I'm thoroughly done with my choices being only "yes" or "not now"
I've noticed this changing over the years from my options when interfacing with a website or app going from "yes" or "no", to "yes" or "maybe later". I've tipped over the point from being mildly annoyed by this trend to now being angry about it.
Navigate to my bank's web portal to pay bills, "did you want to try and qualify for this new Visa card?"
Launch and use an app, "leave a rating!"
It's even a part of Windows now. When running through update prompts, setting up a Microsoft account is "yes" or "remind me in 3 days". The answer is no thank you!
I want to be able say no! And don't ask me anymore, ever again! How often should a product be allowed to nag you into doing something you have absolutely no intention of doing? It feels like a situation where the dial on the nags could just keep getting turned up to try and force people into just submitting into whatever it is they're nagging us to do. They'll just keep prompting you over and over until you get fed up and just say yes.
Is this mindset actively being pushed by large companies to take away our ability to say no, and stop asking? Are there rules in place for this kind of thing?
It's a dark pattern that crops up when companies aren't allowed to skirt around "opt-in" rules for various reasons.
I worked in the ad industry at a particularly seedy company for a while where I ended up on the "desktop and mobile" team, which essentially made all its money through deals to distribute malware via a custom software installer. We'd go find some popular free or open source program (Paint.net, GIMP, Audacity, etc.), create an installer for it, then distribute it via a page with jacked up SEO on AdWords, and make money when people went to install whatever application it was and also ended up with a bazillion fake antivirus or cache cleaning utilities that would spy on them or do other nefarious things.
At one point Google started rejecting the ads for our installer landing pages because we didn't have strong enough "opt-in" controls around the installation of the bundled malware. No matter how we sliced it, any change that made it more obvious to the user what was going on and how to stop it, the company's profits would start to tank (like even turning the "no thanks" from a greyed out text link to a real button would massively tank the number of installs). In our case, we didn't give a crap if the user got the application they wanted or not--we just wanted them to install the malware so we'd get paid. It meant we were free to try things that would provide a poor user experience to more technically savvy users as long as we thought there was a chance it would get us more conversions from the not-so-savvy users.
I imagine the companies that implement the nagging experience you describe are in a similar situation--for some reason they aren't allowed to force the user to take the action they want the users to take--be it leaving a product review or agreeing to be spied on--let's call it Feature X. Maybe the app store they're using for distribution disallows automatically opting users in to Feature X, or they're worried about anti-competitive or privacy laws around Feature X, (edit: or it may simply be technically impossible, such as in the case of Reddit trying to funnel web users to their app instead). But if you're not making money off your users using your product, and you are making money off of Feature X, then of course you're incentivized to do whatever it takes to increase the number of users who opt in to Feature X. Constantly nagging seems like a reasonable thing to do in pursuit of that goal. Users like you who use the application but refuse to accept Feature X have no value to them. As long as even a tiny percent of the people who opt out initially eventually opt in just to get the nagging to stop, that means they've succeeded--even if a much larger percentage of the opt-outers eventually stop using the product altogether out of frustration. They were never going to get what they wanted from you anyway, so as long as the nagging is increasing their conversions on Feature X, they don't care if you leave.
That sounds familiar. Were you working for sourceforge? I think there was a company connected to sourceforge that was doing this, but I don't want to name names without being sure. Certainly, I heard of people being bit by it.
I worked for a company that no longer exists (at least not under the name it was using at the time I was there--spinning up new DBAs and changing company names is a regular tactic used to get around some other problems like being banned from app stores or cloud providers).
To be fair though there were at least dozens of other shady companies all doing the same thing at the same time and trying to eat each others' lunches. A lot of big-name antivirus companies were in on it too, accepting money in exchange for whitelisting the malware installers in their scanners.
Is this the Softonic work environment? Lol
Please don't take this as an attack, but rather as a genuine question: Why would you work for a company like that? Like, don't you feel like you are contributing to the problems rather than doing something to solve them or provide genuine value to someone? If you needed money or to get a foot in the door and didn't have many other options at the time, I totally get that. But any other reason is hard for me to wrap my mind around, honestly.
I work in hospital laboratories, and things that detract value from patients/providers trying to do their jobs actively irritate me. Eventually, if enough of those things accumulate without being solved/dealt with it can cause me to find another job because I want to work at companies where my labor contributes to genuine useful value.
