to install an app instead of using the browser because you know...they can spy more from a phone.
icco 5y ago
Their API is the same way. Instagram really hates its users and developers.
alpb 5y ago
My theory is that Instagram is probably trying to prevent bots capable of rendering pages and making changes on the DOM (e.g. Selenium or chromedp) from harvesting their unauthenticated access rights to Instagram's frontend to crawl/collect images. Hence, as the author tried to circumvent it, they probably got IPbanned.
brudgers 5y ago
[I am not the market segmentation fairy] I can't buy anything from Amazon without an Amazon account. Can't use Facetime without two Apple accounts and two Apple devices. If it really matters, make an account. If it doesn't really matter, then it doesn't really matter.
yatz 5y ago
Wish I could upvote it 10 times!
tbrock 5y ago
Im not sure why this person would expect to see the content while logged out. Shrug. Its part of a social network, if everyone was lurking it would just be a bunch of creepers. The product shows who viewed a post/story/reel etc and can't do that if you arent logged in.
- dheera 5y ago
  If so they should not even show the page to begin with. I'd be fine with that. (It's an intentionally public page about cat pictures, by the way, so it wouldn't be creepy for anonymous internet users to look at. It's only private Instagram pages that would be creepy in that sense.) Letting you browse public content for 5 seconds before asking you log in is a "fuck you" pattern.
  - tbrock 5y ago
    Thats just advertising! I dont work at facebook but i also wasnt born yesterday. Give people a taste so they want to sign up. That doesn't make them evil any more than a movie trailer makes hollywood evil.
lxe 5y ago
If you think forcing to log in to consume content is a 'fuck you' pattern, then what do you think of paywalls?
skillpass 5y ago
I use a Vim extension in my browser which converts 'j' and 'k' into scroll keys. I've found that on many sites which employ the modal overlay and suppress scrolling I can still scroll around using these keys even when arrow keys and mouse scrolling don't work.
fleddr 5y ago
The dark patterns are not a sign of misunderstanding good UX, nor are they a sign of pure evil by their makers. Big social networks only come into existence via an aggressive, exponential roll-out. The main feature of such a network is having your friends on there. None of the other features matter as its plain to see how they copy concepts from each other all the time. It's about getting you in there. Once in existence, producing revenue means keeping you in the experience for as long as possible. Which is best done in an app and preferably logged in. This allows for the personalization and notifications. Put another way, publishing all of this on the open web, with many users using ad-blockers, just doesn't cut it. Further, you don't want to give away all content to the open web (cough...Google). We gave them this power. None of us want to surf the open web. We want 3 apps that do everything. And we won't pay for it, not a penny.
tantalor 5y ago
There are some instagram mirrors you can use: https://dumpor.com/v/polite_cat_olli_official https://dumpor.com/v/polite_cat_olli_official https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official Suffering the ads is preferable to whatever fb wants.
- c7DJTLrn 5y ago
  Thank you :D
- np1810 5y ago
  Thanks for these mirrors... I used to visit picuki website which used to work great until recently...
- zoomablemind 5y ago
  > https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official 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/2020-12-17-future-of-bibliogram.bliz https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/cadence.moe/gemlog/2020-12-1... "Future of Bibliogram after restrictive IP blocking"
bidirectional 5y ago
The alternative is that life is made very easy for dystopian, privacy-invading companies like Clearview AI. Really I find this a lot less galling than on somewhere like Reddit, where most content isn't so personal.
fishtoaster 5y ago
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.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Great, now my boss is going to ask me to implement this. Thanks.
  - xmprt 5y ago
    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.
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  Appwall? Subscribewall? Mailwall?
  - e12e 5y ago
    Millwall? A wall that wears you down until you comply?
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      That's already the name of a a soccer team[2] with the motto "No one likes us and we don't care"[3]. How poetic. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwall_F.C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwall_F.C. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_one_likes_us,_we_don%27t_care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_one_likes_us,_we_don%27t_ca...
- 5y ago
throw7 5y ago
Facebook does this too. I'll go to a link to a facebook page and be greeted some seconds later with nonsense about having to login. There's also that facebook login box that covers the bottom of the page.
- tgtweak 5y ago
  Yeah unless it's a business, even then, you're pushed to sign up for an account to message the business. As a business, I would be weighing my options here as your Facebook page is often one of the first to show in the results. Not long until Facebook starts advertising other businesses over your business page.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
"Wow, fuck you. I just wanted to look at cats." "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.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  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. EDIT: IMHO
  - mdavis6890 5y ago
    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...
    - SavantIdiot 5y ago
      That's a good point. I was referring to the sentiment at the time where people thought there was nothing wrong with sharing music files that one person paid for and then millions copied, rather than buy. Putting aside the ethics of $1/song as good or bad, there was a sense of entitlement that I think has been tempered. Maybe?
- w0de0 5y ago
kderbyma 5y ago
for the areas where you may not want to use profanity, we could also call this a 'Hold-Up' or Bank Robbery pattern - essentially they are holding you at gunpoint for your data which we know they will immediately sell regardless of if you want to use their platform for anything other than that one link
vimax 5y ago
Where are the developers implementing this stuff on large social media, especially Reddit who had such a user friendly founding? Surely they're here on HN. I'd love to hear their thinking in going along with this, assuming it's something better than "fuck the users I want to get paid." How do you join the dev team for a service you like and use, and then knowingly destroy it?
- bserge 5y ago
  Hey, I would if 1. I got paid for it; 2. I'd justify it with "fuck this platform, everyone should go back to individual websites/blogs/forums".
  - jraph 5y ago
    Sabotage by executing the given orders?
- bob1029 5y ago
  > How do you join the dev team for a service you like and use, and then knowingly destroy it? You start with priorities that are fucked up before you even interviewed for the job. The world of today is not like the world of 10+ years ago. In 2001, if you met a developer, there was an exceptionally high % chance that they were fundamentally into technology in a very deep & personal way. In 2021, you will find that most people in technology see it for the cash cow that it is and utilize it accordingly. I would say that maybe 10-20% of the tech employees today actually give a fuck about these sorts of things. The rest just want their paycheck and as many other benefits as they can obtain. Raising a stink over dark patterns is not a good idea if you don't bring a whole lot of other meaningful value to the table.
  - shrimpx 5y ago
    I think this is because "tech" is quickly becoming a business utility, and every company is becoming a "tech company" just by augmenting its business with an app stack. "Tech" has become watered-down by proliferating everywhere, and accordingly developers have grown in number and diminished in average passion and skill. Coupled with this, everyone knows these tech-driven ad-distribution companies posing as "social media" are pretty shady, because they're based on coyly mining user attention for $. So I you get a job there, your moral bar is low enough that a dark pattern here and there is no big deal.
qwertox 5y ago
Yesterday I wanted to see something on Instagram. I think it was inside Relay for Reddit, where a WebView would open the Instagram page. Not only was there this delay, but the cookie consent was ridiculous. I now checked and it's the same on the Desktop in Chrome. I have no option to reject/disable cookies. Usually you get to choose which things you want to reject, like user tracking, personalized ads, but you usually need to keep the functional cookies. This popup only has one button "Accept All" and one "Manage Data Settings". The latter would be the one where I get to choose what to accept. But all I get there is an explanation telling me that "your browser or device may offer settings that allow you to choose whether browser cookies are set and to delete them. These controls vary by browser, and manufacturers may change both the settings they make available and how they work at any time." What is wrong with them? Honestly, Facebook is the worst disease on the internet, even Pinterest doesn't reach their degree of hostility.
