While it is no secret that exploitative practices are interlaced with capitalistic tendencies, the practices are becoming intolerable. Signing up to pay usually takes only two clicks that are prominently visible whereas cancelation options are hidden away in deep settings requiring multiple clicks. Pricing often feel arbitrary with no reference points. Every large company grows with the intention of exhibiting monopolistic behavior. This is not sustainable and should not be tolerated.
It’s happening everywhere, totally unchecked.
if you didn’t steal it, you dont own it. fuck these companies.
until more people take that attitude; problem only gets worse.
We don’t need a shitty youtuber to tell us what we’ve known for years?
It’s for the majority of people that didn’t woke up yet
It’s actually a really well made and comprehensive video that will undoubtedly be a wake up call to lots of people.
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Arun knows his stuff.
Are you complaining because the video was posted here or because it was made in the first place? Maybe this community doesn’t need it, but there are a lot of people out there with not much awareness of what’s happening in this realm.
i also posted this lol
Can we name, shame and review bomb companies that do this?
It’d be easier to list the companies that don’t.
What companies don’t do this?
The gas companies. Don’t want to buy gas anymore? Don’t go to the gas station. No contract needed.
I mean, gas is the original surge pricing commodity, they have had dark patterns in their pricing long before other companies.
Oh.
Considering the main oil companies LITERALLY engage in price fixing, openly.
Yeah, I noticed.
Corporations were allowed to incorporate in the public’s best interest. If they are no longer operating as such they should be dissolved.
This should be the top comment. Corporations should not be allowed to play the game of ‘let’s see how long we can get away with this’.
Skipping a month of Humble Choice is an exercise in gotchas. Sometimes the blue button, sometimes not, about 5 confirmation screens to skip through.
I don’t know why I’m still subbed in all honestly.
It took me a long time to cancel but I finally did because I’d been skipping for every month over the course of maybe two years. I had found out that the classic plan doesn’t even have an advantage anymore, so there was no point in me maintaining that.
I should do the same, tbh.
Most of the higher profile games either get given away on Epic a few months later, or are already included in PSPlus.
Barely have time to play them anyway.
Same here.
Luckily the payment method I had used has expired so every month they remind me to skip the month if I missed doing it. They call it something different but I know what they really mean ʘ‿ʘ
Sounds like you’re just terrible at gotchas
The guy use to take 120 mile UBERs, between cities. Of course it will be very expensive.
What does the fact that it was expensive original have to do with it? He used to pay 120 and now it’s over 350. Those are two entirely different levels of expensive.
Jio Telecom here provides WiFi in my area which we can use to place call through our phones without data pack, but man the permissions that app asks are illogical.
To be fair proper integration of an aftermarket VoIP app requires almost every permission a phone has, especially if the app wants to mirror your caller ID, and supports SMS and attaching various media.
This is actually good. There’s finally more room for good services offered by smaller companies that care about users.
This would require the possibility of competition, which is generally forbidden widely due to lobbying, the consequential weakening of antitrust laws, and the follow-on massive consolidation on a scale that history has never seen before.
Maybe in theory but not in 2024. You’re only allowed to compete until you moon a giant, then you’re screwed.
this reminds me of what happened to the instagram cofounders when zuckerberg asked to buy their company:
Systrom [cofounder] said he feared turning down an acquisition offer from Facebook would send Zuckerberg into “destroy mode” — a concern that Cohler [early investor] affirmed.
(source)
this stuff came up in a court hearing, and then nothing happened about it
They have nothing to fear, no need to compete. They simply dominate and extract rent.
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Antitrust laws and lobbying exist in many countries. You know there are more countries than just the U.S., right?
There’s this thing called multinational corporations that transcend the boundaries of a country. It varies, but this is a global problem. See issues like housing and the cost of food.
Bless your heart
How’s the weather in the reality you live in?
I moved to a smaller company for certain services. Now that small company gets bought up by a big company and the services are discontinued. Back to big tech it is.
Freaking Ironic using a VPN as a sponsorship for this video… VPN landscape is literary riddled with Dark Patterns. Surfshark are also guilty of applying these.
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Usually the best way to go about things!
Most of the VPN ads simply lie as well. “Get more Netflix” except Netflix blocks most popular VPNs extremely quickly. “Be anonymous online” means “we can see all your activity.” Etc.
That’s not even what pisses me off the most about the whole situation. I’m upset that my friends and family don’t care.
That’s because your perspective is quite skewed if you think about it.
To many many people, being at a level where issues such as “dark patterns in muh apps” is a big thing that might annoy them in their life would be absolute heaven. That means all their big issues are long solved and they got the mental and physical capability spare to worry about such, comparatively menial, issues.
If your health is struggling, whether to accept cookies or not (at least digital ones) is really the least of your worries. Especially given that the vast vast majority wouldn’t know what it means either way, or even why it is a thing that anybody would ever care about. It’s like how you don’t care, until reading this sentence now, which parts of the print of a grocery product packaging inks are biodegradable and which are not and hence whether you should throw that empty cardboard box on your compost heap or actually shouldn’t do that.
gestures to everything else I mean… we are fucking drowning in situations to care about.
And I’ve stopped caring about nearly all of them.
Not really much I can do about it, so why worry?
…fuckkkk. that’s fair.
…and then your friend and family don’t care about those either 🙃
I do think some of this is just fatigue. The usual way to deal with this is to either pick one or a few things to try to actively address, or just buckle down and wait for things to improve. Both lead naturally to a situation where it’s hard to get a critical mass of people to respond on any one subject.
