I deeply hate this behavior. Another example: The Health app on iOS has a closeable banner for the "Health Checklist" UI, which gives me the option to turn on things like crash detection, fall detection, etc. All of which are notifications. I hate notifications so I will never turn these on. I dutifully scanned through it the first time and verified everything was turned off, and the banner went away. But like clockwork, the banner comes back every 2 weeks and asks me to go through the checklist again. I suspect there's a "right answer" here. If I consent to turn everything on, it'll stop nagging me. But this badly needs a Never button, not a X button that actually means "nag me again in 2 weeks". I get that some product manager wants their fancy watch features enabled for more users so they can get a promotion, but their career ambitions are degrading my experience.
My grandpa used to say every few years they’d vote on allowing casinos.
And every few years the people of Missouri would vote NO casinos. But one time, they voted to allow the casinos. Then the votes stopped. Hugely manipulative and it feels like this sort of thing is everywhere now.
They did this with a giant new jail and its financing via sales tax in my hometown.
First they bundled it in the regular November election. It failed.
So then they bundled it in a run-off or primary election. It still failed.
Finally they ran it on a solo ballot and it finally passed.
I was like 19 or so. Voted against it every time but that was sort of an eye-opening moment for young me.
It's like p-hacking but with voting. Try enough tests/samples/whatever and eventually you'll get something that's "statisitically significant". Like the old xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/882/
To be fair, when you don't have casinos, you don't have casino taxes, casino employment, casino tourism, etc.
Also, you don't just "have" casinos, building any building of that size is at the very least a multi-month affair and likely multiple years.
So once you say "yes", you've set something in motion that is way harder to unwind than it was to kick off.
Also, I can see it being the casinos themselves asking permission to enter the state. Once they're allowed in, why would they ask to leave? That would be the job of someone else.
YouTube keeps on pushing shorts. If you click the x button on the "shorts" section, it will straight up tell you that it's only hiding the reccomendation for 30 days. They're not even pretending otherwise!
That's not even the worst of it. YouTube has a "shelf" that exists solely to announce that YouTube TV was rated highly in a JD Power consumer survey. It's completely meaningless to users, but that doesn't stop them from trying to show it to you again every few weeks.
Apple's "This video conferencing app just disabled reactions!!!!" notification is just the worst. Every video chat, every app, every time. Ugh!
I even like Apple's reactions implementation, which is pretty good, but there's definitely some PM that wants to push it in my face 10 times every day and I don't know what's worse, the PM doing this fully understanding the cost or whatever system stands aside and lets them continue.
A lot of these things could be useful but there will probably be more false alarms than not to varying degrees. I know I’ve had looks like you had a hard fall alerts that ranged from “huh?” To I landed on my butt from the edge of a bed that I wouldn’t have wanted an ambulance much less a helicopter for.
This is what software freedom means in concrete terms. I wonder if it will be easier to explain the principles of the FLOSS purists to the average person now that multiple facets of their lives are being meddled with by aggressively hostile software, and not just being stung now and then with dropped support, format lock-in, or forced obsolescence.
PMs don't like it when their funnel gets shut off. They hate true rejection and always think the user is just some finagling away from falling down the funnel.
The legislation required is allowing reverse engineering for interoperability. If there was a legal, alternative Youtube frontend that everyone used and didn't do this crap - YouTube's UI would be forced to compete. As it is, writing such a client/frontend (even if you preserve the ads) will probably land you in legal hot water.
See also: how reddit shut down superior competing UIs by changing their API terms.
One can publish their client/frontend pseudonymously, using Tor if necessary. Not like one is gonna profit off it anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
That massively limits your audience. And without something like the EU's Digital Markets Act locked down platforms like iOS would be a non-starter as well.
I don't think YouTube is going to feel compelled to change their UI if 1% of users are using some alternative UI off of Tor.
No, I mean the developer publishes under a pseudonym, and said developer can use Tor if needed to hide their tracks so they can't be served legally, as no one knows who they are in real life. Joe Public isn't risking going to prison or being sued to bankruptcy because they downloaded some random YouTube client, so they don't have to use Tor.
