Rendered at 16:15:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
jchw 55 minutes ago [-]
Should load much slower.
Also, where is the unrelated autoplaying video that will unmute if you actually click it, that follows your scrolling and only becomes smaller when you dismiss it? Plus, it should probably have text that cuts off letting you know you can have access for just $10/month.
Plus, isn't this website undissmissably "better in the app" after a few minutes of attempting to use it on a phone? Where's that at?
edit: Oh shoot! I forgot, too. This modal needs to also ensure there is absolutely no way to scroll. If you could scroll you might be able to accidentally get to the address bar of your browser to fix the URL to xcancel or even close the page, which isn't using the app as you are intended to do.
Also, it doesn't attempt to hijack the back button to give me stuff I clearly wanted to see before I leave the page.
A lot of work left to do here before it's a "real" website. Although, it has about as much substance as the average website so far, so good work on that.
bee_rider 50 minutes ago [-]
> Plus, isn't this website undissmissably "better in the app" after a few minutes of attempting to use it on a phone? Where's that at?
This is the most annoying thing on the internet. There’s a site I’d like to use, but “try the app” takes up the entire page (and appears to be impossible to dismiss?). Actually, is there a way to permanently request the desktop site for all future visits to a domain on iOS? There is no reason to visit this full-page app advertisement.
heathrow83829 34 seconds ago [-]
Wells Fargo went so far as to remove their best feature from their website: the Spending breakdown page! they now say go to the app but the app is far worse than the browser version was before they removed it. i might even stop using them just for this mess.
dcminter 4 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
getpokedagain 23 minutes ago [-]
Its always confusing to me since I'm already accesing it through an app.
inventor7777 24 minutes ago [-]
On iOS Safari, tap the three stacked lines on the URL bar (depending on which Safari view you use), tap Website Settings, then you'll see a Request Desktop Website switch, which should persist for that domain.
mey 34 minutes ago [-]
I have Firefox setup to not launch apps on android with permission. I don't have Instagram/Facebook/etc installed. Attempting to view a Instagram link on mobile is the most hostile thing in existence. You essentially can't, but it so aggressively routes you to the website based Google play store it's horrifying.
jchw 35 minutes ago [-]
I'd recommend using Libredirect if you're on a Firefox-based mobile browser. It can configure redirects to alternate "frontends" that will serve you much more agreeable HTML (though because we live in hell, it will usually still involve antibotting out of sheer necessity. But I accept this.)
For Reddit, my choice for now is safereddit. If I need to view a Reddit link on mobile and old Reddit is blocked as it sometimes is, I just swap the domain to safereddit.com.
For Twitter, my choice has been xcancel for ages. I have no idea how that manages to stay up in spite of Twitter's hostility but it is a Nitter instance that seems to just work.
You can also run these frontends yourself, too, but I assume it requires accounts.
(edit: Also I hope it goes without saying that I don't really have any specific trust that my activity is necessarily more "private" with these frontends, although honestly if I was forced to bet I would have to bet that they are much more respectful to my privacy than Twitter or Reddit are. I just use them for functionality.)
Good luck fellow traveler. If there was more to do in real life, I'd probably had thrown my phone into the ocean by now. I'm about halfway there in spite of the lack of many appealing third spaces.
quercusa 45 minutes ago [-]
If the site happens to be a discussion site that starts with 'R', clearing cookies will let you through for a while. In Brave, there's a setting to do so when you leave the page.
yojo 27 minutes ago [-]
They still haven’t removed “old.reddit.com”. Replace “www” with “old” on any reddit URL and enjoy a relic from when the internet was less ruined.
RattlesnakeJake 21 minutes ago [-]
The issue is that they just started forcing sign-ins on Old Reddit, allegedly because it's easier for bots to scrape. The ability to casually/anonymously peek at a post that answers your question is getting more rare.
And don’t ever save the user’s “no” for next time. We need to needle them to use the app EVERY SINGLE TIME the visitor the website.
I wonder sometimes how the team doing the website feels about being treated as second class. Or if it’s the same team and they have to hold their noses to work on it.
The third dumbest smart person I had to work with obviously hated HTML and kept trying to get us to use a DSL instead. At least it wasn’t an in house one, but he had a couple other devs interested in his madness as well. But the two of us who were doing the bulk of the performance work and tricky bug fixes would have been absolutely sunk if we’d allowed that to happen. One of the worst things about React is trying to track back an HTML bug in someone else’s complex React project to the templates that are misbehaving together. The Grafana UI code is madness to debug.We would have been there very quickly and without the dev toolbox to help.
f17428d27584 20 minutes ago [-]
National cinema chain has a banner on their web site that says something like “film lovers prefer our app” so they manage to employ a little guilt / social proof as well.
It’s such a small thing in the grand scheme of things but it’s just that final straw for me, someone made the decision to be this shitty to their users because they want to employ extra tracking/data collection / advertising in their app.
alsetmusic 23 minutes ago [-]
Where are the third-party ads that interrupt the content I wasn’t able to read? And the popover telling me about singles on my area? Why haven’t I been offered a subscription to a newsletter so I can receive daily updates and offers to pay for additional services?
You’re right. It’s a good start, but there’s still a lot to do.
10 minutes ago [-]
lxe 36 minutes ago [-]
Feedback taken. Will ask ai agents to make improvements.
sidewndr46 8 minutes ago [-]
No, it definitely hijacked the back button
wombat-man 45 minutes ago [-]
Wild that it is somehow worth it to stream video to every visitor on the hopes that it'll get them to stick around longer or see an ad in the video. That conversion number has to be crazy low.
wlesieutre 38 minutes ago [-]
"We value your privacy! We and our 892 legitimate business partners use cookies to improve your experience."
idopmstuff 37 minutes ago [-]
I started an e-commerce brand on a Shopify site. I swore to myself I would never put up one of those stupid things that pops up "Someone bought X product an hour ago!" messages in the corner of the screen.
I ended up trying it. Boosted conversion rate meaningfully. Worth the price I pay in mild self-loathing.
Chesterton's popup, I guess.
ryandrake 20 minutes ago [-]
That's the real problem. Being aggressively annoying works. Dark patterns work. Popups that grab your attention work. Flashing text conveying urgency works. Thumbnails with open-mouth YouTube-face work. Moving buttons around so people mis-click works. Tiny [X] buttons that make people accidentally click an ad work. You're never going to convince someone to stop doing something that is making them money.
frantathefranta 34 minutes ago [-]
Out of all the annoying website things, always thought that one was pretty tame. Almost feels like a spiritual successor to the visit-o-meter. Obviously as long is it doesn't put a (1) on my tab or makes a noise and doesn't steal mouse focus.
LollipopYakuza 20 minutes ago [-]
This reminds me the clickbail title and thumbnail on YouTube.
One of my favorite channel apologized for it but explained that the difference compared to NOT doing this is phenomenal and they can't afford stopping.
agumonkey 20 minutes ago [-]
Is there a law of society / business where everything we hate is on average something that made the society able to function ? it's similar to chesterton but it's not a fence, it's the tree we live on.
rao-v 32 minutes ago [-]
Genuine curiosity - is the pop up vaguely factual or sort of randomly generated?
m4tthumphrey 26 minutes ago [-]
Always randomly generated!
rao-v 4 minutes ago [-]
I salute your honesty! But [he hastens to add, looking furtively around] I also frown disapprovingly at your choices
m4tthumphrey 26 minutes ago [-]
This is not in the same sport let alone league as the things demoed in OP.