I am also aware that my field is absolutely chock full of value detractors in the areas of insurance and billing, which in a way makes it similar to the companies you are describing. But in the lab there is very little I can do about that, at least not without going back to school for many years. It needs law and policy reform to be fixed at this point, IMO.
This is one of a handful of patterns that piss me off. If it's a modal thing that can be removed with my ad blocker, I will do just that.
I particularly don't like the ones that give you the choices of "yes" and "no because I'm a moron", or "use the app" and "use Chrome" when I'm not using Chrome.
No rules in place, the only thing you can do is leave a review of one star and just say "they demanded a review and got one." then (I know, I know) switch to Linux so OneDrive stops readding itself to the startup apps list. Companies are gonna company until we're the batteries from The Matrix or that dude from Black Mirror. You get to live with it... Or burn the system down ala Fight Club.
I second the Linux recommendation. I switched over to Linux Mint I don't know how many years ago - more than 5, less than 10, and have been very satisfied with that decision. No more having to develop specific IT skills just to fight the crap the OS tries to pull in order to feel like I have agency over my own system.
If your operating system is set on serving the company that made it instead of serving you, then you have a really troublesome base to build all your other computer experiences on.
I don't have a handy guide but I was able to change it thanks to this: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Hope this work to you
Don't worry, I understand. I've got a Windows PC as well. Unfortunately I don't have anything that will make it go away forever. I'm sure there's a regedit hack or something but knowing Microsoft that'll break half the OS.
Heres Microsoft's official guide on the subject though.
Practically 100% of the time when an app asks me to write a review I write a one star review that complains about being harassed to leave a review.
Somehow these interruptions always happen when I feel under the gun. I'd imagine that it would make more sense to interrupt people like this after they completed a task and are feeling good as opposed to before when they often feel stressed.
That is one of the reasons why open source is so important, why I argue that basically everyone should pick up at least the thoroughly minimal technical skills even when the popular software goes out the way to hide anything technical, with the actual predictable result being that when something inevitably goes wrong the user simply does not know what.
And also why I do not understand why so many people cling to convenience of for example Windows(or Google or Amazon or whatnot). How is getting constantly nagged, pushed in some direction, profiled and more, convenient?
The only thing I want to stress here re: open source is that while great, it’s only as good as the people hosting it. I agree it’s 100% better than proprietary but even with open source, you’re as private or secure as you trust in whomever running it.
Yes, open source is necessary but not sufficient. It is absolutely impossible to actually verify all of the code you are running but with open source at least the option is there and if the maintainer introduces anti features it can be forked.
Linux is a lot easier to deal with these days than people give it credit for. A little while back, my computer died and all I had was a wimpy little laptop from 2007 that couldn't even really run Windows 7 which was and is no longer supported. So I threw Linux Mint on just to have something, and I ended up adjusting to it even faster than I do most new Windows versions.
Mint, or maybe just the version of Mint I had, requires virtually no command line use. It's just point and click in the same way Windows is. I even let a fairly tech illiterate sibling use it when they needed a computer with no direction other than a "Let me know if you need help." and they managed to handle it no issues whatsoever. Later on, I gave it to my extremely tech illiterate dad when he forgot his laptop for work, and apart from being hopelessly confused by the icons and Google's sites in general, he also got by just fine.
When I was setting things up, there was some command line use, but that was either on the computer running Windows where I was trying to get the initial installer working, or trying to track down some hyper specific problems that stemmed from using some far out of date hardware. When I later threw the same install onto my new computer, there was no command line usage whatsoever.
To piggyback: I am a very confident Linux user. I've run the OS for over 20 years at this point. I have no interest in transitioning my desktop windows PC or my OSX laptop to open source Linux.
As you've identified, people are creatures of habit and you lose 98% of people quickly to that.
At this point we see where a lot of the difficulties with Linux come from. There is not one Linux, there are many. Because while I don't question your experience, I also know that every Linux distro that I have seen in the last ten years gives you this notification out of the box and you can just click it and have your updates installed. It is just a matter of picking a user friendly distro.
Apple’s OS has broadly been called “Mac” for literally 40 years. Surely you’ve encountered that before? 😂
The rest of your comment makes fine points, I just had to laugh at this postscript which struck me as weirdly fingers-in-ears.
