Know what really annoys me? People who act like they're afraid to say the names of websites they don't like. Instead they'll say things like "the orange site," "the bird site," "the site that mysteriously showed up one day when I opened my browser, whose URL consisted of eldritch sigils unknown to Unicode, and which showed nothing but looped videos of horrific visions of a future outside the protection of divine providence, to the tune of the anguished keenings of souls damned to eternal torment, while my monitor began slowly dripping blood."
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If there were a search engine that simply archives crawled web pages in a database that I could then query with SQL and regular expressions, I would pay so much money for it. I'm sick of every single search engine -- yes, including your favorite one, Mr. Reply Guy -- having a terrible natural language interface that prioritizes "giving lots of results" over "giving the one result you were looking for". No matter how generously you use quotes and minus signs, they all return pages that don't contain phrases you explicitly said you want to see, and do contain phrases you explicitly said you don't want to see.
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Seriously, I've been seeing all the "Bluesky vs. Mastodon" posts and "What features do we need to add to Mastodon to compete with Bluesky?" and "will Gargron let those changes happen?"
And all I can think is "just stop using Mastodon! I did!"
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The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing us he didn't exist.
And by "the devil" I mean "Gargron," and by "he" I mean "ActivityPub software besides Mastodon"
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I know I'm not the first to suggest that the cookie warnings mandated by the #GDPR do more harm than good. They're annoying, and they tend to make it much easier to accept than reject cookies (for example, the pattern where it's one click to accept but the other button is just "review preferences" which takes you to a whole new page full of confusing options). Really all they do is train people to automatically click "OK" on anything that pops up at the bottom of the page without reading it. Even relatively security-conscious but not quite paranoid people tend to think that cookie-related risks are low compared to the annoyance of taking the time to deal with cookie preferences every time you visit a website.
Which brings me to dev dot to, one of many Medium-like blogging websites, mostly focusing on software stuff. A lot of articles from there get shared on lobste.rs, or come up when I search for software-related things. So I click on links to their articles a lot, usually before I notice the source.
They have a popup that appears exactly where and when the cookie warning would normally go, with an obvious "OK" button and a much less obvious X in the top right corner. Except it's not a cookie warning. It's an invitation to "thank the author". If you click on it, you're asked to create an account or log in. Pretty much every time I go to one of their articles I get as far as the login screen before I realize that wasn't a cookie warning.
This is not cool of dev dot to, as I'm sure the similarity to cookie warnings was intentional. I have absolutely no desire to join a site that wants to trick me into signing up.
But it also shows how useless the GDPR cookie warnings are. It would have been more effective to mandate that all computer monitors have a warning engraved at the top that says "WEBSITES CAN STORE INFORMATION ON YOUR COMPUTER AND USE IT TO TRACK YOU. THEY PRETTY MUCH ALL DO THIS UNLESS YOU EXPLICITLY TELL THEM NOT TO. SOME OF THEM DON'T LISTEN EVEN THEN. HELL, FACEBOOK CAN TRACK YOU EVEN IF YOU'VE NEVER HAD AN ACCOUNT AND HAVE NEVER VISITED ANY OF THEIR SITES. YOU SHOULD PROBABLY TURN THIS MACHINE OFF AND FLEE TO THE WILDERNESS, OR ACCEPT THE GRIM REALITY THAT PRIVACY IS A FORGOTTEN RELIC OF A BYGONE AGE."
It makes me wonder what even more insidious things people have tried to do with popups masquerading as GDPR warnings. I'm sure there's some sleazy cryptoporn viagra casino site somewhere with a popup that asks you to consent to joining a multi-level marketing scheme and commit to selling a thousand jars of Antioxident Groin Wax.
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Here's a question for anyone else who uses #iceshrimp (and maybe #firefish or other #misskey equivalents, idk):
I only use the web client, mostly on mobile. And every time I post or boost something, I hear an annoying boop. If I happen to be listening to audio from another app at the time, it stops it cold to give me the vital news that I just posted something.
I do not want my Fediverse client to make any sounds whatsoever at any time. Yet I've tried all the notification- or sound-related settings I can find, and the boops keep coming. Is it possible to turn them off?
(As an aside, when designing any UI, always ask, "Is there a reason for this to make noise?" And unless it's an audio or video player or tool for the visually impaired, the answer is almost always "No." And even if the answer is "yes," unless it's an alarm warning you of mortal peril, it should always be easily disabled by the end user.)
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