WarmWash 1 hours ago [-]
Loaded way too fast and is way too responsive.
Also when I checked NoScript, it's only loading js from lxe.github.io
I expect there to be at minimum 8 domains, but often 12-18.
boomlinde 1 hours ago [-]
All buttons and links need to shift around for a good 10 seconds before the page settles.
breuleux 35 minutes ago [-]
I wish we had a UI paradigm where whatever is underneath your cursor is not allowed to change. If you hover a button, that button must remain right there for you to click, if you hover some text, it must remain there for you to select. Browser and OS-enforced, ideally.
We can debate the specifics, maybe it's only in effect for X seconds after you stop moving the cursor, maybe it creates a 100px diameter disk of stability, I don't know. Just let me interact with the stuff I see.
diegocg 21 minutes ago [-]
Oh, that UI paradigm already exist. It's just that browser makers are too busy with things like webasm, webgpu, or allowing pages to launch location/notification popups at users, so they don't have time to fix fundamental flaws.
peterleiser 45 minutes ago [-]
This. My favorite is when I search for products on a website or app and the results appear in batches, with subsequent results interleaving with the previous results. So when you want to select a particular result and start to move your mouse and click, or move your finger and press, you often end up selecting something unintended because a later result pops into the location.
andypants 37 minutes ago [-]
I do this in the gmail mobile app all the time thanks to their ads injecting themselves in between the emails several seconds late. They must love me, their most engaged ad consumer.
coldpie 33 minutes ago [-]
Handy tip: If you disable all the tab category things in settings and go down to a single category (Primary), it will stop showing you ads entirely.
Sardtok 36 minutes ago [-]
It's important to have the accept cookies button pop up on top of something you are almost guaranteed to click at just the right moment.
ModernMech 59 minutes ago [-]
I was waiting for the overlay that hides the content until you turn off your ad blocker. Which of course is a trap because as soon as you do it covers the content in ads.
jabroni_salad 36 minutes ago [-]
Yes, and put a search bar that loses focus to some piece of crap I dont care about after I enter 3 characters, and some hotkeys that navigate me to a different page when I accidentally activate them because I thought I was going to put text in the search field.
youtube people I know you are in here. Fix your stupid PIP thing.
amarant 53 minutes ago [-]
..... In such a way that most commonly used button is replaced by an ad 0.001 seconds before you click it
stackghost 34 minutes ago [-]
js eventListener that intercepts the click/tap event, moves the button somewhere else, and clicks the ad underneath.
john_strinlai 46 minutes ago [-]
>I expect there to be at minimum 8 domains, but often 12-18.
news sites are the worst for this. bloomberg, nbc, etc. have 20+ domains, and as you click "temporarily allow" on one, it loads in a few more.
foxnews loads 36 domains before temporarily allowing any, which probably approaches 50 once you start allowing.
anygivnthursday 1 hours ago [-]
And needs some kind of loop that retries endlessly to make the AdBlock counter go brrr
Gualdrapo 59 minutes ago [-]
It also loaded too fast because it has no (ai-generated/3d/high color contrast) 10MB background image in the hero section
lxe 39 minutes ago [-]
I'm sorry
psychoslave 55 minutes ago [-]
And the legitimate mass spying with multi thousand other organizations, of course.
RivieraKid 1 hours ago [-]
The cookie thing, I assume it's EU-only, is an example of the EU policy making process being fundamentally broken in some way. If you create a flawed policy and don't fix it many years after it's very visibly obvious that it's a bad policy, something is really wrong.
dijit 1 hours ago [-]
it's an example of malicious compliance by some, and herd mentality by others.
I had a discussion with my CFO about removing the cookie banner from our website (because we don't set any tracking cookies, and cookies for things like login are exempted) and he said "yeah, but it makes the site seem less legitimate.
bonoboTP 1 hours ago [-]
That reasoning isn't wrong, though it seems ridiculous when looked at with techie-brain. But if there is a standard expectation of what serious company websites are like, it makes business sense to look like that too. It's like dressing up appropriately to cultural expectations. You can deviate somewhat but you have to strategically spend your weirdness points.
naravara 1 hours ago [-]
How nice of the EU to have determined for the rest of the world that the “cultural expectation” should be that every business do the design equivalent of wearing clown makeup.
Arainach 30 minutes ago [-]
The EU doesn't require banners.
Companies could stop selling and storing your data. They could only use cookies when absolutely essential. They could use lots of kinds of UX.
This is the equivalent of businesses who put a big visible "20% the state says we have to give our employees healthcare" fee on their bill to throw a hissy fit and hope customers get angry at the government for protecting them instead of the business for exploiting them.
nonethewiser 23 minutes ago [-]
Banners exist to eliminate EU regulatory risk. You can try to convince people they aren’t required but its not going to remove any banners.
bonoboTP 57 minutes ago [-]
I don't care about this. I explained why for an individual business trying to project seriousness, it makes sense to adopt a banner in the current environment. I didn't say it's nice of the EU or anything of the sort. It's an incentive pressure that exists on an individual company in the current situation. That's all I said.
pbhjpbhj 1 hours ago [-]
You could have a 'no cookies' badge that links to your cookie policy - 'we use no tracking cookies and so are compliant with EU law ... then list any cookies/local-storage used and explain what they're for.
bborud 52 minutes ago [-]
That would make you sound a lot more professional too. And trustworthy. (As long as that's actually what happens).
When I see these dialogs listing they have 1289723 gazillion vendors they share data with, I know that whoever is in charge of analytics, privacy or both at the company is incompetent.
tempest_ 1 hours ago [-]
Best we can do is a full screen model or annoying toast telling users we dont use cookies and click 4 to 7 check boxes to agree.
Xirdus 59 minutes ago [-]
But then you can't have tracking cookies.
quruquru 1 hours ago [-]
Many years ago, I used to make informational websites for small, local businesses and they all wanted the cookie banner "just to be safe", even after explaining they didn't need it.
forgotaccount3 19 minutes ago [-]
But are you a software developer or a lawyer? Do they 'not need it' because the government provided a way to ensure it's not needed or because your interpretation of the law indicates it's unnecessary? Are you willing to indemnify them for legal costs if your guidance was wrong?
Most small business owner's I've spoken to are keenly aware they are only one bad lawsuit away of closing down. Almost no one care's about the cookie banner. Most just mindlessly click to allow cookies and go on with their life. There's almost no cost to having it.
Xirdus 55 minutes ago [-]
This website contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cookies.
zippyman55 44 minutes ago [-]
The Irish Republican Army, even at the height of their conflict, would never have stooped to such a website.
nonethewiser 27 minutes ago [-]
No one is tanking UX to stick it to the EU. It would be better for them to simply not piss off their users. They are covering their ass.
The obvious conclusion is that when you try to regulate something like this you arent going to get the behavior you want.
