eBay stops me from typing in the thing I want to search for so they can try to persuade me to use the app that I have expressed zero interest in for a decade or so. Guys, I'm trying to press money into your thieving little hands - why are you trying to stop me?

They see it as a win because you've still been using their site for a decade now, and every time they advertise their app there's still a non-zero chance you'll relent, but if they stop pushing their app, that chance drops to zero.

The only winning move is not to play.

Ah yes, I shall use that other auction site. Which was it again?

Make your own. You could even scrape auctions from eBay. You might think it's impossible but every other country seems to have a homegrown one, and not many people habitually go to eBay.

You can't scrape network effects. People don't want to buy something, they want to buy a specific thing and that is only available if there are enough users on the site for one of them to have your specific niche item. And no, not all countries have an equivalent with a user-base that even comes close to eBay.

Many per-country ‘competitors’ are actually owned by eBay.

Such as Tradera in Sweden where I live (they don't try to make me install the app on Tradera at least).

If I'm buying random funkis furniture or computer bits and bobs I can probably use Tradera, and if I want fancy furniture or jewlery or something then there are coalitions of auction houses like Auctionet out there - but as soon as something gets even mildly obscure then there's nothing that has the reach and coverage of eBay.

Starting a new online auction site sounds like a terrific way to throw money away.

It’s a two-sided marketplace, it’d take heaps of cash to crack.

whitehouse.gov

These little easter eggs are why I read the comment section down to the Nth level of nesting.

And then uninstall the app...

Reminds me of Austin Powers:

21! Blackjack,

"Hit me!"

"...but Austin!"

"I also like to live, dangerously."

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.

Whichever devs implemented the Instagram behaviour ought to have their computer taken off them.

100% the worst experience. “Oh you don’t have the app? No big deal, let’s (maybe) play the video anyway but remove the audio, obscure half the screen, and make any interaction redirect and then bounce to the App Store. Why won’t you download our app already????”

They have to be pushy, it's how they install spyware which use tracking methods that would be a CFAA violation and prison time for anyone else: https://localmess.github.io/

Thank you for this information

I don't use IG but my girl does and she likes to show me things. She does use the app and it drives me absolutely nuts how she tries to show me a video or image and I can't actually see/read the main point of it because there's a million gizmos (buttons etc) in the way that seem like they can't be hidden. Like actually 30% of the video is obscured by this pointless crap.

I've been told Zuckerberg - as opposed to murdering competition in the crib, despite him being ON RECORD IN EMAILS as saying 'they can hurt us' - bought a company that was barely anything. It "had 12 employees" or whatever. How they've "grown it" or whatever. Not what I see. I see it as competition killing. People really liked IG... in 2012. Now it's a poster child (or is that Whatsapp?) for antitrust

I figure if they can't make a functioning website, the odds they can make an app are basically zero.

You can have Firefox and struggle with apps BUT you visit Instagram? This is actually possible both in one person? Wow.

You don't have a group chat where friends are posting memes and videos?

I decided to not use Facebook.

I don't even want to argue whether you should be this guy or that guy. It's the mixture that excited me. :)

If you are on Facebook, you don't need to care what browser to use and you don't need to struggle with apps. Either have your own opinion and try to be consistent, credible and reliable with its implementation. Or be a good Normie. Eat Facebook - but take it as it's served to you.

Don't tell yourself and people around you a story of someone who cares, when in fact you use Facebook.

People share links to Instagram with me. It isn't something I seek out myself.

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.

DO IT! They probably do not even consider the idea that they would lose customers due to UX. Lower rates, promotions, change of circumstances, but there probably isn't a checkmark in their loss of customer forms that include we made our user interface worse.

Meh, WF already has their info, they just create 3 more accounts for every one that is closed.

Opening accounts like that might benefit the associate who gets credit for them, but money is the metric that actually counts.

And if nothing else, leaving a company whose service sucks doesn't need to send a message, it's just moving so the service you receive improves.

You should stop using Wells Fargo anyway. It's been what, nine months since their last national scandal? They're overdue.

You can try to stop using Wells Fargo, but they won't let you. They'll just open more accounts for you

When my wife and I finally got rid of our Wells Fargo accounts -- having sold our house and thus eliminated that mortgage, and having already moved our personal banking to a credit union -- we legitimately celebrated by going out to dinner.

Sounds like that feature would really cut into their overdraft fees.

Some Fucking MBA (SFMBA) heard that apps build customer loyalty and increase eyeball time on their sites, so now their company needs an app.

Repeat (without rinsing).

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.

Its always confusing to me since I'm already accesing it through an app.

Have you ever noticed that nothing is actually ever better in the app. In the web browser I can change to desktop mode and access all the features they don't have in the app, also in the browser I can block ads.

And tabs! Browsers have tabs. None of the "apps" I use seem to comprehend that I might want to look at or do more than one thing at a time with them

Actually, it is. Your behavior can be tracked better, re-engagement through push notifications and ads. It's just not better for you. But aren't we all trying to maximize shareholder value anyway?

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.

YouTube does something that makes me irate: it saves the abusive autoplay settings only locally per device. There is no way to set it in your account, so every time I log back in I have to disable autoplaying thumbnails and autoplay next video. Every. Single. Time.

I think a lot of people get progressively worn down by things like this, but for me I actually get angrier each time it happens. It's probably good I no longer work at Google because I would probably feel genuinely enticed to find whoever is most responsible for this and engage in psychological warfare.

Yeah it’s definitely passive aggressive and those people must be stopped.

But I think it’s sometimes by management design. Scrum makes it pretty easy to keep devs permanently off balance so they can’t think about how wrong what we are building is. Maybe that person really is a piece of work, but maybe they just have never had time to think about how dumb that decision was and go fix it. Similar to you, I’m glad I don’t know where Ken Schwaber lives or when he’s presenting because I’d probably call him a traitor to his stupid face.

I am now very interested in the second and first dumbest smart people you have worked with. You can't keep us hanging!

I know the Brave browser can be set to always request the desktop version of the site. Whether or not the website respects that or not may vary. And yes, on iOS.

It's also effectively youtube premium for free as in beer. Lovely browser.

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.

I don’t know if this site did something tricky or if it is something about how I access it, but the switch doesn’t persist.

There a two dropdown menu options for "request desktop" in my Safari, in that menu. Translations might be imprecise because I use German locale.

But one is in a section called "Website actions", then there's another one in a section named "Website settings".

I didn't even notice it myself until now.

In earlier versions (before Liquid glass redesign I guess, which enlarged all dropdown paddings), the latter was called "always request Desktop site for xyz".

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.

Nah, it isn’t Reddit. I actually removed Reddit from my search results once they stopped allowing me to use the old interface.

It’s just some random job board that happens to be popular in my niche for whatever reason.

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.

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.

Yes, but it now requires you to have an account.

And sometimes even to verify with Persona.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sink-it-for-reddit/id644987363... Here is an iOS safari extension that helps mitigate their bs. Just putting this out there for people.

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.

How is the Reddit mobile site worse than this obvious satirical site? I ended up using ublock to zap the annoying Reddit thing because it was annoying to keep going to old.reddit when people sent me links.