loloquwowndueo 5y ago
Use an app / webpage like ingramer (https://ingramer.com/downloader/instagram/photo/ https://ingramer.com/downloader/instagram/photo/) :) Instagram will probably notice and break/ban them eventually but meanwhile, this works.
el_benhameen 5y ago
I have been fascinated by this pattern lately. I don’t have an instagram account, but there are a few that I’ll browse occasionally. I usually browse in mobile Safari’s private mode. I can usually view one or two accounts before I get locked out. They’re incredibly good at locking you out! It’s not cookie-based, because I’m still locked out if I exit private mode or use a different browser on a different machine. I’m even locked out if I switch off wifi and browse from a tmobile ip. I’m not sure how they’re this good at fingerprinting, but it’s quite something.
freewilly1040 5y ago
The article is a great example of blogspam: - Inflammatory title - Low effort content - An invitation to hate on a favorite HN target
- c7DJTLrn 5y ago
  I pray for the day I won't have any reason to whine.
annadane 5y ago
Ban Mark Zuckerberg from the internet. He ruins everything he touches
stevespang 5y ago
Who turned the ZUCK loose with arrows and spears ? Yeah, sure, his security detail made 100's of video clips of him before he got one on target, they have jokes flowing between their texting each other how lame Zuck is . . . .
ajharrison 5y ago
Such strong opinions for something you don’t and aren’t willing to pay a dime for. Why don’t you just shut up and use what you’re given for free?
easterncalculus 5y ago
Just looking at how this post got 400 points in an hour says a lot about how people feel about this. Internet fame isn't the arbiter of truth, but practically everyone here knows and relates to this post at one point or another on the web these days.
rexyg 5y ago
Ah, the classic “bait-and-switch”
sneak 5y ago
I have all Facebook properties (fb, instagram, whatsapp, all of it) blocked by DNS via NextDNS on my router. You're encouraged to try it.
tiborsaas 5y ago
The phenomenon he's seen is more likey the result of an overly paranoid and aggressive ant-bot algorithm. I've seen this too, but when using various devices and accidental (company machine) VPN connections.
dheera 5y ago
> 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.
dorianmariefr 5y ago
Marked as "Can't reproduce" :) e.g. I can browse the cat pictures just fine
ksangeelee 5y ago
Just don't use these hostile sites. Your presence on them just adds to their credibility, and the rewards they offer are scant at best.
trey-jones 5y ago
Exactly this about Instagram and Facebook bother me a little bit too, and here is something that most people also don't experience: I sometimes use a VPS from a popular cloud provider as a proxy for my web browsing. I frequently get asked to "Prove I'm not a robot". This happens on all kinds of sites, including Youtube, Paypal, some government sites, etc. It is annoying enough, but Facebook as well as Instagram won't let me see _anything_ without logging in (which I don't). So can't even check the Lunch menu for a local restaurant on Facebook over this proxy.
- rdschouw 5y ago
  The same happens when you use Linux as your desktop OS together with an ad-blocker. I guess it trips off some anti-bot rules. My favorite is Google's captcha where they let visitors solve their machine learning classification problem by asking them to classify images.
miohtama 5y ago
I recommend trying to hit Reader mode button to defeat Fuck You patterns. This simple trick works on surprisingly many websites, because they need to conform with Google SEO rules.
- abdusco 5y ago
  Yep. Works on many paywall sites, too. Whenever you hit a paywall, turn on the reader mode, then refresh.
cabalamat 5y ago
I don't like stikcy header,s so I use the Kill Sticky bookmarklet ( https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ ) When I do this, some websites do the same thing, i.e. don't let me scroll down. I think calling this the Fuck You pattern is entirely appropriate.
darepublic 5y ago
> 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. ^ try finding the container of the content that has its overflow set to 'hidden', and change it back to auto. Then you should be able to scroll again
Q1312 5y ago
bnb1kaz843ecm0qnsp5gvpk6fjkca789hr3xa62lyg
NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
There you go, an idea for business :) - an "mutual" account that will crawl pages on those sites - then share them without login I am to sleepy and this idea is stupid as hell ...
mrtweetyhack 5y ago
what dumb fuck visits instagram in the first place? serious question.
makecheck 5y ago
What I don’t understand about most sites that do this is how QUICKLY they reach the “fuck you” state. It’s like a few clicks, or a few seconds, or whatever — nowhere near long enough to get any idea what the site is about, what it offers, whether it is valuable, etc. Therefore, what exactly is gained here? I just get annoyed and immediately leave. Imagine if this happened elsewhere in life. You go into a grocery store, you grab a cart, you get 5 feet inside, grab one item, and then you are immediately blocked by 8 security guards and interrogated for your name before you can continue. Would you stay in the store?
jbpnoy6fifty 5y ago
Do pay walls count as a “fuck you” pattern? How about free trials with credit card submissions and having difficult “cancel subscription” work flows?
antibland 5y ago
> …but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page * { overflow: auto !important; }
surround 5y ago
Bibliogram is an unofficial front end to Instagram. Among other features, it won't prompt you to log in. Here's Ollie's page on Bibliogram: https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official Reddit on mobile is also beginning to require logging in to view certain pages, in which case you can use: https://libredd.it/ https://libredd.it/ Or https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/
seanp2k2 5y ago
Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter also do this, and I wish I could exclude them from Google search results. The worst offense IMO is that even if you do take their bait to “use the app”, they punt you to the App Store page, losing the URL you were on in the process, so even though I have all of those apps installed, it’s not possible to click through from a Google result then open that same post in the app. At that point, I don’t try to search for the same thing in the app, I just convince myself that it’s not worth it and abandon any attempt to access that content. They can keep it.
shmiga 5y ago
I would say - fuck Mark!!!
tonymet 5y ago
It’s a cynical way to interpret it . The desktop experience is only 30% of mobile. Brand perception is tarnished if people use the reduced experience . Think of web as a preview experience and mobile is the complete product.
kristopolous 5y ago
The pattern is real but in this instance they're blocking bots and scrapers.
swyx 5y ago
Linkedin has one of these too. Displays your full information to Google to index you, but if a human user visits, up comes the login wall. F you for treating bots better than humans, linkedin.
__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
I want plug-in which lets users highlight content on a page and mark it as "not malicious". It would use a CTPH algorithm to call out the non malicious bits from their context (same tech that virus scanners use). I call these annotations "brushstrokes". Other users could "follow" my brushstrokes, so when they land on the page, instead of implicitly running whatever code it finds there it just fetches the known-non-malicious parts. I.e. the cat pictures. I'd totally pay $5/month if $4 of it went to people who are annotating the web in this way. You could get paid in accordance with how popular and trustworthy your brushstrokes are, and together we can fix the web. I guess the goal would be UURL's, where the both the reference and the referent are uniform--rather than a uniform reference to a who-knows-what-this-site-will-do referent.
DevKoala 5y ago
Use ingramer.com or a similar tool/api, download all the images of your desired profile, and problem solved. I call this solution “fuck you too”.
Black101 5y ago
I like that name better. But something that means exactly the same thing that isn't considered a curse word would be even better.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
this is not news about the content hidden behind login. Like come on. This is just a whiny post from a guy that for some reason didn't know this from like a 2 years ago! Nothing about a pattern or simply coming to the realization that IG wants only users of its platform who log in, to use it and see its content! Not really knew considering in the early days it was an APP only platform....we've only been lucky to have the web desktop version for a short number of years. Do I like this behaviour - No. But am I not surprised from a company, as mentioned, hasn't exactly supported anything web/open over its existence. I mean look at the never-resolved feud between twitter and instagram that means you stillllll can't post pics to twitter from Instagram or see preview cards on twitter of IG links etc --all because of a spat like 10 years ago. But not posting nerdy rants about how I have to use bots and shit to workaround logging into a site I am apparently interested in the content of, but don't want to actually use or participate in.
