I happened to click a link that took me to the associated twitter X account for something I was interested in and was greeted by not one, not two, but four modern day web popups.
I know it’s nothing new. I’ve got a couple of firefox plugins that are usually quite good at hiding this sort of nonsense, but I guess they failed me today (or, I shudder to think, there were even more that were blocked, and this is what got through)
What’s the worst new/not-signed-in user experience you’ve encountered recently?
The web. It was good while it lasted.
robots.txt is the perfect summary of the web era. A plain text file that politely asked web crawlers not to do certain things. Such an innocent time.
Anybody know why google has a popup on every major website now? And more importantly, how to get rid of that without creating an account?
Disable all third party JS in uBlock origin
That can cause the page to fail to load in some instances.
Some specific websites might need tweaking but from anecdotal evidence about 90% of websites work just fine. YMMV though because I don’t visit twitter
A number of the more tech savvy online newspapers have begun enforcing client-side scripts as a means of preventing people from reading articles without a subscription.
And they get to deal with a combo of NoScript and UBlock origin from my Librewolf instance. If I really can’t get in, I’m going to HackerNews
this comment will not get any upvotes from anyone who follows it 😁
Why? It’s how I browse every day
It’s really interesting, I hadn’t tried this in a long long time. Some sites are simply broken, others drag themselves along half broken, but lemmy seems to be doing alright weheee
I use uBlock’s “Medium mode” that (for some reason) is hidden behind several obscure steps: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode
Anyway, yeah, it pretty much breaks every website the first time you visit. Well, every domain at least. But once you figure out which scripts to allow to get it functioning, you can save individual settings for each site/domain that load automatically every time you visit afterwards.
uBlock Filter:
||smartlock.google.com
||accounts.google.com/gsi/$3p
||id.google.com^You mean uBlock Origin, right?
Yes, that’s the only one you should use
It works 🫡 thank you 😊
I have a very hard time believing that these companies are unaware of how auful this shit makes their webpages.
Anyone can make a good website. It takes a real engineer to make a horrible website that people will use just enough while suffering.
That’s a very good quote.
Inspired from the quote “Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
Source: Unknown
Oh they’re aware, they just don’t care 99% of the time.
I barely see them pop up, if they do it’s for a fraction of a second before a browser extension nukes them.
It’s diminishing customer experience creep, except the company doesn’t understand what the user data means. They run A/B tests of different layouts, seeing what kind of feedback each gets to learn more about design choices and users. Each version should get its own feedback and then that data is compiled by data scientists into actionable feedback, things that can be done to improve the website in the direction the company thinks is an “improvement”.
Twitter abandoned those data scientists with the initial layoffs. There is no one to tell them what works and what impacts the customer experience, which is why each time the internal question of “how do we open up for engagement?” they answer it the same way, “Use existing user bases by linking their account to Twitter.” The result is several login requests all looking for the same cookie.
It’s lazy or inexperienced management. Knowing the type of person Elon hires, it’s probably both.
I do a lot of my browsing from an iPhone 11. At least twice a day, a page will crash and reload halfway through whatever article I was trying to read. I get it’s a few generations old, but since when do you need state of the art tech to view what should be a static page.
I mean, they kinda don’t. Companies are entities made out of policies guiding how people split up objectives into smaller parts. The more people involved and the more indirect it is, the less coherent it gets
Legal says you need one popup for compliance. Marketing or analytics say you need more users to log in. Elon wants to remind people to call it Twitter.
By the time it filters through managers to the devs, they probably know it’ll be a horrible experience, but what are they going to do? It’s not their job. They’ll get brushed off. There might even be a compelling reason to do it in this way - with this in particular, annoying and intrusive popups are malicious compliance with the EU cookie laws. But everyone seems to be doing it this way - that’s probably what legal is going to recommend rather than interpreting the law themselves
So the problem is the structure. If you want a hierarchy of obedient replaceable cogs, you’ve made sure no one sees the full picture
on top of what others have said - directing you to the app and login - it’s also likely just that teams don’t talk and make decisions that solve their local issue without too much for the whole, and then say “ugh team x solved this so inelegantly! we were forced to do our thing that wasn’t as nice!”