Achterlangs 1 hours ago [-]
I have had the same discussion multiple times at multiple companies. Luckily most of them were fine with dismissing the popup with a timer.
patwolf 32 minutes ago [-]
I built an ecommerce site long ago, and even though the UI was fairly modern for the time, they insisted we use antiquated styling on the billing forms of the checkout page to help exude trust. As a developer it bugged me because I knew it was just styling, but they probably weren't wrong.
Aurornis 48 minutes ago [-]
> and he said "yeah, but it makes the site seem less legitimate.
He may be right, sadly. I’ve seen the lack of a cookie banner used to suggest that a site was doing something shady or not complying with the law.
Most people don’t have knowledge about the finer details of cookie laws. They’ve been trained to believe that legitimate sites who comply with the laws will implement the cookie banner, and not seeing it feels suspiciously unprofessional.
kermatt 39 minutes ago [-]
> but it makes the site seem less legitimate
I have yet to head that cookie prompts are a sign of legitimacy. What business has customers that would think that way?
alexpotato 1 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of the early days of the CANSPAM act.
One of the best indicators that something was not spam was the unsubscribe button.
vovavili 48 minutes ago [-]
>it's an example of malicious compliance
So how would you do ePrivacy Directive compliance/risk avoidance in a non-obnoxious way?
dghlsakjg 46 minutes ago [-]
Don’t use a bunch of unnecessary tracking cookies?
Completely eliminates the need for a cookie permission bar.
vovavili 11 minutes ago [-]
I am obviously referring to a scenario where tracking cookies would be highly beneficial to expanding the business, e.g. e-commerce.
pie_flavor 30 minutes ago [-]
The law does not say 'tracking'. It says 'strictly necessary'. If you remember the user's light/dark theme preference in a cookie, that requires notification. (Or rather, what it requires in practice is that you hire a Highly Paid Consultant.)
dghlsakjg 56 seconds ago [-]
Okay, but it doesn’t require notification for every user that hits your landing page.
If you want to remember dark mode with a cookie, then you can just gate that setting behind a “allow functional cookies” toggle.
Getting consent for functional cookies doesn’t have to be done with an intrusive cookie bar on landing. You can request consent as it becomes needed. There’s other ways of complying that aren’t dark patterns.
0xbadcafebee 27 minutes ago [-]
Good point. The page should have 200MB of assets so that it loads slowly, making it look like there's serious engineering going on.
bborud 57 minutes ago [-]
I'd say just remove it. Don't ask people who don't actually understand the cost of having it there because you will get the wrong answers. Sometimes people just have to do the right thing, take some heat and then everyone can move on. If it has severe consequences then that's probably a good reason to leave anyway.
Back in the day, this is how we introduced AWS at a large company. We just did it. And once done, they couldn't deny that it cost a fraction of what we were paying our supplier and that things took minutes to set up rather than weeks. And that they worked a lot better.
Yes, there was shouting in meeting rooms. And yes, people said "you can't do this". Turns out they were wrong. A few years later I mentioned this to Werner Vogels. During a meeting. Where my CEO and CTO were present. And where everyone was feeling very good about us being one of AWS' biggest customers in our region.
So when someone says "you can't do that", sometimes you should make them prove it.
(At the time AWS was a good idea. Today dependence on a US service provider is a harder sell in Europe. The _first_ question you get today is if we can host it ourselves if we need to or if we can use a local service provider.)
docjay 44 minutes ago [-]
I have the same mindset and often did the same thing, but then I thought about my doctor sneaking into my house while I’m sleeping and injecting me with the “good medicine” I had refused in their office.
bborud 19 minutes ago [-]
I did not anticipate where that sentence ended up :-).
mmillin 1 hours ago [-]
I see a lot of people below arguing that this isn’t the fault of the EU policy but the companies. I think that’s being overly charitable to the policy. While you can be rightly upset with the companies behavior, ultimately policy has to work with the incentives it creates. The policy in its current form allows for meeting requirements with annoying cookie banner opt-outs while keeping the lucrative business of tracking. If we don’t want that, the policy should be changed. Don’t expect companies to go against their interests here, even if some will actually be thoughtful and find a way to do so. The “Purpose Of a System Is What It Does” principle applies, and the purpose of the EU policy seems to be cookie banners for most sites.
Classic over-regulation producing unintended side effects
tempest_ 56 minutes ago [-]
Nah fuck the companies and their horse shit.
99% percent of them intentionally turn the "decline" choice into a 5 - 10 step game of dark patterns even though the EU policy says it should be equally easy to decline. They know its bullshit but they also know the chance that someone will drag them through court is low.
naravara 58 minutes ago [-]
I’ve long believed that making companies liable for paying damages if PII is leaked in a data breach would be the best way to stop excessive tracking. If you force them to have to manage user data like they’re handling radioactive waste then the expense and overhead involved is a natural drag on the business logic that drives the bottomless appetite for data collection. They’ll collect it if they actually need it, and they’ll take great pains to secure it.
dgellow 36 minutes ago [-]
That’s already part of the EU regulations people in the comments complain about
mnewme 53 minutes ago [-]
Actually having worked in big companies,many of them just track everything, but don’t actually use the data, which is even worse.
Aurornis 43 minutes ago [-]
The most valuable data breach content isn’t your advertising tracking data, though.
It would be your payment information, which is orthogonal to most of the tracking data.
The black market demand for leaked advertising-related tracking data is basically nil, except maybe in cases where it’s related to something else exploitable or usable for blackmail like if someone frequents cryptocurrency exchanges or porn sites. Nobody cares to pay for black market data about you shopping for towels on Amazon or things like that.
cindyllm 41 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
zetanor 1 hours ago [-]
The EU said "you have to ask for permission before forcefully sodomizing your users", and webdevs thought "let's ask for permission" rather than "let's not forcefully sodomize our users". Of course, the law could have said "don't forcefully sodomize users", but it seems the west is still under the impression that some people will do the right thing, just because, sometimes. (maybe 20 years ago they would have, just because, sometimes, but they won't now)
nirava 1 hours ago [-]
Not web devs per se, I’d be hard pressed to find a serious web dev who wanted to “forcefully sodomize users”. Thats a management thing
bborud 49 minutes ago [-]
Many of them can't help themselves.
I used to have long conversations with frontend developers that "no, when I log on I don't want to be forced through a look-at-the-new-feature-we-made" sequences. And then they went ahead and did it anyway. And usually whatever flag they tried to set to make sure you only saw it once would malfunction, so next time you'd get to click through it all over again.
(If you want to tell users about new features, show a unread flag on a notification icon and make it a one-click affair to make it go away. Don't get in users' face with stuff they don't want)
zetanor 1 hours ago [-]
"No."
If every webdev who would say no can be trivially replaced by webdevs who won't say no, then yes, it is webdevs.
StableAlkyne 35 minutes ago [-]
"Damn, I'm being asked to put a cookie into this site that will maybe result in some guy seeing an ad about a toothpaste he might buy at some point in the future.
I'm going to risk months of unemployment and explain to my family why this is more important than eating when I get home. The internet is serious business, they'll understand."