The problem with that is that this is often not a real choice. You don't get to pick individual properties, you get to pick from a (usually pretty small) selection of products which bundle a lot of properties together, and these annoyances are usually not deal-breaking enough to cancel the other reasons why you are using that product.
Often, there simply is no respectful alternative because everyone is doing it, or the respectful alternative is utterly useless due to other issues, or the disrespectful platform is the exclusive distributor for some content that you really want to access.
The platforms/apps know this and generally get more abusive the less alternatives you have.
- Most users just use what is preinstalled on their device. That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
- As the blogpost points out, many people don't even realise there's an option.
- Which sometimes there is not: either literally or in practice. E.g. I'm forced to maintain at the very least a whatsapp and a facebook account to perform basic everyday tasks.
- Finally, what I think is the most important point: these behaviours give a competitive advantage, therefore there needs to be a floor enforced by law. It's much like environmental protections, it's not enough to say "the customers should pick the greener choice", because dumping waste into a river is cheaper than processing it or recycling. You need to enforce a level playing field via laws, to ensure this does not happen.
Don't forget two sided markets. Now that your mother in law is on Facebook and is never going to jump platforms, you are stuck on Facebook.
I find it shocking how many community organizations are completely dependent on Meta. I saw a poster for a club that gets together to play board games that simply had a heading that said "Board Game Club" and a QR code but no meeting times or places, no contact phone, email or web site url. The QR code points to... a Facebook page. If you want to engage with this organization you have no choice but to use Facebook and be subject to their system of pernicious personalization.
Many student organizations at Cornell use Instagram as their primary or only communications tool. There are so many problem with that, not least that you can't engage with that platform without giving a mobile phone number with a real cellular carrier and that doesn't have metadata about events so you get notifications on your phone about events that happened a month ago. It's absurd, but you'd make yourself a hermit if you eschewed these platforms.
> That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
That seems counterfactual when talking about Chrome. Microsoft has tried every trick in the book - short of simply blocking Chrome - to get people using Edge on Windows. It's been somewhat effective, but Chrome still retains a dominant lead. This is entirely due people going out of their way to install Chrome.
That's not inherently the case. Scummy dark patterns like these might show short-term advantages in numbers, but doing that burns user trust.
It's a pretty stark difference between classes of companies. Consider how people feel about Comcast and Facebook, versus how people feel about Stripe and Vanguard. (Random examples of companies with wildly different reputations.)
You think a few niche individuals refusing to use Microsoft os is going to make a noticeable difference in their stats in the slightest? Even apple is a fairly small fraction of that market share and the next smaller option is a rounding error.
I think we’re seeing the effects of Microsoft’s treatment of their users. Windows 11 has been out for years now and we’re a few months away from Windows 10 being unsupported, but 10 is still the most popular version of Windows. I expect that hundreds of millions of users will choose to run 10 unsupported rather than upgrade to 11. Since 11 came out, desktop Linux market share has increased from 1.5% to 4% and Mac OS has seen significant gains as well. I think the more relevant factor is that Microsoft simply doesn’t care. We reached “peak desktop” in the mid-2010s and now Microsoft is simply following the MBA playbook of what to do when you have a widely used product in a market that’s stopped growing (spend the bare minimum on maintenance, redirect revenue to developing products in markets that are growing like cloud and AI services, use your market position to push existing Windows customers to use your new products in growth markets).
I'm not suggesting that a few people doing this is enough, or that individual choice is going to be successful. But I do think it's one of many reasons for people to systematically use Open Source wherever possible, and it's a case study in what you get by doing so.
I once compared the onboarding experience of a previous product I worked on to walking the timeshare gauntlet in the arrivals area of Mexican airports.
While I 100% agree with this, I also think this isn't some sort of failing or "oops didn't think of that!" type mistake -- this behavior is fully on purpose.
They want the user to be worn down until they just accept the notifications or whatever else or even just accidentally click YES on one of the recurrent pop ups.
It is beyond infuriating the number of times a google search misclick on my phone leads me to the app store opening the page for the google app. Same with a reddit page. They know what they're doing and they don't care. And even then you have to manually close that giant banner that covers half your screen to dismiss the nag to download the app-- when the web version works perfectly fine!
