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The first thing that pops up is > We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. > Accept | Decline Do "non-essential" cookies

The first thing that pops up is > We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. > Accept | Decline Do "non-essential" cookies actually make my experience any better? I always decline and haven't noticed a difference from the pre-GDPR days.

clan 2y ago
I have only seen it as harassment mainly on news sites. "We cannot play this video" or the all too common Twitter or Instagram embeddings. On one hand I know I waste my time but I am such a weirdo I make "my stand" by always declining. Are the consent forms too broken or conveluted I usually leave the site. But we are in the minority and all of us are probably HN users. And my gut feeling is that on HN we are still a small minority. I think the more common approach here is auto accept extensions.
- xp84 2y ago
  That’s funny - I similarly “make my stand” — but it’s against GDPR silliness by always accepting all. I literally do not think my life would be better if I saw a bunch of crappy untreated ads for “one weird trick,” diet snake oils, etc. so I have zero problem with targeted ads and the cookies that enable them. Though I’ve seen firsthand all the ridiculous overhead cost this crackpot law has imposed on all companies, who literally do not care who I am, they just want me to buy a laptop or something. All this to avoid users just setting their browsers to discard cookies according to their wishes, an ability they’ve had for a decade or more. I find these cookie banners twice as annoying as ads ever were.
Y-bar 2y ago
Speaking from my own experience, and implementations, it rarely has any direct influence. It is a roundabout way of saying that “if you accept we will get some additional data that will influence our decision-making”. Which in turn could help prioritise bugs and features related to what you did when visiting the site. On rare occasions, it can have direct influence, such as if you are searching for an ambiguous term we could forward the product categories you browsed recently to a third party search engine for different weights on the results. This actually has a positive effect with higher click-through on results, fewer searches, and click position nearer the top.

clan 2y ago

I have only seen it as harassment mainly on news sites. "We cannot play this video" or the all too common Twitter or Instagram embeddings. On one hand I know I waste my time but I am such a weirdo I make "my stand" by always declining. Are the consent forms too broken or conveluted I usually leave the site. But we are in the minority and all of us are probably HN users. And my gut feeling is that on HN we are still a small minority. I think the more common approach here is auto accept extensions.

xp84 2y ago
That’s funny - I similarly “make my stand” — but it’s against GDPR silliness by always accepting all. I literally do not think my life would be better if I saw a bunch of crappy untreated ads for “one weird trick,” diet snake oils, etc. so I have zero problem with targeted ads and the cookies that enable them. Though I’ve seen firsthand all the ridiculous overhead cost this crackpot law has imposed on all companies, who literally do not care who I am, they just want me to buy a laptop or something. All this to avoid users just setting their browsers to discard cookies according to their wishes, an ability they’ve had for a decade or more. I find these cookie banners twice as annoying as ads ever were.

Y-bar 2y ago

Speaking from my own experience, and implementations, it rarely has any direct influence. It is a roundabout way of saying that “if you accept we will get some additional data that will influence our decision-making”. Which in turn could help prioritise bugs and features related to what you did when visiting the site. On rare occasions, it can have direct influence, such as if you are searching for an ambiguous term we could forward the product categories you browsed recently to a third party search engine for different weights on the results. This actually has a positive effect with higher click-through on results, fewer searches, and click position nearer the top.