-- the hypothetical webdev in that scenario, I guess?
zetanor 10 minutes ago [-]
If you can get replaced over something so minor, it means there's dozens of capable bootlickers lined up and ready to do it as soon as you're gone, so yes, there is a webdev problem.
StableAlkyne 5 minutes ago [-]
> bootlickers
Mate, it's just a cookie on a site.
zamadatix 50 minutes ago [-]
You don't really need a web dev to add a cookie banner these days, but you probably still want one to build the actual site (unless it's simple enough to be fully site-as-a-service, in which case there is really no webdev at all).
Be it the EU for regulating disclosure and consent requirements, users for being "lazy" and usually just accepting all, or the webdev for not staking their livelihood on denying the banner - I'm sure they'll all get blamed before someone sees the ones actually demanding it be done can be the problem.
bonoboTP 53 minutes ago [-]
You can try to put the blame on the grunts, like trying to focus on the engineers in the VW Dieselgate, etc, but that is very weak leverage. You have to intervene at the root cause of the incentive. But of course the higher you go, the more there is a blur between legislators and business owners and they won't be harsh to themselves.
edoceo 58 minutes ago [-]
It's silly to blame the individual who doesn't have the authority or power at the business making these choices.
56 minutes ago [-]
mnewme 1 hours ago [-]
Actually cookies are not mandated by the EU, but this was the solution the big companies agreed on and now Google and Co try to lobby against better solutions.
Most US sites are giving the cookie bag to US users. It may simply be easier for leadership to say add the widget than it is to say we won’t accept traffic from the EU or risk the consequences
It feels similar to how CA environmental regs become the national standard simply because the market is so large it’s not worth splitting on it. So they just slap a cancer warning on everything
qurren 42 minutes ago [-]
1. It's also a piece of cake to just not display the cookie banner for non-EU IPs
2. If you are a purely US entity with no actual business presence in the EU, you only need to comply with US laws and nothing else. If the EU doesn't like a purely-foreign website, it's on them to set up a national firewall and block it.
Case in point 1: It's not on you to comply with China's laws, it's on them to block it if they want to
Case in point 2: China's local businesses with no EU presence do not follow GDPR and do not display cookie banners even if accessed from the EU
dgellow 31 minutes ago [-]
GDPR applies to EU citizens data. It doesn’t matter where your business is located in the world, if you process European personal data you’re on the hook. Of course you can decide to ignore and argue the EU doesn’t have jurisdiction
qurren 29 minutes ago [-]
Exactly, they don't have jurisdiction outside their borders. If you don't have a presence there, they cannot subject you to their laws.
1. When is the last time you saw China enforcing its laws outside their borders? Why would EU be any different?
2. China has laws that are directly contradictory to GDPR laws; you may be required to retain data regardless of consent; if your website is based in China you have to follow local laws first before you follow contradictory foreign laws that have no jurisdiction over you.
logseman 1 hours ago [-]
Do Not Track was the right implementation (browser-based, activate only once) and it was sabotaged by ad peddlers. It is bad policy that has been reached after every better alternative was rejected.
dgellow 30 minutes ago [-]
Do not track has been used by ad companies to track users, it’s one of the datapoints that can be used to identify your fingerprint
Havoc 1 hours ago [-]
Policy making assumed good faith actors - specifically that tracking outside of necessary for website to function to be minimal. Because like…not necessary.
It’s only broken to the extent that it collided with a messed up world where websites track even when they don’t need to and then send that to 2000 partners for more profit extraction on top of what the website does commercially.
Something is deeply fucked up there and it’s not the EU part. They just make a good scapegoat because the banner is what users see
ryanfreeborn 22 minutes ago [-]
Policy should never assume good faith actors. There wouldn't need to be policy if an assumption of good faith was a valid substrate for the policy. The policy is bad because its authors built it in a vacuum, without any thought or care put towards how its compliance would actually instatiate. This is a consistent problem with EU regulators. The 'tax' the policy levies on invasive cookie use (which I agree is broken and horrific) is forwarded to the user, via this terrible, omnipresent popup. The policy has made the problem worse, by further densensitizing humanity at large to this terrible practice. Shameful behavior by EU regulators and they should absolutely be pilloried for the present state.
f6v 56 minutes ago [-]
> Policy making assumed good faith actors
Let's not paint the policymakers naïve when they're in fact incompetent.
Havoc 22 minutes ago [-]
Let’s not paint the policymakers incompetent when they’re in fact naive
dragonwriter 2 minutes ago [-]
So, let’s not paint them as <term meaning lacking the combination of knowledge and skill to do a job effectively> when they are in fact <term meaning particularly lacking wisdom, experience, and/or judgement>
Are you sure?
f6v 11 minutes ago [-]
If you think about it, a naïve policy maker isn't competent.
mnewme 48 minutes ago [-]
They are not incompetent in general. Most stuff works pretty well in Europe and better than in most of the world. We just focus on the bad regulations
Xirdus 46 minutes ago [-]
The biggest positive outcome of the whole GDPR affair is that people finally believe me when I say that yes, they are selling your data to thousands of 3rd parties, and no, I'm not making these numbers up or exagerrating at all.
4ndrewl 40 minutes ago [-]
It's not a cookies banner. It's a request to harvest your data and share it with third parties for purposes that are not required for the service you're offering.
No harvest data to 936 partners? No need for a banner!
The most used banners at least have a quick way of dismissing without opting in. When the cases against too obvious dark patterns started that fixed itself at least.
gdcbe 1 hours ago [-]
I have yet to see an actual part of that policy which requires a cookie banner though. Seems more to me that it's a combination of (a) websites allowing all kind of fcked up use cases of cookies on their site (most sites do not even need cookies for real) and (b) not respecting http headers that ask to not be tracked... They much rather have a very confusing popup that kinda forces you to accept all :) How convenient.
Just like websites also give zero fcks about accept-language header... sure do geoip lookup, so much easier... not
devmor 1 hours ago [-]
I have always seen the cookie banner as a sort of punishment to the public for daring to have demanded better treatment.
“Oh you want consent involved in this interaction? Then we’ll annoy you about it constantly instead of respecting the intent of the regulation.”
6510 11 minutes ago [-]
You are free to set cookies if you need them for site functionality.
nathell 18 minutes ago [-]
No it’s not, it’s a testimony to how broken the Internet is.
There’s a perfectly valid and simple way to comply with the EU policies, including GDPR, and not impose annoying popups on your users: just don’t set cookies (if you need to have a login, you can ask for permissions at login time) and don’t collect personal data. That a lot of sites elect not to do that is an indication of how they treat the user, not of the brokenness of EU law.
skrebbel 1 hours ago [-]
Bullshit. There’s no need to track every visitor. Just stop tracking and you don’t need a cookie banner.
The only mistake EU policymakers made was underestimating how willing companies were to deface their websites.
>The only mistake EU policymakers made was underestimating how willing companies were to deface their websites.
Yes and that is a MASSIVE mistake for a policymaker to commit. They should absolutely be pilloried for their incredible lack of foresight and understanding of how internet companies handle compliance. The policy has set back humanity by further desensitizing internet users around the world to the terrible, endemic use of cookies by most websites.
zigzag312 1 hours ago [-]
The policy is both, good, but also flawed. For example, you cannot persist settings, because one policy says that website settings should be ephemeral unless user agrees to persist them.
dgellow 29 minutes ago [-]
That’s not true, it’s even explicitly called out by the EU guidelines.