Alright time to stop ranting and get back to work :)
Agreed. And it's bad enough within apps... it's even worse the way they use push notifications for this kind of thing. I installed your app so I'd know when my prescriptions are ready, or when my ride is here. Abusing that privilege to upsell me on a credit card by making my phone buzz is infuriating.
I've had to uninstall so many apps because of this bad behavior.
>The population (especially the younger generation, who never seen a different kind of technology at all) is being conditioned by the tech industry to accept that software should behave like an unreliable, manipulative human rather than a precise, predictable machine. They're learning that you can't simply tell a computer
Youtube isn't your computer. It's their computer. And the precise, predictable mechanical command they have given it is to manipulate you.
The way out is employee- and customer-owned non-profit platforms not beholden to private equity or publicly-traded corporations driven to exploit dark patterns.
I've personally witnessed non-profits behave in bizarre and anti-human fashions too, though perhaps not quite to the same intensity as for-profits. I don't believe they're some magical silver-bullet. And "employee-owned" is even more useless in this regard.
The way out is to just not engage. Do you find anything truly appealing about Youtube? If there was some video on it somewhere that was "I can't live without this" good, why haven't you ripped the video with youtube-dl and kept it? It would no longer be a Youtube video, and you'd no longer have to tolerate Youtube's antihuman UI.
The index case is public television on the US which has endless cloying and annoying fundraisers but you know in the end of the day they care what big sponsors like the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation and the The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation think but not "viewers like you" because of these problems
Or look at the case of Mozilla which seems to be at least treading water when it comes to browser engineering but in terms of marketing and legitimacy they seem to be doing as little as possible to threaten Chrome but keep plugging along because if Firefox went down then Google might get pulled into antitrust court. (Think how Microsoft funded Apple during the dark years of the 1990s to keep competition alive or how the existence of Android must have a huge value to Apple today in that Apple can claim it has competition -- competition like the heel in pro wrestling)
Yup. Corporate non-ownership, non-control in consumer products and services is becoming far too normalized. Louis Rossmann regularly points out these absurd, customer-hostile practices.
Companies no longer view their customers as their customers, and I'm not sure I've settled on an explanation that makes sense to me. I only have examples. The biggest one though was Bug Light and the Dylan Mulvaney thing from several years ago. I no longer have a link, but there was a paraphrased quote from the marketing director at the time directly expressing contempt for those who drank Bud Light. But a frustrated expletive, rather a full-on rant about how they were all moronic frat boys and gauche rednecks.
What does it mean when a company has no respect for its own customers, no gratitude, and even measurable levels of what can only be called hatred? I don't know the answer to that question, but that's the world we all live in this year of 2025. And I can't imagine it could possibly turn out well for any of us.
I am not sure you’re making a reasonable or realistic argument when you are saying that someone should risk or give up their job, personal security, and stability of their family rather than implement a button to turn off iPhone notifications.
I don’t disagree with the principle at all, but if it’s ever going to change the conversation has to start somewhere rational. “Destroy your life because your UI offends me” isn’t it.
I deeply hate this behavior. Another example: The Health app on iOS has a closeable banner for the "Health Checklist" UI, which gives me the option to turn on things like crash detection, fall detection, etc. All of which are notifications. I hate notifications so I will never turn these on. I dutifully scanned through it the first time and verified everything was turned off, and the banner went away. But like clockwork, the banner comes back every 2 weeks and asks me to go through the checklist again. I suspect there's a "right answer" here. If I consent to turn everything on, it'll stop nagging me. But this badly needs a Never button, not a X button that actually means "nag me again in 2 weeks". I get that some product manager wants their fancy watch features enabled for more users so they can get a promotion, but their career ambitions are degrading my experience.
My grandpa used to say every few years they’d vote on allowing casinos.
And every few years the people of Missouri would vote NO casinos. But one time, they voted to allow the casinos. Then the votes stopped. Hugely manipulative and it feels like this sort of thing is everywhere now.
