Technology

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's intentional, they want you logged in so they can track what you're doing

Oh they're aware, they just don't care 99% of the time.

They know exactly. Once you create a Twitter account, consent to cookies and link your Google account (AKA give them all your data) you'll never see these pop-ups again.

Basically extortion.

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.

Cancel X period brbgoatftw

...wat is that?

Wait, people choose to put it in their website??

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.

https://privacypass.github.io/ has helped somewhat

Ask cookie question is required.

Thank the European bureaucrats that don't understand technology.

Agreement? Read them 1 hour until you have understood everything.

I one time for fun (cause I'm insane) read the entire Windows license agreement, MSA (Microsoft Services Agreement), and privacy policy. It took me 1 hour and 45 minutes, I timed it.

Dont be a pussy, do it!