Copy pasting an older comment because it’s really coming up all the time…
That's not true and is a very common misinformation people repeat online. You can save user preferences in cookies without any consent banner, if the cookie isn't used for tracking.
See here[0], page 6:
> As stated in Article 5(3) ePD: ‘This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.’
0: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2024-10/ed...
As long as you do not share that info with 3rd party, and the user requested it, you can store via cookies pretty much whatever you want without the need for a consent screen
NetMageSCW 1 hours ago [-]
That shows the same fundamental misunderstanding of the modern web that led to the ignorance of EU regulations.
iwontberude 11 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
sghiassy 1 hours ago [-]
It’s an EU law, but it impacts us all in America as well… because you know, every fucking website
mnewme 1 hours ago [-]
It is not an EU law. Nowhere in GDPR are cookie banners mandated.
we could have settled on privacy compliant tracking without cookies, which is possible or use browser preferences and respect those (which would be perfectly legal)
kwertyoowiyop 1 hours ago [-]
Needs a Google login popup, required for any site that there is no reason at all to have an account with.
robertjwebb 1 hours ago [-]
It should appear a second after the page seems to have finished loading, so that it hijacks the input if the user is navigating with the keyboard or typing something into a form.
Dwedit 1 hours ago [-]
Or even better, something that pretends to be a real "Sign in with Google" button but instead phishes your username and password.
malfist 41 minutes ago [-]
It also needs to ask the browser for your location and to send you notifications.
JKCalhoun 50 minutes ago [-]
Notifications?
How about an email popup. My browser will happily auto-populate it.
2b3a51 30 minutes ago [-]
I'm filing a bug report...
Steps to reproduce:
Open terminal emulator and type;
I can read the same content as I can read in Firefox.
What I expected to happen: See content similar to the following;
Update your browser
Your browser isn't supported any more. To continue your search, upgrade to a
recent version. Learn more
cg5280 1 hours ago [-]
So many websites do popups and it feels so anti-user. Maybe I get unusually annoyed, but I do not need a Gemini popup ad in Google Docs. Just let me do what I came to the website to do!
dylan604 1 hours ago [-]
But you could obviously be doing it faster/smarter by using Gemini /s
SamBam 52 minutes ago [-]
If they make it hard enough to interact with the actual website, we'll have to use AI!
dylan604 37 minutes ago [-]
See, there you go thinking being able to use a website is a right
andy99 1 hours ago [-]
Needs to autoplay a video which when dismissed just moves to another window and continues playing. With sound.
six_seven 1 hours ago [-]
and hijack your clipboard and back button
tamimio 1 hours ago [-]
And you can’t dismiss it because the X is somehow hidden behind another popup
nphardon 9 minutes ago [-]
A while back I realized that it was just the browser keeping me on screen when I didn't want to be. I switched to the purely native Safari app on my phone, from a highly customized ad blocking browser, with lots of content filtering. My screen time dropped from like 2 hours a day to like 10 minutes.
That "In case you're not aware, there's COVID-19 happening" banner isn't nearly tall nor yellow enough. Given a 6-inch-tall screen, the proper layout would be:
+-----------------+
|2" of vestigial |
|COVID messaging |
+-----------------+
|1.5" of actual |
| content |
+-----------------+
|2.5 of EU |
| cookie banner |
+-----------------+
A local utility took it even further during COVID:
+---------------------+
|2" of COVID messaging|
+---------------------+
|1" of undismissable |
| "our app is gone; |
| use the mobile site |
| that you're on now" |
+---------------------+
|0.5" of content |
+---------------------+
|2.5" of EU cookie |
| banner, despite |
| being a US-only corp|
+---------------------+
jasonjayr 1 hours ago [-]
It also needs to scroll in after a second or two, and shift the page content down, so you mis-click the wrong link, and end up loading something that takes forever to load and somehow manages to cause the back button to misbehave.
pbhjpbhj 55 minutes ago [-]
Clever people with no morals use that to load ads under your finger, timed to create an inadvertent click.
I swear NYT do this in their games app, the play button gets replaced with a subscribe as the late loaded subscribe element shifts the page exactly the amount to put subscribe under your finger. I wonder how well it worked?
monknomo 51 minutes ago [-]
manually scrolling before every widget loads should cause a full page refresh.
zooming in should cause a full page refresh
tedggh 1 hours ago [-]
As feedback, you made that popup way too clean and easy to close. That’s not how it works in reality. You need to make the background transparent and the X so small it’s technically impossible to hit. Also think about adding an ad and a timer and move the popup slightly after N ms so that the user always hits the ad.
coldpie 37 minutes ago [-]
Yeah. I've written about this a few times, with some suggestions for how to make it marginally less miserable to visit a website:
How hard could it be to write a greasemonkey script that will send the current html/Javascript from hell to a LLM with a prompt that will ask you which of the detected annoying elements you want to remove, and then will create and install another GM script that is removing those elements from this site, and also invent finglonger as a side effect. A man can dream, though. A man can dream.
peesem 1 hours ago [-]
inaccurate, i don't have to go three screens deep into a modal to choose only necessary cookies
nerdawson 1 hours ago [-]
The best one now is “Read for free” (give me all the trackers) or join a subscription and you can opt out. Pretty much every news / media site now
orthoxerox 1 hours ago [-]
That one is honest at least, makes you aware that you're the product.
s08148692 1 hours ago [-]
It's a bit 2025. Needs a scroll hijack background animation and cursor effects to be up to date for 2026
ChipopLeMoral 9 minutes ago [-]
Missing some spammy "article" links with AI generated images.
dstanko 35 minutes ago [-]
I may be skeptical, so take this with a grain of salt. The transformation happened when someone decided to stop being UI designer, to become UX designer. That wasn't enough, so they came up with XD - experience design. At every step of the way, they introduced more lofty goals for the design to justify the increased importance of themselves.
Yea , thank u , I really despite those websites of current web, much JS, colors, much images and animations with mouse, and million fonts , rounded buttons and everything is rounded and "modern" and slow and bloated
why cant have we simple websites, small coherent nice color palette
to just read and know the needed info ?
hackernews is extremely good example
suckless: https://suckless.org/sucks/web/
is another brilliant example
jonplackett 56 minutes ago [-]
I made a game about this. You can play it if you want to feel annoyed.
Maybe also it could randomly jump to different vertical scroll positions while you are reading an article?
jmmv 43 minutes ago [-]
Somehow the clicking around reminded me of Windows RG. Go check this old relic if you have never seen it: https://www.jamesweb.co.uk/windowsrg . Turn the volume up!
freediver 44 minutes ago [-]
Answer: ads as the main business model running the web since 25 years ago and us accepting the convenience 'free'.
It turns out everything has a price, and in more recent we started noticing that our time, attention and intelligence not being insulted also has value.
donatj 49 minutes ago [-]
We've got the stupid chat bubble at the bottom.