They did this with a giant new jail and its financing via sales tax in my hometown.
First they bundled it in the regular November election. It failed. So then they bundled it in a run-off or primary election. It still failed. Finally they ran it on a solo ballot and it finally passed.
I was like 19 or so. Voted against it every time but that was sort of an eye-opening moment for young me.
From a memorable villain monologue:
> all we need... is for one of us, just one, sooner or later to have the thing we're all hoping for. One good day.
It's like p-hacking but with voting. Try enough tests/samples/whatever and eventually you'll get something that's "statisitically significant". Like the old xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/882/
It's not just casinos. It's also the Constitution. And they've had over 200 years.
To be fair, when you don't have casinos, you don't have casino taxes, casino employment, casino tourism, etc.
Also, you don't just "have" casinos, building any building of that size is at the very least a multi-month affair and likely multiple years.
So once you say "yes", you've set something in motion that is way harder to unwind than it was to kick off.
Also, I can see it being the casinos themselves asking permission to enter the state. Once they're allowed in, why would they ask to leave? That would be the job of someone else.
In other words, we should let powerful corporations control the agenda of democracy, not the demos (that is, the people)?
There are also negatives that come with casinos. The taxes are nice but the crime isn't.
Would be interesting to know who petitioned for the votes.
YouTube keeps on pushing shorts. If you click the x button on the "shorts" section, it will straight up tell you that it's only hiding the reccomendation for 30 days. They're not even pretending otherwise!
That's not even the worst of it. YouTube has a "shelf" that exists solely to announce that YouTube TV was rated highly in a JD Power consumer survey. It's completely meaningless to users, but that doesn't stop them from trying to show it to you again every few weeks.
Which makes me feel much better about using yt-dlp, SponsorBlock, and Brave.
Apple's "This video conferencing app just disabled reactions!!!!" notification is just the worst. Every video chat, every app, every time. Ugh!
I even like Apple's reactions implementation, which is pretty good, but there's definitely some PM that wants to push it in my face 10 times every day and I don't know what's worse, the PM doing this fully understanding the cost or whatever system stands aside and lets them continue.
A lot of these things could be useful but there will probably be more false alarms than not to varying degrees. I know I’ve had looks like you had a hard fall alerts that ranged from “huh?” To I landed on my butt from the edge of a bed that I wouldn’t have wanted an ambulance much less a helicopter for.
Related joke going around right now:
Does Microsoft understand consent? Yes / Ask me again later
In general, options like "never ask me again" seem to have disappeared, and we should bring them back.
This is what software freedom means in concrete terms. I wonder if it will be easier to explain the principles of the FLOSS purists to the average person now that multiple facets of their lives are being meddled with by aggressively hostile software, and not just being stung now and then with dropped support, format lock-in, or forced obsolescence.
PMs don't like it when their funnel gets shut off. They hate true rejection and always think the user is just some finagling away from falling down the funnel.
And they don't understand that respecting users (and non-users) has value, and changes how people see your company.
Legislation will be necessary. Otherwise, why would they bother?
The legislation required is allowing reverse engineering for interoperability. If there was a legal, alternative Youtube frontend that everyone used and didn't do this crap - YouTube's UI would be forced to compete. As it is, writing such a client/frontend (even if you preserve the ads) will probably land you in legal hot water.
See also: how reddit shut down superior competing UIs by changing their API terms.
One can publish their client/frontend pseudonymously, using Tor if necessary. Not like one is gonna profit off it anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
That massively limits your audience. And without something like the EU's Digital Markets Act locked down platforms like iOS would be a non-starter as well.
I don't think YouTube is going to feel compelled to change their UI if 1% of users are using some alternative UI off of Tor.
No, I mean the developer publishes under a pseudonym, and said developer can use Tor if needed to hide their tracks so they can't be served legally, as no one knows who they are in real life. Joe Public isn't risking going to prison or being sued to bankruptcy because they downloaded some random YouTube client, so they don't have to use Tor.
Or refusing to use software that does this kind of thing, and using more respectful software instead.