Well, unless you’re a nerd, you only see those messages once
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If you ever want to read anyone’s tweets somewhat chronologically or see someone’s latest tweet, you’re gonna create an account.
Tweets as view on people’s profiles are totally scrambled (presumably to thwart LLM-feeding scrapers).
It’s intentional, they want you logged in so they can track what you’re doing
iT’s bEtTeR iN tHe aPp
If this were a competent company, I’d say that they’re entirely aware of it and how fucking awful it is, but that there’s a mandate coming from somewhere that the page MUST include x, y and z and so they add x, y and z but usually try to at least make the site usable.
This being Twitter, though, I’m sure it’s because a screaming man-child threw a sink at someone and told them to do it or they’ll be fired and so they did it in the most half-assed obnoxious way they could manage.
Common language used to dismiss bad decisions like this:
- We need to track and meet our metrics for the quarter
- Engagement for $FEATURE is down, so we have to take measures to get people to take notice
- It’s opt-in/opt-out, so it’s the right thing to do
- It’s only a one time thing and then the system remembers1 what the user selected
- Only new users are affected - our power users will put up with it
- It’s just a minor inconvenience, really
- It’s just a website
1 - Oh, did you turn off cookies or clear your cache? Sorry about that.
Pretty sure you just triggered every developer and/or person who had to sit through a product meeting.
Though you missed the last bullet point: Our user surveys showed that people would actually prefer these changes
Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed
(grumble, unblock, reload)Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)…spin…spin…spin…
… Spin … Spin … Spin …
… Remember that you turned off your VPN
… Turn it on
… CF: OK, only humans use VPN, no need to show the challenge
You forgot:
Click all the pictures of buses.
(clicks)…spin…spin…spin…
Click all the pictures of bicycles.
(clicks)…spin…spin…spin…
Click all the pictures of traffic lights.
(clicks)…spin…spin…spin…
Click all the objects heavier than this one
…spin…spin…spin…
I didn’t forget; I just chose to highlight Cloudflare’s awful captcha instead of Google’s awful captcha. :)
https://privacypass.github.io/ has helped somewhat
Interesting. A quick look at the description makes me think it could help with the inconvenience problem, but probably not with the allowing javascript problem. In any case, I’ll have to take a closer look. Thanks for the link.
Privacy Pass will generate a number of random nonces that will be used as tokens
British people making a double take
Privacy Pass just randomly generated Prince Andrew and now my browser is all sweaty.
Reminds me of screenshots of internet explorer with 20 search bar addons from the 2000s 🤣
Google and YouTube are pretty fucking bad without an ad-blocker installed. From someone who has worked in jobs where I may as well have called myself a ‘Professional Googler’ and where I do not have permissions to install an ad-blocker on my work computer, the amount of ads I get buried with really sours the experience.
Also, a lot of news sites (particularly anything owned by Reach PLC such as the Mirror) are now flipping the middle-finger at GDPR by forcing users to pay to reject tracking cookies. Here’s a screengrab from the Daily Mirror website…
How will Daily Mirror remember I paid if they are not storing any cookies for me as they promise? Also,asking to pay just for valuing your privacy, I don’t assume this payment will lead to removal of ads or any more exclusive benefits.
How do you not have permission to install an ad-blocker? lol
It took long enough but the pop-ups evolved into new pop-ups.
It’s kind of bothersome how almost blind I am to them now. I habitually find a way to close them without having to read or focus my eyes on anything. That’s not to say it isn’t still an annoyance.
This is so common it has a name, it’s called banner blindness.
One of the important aspects of interface design is supposed to be not showing alerts for everything, so that when they pop up you feel compelled to pay attention.
Not long ago a nurse killed an older woman by giving her the wrong medicine; she took accountability but called out that the software they use provides so many alerts that (probably unofficial) policy was to just click through them to get to treating the patient. One of those alerts was a callout that the wrong dosage was selected and she zoomed right by it out of habit.