oneshoe 5y ago
My challenge with this is that, I believe, you think instagram is a free service. It isn't, you pay for the service by selling your data to advertisers and using your data for advertisement. If they don't have your data, you aren't paying for the service. I hate this and also, I don't use their service - same for facebook.
loosescrews 5y ago
I don't understand why Zoom doesn't get more flak for this. Their web version is intentionally crippled and broken in an attempt to force users to download their app. They won't even show the link to join a meeting with the web version until you have failed to join with the app (it used to require 3 failed attempts, but they seem to have dropped that to a single failed attempt).
pentagrama 5y ago
Instagram have a paywall, to be able to see the content you must pay with your data by creating an account, and later hopefully become addicted to the platform to give more data and eat as many ads as possible.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
doc_gunthrop 5y ago
Another user mentioned bibliogram.art as a front-end for anonymous IG browsing. There's also an Android app available on F-droid for this purpose: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.austinhuang.instagrabber/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.austinhuang.instagrabber/
snickerer 5y ago
We urgently need a functional P2P protocol for social media. Something where I can quickly and easily show my stuff to my friends - and vice versa. From my device to your device.
baby 5y ago
I feel like most websites used to be like that. And then suddenly we got a load of great websites that just gave us what we wanted without ads. Facebook, youtube, reddit, google maps, gmail, etc. Now things are changing once again.
imglorp 5y ago
Fortunately there are "instgram viewer" sites which proxy for you. For now. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=instagram+viewer&t=ffab&atb=v126-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=instagram+viewer&t=ffab&atb=v126-1...
ok123456 5y ago
Today I came across another type of "fuck you" pattern. I was buying a shirt (https://vindlr.com/collections/savings-guy/products/green-savings-guy-t-shirt https://vindlr.com/collections/savings-guy/products/green-sa...). The first time I went to look at the page, it was $25. I closed it and came back several hours later it has risen to $30. I opened the site in private mode, and the price was $25 again.
_tom_ 5y ago
My favorite example is "login before you know what's here". I'm always amazed by this. I hear about a new website, open it up, and there's a sign up pop-up. 100% close and go away.
bitwize 5y ago
Your contract with the platform when you get the content is, you're going to log in/use the app. Otherwise you couldn't get the content on an ad-supported basis. Any time you try to scrape the web page you're actually stealing content.
leeter 5y ago
Facebook's use of this pattern prevented me from attending my grandfather's funeral (live streamed on facebook because of COVID) earlier this year. I was to say the least... pissed. If not for my sister who re-broadcast it to me over discord I'd have missed it completely.
blunte 5y ago
Yes, Fuck Facebook, and fuck every other company that doesn't provide a net-positive for humanity. They may offer something convenient or useful, but if the mid/long-term cost is higher, then it's not a good thing for us or even for them. People with short term vision (less than 50 years) are making poorly informed decisions. Granted, I would like to be fabulously wealthy. But if gaining my wealth meant the world would be worse in 2+ years (I give myself a year just to be selfish), then it's just not worth it. That 2 year cost will eventually kick my ass in 20-40 years. So speaking very selfishly, if it has a net negative cost of greater than 1 year, then it likely will hurt me personally. So I (and everyone else) should pass on that option. Backing up a bit, let's break down what insta and fb offer. Very briefly, they offer some connection to close and unrelated humans. They offer some communication, some awareness, some entertainment. But their cost is SO high. Honestly, if we just budgeted $50/mo for services which didn't harvest our data, we'd probably be ahead. And our services would be less twisted in favor of "fuck you" patterns.
killingtime74 5y ago
Author using "dark patterns" to describe anything he doesn't like (vendor upholding their side of the bargain)
sekushi 5y ago
> It sort of worked, but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page. Just an FYI the author needed to remove the CSS attribute on the body? element "no-scroll" I've noticed Instagram's A/B testing however only so far as it prevents users from seeing "too much" without logging in. The case OP mentions is the least fool proof as there are many images left on the page after you get rid of the obstacles (modal, dark modal screen covering page, and no scroll css attribute). The other more robust method I've seen involves Instagram only sending the amount of images to the browser they want you to see
brailsafe 5y ago
The day instagram goes full Reddit is the day I probably stop using it. Thankfully I'm still just barely getting by with the website, but usually logged in.
mastercoder82 5y ago
Well, it's definitely a dark pattern. But why do you use Instagram to view cat pictures? Just use google image search to view as many cat pictures you want. Yes, google also serve ads - but it doesn't prevent you from viewing images. And ads can be easily blocked with an ad blocker. Social media, specially the FB family, is all about dark patterns. Avoid using them - at least for viewing cat pictures.
aj_nikhil 5y ago
Instagram is a mistake of the internet.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  Instagram was fabulous until FB got their dirty fingers in there. I think Facebook and all their properties are cancer for the web. They are banned on all my devices (and traffic to/from their shitty endpoints is actively banned on my networks). I call this the "fuck you too" pattern.
- sdave 5y ago
  Tiktok ?
oblib 5y ago
Well I'm late to getting in on this but that blog post made me laugh. I've done the same thing with my browser and had sites figure out ways to keep me out. I just quit going there. Didn't really give it much thought though, aside from asking myself "why am I such a tightass?".
jollybean 5y ago
I don't think that's a dark pattern. A dark pattern is trying to trick you into something silly. Like buying something extra you didn't even know about. This is just them saying 'login' and when you try to get around it, they're saying 'login' again.
xalava 5y ago
I've been using this expression for years, but I use it when a company purposely does not applies your explicit decision. In this case, you are the one trying to circumvent their policy. https://mobile.twitter.com/XavierLava/status/1085900143126368258 https://mobile.twitter.com/XavierLava/status/108590014312636...
Labo333 5y ago
If you really want to browse cat pictures, just use this firefox add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/instagram-guest/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/instagram-guest/ There are also proxy websites that allow you to browse instagram without login, but I don't like third parties learning about my browsing.
zimpenfish 5y ago
Thing is, Facebook just tipped over the $1T valuation and, presumably, could easily subsidise Instagram as an ad- and dark-pattern-free environment, generate tons of goodwill, and maybe ameliorate some of the current anti-trust coming their way. It just seems like the most obvious basic common sense approach?
littlecranky67 5y ago
I also like the mobile youtube website where they will ask you to create an account / login every 2-3 video views to "enhance user experience". This constant nudging (also a dark pattern) is clearly not about enhancing UX (commenting and playlists are not so much of use if you just watch links somebody posts in a chat or email) but clearly for youtube to serve better ads and track you more.
urthor 5y ago
You get the level of service you pay for. Instagram's free of charge.
kazinator 5y ago
The Royal Bank of Canada ("RBC") perpetrated a FYP last summer. Users were suddenly denied access to online banking, unless they agreed to switch all statement reporting from paper to electronic. This was a condition prior to being allowed to continue with the login; the option was given to refuse, but it was made clear that this choice meant losing access to online banking. But, don't worry, the UI flow assured the user: once you log in you can set your statement reporting preferences. Of course, it didn't show you what the current preferences are or save them anywhere! I had just one or two things for which I had been getting paper statements, all else being electronic. I could not remember exactly which and since they didn't remember for me, I did the simplest thing and switched every single item to snail-mail paper statements. Getting the user to resent you (even more) isn't how you bring about cooperation.
animal531 5y ago
I'm allowed to view approximately 20 images free per day before Instagram forces me to a login screen.
swamp-agr 5y ago
You can go ahead and block FB before FB blocks you. With a simple /etc/hosts update like that: https://pastebin.com/FAV2f9eA https://pastebin.com/FAV2f9eA Several years without FB and its scripts anywhere. Never regret about such decision.