We didn't want it, it's like a megabyte of JavaScript. It's some third party service corporate forced on us.
I have to imagine a lot of websites are in the same boat, where they're just add crap they don't want to add by higher ups.
polishdude20 1 hours ago [-]
Even my back button was hijacked for a second. Nice attention to detail!
wktmeow 1 hours ago [-]
Yea but do you guys remember when we actually needed pop up blockers to avoid having a site spawn like 10 new windows behind the current one, and tabs didn’t really exist yet, and the popups had adult content and sometimes they autoplayed sound/video? Like, internet explorer 6 era? Sometimes I miss those days
SamBam 50 minutes ago [-]
You knew you done goofed when the adult site you opened on your family computer was opening new windows faster than you could close them...
0xbadcafebee 37 minutes ago [-]
Not a problem; you were on a 28.8k, so the adult banner images would take forever to load, so you could close the pop-ups before they got you in trouble
spottedmarley 2 hours ago [-]
No endless scroll? What the hell am I supposed do I do with my mouse wheel?? Useless!
hectdev 1 hours ago [-]
Needs a scroll that becomes a full page ad that when you scroll pass becomes the same ad but 1/3rd the page
freudia 1 hours ago [-]
Don't give them ideas... LoL
NetMageSCW 60 minutes ago [-]
That is already deployed to real web sites.
lxe 36 minutes ago [-]
I made this 6 years ago but it still applies today.
t1234s 40 minutes ago [-]
The worst patterns:
1) scroll hijacking (this should be a felony)
2) stupid cookie popups/banners
3) useless hero images (clients love them, users hate them)
clintmcmahon 50 minutes ago [-]
Is the beef with the design or the pop ups, chatbot, banner, etc?
If it's the design, not everyone is a web designer so the bootstrap theme is great to get up off the ground.
If it's the other stuff then, yeah, totally.
j9feng 37 minutes ago [-]
If the traffic to the site drops dramatically because of the “features”, we would have seen the features removed already.
agumonkey 22 minutes ago [-]
it's missing the google sso popup, the close buttons are not anti-pattern enough, and the cookie banner still lets me use the site too much
good job though
snawazzee 20 minutes ago [-]
I knew it wont work but still I tried to enter a message in chat window and click enter. (And it didn't worked)
hellojomp 60 minutes ago [-]
If it's going to be every website, it might as well be about pipes.
Cookie banners are a great example of regulation gone wrong.
Me having to make a legal agreement with every website is absurd and totally predictable.
MBCook 1 hours ago [-]
Every paragraph (maybe sentence) needs to fade in as I attempt to scroll. If I can read the first paragraph easily when the page loads (ignoring the pop-ups) then the website is too well designed.
JKCalhoun 49 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I hand-rolled my site. Not even Google analytics. I have absolutely no idea if anyone even visits my site.
Oh well.
1dom 34 minutes ago [-]
No need to worry, I just visited. Now you know.
Seems like the sort of site and person who should have a guestbook - I would have left an appreciative and encouraging comment there, but this will have to do:)
rob74 50 minutes ago [-]
(2019) *
* according to the copyright notice, although, going by the mention of Covid, it could also be 2020?
alpha_trion 59 minutes ago [-]
Needs more jank from a bajillion ads loading. :D
Kidding aside, this is hilarious and made my morning
Damn, yeah this is exactly how I make my websites look.
wxw 1 hours ago [-]
I kinda miss the CSS bootstrap aesthetic.
Retr0id 1 hours ago [-]
Bootstrap, what a blast from the past! They just don't make bad websites like they used to.
amelius 48 minutes ago [-]
Apple.com looks ok. It doesn't have the cookie banner.
jsharf 47 minutes ago [-]
We need a special version mocking recipe websites
aavci 42 minutes ago [-]
Where is the ‘sign in with google’ pop up?
heyitsmedotjayb 1 hours ago [-]
It needs to present a happy moose to you if you don't use an adblocker
ratelimitsteve 1 hours ago [-]
I wasn't asked for my location, notifications, camera permissions or to log in. This is, regrettably, still better than most recipe websites I visit.
improgrammer007 54 minutes ago [-]
I use Brave browser and even that didn’t help.
motbus3 47 minutes ago [-]
It should also detect the ad blocker
jedbrooke 1 hours ago [-]
it’s missing spinners for 5-10 seconds while it loads endless megabytes of javascript doing who knows what.
Seriously how did we get to this point? I remember growing up in the 2000’s and all the marketing about computers was “it’s fast!” and “get results instantly!” that kind of thing. Now everything it gated by multiple spinners, then it loads a skeleton, then it partially loads your actual content, then, when you go to click on something, more content loads and the existing content jumps to a new place and you end up clicking on something else, meaning now you have to go back (if they haven’t hijacked the back button), wait for it all to load again, wait for the second “real” load, and then click on what you actually meant to click on in the first place.
sublinear 23 minutes ago [-]
Not true.
The web is more than blogspam, SaaS, the most desperate cases of ecommerce, and the web versions of legacy newspapers/magazines.
Also on iPhones Twitter appears to have aligned their privacy reject button with where their open in app overlay appears just a second later so that you hit that instead.
Too many people working on evil dark pattern bullshit
maqp 44 minutes ago [-]
I can't believe I'm not able to buy Every Fucking Website Premium with business focused ads and native advertising masquerading as quasi-educational infotainment. Also where's the sign-up with Spybook?
josefritzishere 36 minutes ago [-]
This is completely accurate. I see it every day.
0xbadcafebee 39 minutes ago [-]
Needs a shopping cart that when you click submit, does nothing, requiring you to open web dev tools to discover the silent 503 error, with no way to report the error. Bonus points for a bank account, credit card or retirement fund
programmarchy 1 hours ago [-]
Really needs a 20MB video playing in the background of the hero.
tacodestroyer 1 hours ago [-]
with an ad overlayed that won't go away
fuzzy_dunlopp 52 minutes ago [-]
SmallWeb ftw!
1dom 33 minutes ago [-]
This feels about 2 - 5 years out of date now. There isn't enough dark theme with slop-neon accents.
lxe 27 minutes ago [-]
I should modernize this?
1dom 11 minutes ago [-]
Claude should modernise this. It'll come out looking like all the other results when you search an image engine for "AI landing page": dark, with purple, blue or other neon accents.
_superposition_ 1 hours ago [-]
This is perfect.
croes 49 minutes ago [-]
The cookie banner should have the option to change the cookies but you have to deselect the trackers one by one
tonymet 51 minutes ago [-]
It’s missing a “we stand with the current thing “ flag and a compliance prompt for community standards.
