7 ms·

As I become older (and grumpier) I have realized that not engaging is the best thing to do, wherever possible. Dirty restaurant / rude staff? Don't go there. D

• stevenae 2y ago
  I co-sign. If I could expand: When you must engage with sub-par experiences, look to redirect in a positive manner. Don't try to brute-force a solution, rather, suggest an alternative that the counterpart may not have considered.
  • candiddevmike 2y ago
    As I've grown older, I've learned unsolicited advice is almost universally despised (and you have a > 50% chance of making an ass of yourself due to lack of context/armchair general). Therefore, start with a complaint, and if they truly want your feedback, offer it.
    • teaearlgraycold 2y ago
      It’s such a shame. I think I can feel what others do when I get unsolicited advice, but I’m able to regulate my emotions and either take the advice or explain why it’s missing context. If only others could have more humility and analysis ability. But you can’t do too much to change others.
  • amne 2y ago
    Yes. I browse, I see banner (slide, popup, sidebar), I close tab. I have friends that ask me if enjoyed the paragraph about something they shared a link to only for me to have to come back and say I closed it after reading two words and getting interrupted by ”Put your email here to read more". Nope. I tell them that is not a good web experience for me. I just hope that more people start doing this.
• forgotmypw17 2y ago
  I agree. I’ve noticed a strong correlation between friction (such as newsletter modals, cookie consent modals, register to read, etc.) and low-quality content that is just a waste of my time to read. Since I realized this, I’ve saved a lot of time and effort by closing a tab as soon as I see one of these tells and not looking back. I'm really grateful to the low-quality content creators for making it so easy to recognize.
  • wuj 2y ago
    That moment when you want to read a tweet just to be prompted to login.
    • deprecative 2y ago
      If someone uses Twitter that's a pretty good indicator that I don't need to interact with them nor their content.
• masfuerte 2y ago
  I've been doing this for years. Unfortunately I'm looking for a job now and there's no escape from it. The job sites, the agencies, the employers' sites - they are all awful. The best one was an employer's site that described itself as "Easy Apply"! You had to give it a resume, which it parsed, badly, and sprayed randomly into about a thousand text boxes. I thought maybe the problem was starting with a pdf, so I began again with a Word document. The results were exactly the same, suggesting they exported to pdf and used the same shitty parser. Having to rearrange all this text into the correct boxes was annoying enough, but they weren't just vanilla text boxes. They were janky javascript abominations that responded to input really slowly. And employers moan that they have trouble finding good staff.
  • rrr_oh_man 2y ago
    > And employers moan that they have trouble finding good staff. Employers have trouble finding good staff that they can pay peanuts. A shitty application form is a great filter for people who are desparate and will put up with low pay and toxic corporate idiosyncrasies.
    • bboygravity 2y ago
      Reminds me of ASML's yearly whining (they form cartels with other tech businesses in the region to keep max compensation down and are then acting surprised that they can't find local engineers who deliberately avoid the company).
      • fHr 2y ago
        Nice, I can't understand their growth potential could be like infinite they operate in the right space and have the right tech and fill in a nice niche. But C-suite and shareholders dividends need to be maximalized and engineeres enslaved I guess. Man I love latestage capitalism /s.
        • WalterBright 2y ago
          > engineers who deliberately avoid the company .. engineeres enslaved Not sure how you equated the two.
• ardme 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • stirfish 2y ago
    >Avoiding dirty restaurants? You might have low testosterone. Try getting absolutely juiced and demanding to clean the kitchen. The world can be better, but it's also okay to pick your battles.
  • bequanna 2y ago
    Not necessarily true. Higher T levels are associated with more risk taking and aggression, sure, but also less neurotic and irritable behavior.
• jjice 2y ago
  Completely agree. It may be considered a "loss" if you encounter rude staff, but fighting back won't make you "win", even if you technically do. Your stress and mental state is much better if you just let some stuff go. Obviously not everything, but I'd say that probably goes for the majority of small annoyances in your life.
• whamlastxmas 2y ago
  My favorite person on twitter (plinz) had advice that I loved and try really hard to follow that’s similar to this. If you see a discussion or comment online that bothers you or is frustrating, the best thing to do is not engage with it. Engagement causes that person to post more and effectively creates more of the content that you dislike. E.g. if no one on the internet ever responded to pro Trump stuff, pro Trump people would get tired of yelling into the void with no reaction.
  • akudha 2y ago
    Yup, Trump would have likely not won in 2016 if he wasn't pushed by the media. I remember the media would not cover Bernie, even when he got big crowds. But the media would wait for Trump to take the stage, showing empty podium live. ALL media (mainstream or social or legacy) know to push controversy, negativity etc because it gets them engagement which gets them dollars. It is also easy and lazy thing to do. There is a reason politicians push "the other guy is bad" rather than "I am good" narrative in their ads. It works short term at least while doing long term damage
    • qzw 2y ago
      There’s a meme that we are where we are today in the U.S. starting with the Reagan presidency, and there’s certainly a lot of truth to that. But personally I believe American politics began a long downward trend once television became the primary medium. We’ve all heard how JFK outsmarted Nixon during their televised debate by wearing a blue shirt, because blue showed up as white whereas Nixon’s white shirt showed up as gray. The visuals of candidates began to dominate politics, and people made their judgements based that. Would Reagan have even become president if he wasn’t so good in front of a camera?