1202 points by c7DJTLrn 5y ago

The inability to scroll is from a body-level element that has `overflow: hidden` set. Set that to visible and you should be able to scroll

Y_Y 5y ago
Maybe it's time for shit like hiding scrollbars to be opt-in. I bet there are great use-cases for messing with scrolling, or right-click, or the back button, or whatever else. I bet there are benevolent websites that make downright acceptable use of these things. But this is not the hot path. There is far more abuse than good-use, yet I don't know any browser that does the right thing.

colordrops 5y ago

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.

binarymax 5y ago
IMDB is doing this now too. Infuriating.
- stevenwoo 5y ago
  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.
Spivak 5y ago
Wait wha? What’s the flow here to produce this? 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.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Are you on Android? You have to tap search icon, then the search bar, after which the keyboard pops up then disappears, then tap the search bar again.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    I’m on iOS so I don’t think that’s supposed to happen. Definitely wouldn’t be the first time Android gets the shaft in terms of app quality from large companies. Looking at you Google whose iOS apps are better than their Android apps for some reason.
    - colordrops 5y ago
      Perhaps iOS doesn't allow it. It's a valuable "bug" for Instagram, so they have no incentive to fix it. Otherwise the app is relatively bug free, and this issue has existed for years, so I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt. Facebook absolutely doesn't deserve it.
      - owlninja 5y ago
        My Android device works the same as the iOS user described.
        colordrops 5y ago
        I've seen it on multiple android devices. But even if only one tap on the search bar is necessary, it's still an antipattern, as the user clearly wants to search, and the keyboard should come up right away. Recommendations and suggestions should not be conflated with search, or at least shouldn't override search.
burlesona 5y ago
Wow, I don’t use Instagram so I haven’t seen this, but that’s a very nasty pattern.

nkingsy 5y ago

Q: But what about the unauthenticated existing users we might alienate? 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.

deleted 5y ago
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saba2008 5y ago
Users are not consumers, but product. And untracked users are lower quality, so culling them can be beneficial. So no problem here.
turtletontine 5y ago
... 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.
- Groxx 5y ago
  You can still collect (a lot) more information than classical advertising in print or on TV gets, and that seems to work alright.
  - Traster 5y ago
    Actually I think it's the opposite - online advertising is so ineffective all this micro-targetting is the minimum required to persuade people to throw their money away. In reality how do I target someone in New York? I buy an ad in the NYT.
    - Groxx 5y ago
      It's frequently ineffective because it's frequently done mindlessly, because it's possible to do so at enormous scale for low cost. The equivalent in the online world would be to pay site X to show ad Y at times Q-Z. And then you just trust that they'll do so, like you have to do for print/TV ads, and pay the site. That does happen, and you can find quite a lot of company blog posts out there saying that it works, but it's much more manual so yeah. It isn't the majority.

axbytg 5y ago

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.

mulmen 5y ago
What I don’t understand is why Reddit wants us to use the app so badly. Is it just for ads? Is it data collection?
- notjustanymike 5y ago
  Likely both. It sure as hell ain't to make your experience any better.
- ornornor 5y ago
  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.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    They deliberately make their mobile web experience awful, so I don’t think that’s why (how can you trust a metric that you’re deliberately sabotaging?). I suspect mobile apps just allow for more data collection than web apps.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    I think it's time for lawmakers to start drafting up an "engagement tax" and start penalizing companies for demanding peoples' attention.
- Cicero22 5y ago
  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.

marklubi 5y ago

Pinterest is another one that exhibits this pattern. Infuriating.

pjerem 5y ago

Ah ah ! I had the exact same issue with an Instagram account I wanted to see because it was mentioned in some newspaper. I have no problem with private content but here it’s not even that : the content is shown then hidden. Of course it’s their site, their rules. But it says a lot about the engineering of frustration and the respect they show to potential users.

Groxx 5y ago

Yeah - this is why I stay out of Instagram. They're repeatedly, blatantly hostile to any non-user use. At least they're not as bad as Pinterest, which has done this for years, plus their million alternate domains polluting search results.

avalys 5y ago
What exactly is a “non-user use”?
- Groxx 5y ago
  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.
- insomniacity 5y ago
  Anyone who hasn't signed up for various tracking!
- seanp2k2 5y ago
  “Non-member use”
suzzer99 5y ago
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.
B4CKlash 5y ago
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.

klyrs 5y ago

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.

bserge 5y ago
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.
wlesieutre 5y ago
I don't know if it's just me or what, but I can no longer view Instagram posts while logged out. Other people report being able to, but it just sends me straight to a login page.
- muixoozie 5y ago
  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.
5y ago

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inostia 5y ago

I haven't used Facebook or Instagram in about 3 years. Occasionally I'll get sent a link to something on Instagram before having this exact experience. Whatever I'm missing out on, it hasn't been enough to convince me to make another account, my quality of life has significantly improved ever since I extricated myself from the social media hellscape. Indeed, "fuck you" Facebook.

rusk 5y ago

It’s a good one actually cause even if it’s falsely triggered e.g by users on NAT sharing the same address it’s only going to tell them “fuck you” but they can still login

avalys 5y ago

This seems like an anti-scraping measure to me, they are limiting how much content you can access on the site without an account? Seems like if they did not have protections like this, another group of people would be complaining about easy FB makes it for nefarious actors to violate your privacy, etc. and how careless they are in not locking down access better.