The problem with that is that this is often not a real choice. You don't get to pick individual properties, you get to pick from a (usually pretty small) selection of products which bundle a lot of properties together, and these annoyances are usually not deal-breaking enough to cancel the other reasons why you are using that product.
Often, there simply is no respectful alternative because everyone is doing it, or the respectful alternative is utterly useless due to other issues, or the disrespectful platform is the exclusive distributor for some content that you really want to access.
The platforms/apps know this and generally get more abusive the less alternatives you have.
Many problems with that approach.
- Most users just use what is preinstalled on their device. That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
- As the blogpost points out, many people don't even realise there's an option.
- Which sometimes there is not: either literally or in practice. E.g. I'm forced to maintain at the very least a whatsapp and a facebook account to perform basic everyday tasks.
- Finally, what I think is the most important point: these behaviours give a competitive advantage, therefore there needs to be a floor enforced by law. It's much like environmental protections, it's not enough to say "the customers should pick the greener choice", because dumping waste into a river is cheaper than processing it or recycling. You need to enforce a level playing field via laws, to ensure this does not happen.
Don't forget two sided markets. Now that your mother in law is on Facebook and is never going to jump platforms, you are stuck on Facebook.
I find it shocking how many community organizations are completely dependent on Meta. I saw a poster for a club that gets together to play board games that simply had a heading that said "Board Game Club" and a QR code but no meeting times or places, no contact phone, email or web site url. The QR code points to... a Facebook page. If you want to engage with this organization you have no choice but to use Facebook and be subject to their system of pernicious personalization.
Many student organizations at Cornell use Instagram as their primary or only communications tool. There are so many problem with that, not least that you can't engage with that platform without giving a mobile phone number with a real cellular carrier and that doesn't have metadata about events so you get notifications on your phone about events that happened a month ago. It's absurd, but you'd make yourself a hermit if you eschewed these platforms.
> That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
That seems counterfactual when talking about Chrome. Microsoft has tried every trick in the book - short of simply blocking Chrome - to get people using Edge on Windows. It's been somewhat effective, but Chrome still retains a dominant lead. This is entirely due people going out of their way to install Chrome.
[dead]
> these behaviours give a competitive advantage
That's not inherently the case. Scummy dark patterns like these might show short-term advantages in numbers, but doing that burns user trust.
It's a pretty stark difference between classes of companies. Consider how people feel about Comcast and Facebook, versus how people feel about Stripe and Vanguard. (Random examples of companies with wildly different reputations.)
Comcast and Facebook are B2C companies while Microsoft is also B2B, where this problem is most pervasive.
Facebook is B2B when it comes to advertising and also its use as a communications and promotional tool outside of advertising.
You think a few niche individuals refusing to use Microsoft os is going to make a noticeable difference in their stats in the slightest? Even apple is a fairly small fraction of that market share and the next smaller option is a rounding error.
I think we’re seeing the effects of Microsoft’s treatment of their users. Windows 11 has been out for years now and we’re a few months away from Windows 10 being unsupported, but 10 is still the most popular version of Windows. I expect that hundreds of millions of users will choose to run 10 unsupported rather than upgrade to 11. Since 11 came out, desktop Linux market share has increased from 1.5% to 4% and Mac OS has seen significant gains as well. I think the more relevant factor is that Microsoft simply doesn’t care. We reached “peak desktop” in the mid-2010s and now Microsoft is simply following the MBA playbook of what to do when you have a widely used product in a market that’s stopped growing (spend the bare minimum on maintenance, redirect revenue to developing products in markets that are growing like cloud and AI services, use your market position to push existing Windows customers to use your new products in growth markets).
I'm not suggesting that a few people doing this is enough, or that individual choice is going to be successful. But I do think it's one of many reasons for people to systematically use Open Source wherever possible, and it's a case study in what you get by doing so.
I once compared the onboarding experience of a previous product I worked on to walking the timeshare gauntlet in the arrivals area of Mexican airports.
While I 100% agree with this, I also think this isn't some sort of failing or "oops didn't think of that!" type mistake -- this behavior is fully on purpose.
They want the user to be worn down until they just accept the notifications or whatever else or even just accidentally click YES on one of the recurrent pop ups.