Also 1.5gb of heap allocated minimum
57 minutes ago [-]
morkalork 1 hours ago [-]
Needs the floating video thumbnail with auto-play and sound. Also the requests for location and permission to send notifications dialogs in chrome!
reality_inspctr 1 hours ago [-]
No agents.md?
monxer 1 hours ago [-]
Every Fucking Website not created by Claude. Otherwise it would have a dark gray background with transparant rounded buttons with a neon border.
lxe 26 minutes ago [-]
This is from pre-ai era
martythemaniak 1 hours ago [-]
For my current project, I tried going with a non-traditional style I personally liked, I call it "Soft Neo Brutalism". You can see it at: http://www.frost-e.com
I generally wanted web 1.0 simplicity, lots of contrast, but also a soft gentle colours and modern vibe. I also have a general design for use in dashboards/apps etc: https://frost-e.com/design-system/
dorianpruski 1 hours ago [-]
missing carousel
andai 1 hours ago [-]
Trump 2020! I hate puppies!
dangjustintime 1 hours ago [-]
This is actually good boilerplate. lol
hbcdbff 51 minutes ago [-]
Not enough AI slop
lifestyleguru 1 hours ago [-]
Cookie banners are malicious compliance. There are only 1-2 EU countries with quarrelsome predatory lawyers proactively scanning the web.
The positives about covid and AI is that we don't hear anymore about blockchain and crypto (well, except one boomer oligarch holding onto it). Just please make the next two big things happen already for God's sake.
lxe 39 minutes ago [-]
lol
hizyyo 30 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
rocketpop 57 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
25 minutes ago [-]
gib444 1 hours ago [-]
Because it fucking works
(AIUI "I agree" gets people to give explicit consent with good success and the subscribe modals are quite effective too)
pbhjpbhj 50 minutes ago [-]
There was a piece of caselaw about a company having an "agree" but a million tick-boxes to disagree. A lot of sites added a "disagree" button then.
frail_figure 1 hours ago [-]
Just a quick reminder that you don't need to put up any cookie banners at all if you simply don't track your users in a privacy-invading way.
Also, where is the unrelated autoplaying video that will unmute if you actually click it, that follows your scrolling and only becomes smaller when you dismiss it? Plus, it should probably have text that cuts off letting you know you can have access for just $10/month.
Plus, isn't this website undissmissably "better in the app" after a few minutes of attempting to use it on a phone? Where's that at?
edit: Oh shoot! I forgot, too. This modal needs to also ensure there is absolutely no way to scroll. If you could scroll you might be able to accidentally get to the address bar of your browser to fix the URL to xcancel or even close the page, which isn't using the app as you are intended to do.
Also, it doesn't attempt to hijack the back button to give me stuff I clearly wanted to see before I leave the page.
A lot of work left to do here before it's a "real" website. Although, it has about as much substance as the average website so far, so good work on that.
This is the most annoying thing on the internet. There’s a site I’d like to use, but “try the app” takes up the entire page (and appears to be impossible to dismiss?). Actually, is there a way to permanently request the desktop site for all future visits to a domain on iOS? There is no reason to visit this full-page app advertisement.
For Reddit, my choice for now is safereddit. If I need to view a Reddit link on mobile and old Reddit is blocked as it sometimes is, I just swap the domain to safereddit.com.
For Twitter, my choice has been xcancel for ages. I have no idea how that manages to stay up in spite of Twitter's hostility but it is a Nitter instance that seems to just work.
You can also run these frontends yourself, too, but I assume it requires accounts.
(edit: Also I hope it goes without saying that I don't really have any specific trust that my activity is necessarily more "private" with these frontends, although honestly if I was forced to bet I would have to bet that they are much more respectful to my privacy than Twitter or Reddit are. I just use them for functionality.)
Good luck fellow traveler. If there was more to do in real life, I'd probably had thrown my phone into the ocean by now. I'm about halfway there in spite of the lack of many appealing third spaces.
I wonder sometimes how the team doing the website feels about being treated as second class. Or if it’s the same team and they have to hold their noses to work on it.
The third dumbest smart person I had to work with obviously hated HTML and kept trying to get us to use a DSL instead. At least it wasn’t an in house one, but he had a couple other devs interested in his madness as well. But the two of us who were doing the bulk of the performance work and tricky bug fixes would have been absolutely sunk if we’d allowed that to happen. One of the worst things about React is trying to track back an HTML bug in someone else’s complex React project to the templates that are misbehaving together. The Grafana UI code is madness to debug.We would have been there very quickly and without the dev toolbox to help.
It’s such a small thing in the grand scheme of things but it’s just that final straw for me, someone made the decision to be this shitty to their users because they want to employ extra tracking/data collection / advertising in their app.
You’re right. It’s a good start, but there’s still a lot to do.
I ended up trying it. Boosted conversion rate meaningfully. Worth the price I pay in mild self-loathing.
Chesterton's popup, I guess.
Also when I checked NoScript, it's only loading js from lxe.github.io
I expect there to be at minimum 8 domains, but often 12-18.
We can debate the specifics, maybe it's only in effect for X seconds after you stop moving the cursor, maybe it creates a 100px diameter disk of stability, I don't know. Just let me interact with the stuff I see.
youtube people I know you are in here. Fix your stupid PIP thing.
news sites are the worst for this. bloomberg, nbc, etc. have 20+ domains, and as you click "temporarily allow" on one, it loads in a few more.
foxnews loads 36 domains before temporarily allowing any, which probably approaches 50 once you start allowing.
I had a discussion with my CFO about removing the cookie banner from our website (because we don't set any tracking cookies, and cookies for things like login are exempted) and he said "yeah, but it makes the site seem less legitimate.
Companies could stop selling and storing your data. They could only use cookies when absolutely essential. They could use lots of kinds of UX.
This is the equivalent of businesses who put a big visible "20% the state says we have to give our employees healthcare" fee on their bill to throw a hissy fit and hope customers get angry at the government for protecting them instead of the business for exploiting them.
When I see these dialogs listing they have 1289723 gazillion vendors they share data with, I know that whoever is in charge of analytics, privacy or both at the company is incompetent.
Most small business owner's I've spoken to are keenly aware they are only one bad lawsuit away of closing down. Almost no one care's about the cookie banner. Most just mindlessly click to allow cookies and go on with their life. There's almost no cost to having it.
The obvious conclusion is that when you try to regulate something like this you arent going to get the behavior you want.
He may be right, sadly. I’ve seen the lack of a cookie banner used to suggest that a site was doing something shady or not complying with the law.
Most people don’t have knowledge about the finer details of cookie laws. They’ve been trained to believe that legitimate sites who comply with the laws will implement the cookie banner, and not seeing it feels suspiciously unprofessional.
I have yet to head that cookie prompts are a sign of legitimacy. What business has customers that would think that way?
One of the best indicators that something was not spam was the unsubscribe button.
So how would you do ePrivacy Directive compliance/risk avoidance in a non-obnoxious way?
Completely eliminates the need for a cookie permission bar.
If you want to remember dark mode with a cookie, then you can just gate that setting behind a “allow functional cookies” toggle.
Getting consent for functional cookies doesn’t have to be done with an intrusive cookie bar on landing. You can request consent as it becomes needed. There’s other ways of complying that aren’t dark patterns.
Back in the day, this is how we introduced AWS at a large company. We just did it. And once done, they couldn't deny that it cost a fraction of what we were paying our supplier and that things took minutes to set up rather than weeks. And that they worked a lot better.
Yes, there was shouting in meeting rooms. And yes, people said "you can't do this". Turns out they were wrong. A few years later I mentioned this to Werner Vogels. During a meeting. Where my CEO and CTO were present. And where everyone was feeling very good about us being one of AWS' biggest customers in our region.