pjerem 5y ago
No because the first thing they do is to show you all of the content, ready to be scraped. Then they add their modal and then, after three reloads they store in your browser storage, they stops to show you the content. So they don’t protect any data, they just leak it all. Then they hide it.
kwijibob 5y ago
I think this is partially correct. I hate the FU patterns as well, but there are so many lame aggregator sites scraping for viral content. I would say FU patterns are: 80% trying to keep people in the walled garden ecosystem, 20% trying to make it hard for scrapers.

rglover 5y ago

It sounds like they disabled the scroll event on the body by setting overflow: hidden;.

rav 5y ago

I just tried in a private browsing window: Without refreshing the page (to trigger the "forced HTTP redirect to login") I could delete the modal and disable the overflow:hidden on body and keep scrolling down quite a bit until I hit a post from January 18, 2019. So if you're prepared to try hard you can view a lot of cat pics without creating an account...

aendruk 5y ago

I used to be able to see photos that friends and family publish to Instagram, but then one day I was inexplicably cut off—no more access via open standard protocols. I’m sad about that.

Flott 5y ago

Fuck you patterns are everywhere on the web nowaday. Some of the most annoying to me: Twitch trying to discourage the use of the embedded player/non official players (like VLC) by replacing the content by a fullscreen purple picture asking you to watch on twitch.tv. Reddit trying to force mobile user to use the reddit app as soon as the content is marked NSFW. Instagram forcing me to login to view pictures. Twitter asking me to see who someone is following.

dheera 5y ago
Another one is the "can I help you" chat box that pops up. Intercom and the likes. Thinking about making a Chrome plugin that intentionally asks some nonsense questions programmatically in the background to waste their time and disincentivize that behavior. (To be clear, I love having chat channels for sales and support, just NOT unsolicited "Can I help you" popups.)
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  That just drives them toward using bots instead of humans.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mercury_craze 5y ago

Facebook was doing this for a while on business pages, but it looks like they've backed out of it now. Around 2 years ago you were only permitted to see content 'above the fold'. Scroll down to the second page of content and you saw an undismissable modal covering the entire page. Happily(!) you now have the option to dismiss the modal and continue scrolling, but the modal is shown for every new business page you visit.

commoner 5y ago
Using a VPN, I'm completely locked out of any Facebook page, business or not. It just shows a login form.

xqw 5y ago

> but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page Try this custom userstyle in a custom CSS plugin (like Stylus): body, html, html body, .overflow-hidden { overflow: auto !important; } ...I leave this on all the time, and use uBlock to snipe the SIGN UP NOW popovers, works wonders.

joelbondurant 5y ago

California brand tax cattle state property objects must be constantly tracked for terrorist activity.

abhinavsharma 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... Microsoft's old playbook, just done better, and against the web at large.

dash2 5y ago

On Firefox, when I load instagram, it deletes my history so I can't click back. I can't believe they'd deliberately be that shitty... is this some weird bug?

Zak 5y ago
Firefox is doing that to keep Facebook from being able to access that tab's browsing history. You can disable this feature if you don't like it. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/
- commoner 5y ago
  Facebook Container is not pre-installed on Firefox. This probably isn't the issue.
  - Zak 5y ago
    Perhaps, but this is exactly the behavior of Facebook Container.
    - dash2 5y ago
      You're right. Thanks for telling me.

gabes 5y ago

Speaking of fuck you patterns, has anyone else been part of the A/B test where navigating to an Instagram page prevents you from using the back button? They somehow clean my tab history so that I can’t go back to Google. It’s been happening to me for months!

fleddr 5y ago
I'm glad you mention this, thought I was the only one. I've been experiencing this on facebook.com, for years. I'm puzzled how this is even technically possible. A website isn't supposed to be able to clear the history of where I came from?
- greenshackle2 5y ago
  It's Firefox doing it to prevent Facebook (and Instagram) from scraping your history. If you're not on Firefox, then I don't know.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    That makes total sense, thanks!
  - commoner 5y ago
    Is there an announcement, help page, or issue/commit explaining this feature?
    - greenshackle2 5y ago
      There's this: https://www.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/facebookcontainer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/facebookcontainer/ I'm not sure if it's built into some versions now? It does it on my Windows computer but not my Linux laptop, and I don't remember explicitly installing this extension on either.
  - gabes 5y ago
    Ah of course. Shows how I hold my bias toward Facebook :facepalm:

hnarn 5y ago

Funnily enough the Instagram link in the blog post worked fine for me, because I use the "Privacy Redirect" extension which sent me to https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official

polartx 5y ago

Oh, I’ve got a perfect example of a ‘Fuck You’ pattern in the wild, and it’s served with a side of ‘user gas-lighting’. The gun.deals app, (specifically the iOS version, though I suspect android is engineered the same way), is your typical design of stacked rows of links for deals on, you guessed it, gun stuff. As with these apps, the user scrolls down the list by dragging their finger upward. Except on gun.deals, the app will [intentionally] misinterpret the first contact of the finger as a ‘click’ on the row item. This causes the user to have to back out of the item they had intended to scroll past. (While almost certainly delivering fraudulently obtained ‘impressions’ that the app maker can represent to advertisers and vendors they are selling data and screen share to).

edem 5y ago

This is the reason why I don't use Instagram...and that it also tries to force you to install an app instead of using the browser because you know...they can spy more from a phone.

icco 5y ago

Their API is the same way. Instagram really hates its users and developers.

alpb 5y ago

My theory is that Instagram is probably trying to prevent bots capable of rendering pages and making changes on the DOM (e.g. Selenium or chromedp) from harvesting their unauthenticated access rights to Instagram's frontend to crawl/collect images. Hence, as the author tried to circumvent it, they probably got IPbanned.

brudgers 5y ago

[I am not the market segmentation fairy] I can't buy anything from Amazon without an Amazon account. Can't use Facetime without two Apple accounts and two Apple devices. If it really matters, make an account. If it doesn't really matter, then it doesn't really matter.

yatz 5y ago

Wish I could upvote it 10 times!

tbrock 5y ago

Im not sure why this person would expect to see the content while logged out. Shrug. Its part of a social network, if everyone was lurking it would just be a bunch of creepers. The product shows who viewed a post/story/reel etc and can't do that if you arent logged in.

dheera 5y ago
If so they should not even show the page to begin with. I'd be fine with that. (It's an intentionally public page about cat pictures, by the way, so it wouldn't be creepy for anonymous internet users to look at. It's only private Instagram pages that would be creepy in that sense.) Letting you browse public content for 5 seconds before asking you log in is a "fuck you" pattern.
- tbrock 5y ago
  Thats just advertising! I dont work at facebook but i also wasnt born yesterday. Give people a taste so they want to sign up. That doesn't make them evil any more than a movie trailer makes hollywood evil.

lxe 5y ago

If you think forcing to log in to consume content is a 'fuck you' pattern, then what do you think of paywalls?

skillpass 5y ago

I use a Vim extension in my browser which converts 'j' and 'k' into scroll keys. I've found that on many sites which employ the modal overlay and suppress scrolling I can still scroll around using these keys even when arrow keys and mouse scrolling don't work.