But at a certain point, it’s still a cop out. And part of the trick. If you drown anyone in enough bullshit, you can’t expect it to all get called out – but that doesn’t mean it’s not all bullshit. It is divide and conquer in another form.
How so? You can’t work on everything at the same time. And the more immediate and direct an issue is, the more it needs your direct focus.
Meaning that issues such as dark patterns in cookie signups are automatically lowest-tier-ever-for-once-I-got-fuck-all-left-to-worry-about.
There is no war other then class war. It all ties back into our way of life. People don’t like to think about it because it’s such a huge cultural and political shift to fix it, that they can more easily imagine a post apocalyptic future. Rather then a future where you and your children aren’t exploited from cradle to grave.
Covid has shown the world that we can drown the world in bullshit. Before that, people used to care more and companies had a name to lose, now there’s just apathy and greed left.
I short of have a theory with this. There’s this belief that “netflix killed piracy” because they provided an actual service with a fair price and the commodity that people wanted to watch shows. And that later on, it got enshittified. But I kinda think that, collaterally, a very important factor that explains people not even knowing how to download a torrent or having 0 critical mind when it comes to the other companies abusing their power has been the surge of smartphones
They were designed to have idiot-proof protection, but more and more they distanced newer generations from having a minimal technical background on how to use computers, which then leads to a more ignorant society incapable of saying no to such companies
I’m not saying this has been the main factor but I have my suspicions to believe it might be related
This is such a good observation. We all assumed the “digital natives” generation was going to be able to just be hacker-level familiar with technology. And for those who grew up with just PCs, it’s probably true. But the “smartphone native” generation followed so quickly it changed the learning patterns. They understand tech generally and specific apps, but get lost with troubleshooting general problems because computers became appliances.
Scary to think but…Are the same young people who a decade ago were tech support for their parents and grandparents going to have to also do it for their adult children and grandchildren?
the bad news is that, despite growing up with pc’s and having had some level of troubleshooting skill as a result, i have forgotten most of it in the last 10 years as computing/tech has become pushy and handholdy. i suspect this is not uncommon.
edit - but i still miss xp. 😔
I am running into this problem at work all the time! I am a Millennial who does corporate training for new recruits in a field that we will almost completely train you on. I.e. you don’t have to have a specific degree or certification because we’ll train you on the job.
I have found that almost all of the Gen Z hires don’t have more than a basic level of computer literacy. They didn’t learn the hard way in middle school that if you don’t save your essay, it will be deleted. They had auto-save. They don’t how to ctrl+alt+delete to get to their task manager to force shut down a frozen program because they (often) used chromebooks or phones/tablets where it was basically an internet machine that could be restarted if need be, but didn’t have more involved software. They have never had to troubleshoot issues with burning data onto a CD (archaic, I know, but our job requires it). They don’t know how to format a lot of things in Word because Google docs does a lot of it for you (or doesn’t even have the option). Hell, they don’t always know what a proper address on a letter looks like because they don’t send snail mail - although this only relates to tech in the formatting and printing of letters.
So now I’m training them on the new material they have to learn for the job, but also computer intricacies that I learned in middle school on my Gateway computer with like 1 gig of ram and floppy disks. When you needed to format something perfectly for school, but nothing was user friendly, you had to learn a lot of weird tricks and workarounds.
They are generally still better at using the computer than Gen X or Boomers, but the Millenials get computers on a different level because we grew with the tech. Gen Z can pick up new software quicker, but still don’t always get how things actually work.
I also thought that as true digital natives, they would know a lot more than they actually do. I agree with the likelihood that we will more than likely have to translate for our elders and the younger generation as well.
It’s definitely a thing.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
Yes! Exactly this!
I would have to agree. Dumb shit like “brand loyalty” probably comes into play as well.
Has anyone here noticed how it’s almost impossible to watch a TikTok on mobile if you don’t have an account or the app? My friend sends me links and I click it but the website opens playing it muted and it only plays the TikTok one time, no repeating. Then it prompts me to install the app. If I say I don’t want to the unmute button disappears and I’m unable to play the TikTok again with sound. The only way to do it is to refresh which just prompts me to download the app again after being played the TikTok one time with no sound. Aggravating as all hell.
Most of my friends know better than to send me TikTok links. But for the few who still do, I use this open source frontend called ProxiTok.
To get TikTok links to redirect automatically on click, use the LibRedirect extension.
This all seems a little advanced for me. Is there a way to do this on phones?
Don’t worry, it’s not complicated at all. A little inconvenient maybe, but that’s always the trade-off when it comes to privacy and security.
Here are the two most convenient ways that I can think of on each OS.
iOS: Bookmark the frontend URL. When you get sent a link, pop open the page and paste the TikTok URL.
Android: Get Firefox and set it as your default browser. Install the LibRedirect add-on (browser extension). Whenever you get sent a URL, just tap it and it’ll automatically get redirected to the privacy-friendly frontend.
How long until that sort of thing goes the way of Bibliogram/Barinsta?
Only time will tell.
I know this one also went down recently for Instagram: proxigram.privacyfrontends.repl.co
But I’m not sure if it was an Instagram change that did it, or Replit took it down or what.
I’ve been searching for a solution to this exact problem. My partner sends links occasionally and I always ignore because of how the web interface is blatantly hostile. Tried routing the links through MPV on android but no dice.
If anyone has a solution please share.
See my comment above
Not if you just ignore the link
I hate tik tok but I also have actual friends and I am not gonna be a dick to them about what link they sent me
ADA lawsuits can fix that.