It is beyond infuriating the number of times a google search misclick on my phone leads me to the app store opening the page for the google app. Same with a reddit page. They know what they're doing and they don't care. And even then you have to manually close that giant banner that covers half your screen to dismiss the nag to download the app-- when the web version works perfectly fine!
Alright time to stop ranting and get back to work :)
From the title I assumed it was going to be about LLMs!
Agreed. And it's bad enough within apps... it's even worse the way they use push notifications for this kind of thing. I installed your app so I'd know when my prescriptions are ready, or when my ride is here. Abusing that privilege to upsell me on a credit card by making my phone buzz is infuriating.
I've had to uninstall so many apps because of this bad behavior.
>The population (especially the younger generation, who never seen a different kind of technology at all) is being conditioned by the tech industry to accept that software should behave like an unreliable, manipulative human rather than a precise, predictable machine. They're learning that you can't simply tell a computer
Youtube isn't your computer. It's their computer. And the precise, predictable mechanical command they have given it is to manipulate you.
The way out is employee- and customer-owned non-profit platforms not beholden to private equity or publicly-traded corporations driven to exploit dark patterns.
I've personally witnessed non-profits behave in bizarre and anti-human fashions too, though perhaps not quite to the same intensity as for-profits. I don't believe they're some magical silver-bullet. And "employee-owned" is even more useless in this regard.
The way out is to just not engage. Do you find anything truly appealing about Youtube? If there was some video on it somewhere that was "I can't live without this" good, why haven't you ripped the video with youtube-dl and kept it? It would no longer be a Youtube video, and you'd no longer have to tolerate Youtube's antihuman UI.
The index case is public television on the US which has endless cloying and annoying fundraisers but you know in the end of the day they care what big sponsors like the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation and the The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation think but not "viewers like you" because of these problems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Or look at the case of Mozilla which seems to be at least treading water when it comes to browser engineering but in terms of marketing and legitimacy they seem to be doing as little as possible to threaten Chrome but keep plugging along because if Firefox went down then Google might get pulled into antitrust court. (Think how Microsoft funded Apple during the dark years of the 1990s to keep competition alive or how the existence of Android must have a huge value to Apple today in that Apple can claim it has competition -- competition like the heel in pro wrestling)
“Funded by the CPB, a private corporation funded by the American people.”
Of all the interstitials PBS had, this one was by far the oddest.
Public broadcasting in the US is in deep denial about being state media.
That works great for the one you already have, how would you discover future "I can't live without this" good videos if you stop using YouTube?
Yup. Corporate non-ownership, non-control in consumer products and services is becoming far too normalized. Louis Rossmann regularly points out these absurd, customer-hostile practices.
>these absurd, customer-hostile practices
Companies no longer view their customers as their customers, and I'm not sure I've settled on an explanation that makes sense to me. I only have examples. The biggest one though was Bug Light and the Dylan Mulvaney thing from several years ago. I no longer have a link, but there was a paraphrased quote from the marketing director at the time directly expressing contempt for those who drank Bud Light. But a frustrated expletive, rather a full-on rant about how they were all moronic frat boys and gauche rednecks.
What does it mean when a company has no respect for its own customers, no gratitude, and even measurable levels of what can only be called hatred? I don't know the answer to that question, but that's the world we all live in this year of 2025. And I can't imagine it could possibly turn out well for any of us.
Why are UX designers getting the heat? The PM is the one forcing their hand.
Like everyone else, UX designers have a choice to follow unethical orders or refuse them.
Yes yes, labor market, visas, etc. It's still a choice to do something evil, even if you're coerced.
There are degrees of evil though, surely?
I am not sure you’re making a reasonable or realistic argument when you are saying that someone should risk or give up their job, personal security, and stability of their family rather than implement a button to turn off iPhone notifications.
I don’t disagree with the principle at all, but if it’s ever going to change the conversation has to start somewhere rational. “Destroy your life because your UI offends me” isn’t it.
Programmers are pretty innocent, but UX Designers by trade should disallow dark patterns that worsen User's eXperience, right?
Just following orders amirite
Got it!