fleddr 5y ago

The dark patterns are not a sign of misunderstanding good UX, nor are they a sign of pure evil by their makers. Big social networks only come into existence via an aggressive, exponential roll-out. The main feature of such a network is having your friends on there. None of the other features matter as its plain to see how they copy concepts from each other all the time. It's about getting you in there. Once in existence, producing revenue means keeping you in the experience for as long as possible. Which is best done in an app and preferably logged in. This allows for the personalization and notifications. Put another way, publishing all of this on the open web, with many users using ad-blockers, just doesn't cut it. Further, you don't want to give away all content to the open web (cough...Google). We gave them this power. None of us want to surf the open web. We want 3 apps that do everything. And we won't pay for it, not a penny.

tantalor 5y ago

There are some instagram mirrors you can use: https://dumpor.com/v/polite_cat_olli_official https://dumpor.com/v/polite_cat_olli_official https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official Suffering the ads is preferable to whatever fb wants.

c7DJTLrn 5y ago
Thank you :D
np1810 5y ago
Thanks for these mirrors... I used to visit picuki website which used to work great until recently...
zoomablemind 5y ago
> https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official 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/2020-12-17-future-of-bibliogram.bliz https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/cadence.moe/gemlog/2020-12-1... "Future of Bibliogram after restrictive IP blocking"

bidirectional 5y ago

The alternative is that life is made very easy for dystopian, privacy-invading companies like Clearview AI. Really I find this a lot less galling than on somewhere like Reddit, where most content isn't so personal.

fishtoaster 5y ago

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.

SavantIdiot 5y ago
Great, now my boss is going to ask me to implement this. Thanks.
- xmprt 5y ago
  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.
EamonnMR 5y ago
Appwall? Subscribewall? Mailwall?
- e12e 5y ago
  Millwall? A wall that wears you down until you comply?
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    That's already the name of a a soccer team[2] with the motto "No one likes us and we don't care"[3]. How poetic. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwall_F.C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwall_F.C. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_one_likes_us,_we_don%27t_care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_one_likes_us,_we_don%27t_ca...
5y ago

throw7 5y ago

Facebook does this too. I'll go to a link to a facebook page and be greeted some seconds later with nonsense about having to login. There's also that facebook login box that covers the bottom of the page.

tgtweak 5y ago
Yeah unless it's a business, even then, you're pushed to sign up for an account to message the business. As a business, I would be weighing my options here as your Facebook page is often one of the first to show in the results. Not long until Facebook starts advertising other businesses over your business page.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

"Wow, fuck you. I just wanted to look at cats." "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.

SavantIdiot 5y ago
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. EDIT: IMHO
- mdavis6890 5y ago
  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...
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    That's a good point. I was referring to the sentiment at the time where people thought there was nothing wrong with sharing music files that one person paid for and then millions copied, rather than buy. Putting aside the ethics of $1/song as good or bad, there was a sense of entitlement that I think has been tempered. Maybe?
w0de0 5y ago

kderbyma 5y ago

for the areas where you may not want to use profanity, we could also call this a 'Hold-Up' or Bank Robbery pattern - essentially they are holding you at gunpoint for your data which we know they will immediately sell regardless of if you want to use their platform for anything other than that one link

vimax 5y ago

Where are the developers implementing this stuff on large social media, especially Reddit who had such a user friendly founding? Surely they're here on HN. I'd love to hear their thinking in going along with this, assuming it's something better than "fuck the users I want to get paid." How do you join the dev team for a service you like and use, and then knowingly destroy it?

bserge 5y ago
Hey, I would if 1. I got paid for it; 2. I'd justify it with "fuck this platform, everyone should go back to individual websites/blogs/forums".
- jraph 5y ago
  Sabotage by executing the given orders?
bob1029 5y ago
> How do you join the dev team for a service you like and use, and then knowingly destroy it? You start with priorities that are fucked up before you even interviewed for the job. The world of today is not like the world of 10+ years ago. In 2001, if you met a developer, there was an exceptionally high % chance that they were fundamentally into technology in a very deep & personal way. In 2021, you will find that most people in technology see it for the cash cow that it is and utilize it accordingly. I would say that maybe 10-20% of the tech employees today actually give a fuck about these sorts of things. The rest just want their paycheck and as many other benefits as they can obtain. Raising a stink over dark patterns is not a good idea if you don't bring a whole lot of other meaningful value to the table.
- shrimpx 5y ago
  I think this is because "tech" is quickly becoming a business utility, and every company is becoming a "tech company" just by augmenting its business with an app stack. "Tech" has become watered-down by proliferating everywhere, and accordingly developers have grown in number and diminished in average passion and skill. Coupled with this, everyone knows these tech-driven ad-distribution companies posing as "social media" are pretty shady, because they're based on coyly mining user attention for $. So I you get a job there, your moral bar is low enough that a dark pattern here and there is no big deal.

qwertox 5y ago

Yesterday I wanted to see something on Instagram. I think it was inside Relay for Reddit, where a WebView would open the Instagram page. Not only was there this delay, but the cookie consent was ridiculous. I now checked and it's the same on the Desktop in Chrome. I have no option to reject/disable cookies. Usually you get to choose which things you want to reject, like user tracking, personalized ads, but you usually need to keep the functional cookies. This popup only has one button "Accept All" and one "Manage Data Settings". The latter would be the one where I get to choose what to accept. But all I get there is an explanation telling me that "your browser or device may offer settings that allow you to choose whether browser cookies are set and to delete them. These controls vary by browser, and manufacturers may change both the settings they make available and how they work at any time." What is wrong with them? Honestly, Facebook is the worst disease on the internet, even Pinterest doesn't reach their degree of hostility.

loloquwowndueo 5y ago

Use an app / webpage like ingramer (https://ingramer.com/downloader/instagram/photo/ https://ingramer.com/downloader/instagram/photo/) :) Instagram will probably notice and break/ban them eventually but meanwhile, this works.

el_benhameen 5y ago

I have been fascinated by this pattern lately. I don’t have an instagram account, but there are a few that I’ll browse occasionally. I usually browse in mobile Safari’s private mode. I can usually view one or two accounts before I get locked out. They’re incredibly good at locking you out! It’s not cookie-based, because I’m still locked out if I exit private mode or use a different browser on a different machine. I’m even locked out if I switch off wifi and browse from a tmobile ip. I’m not sure how they’re this good at fingerprinting, but it’s quite something.

freewilly1040 5y ago

The article is a great example of blogspam: - Inflammatory title - Low effort content - An invitation to hate on a favorite HN target

c7DJTLrn 5y ago
I pray for the day I won't have any reason to whine.

annadane 5y ago

Ban Mark Zuckerberg from the internet. He ruins everything he touches

stevespang 5y ago

Who turned the ZUCK loose with arrows and spears ? Yeah, sure, his security detail made 100's of video clips of him before he got one on target, they have jokes flowing between their texting each other how lame Zuck is . . . .

ajharrison 5y ago

Such strong opinions for something you don’t and aren’t willing to pay a dime for. Why don’t you just shut up and use what you’re given for free?

