The web is a beautiful open standard. So naturally, we do what we can to completely break or at least bend those standards as needed. Without a doubt, one of the most brutal ways we do that is with dialog boxes that never, ever, go away. I’m talking about the hostile architecture of the web. I bet your clicker finger is getting sore just thinking about them.
With the introduction of GDPR, we got several good things. Even as a marketer I can admit that better user privacy and data deletion are good things. The worst things we got are these maddening cookie consent boxes. They are absolute garbage and unnecessary. Even worse is when you do consent and then return to the site the next day you have to re-consent again! Isn’t that the whole fucking point of the damn cookie? To remember that I consented and said yes?
Oh, and you will consent either way.
You will accept cookies as your lord and savior if they ask you to. Because not to consent would mean clicking 3 more dialog boxes, adjusting several radio switches, and finally confirming your selection. No one has time for that. Even when cookies are involved.
Another example is the pushers to various things like trying to get you to install an app or notify in you some other channel. Sites like this make their mobile web experiences extra crappy so you’re even more incentivized to get that native app and subscribe to that whatever. That way they can give you a better experience in the form of sucking yet more data from your life. Unfortunately, if you don’t want what they are pushing you’ll still be reminded of it, daily, until you die or stop using that site altogether. Whatever comes first. Marketers could easily put a frequency cap on such things, or make them a one time notification. But we don’t, because we’re some combination of greedy, lazy, or just sadistic.
There was an air of hope for those sore fingers everywhere when Google said it would punish bad sites with too many pop-up dialogs and hidden content via their Core Web Vitals scoring. Finally, sites that put the actual content first would be rewarded. However, when I googled ‘core web vitals’ one of the top results was the below Forbes article.
I guess those vitals ain’t so core after all.
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