Another term I seen in the context of healthcare is alert fatigue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
Alarm fatigue or alert fatigue describes how busy workers (in the case of health care, clinicians) become desensitized to safety alerts, and as a result ignore or fail to respond appropriately to such warnings.[1] Alarm fatigue occurs in many fields, including construction[2] and mining[3] (where vehicle back-up alarms sound so frequently that they often become senseless background noise), healthcare[4] (where electronic monitors tracking clinical information such as vital signs and blood glucose sound alarms so frequently, and often for such minor reasons, that they lose the urgency and attention-grabbing power which they are intended to have), and the nuclear power field. Like crying wolf, such false alarms rob the critical alarms of the importance they deserve. Alarm management and policy are critical to prevent alarm fatigue.
Automation engineer here: alarm management is a hugely important part of making a plant operable.
It is also a project that is never done, you must always review alarms that come in and see if they are providing useful information and what the operators are supposed to do with said information.
If the operators are not supposed to do anything with the information, then what is the point of having the alarm?
Same when setting up Nagios, after a time you learn fewer alerts is better
xcancel.com ftw
Cancel X period brbgoatftw
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One of the few surviving nitter instances
I will say that the Google Auth prompt in particular is just this huge nuisance and a horrible experience. People should feel stupid for including it in their web experience.
Wait, people choose to put it in their website??
Yes. How else would it get there?
I don’t know, but I also don’t know why would anyone willingly choose this UX for their website.
Writing sign-in and authentication can be difficult. Google handles it for you. They’ll also store all of the secret stuff that you don’t want to leak, like passwords, etc. So I can see some of the appeal for sites of a certain size, but not really Twitter.
I can understand that, and a user can also enjoy the simplicity of the process. However, I’m speaking about this very popup here. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of websites that allow you to sign in/up with Google (or another 3rd-party provider) that don’t have this problem. I see so many websites and mobile apps that make it very difficult to use them. I always wonder if anyone at the company is using their own website/app. Reddit is another great example.
Given how intrusive google is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was kinda forced by them along with some other functionality
It’s not. It is up to the owner to code it into their website or not.
But it acts as a Login for the page instead of registering a new account? How would Google do that without the page owners permission?!
Honestly, I didn’t even know what it does until now. I get so annoyed by it that I just close it immediately after it pops up. Probably time to make a uBlock Origin filter for it I guess
Wait, how can I get rid of google auth pop-ups? I got Ublock but they still come up whenever I go to a reddit page.
Thanks man, the ublock filter in the first link works like a charm :-)
Visiting the corpse of Twitter was your first mistake
Digital necrophilia…
The absolute lack of any kind of consistency with layout or alignment makes me cringe too.
It’s just shows how they’re just glued onto the page with no care or planning. Especially no consideration to the user or user experience.
The absolute lack of any kind of consistency with layout or alignment makes me cringe too.
My guess is they’re all built by different teams that didn’t reuse any of the code written by the other teams. Ideally you’re supposed to have a design system with standards for this, but I think all the good developers left (or were fired from) Twitter when Musk took over.
I’ve been saying the same for tv commercials. I’ve always hated them but they were built into the episodes, now they jump scare mid sentence and come back to another speaking.
I sail quite often but the wife likes the convenience, so.
It all sucks and getting suckier!
Did someone say… cookies?
I can just tell that whenever Twitter’s user interface has weak attempts at humour, it was put there during the previous ownership, and that just makes me sad.
Like when you delete your account the final message says “#Goodbye”, I was tearing up, thinking, like, shit, Musk really fucked everything up, did he?
Musk really fucked everything up, did he?
Other than no longer being able to use an app to access twitter, I haven’t noticed anything else changing for the worse. They even made the “media” tab into grid rather than list which was a welcome update.
How about just the userbase? I’d say that changed for the worse. A lot worse. And if you don’t think so, I hope you enjoy yelling about Jews at your next khakis and tiki torches march.
Musk made it even worse but Twitter was already shit before Musk
I just set all the twitter and meta domains to localhost in my hosts file; no accidental clicks that go through for me :)