easterncalculus 5y ago

Just looking at how this post got 400 points in an hour says a lot about how people feel about this. Internet fame isn't the arbiter of truth, but practically everyone here knows and relates to this post at one point or another on the web these days.

rexyg 5y ago

Ah, the classic “bait-and-switch”

sneak 5y ago

I have all Facebook properties (fb, instagram, whatsapp, all of it) blocked by DNS via NextDNS on my router. You're encouraged to try it.

tiborsaas 5y ago

The phenomenon he's seen is more likey the result of an overly paranoid and aggressive ant-bot algorithm. I've seen this too, but when using various devices and accidental (company machine) VPN connections.

dheera 5y ago

> 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.

dorianmariefr 5y ago

Marked as "Can't reproduce" :) e.g. I can browse the cat pictures just fine

ksangeelee 5y ago

Just don't use these hostile sites. Your presence on them just adds to their credibility, and the rewards they offer are scant at best.

trey-jones 5y ago

Exactly this about Instagram and Facebook bother me a little bit too, and here is something that most people also don't experience: I sometimes use a VPS from a popular cloud provider as a proxy for my web browsing. I frequently get asked to "Prove I'm not a robot". This happens on all kinds of sites, including Youtube, Paypal, some government sites, etc. It is annoying enough, but Facebook as well as Instagram won't let me see _anything_ without logging in (which I don't). So can't even check the Lunch menu for a local restaurant on Facebook over this proxy.

rdschouw 5y ago
The same happens when you use Linux as your desktop OS together with an ad-blocker. I guess it trips off some anti-bot rules. My favorite is Google's captcha where they let visitors solve their machine learning classification problem by asking them to classify images.

miohtama 5y ago

I recommend trying to hit Reader mode button to defeat Fuck You patterns. This simple trick works on surprisingly many websites, because they need to conform with Google SEO rules.

abdusco 5y ago
Yep. Works on many paywall sites, too. Whenever you hit a paywall, turn on the reader mode, then refresh.

cabalamat 5y ago

I don't like stikcy header,s so I use the Kill Sticky bookmarklet ( https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ ) When I do this, some websites do the same thing, i.e. don't let me scroll down. I think calling this the Fuck You pattern is entirely appropriate.

darepublic 5y ago

> 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. ^ try finding the container of the content that has its overflow set to 'hidden', and change it back to auto. Then you should be able to scroll again

Q1312 5y ago

bnb1kaz843ecm0qnsp5gvpk6fjkca789hr3xa62lyg

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

There you go, an idea for business :) - an "mutual" account that will crawl pages on those sites - then share them without login I am to sleepy and this idea is stupid as hell ...

mrtweetyhack 5y ago

what dumb fuck visits instagram in the first place? serious question.

makecheck 5y ago

What I don’t understand about most sites that do this is how QUICKLY they reach the “fuck you” state. It’s like a few clicks, or a few seconds, or whatever — nowhere near long enough to get any idea what the site is about, what it offers, whether it is valuable, etc. Therefore, what exactly is gained here? I just get annoyed and immediately leave. Imagine if this happened elsewhere in life. You go into a grocery store, you grab a cart, you get 5 feet inside, grab one item, and then you are immediately blocked by 8 security guards and interrogated for your name before you can continue. Would you stay in the store?

jbpnoy6fifty 5y ago

Do pay walls count as a “fuck you” pattern? How about free trials with credit card submissions and having difficult “cancel subscription” work flows?

antibland 5y ago

> …but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page * { overflow: auto !important; }

surround 5y ago

Bibliogram is an unofficial front end to Instagram. Among other features, it won't prompt you to log in. Here's Ollie's page on Bibliogram: https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official https://bibliogram.art/u/polite_cat_olli_official Reddit on mobile is also beginning to require logging in to view certain pages, in which case you can use: https://libredd.it/ https://libredd.it/ Or https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/

seanp2k2 5y ago

Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter also do this, and I wish I could exclude them from Google search results. The worst offense IMO is that even if you do take their bait to “use the app”, they punt you to the App Store page, losing the URL you were on in the process, so even though I have all of those apps installed, it’s not possible to click through from a Google result then open that same post in the app. At that point, I don’t try to search for the same thing in the app, I just convince myself that it’s not worth it and abandon any attempt to access that content. They can keep it.

shmiga 5y ago

I would say - fuck Mark!!!

tonymet 5y ago

It’s a cynical way to interpret it . The desktop experience is only 30% of mobile. Brand perception is tarnished if people use the reduced experience . Think of web as a preview experience and mobile is the complete product.

kristopolous 5y ago

The pattern is real but in this instance they're blocking bots and scrapers.

swyx 5y ago

Linkedin has one of these too. Displays your full information to Google to index you, but if a human user visits, up comes the login wall. F you for treating bots better than humans, linkedin.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago

I want plug-in which lets users highlight content on a page and mark it as "not malicious". It would use a CTPH algorithm to call out the non malicious bits from their context (same tech that virus scanners use). I call these annotations "brushstrokes". Other users could "follow" my brushstrokes, so when they land on the page, instead of implicitly running whatever code it finds there it just fetches the known-non-malicious parts. I.e. the cat pictures. I'd totally pay $5/month if $4 of it went to people who are annotating the web in this way. You could get paid in accordance with how popular and trustworthy your brushstrokes are, and together we can fix the web. I guess the goal would be UURL's, where the both the reference and the referent are uniform--rather than a uniform reference to a who-knows-what-this-site-will-do referent.

DevKoala 5y ago

Use ingramer.com or a similar tool/api, download all the images of your desired profile, and problem solved. I call this solution “fuck you too”.

Black101 5y ago

I like that name better. But something that means exactly the same thing that isn't considered a curse word would be even better.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

this is not news about the content hidden behind login. Like come on. This is just a whiny post from a guy that for some reason didn't know this from like a 2 years ago! Nothing about a pattern or simply coming to the realization that IG wants only users of its platform who log in, to use it and see its content! Not really knew considering in the early days it was an APP only platform....we've only been lucky to have the web desktop version for a short number of years. Do I like this behaviour - No. But am I not surprised from a company, as mentioned, hasn't exactly supported anything web/open over its existence. I mean look at the never-resolved feud between twitter and instagram that means you stillllll can't post pics to twitter from Instagram or see preview cards on twitter of IG links etc --all because of a spat like 10 years ago. But not posting nerdy rants about how I have to use bots and shit to workaround logging into a site I am apparently interested in the content of, but don't want to actually use or participate in.

oneshoe 5y ago

My challenge with this is that, I believe, you think instagram is a free service. It isn't, you pay for the service by selling your data to advertisers and using your data for advertisement. If they don't have your data, you aren't paying for the service. I hate this and also, I don't use their service - same for facebook.

loosescrews 5y ago

I don't understand why Zoom doesn't get more flak for this. Their web version is intentionally crippled and broken in an attempt to force users to download their app. They won't even show the link to join a meeting with the web version until you have failed to join with the app (it used to require 3 failed attempts, but they seem to have dropped that to a single failed attempt).