      • drewcoo 2y ago
        JFK didn't just wear shirts on TV. He managed to convince the dead in Cook county, Illinois to vote for him, often several times each! I'd consider that a much more impressive first. It eclipses hanging chads and Russiagate in more recent elections. JFK won the election because Nixon conceded even though there were plenty of suspicious circumstances - more than enough to justify challenging the results of a very close election. Today the people have so little faith in the system and in the candidates that almost half of them don't vote.
• anonymoushn 2y ago
  Unfortunately companies like Anthropic like to provide web sites that work long enough to obtain your credit card information, then break them in a way that prevents you from unsubscribing.
  • Modified3019 2y ago
    Virtual credit cards and masked email addresses have been amazing.
    • LoganDark 2y ago
      Some banks offer virtual cards directly, but there's also Privacy (.com). For masked email I find Firefox Relay works pretty well. I like Privacy because they let me switch banks easily, as well as place spending limits, pause or close cards, etc., just like Firefox Relay would allow me to switch emails easily. I believe I use Firefox Relay for everything email-related now (I pay $1/mo for my own subdomain), and also use Privacy for everything money-related (given they accept Privacy cards). https://emkei.cz https://emkei.cz is a good "fake mailer" for getting outbound email from a Firefox Relay address, for those companies that want you to send them an email from the address on your account. Basically you send something from the company's email to your relay address, then reply to it and Firefox Relay will send it to the real company's email, but from your relay address. (You know, this sounds like it could make for a great phishing exploit because Firefox Relay doesn't check or notify you if SPF/DKIM/DMARC fails on an incoming email, and the forward that it does to your personal email will be entirely lacking those indicators. So aside from email content itself looking suspicious, it could be possible to perfectly spoof a real email because the relay step strips all the original authenticating information.)
    • diarrhea 2y ago
      I’ve been using catchall email for everything for well over 5 years now, and it hasn’t been useful once since. Regular spam filters from my provider and occasionally hitting “Unsubscribe” once seem to do the trick.
  • CM30 2y ago
    Or have it so it's trivial to sign up online, but cancelling requires contacting them via phone/post/whatever. 'Funny' how well these systems seem to work when people are giving you money, but how much of an unusable mess they turn into when it's the other way around.
• scrubs 2y ago
  Totally agree - I will just add that 1 or 2 times a year I do the opposite. I call out stupid when I see it and spare nothing. Clear, straight criticism leveled at management if I can find them. Your right: they know it's screwed up most of the time. But the front line is not at root responsible ... and I get a bit of extra satisfaction flushing management out into the open so they can't hide out.
• trvz 2y ago
  > Don't use those sites. Go harder on that – block those sites in your network outright (such as in Pihole). Else you may end up on them in future, either by accident (clicking a link) or temptation.
• kkfx 2y ago
  > Obviously this can't be applied to essential services like healthcare etc. And that's the reason why you have to engage. Allow things to go that way one time, you'll get them all the time. Protest, politely but effectively, all the time and things will change. We all suffer crappy services, if almost nobody protest they'll not change, because much of them are used by people with no choice, starting from fiscal stuff.
• dylan604 2y ago
  Hear hear! Seconded! And all of the other similar phrases of support. However...I was recently at my neighborhood tavern, and the group down the bar from me got my attention in a way that moved me to action by wanting to donate to their cause. I asked how, and they provided me a URL that took me to a payment portal. It should have been that easy. Instead, it wanted full account creation with username, email, phone number, and password with specific requirements. After 3 attempts of not being able to generate a valid password, they decided I had too many at the pub and decided to "help". After multiple attempts, they were also unable to generate a password to create the account to take my money. Their own website and all off the unnecessary account creation policies actively prevented a successful conversion. I laughed and laughed at their folly. Of course, the individuals receiving the laughter were not the ones that mattered regarding this, so I stifled my smugness in this victory and suggested they tell their coworkers.
  • WalterBright 2y ago
    A principle I learned from Eric Engstrom is "if you want to succeed in business, make it easy for people to give you money". It's true, too. By making payment easier, sales volume doubled.
    • dylan604 2y ago
      The fact that it's a "shut up and take my money" is a meme says enough as well. Probably reach more younger people that don't read and only speak in images /s
• mihaic 2y ago
  >these businesses know their shit is broken or they're doing low quality work I'm honestly sure about this often, since bad staff might not be obvious to the manager without someone pointing it out. As a general rule though, just giving up on something bad is not a terrible strategy.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• MrJohz 2y ago
  One of the wisest pieces of advice my mother gave me growing up was always to think about what you want out of an interaction. Before you send a text, prepare an email, write a comment, argue a point, etc: what is your goal, and what's the best thing you're going to get out of it? It's really good advice, because it makes it so much easier to just let things go. Yes, the website I'm using is awful and could easily be done better. Yes, the person I'm taking to is obviously wrong. But I'm not going to get anything out of getting involved - at best some mild catharsis - and I'll just waste everyone's time doing so. So let it go.
• dheera 2y ago
  I can't remember the number of times that I've selected "Afghanistan" from the contact form list as my country of residence because it was the first option in the dropdown.
• al_borland 2y ago
  I’m getting close to completely abandoning Amazon over this. I recently unsubscribed from Prime and the number of dark patterns in every single checkout, attempting to get users to sign up for Prime, is unconscionable. No wonder so many people are subscribed, the user has to actively fight against it.
• JohnFen 2y ago
  This is my habit as well. If the company is owned by real people (rather than a corporation), then I'll do the courtesy of sending an email or something to explain why I'm no longer going to use their product/service. Either way, though, I just remember not to use that company anymore and get on with my life. There's no reason for me to spend my time and energy any further on nonsense.
• interludead 2y ago
  Avoiding Stress is the best way to keep it together for me lately