So when someone says "you can't do that", sometimes you should make them prove it.
(At the time AWS was a good idea. Today dependence on a US service provider is a harder sell in Europe. The _first_ question you get today is if we can host it ourselves if we need to or if we can use a local service provider.)
99% percent of them intentionally turn the "decline" choice into a 5 - 10 step game of dark patterns even though the EU policy says it should be equally easy to decline. They know its bullshit but they also know the chance that someone will drag them through court is low.
It would be your payment information, which is orthogonal to most of the tracking data.
The black market demand for leaked advertising-related tracking data is basically nil, except maybe in cases where it’s related to something else exploitable or usable for blackmail like if someone frequents cryptocurrency exchanges or porn sites. Nobody cares to pay for black market data about you shopping for towels on Amazon or things like that.
I used to have long conversations with frontend developers that "no, when I log on I don't want to be forced through a look-at-the-new-feature-we-made" sequences. And then they went ahead and did it anyway. And usually whatever flag they tried to set to make sure you only saw it once would malfunction, so next time you'd get to click through it all over again.
(If you want to tell users about new features, show a unread flag on a notification icon and make it a one-click affair to make it go away. Don't get in users' face with stuff they don't want)
If every webdev who would say no can be trivially replaced by webdevs who won't say no, then yes, it is webdevs.
I'm going to risk months of unemployment and explain to my family why this is more important than eating when I get home. The internet is serious business, they'll understand."
-- the hypothetical webdev in that scenario, I guess?
Mate, it's just a cookie on a site.
Be it the EU for regulating disclosure and consent requirements, users for being "lazy" and usually just accepting all, or the webdev for not staking their livelihood on denying the banner - I'm sure they'll all get blamed before someone sees the ones actually demanding it be done can be the problem.
Check out: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
It feels similar to how CA environmental regs become the national standard simply because the market is so large it’s not worth splitting on it. So they just slap a cancer warning on everything
2. If you are a purely US entity with no actual business presence in the EU, you only need to comply with US laws and nothing else. If the EU doesn't like a purely-foreign website, it's on them to set up a national firewall and block it.
Case in point 1: It's not on you to comply with China's laws, it's on them to block it if they want to
Case in point 2: China's local businesses with no EU presence do not follow GDPR and do not display cookie banners even if accessed from the EU
1. When is the last time you saw China enforcing its laws outside their borders? Why would EU be any different?
2. China has laws that are directly contradictory to GDPR laws; you may be required to retain data regardless of consent; if your website is based in China you have to follow local laws first before you follow contradictory foreign laws that have no jurisdiction over you.
It’s only broken to the extent that it collided with a messed up world where websites track even when they don’t need to and then send that to 2000 partners for more profit extraction on top of what the website does commercially.
Something is deeply fucked up there and it’s not the EU part. They just make a good scapegoat because the banner is what users see
Let's not paint the policymakers naïve when they're in fact incompetent.
Are you sure?
No harvest data to 936 partners? No need for a banner!
Just like websites also give zero fcks about accept-language header... sure do geoip lookup, so much easier... not
“Oh you want consent involved in this interaction? Then we’ll annoy you about it constantly instead of respecting the intent of the regulation.”
There’s a perfectly valid and simple way to comply with the EU policies, including GDPR, and not impose annoying popups on your users: just don’t set cookies (if you need to have a login, you can ask for permissions at login time) and don’t collect personal data. That a lot of sites elect not to do that is an indication of how they treat the user, not of the brokenness of EU law.
The only mistake EU policymakers made was underestimating how willing companies were to deface their websites.
Yes and that is a MASSIVE mistake for a policymaker to commit. They should absolutely be pilloried for their incredible lack of foresight and understanding of how internet companies handle compliance. The policy has set back humanity by further desensitizing internet users around the world to the terrible, endemic use of cookies by most websites.
Copy pasting an older comment because it’s really coming up all the time…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060456
===
That's not true and is a very common misinformation people repeat online. You can save user preferences in cookies without any consent banner, if the cookie isn't used for tracking. See here[0], page 6: > As stated in Article 5(3) ePD: ‘This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.’ 0: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2024-10/ed... As long as you do not share that info with 3rd party, and the user requested it, you can store via cookies pretty much whatever you want without the need for a consent screen
Actually big tech is to blame: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
- https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/subjects...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive
How about an email popup. My browser will happily auto-populate it.
Steps to reproduce: Open terminal emulator and type;
$ w3m https://lxe.github.io/everywebsite/
I can read the same content as I can read in Firefox.
What I expected to happen: See content similar to the following;
Update your browser Your browser isn't supported any more. To continue your search, upgrade to a recent version. Learn more
I swear NYT do this in their games app, the play button gets replaced with a subscribe as the late loaded subscribe element shifts the page exactly the amount to put subscribe under your finger. I wonder how well it worked?
zooming in should cause a full page refresh
"Take back your web browser screen space with Kill Sticky" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
"Quick Tips For Making The Internet Suck Less" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/08/01/tips-for-making-th...
"Web browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/12/31/web-browsers-have-...
https://termsandconditions.game
It turns out everything has a price, and in more recent we started noticing that our time, attention and intelligence not being insulted also has value.
We didn't want it, it's like a megabyte of JavaScript. It's some third party service corporate forced on us.
I have to imagine a lot of websites are in the same boat, where they're just add crap they don't want to add by higher ups.
1) scroll hijacking (this should be a felony) 2) stupid cookie popups/banners 3) useless hero images (clients love them, users hate them)
If it's the design, not everyone is a web designer so the bootstrap theme is great to get up off the ground.
If it's the other stuff then, yeah, totally.
good job though
(shameless plug)
https://www.howgoodisyourpipe.com/
Me having to make a legal agreement with every website is absurd and totally predictable.
Oh well.
Seems like the sort of site and person who should have a guestbook - I would have left an appreciative and encouraging comment there, but this will have to do:)
* according to the copyright notice, although, going by the mention of Covid, it could also be 2020?
Seriously how did we get to this point? I remember growing up in the 2000’s and all the marketing about computers was “it’s fast!” and “get results instantly!” that kind of thing. Now everything it gated by multiple spinners, then it loads a skeleton, then it partially loads your actual content, then, when you go to click on something, more content loads and the existing content jumps to a new place and you end up clicking on something else, meaning now you have to go back (if they haven’t hijacked the back button), wait for it all to load again, wait for the second “real” load, and then click on what you actually meant to click on in the first place.
The web is more than blogspam, SaaS, the most desperate cases of ecommerce, and the web versions of legacy newspapers/magazines.
Too many people working on evil dark pattern bullshit
Also 1.5gb of heap allocated minimum
I generally wanted web 1.0 simplicity, lots of contrast, but also a soft gentle colours and modern vibe. I also have a general design for use in dashboards/apps etc: https://frost-e.com/design-system/
The positives about covid and AI is that we don't hear anymore about blockchain and crypto (well, except one boomer oligarch holding onto it). Just please make the next two big things happen already for God's sake.
(AIUI "I agree" gets people to give explicit consent with good success and the subscribe modals are quite effective too)