pentagrama 5y ago

Instagram have a paywall, to be able to see the content you must pay with your data by creating an account, and later hopefully become addicted to the platform to give more data and eat as many ads as possible.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

doc_gunthrop 5y ago

Another user mentioned bibliogram.art as a front-end for anonymous IG browsing. There's also an Android app available on F-droid for this purpose: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.austinhuang.instagrabber/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.austinhuang.instagrabber/

snickerer 5y ago

We urgently need a functional P2P protocol for social media. Something where I can quickly and easily show my stuff to my friends - and vice versa. From my device to your device.

baby 5y ago

I feel like most websites used to be like that. And then suddenly we got a load of great websites that just gave us what we wanted without ads. Facebook, youtube, reddit, google maps, gmail, etc. Now things are changing once again.

imglorp 5y ago

Fortunately there are "instgram viewer" sites which proxy for you. For now. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=instagram+viewer&t=ffab&atb=v126-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=instagram+viewer&t=ffab&atb=v126-1...

ok123456 5y ago

Today I came across another type of "fuck you" pattern. I was buying a shirt (https://vindlr.com/collections/savings-guy/products/green-savings-guy-t-shirt https://vindlr.com/collections/savings-guy/products/green-sa...). The first time I went to look at the page, it was $25. I closed it and came back several hours later it has risen to $30. I opened the site in private mode, and the price was $25 again.

_tom_ 5y ago

My favorite example is "login before you know what's here". I'm always amazed by this. I hear about a new website, open it up, and there's a sign up pop-up. 100% close and go away.

bitwize 5y ago

Your contract with the platform when you get the content is, you're going to log in/use the app. Otherwise you couldn't get the content on an ad-supported basis. Any time you try to scrape the web page you're actually stealing content.

leeter 5y ago

Facebook's use of this pattern prevented me from attending my grandfather's funeral (live streamed on facebook because of COVID) earlier this year. I was to say the least... pissed. If not for my sister who re-broadcast it to me over discord I'd have missed it completely.

blunte 5y ago

Yes, Fuck Facebook, and fuck every other company that doesn't provide a net-positive for humanity. They may offer something convenient or useful, but if the mid/long-term cost is higher, then it's not a good thing for us or even for them. People with short term vision (less than 50 years) are making poorly informed decisions. Granted, I would like to be fabulously wealthy. But if gaining my wealth meant the world would be worse in 2+ years (I give myself a year just to be selfish), then it's just not worth it. That 2 year cost will eventually kick my ass in 20-40 years. So speaking very selfishly, if it has a net negative cost of greater than 1 year, then it likely will hurt me personally. So I (and everyone else) should pass on that option. Backing up a bit, let's break down what insta and fb offer. Very briefly, they offer some connection to close and unrelated humans. They offer some communication, some awareness, some entertainment. But their cost is SO high. Honestly, if we just budgeted $50/mo for services which didn't harvest our data, we'd probably be ahead. And our services would be less twisted in favor of "fuck you" patterns.

killingtime74 5y ago

Author using "dark patterns" to describe anything he doesn't like (vendor upholding their side of the bargain)

sekushi 5y ago

> It sort of worked, but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page. Just an FYI the author needed to remove the CSS attribute on the body? element "no-scroll" I've noticed Instagram's A/B testing however only so far as it prevents users from seeing "too much" without logging in. The case OP mentions is the least fool proof as there are many images left on the page after you get rid of the obstacles (modal, dark modal screen covering page, and no scroll css attribute). The other more robust method I've seen involves Instagram only sending the amount of images to the browser they want you to see

brailsafe 5y ago

The day instagram goes full Reddit is the day I probably stop using it. Thankfully I'm still just barely getting by with the website, but usually logged in.

mastercoder82 5y ago

Well, it's definitely a dark pattern. But why do you use Instagram to view cat pictures? Just use google image search to view as many cat pictures you want. Yes, google also serve ads - but it doesn't prevent you from viewing images. And ads can be easily blocked with an ad blocker. Social media, specially the FB family, is all about dark patterns. Avoid using them - at least for viewing cat pictures.

aj_nikhil 5y ago

Instagram is a mistake of the internet.

rantwasp 5y ago
Instagram was fabulous until FB got their dirty fingers in there. I think Facebook and all their properties are cancer for the web. They are banned on all my devices (and traffic to/from their shitty endpoints is actively banned on my networks). I call this the "fuck you too" pattern.
sdave 5y ago
Tiktok ?

oblib 5y ago

Well I'm late to getting in on this but that blog post made me laugh. I've done the same thing with my browser and had sites figure out ways to keep me out. I just quit going there. Didn't really give it much thought though, aside from asking myself "why am I such a tightass?".

jollybean 5y ago

I don't think that's a dark pattern. A dark pattern is trying to trick you into something silly. Like buying something extra you didn't even know about. This is just them saying 'login' and when you try to get around it, they're saying 'login' again.

xalava 5y ago

I've been using this expression for years, but I use it when a company purposely does not applies your explicit decision. In this case, you are the one trying to circumvent their policy. https://mobile.twitter.com/XavierLava/status/1085900143126368258 https://mobile.twitter.com/XavierLava/status/108590014312636...

Labo333 5y ago

If you really want to browse cat pictures, just use this firefox add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/instagram-guest/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/instagram-guest/ There are also proxy websites that allow you to browse instagram without login, but I don't like third parties learning about my browsing.

zimpenfish 5y ago

Thing is, Facebook just tipped over the $1T valuation and, presumably, could easily subsidise Instagram as an ad- and dark-pattern-free environment, generate tons of goodwill, and maybe ameliorate some of the current anti-trust coming their way. It just seems like the most obvious basic common sense approach?

littlecranky67 5y ago

I also like the mobile youtube website where they will ask you to create an account / login every 2-3 video views to "enhance user experience". This constant nudging (also a dark pattern) is clearly not about enhancing UX (commenting and playlists are not so much of use if you just watch links somebody posts in a chat or email) but clearly for youtube to serve better ads and track you more.

urthor 5y ago

You get the level of service you pay for. Instagram's free of charge.

kazinator 5y ago

The Royal Bank of Canada ("RBC") perpetrated a FYP last summer. Users were suddenly denied access to online banking, unless they agreed to switch all statement reporting from paper to electronic. This was a condition prior to being allowed to continue with the login; the option was given to refuse, but it was made clear that this choice meant losing access to online banking. But, don't worry, the UI flow assured the user: once you log in you can set your statement reporting preferences. Of course, it didn't show you what the current preferences are or save them anywhere! I had just one or two things for which I had been getting paper statements, all else being electronic. I could not remember exactly which and since they didn't remember for me, I did the simplest thing and switched every single item to snail-mail paper statements. Getting the user to resent you (even more) isn't how you bring about cooperation.

animal531 5y ago

I'm allowed to view approximately 20 images free per day before Instagram forces me to a login screen.

swamp-agr 5y ago

You can go ahead and block FB before FB blocks you. With a simple /etc/hosts update like that: https://pastebin.com/FAV2f9eA https://pastebin.com/FAV2f9eA Several years without FB and its scripts anywhere. Never regret about such decision.