It was Macintosh System 1-7 for awhile, then you had OS 8, OS 9, OS X, with point releases for many years. Then they started using whole numbers again a couple of years ago and style it as "MacOS" instead of "Mac OS". But it's effectively been "Mac OS" since the 90s.
I got tired of constantly fighting my DAW on Manjaro. I got tired of my MIDI controllers not working correctly, even when properly mapped and setup. I tried Pipewire, too. My experience with Mint, and several other flavors of Linux over several months was pretty hodge-podge and varied when it came to things working better, or worse, or at all.
Converting VST to .so files sometimes worked, and sometimes my DAW (or three, I tried a few other ones just in case) wouldn't even recognize the converted VSTs anyways. Wine and various Wine wrappers don't always work for specific VST host/DAW software that runs flawlessly on Windows without me having to dig through repositories and the internet.
Proton works great for gaming - until it doesn't, and you spend more time troubleshooting down the line of Proton installs rather than actually playing the games you wanna play. Wrappers sometimes work and sometimes don't when it comes to launching non-Steam games like, Epic or GoG storefront games.
I don't consider myself tech illiterate, I just got tired of trying to find hacky ways to get stuff to work on Linux that literally "just works" on Windows. Call me lazy, I don't care. I just want my shit to work so I can use it, or play games, or whatever it is I'd like to do at the moment.
I'd rather have a working PC than a Linux box that almost does everything I could do in Windows just fine. I'll take the tradeoff and ride Windows 10 til EOL and see where Linux is then.
Personally I do not have more problems with Linux than Windows, opposite actually. It is of course dependent on personal needs but running Windows alongside is perfectly doable, I do it for the few things I need it for.
I also view the problems I have with the respective systems through the lens of what exactly is the reason for the problem and the likely future development.
On Linux they are usually the result of third party incompatibilities that would vanish quickly with bigger marketshare and the various compatibility layers mostly enable working around.
On Windows the problems are almost universally something MS purposefully inserted to increase whatever metric without regard for user experience or the simple basic fact that I own the system(this is probably a longer potential discussion, but I bought the hw with the sw installed(or just bought the sw) and it works against me). They will almost inevitably get way worse, unless something changes.
Bugs are of course on both systems but at least on Linux it is lower probability that I encounter a "something happened" error.
I wish Linux did have a bit more third party compatibility, and it's not like larger music software or music hardware manufacturers exactly develop for Linux - some do, or include a native version of software, which is nice when it happens. I don't expect it though.
That's just my use case though, and I mostly produce music and play games on my desktop with a bit of art related stuff on the side.
I was pretty frustrated trying to find a distro that had less small annoyances that just got in my way once I dug into it. I didnt find one that made me say "I want to stick with this, everything works just fine".
Maybe that distro is out there somewhere for me, and maybe one day I'll find it.
Pisses me off so much on YouTube as well. They keep forcefeeding the Shorts tab into my home page. When I go to remove it, it says "we will hide this for 30 days".
No! Every 30 days I click to hide you! I have no interest in shorts! Let me permanently hide that tab!
There's an extension called youtube unhook that allows you to customise youtube properly so you never see shorts or whatever other section again if you don't want. Works on Firefox based android browsers too though I prefer newpipe x sponsorblock for mobile. Combined with ublock origin it actually makes youtube pretty decent to use heavily.
OMG, thank you for this! Especially since it works on Firefox android, where I keep fat-fingering onto Shorts (grrr).
Theres also YouTube ReVanved which has sponsorblock built in, and a range of layout options available.
It's intended to wear you down, and there are no robust laws against it unfortunately. As a society we can't even legislate against companies using dark patterns on kids for money (Roblox), so I'm not exactly hopeful for things like this getting good laws.
The best I've figured out is to find alternatives from these platforms when I see them, and use ad/tracker blockers when I have no choice.
It depends on which society you're in. This is exactly the sort of thing the EU is eager to legislate these days.
10 years ago I would have been vehemently against it, now it seems like the only option. Nothing else is going to stop the enshittification.
Who would be against preventing companies from forcing users to do unreasonable things? Like really, who? CEOs and investors I suppose.
10+ years ago the majority of tech regulation was awful. It often added barriers without solving the problems it intended to solve.
More recently it's still bad but it has improved, legislators and their advisors are less tech illiterate. Even if it hadn't improved, these companies are big enough that market forces can't shift them. Legislation is all that's left.
In most cases I strongly dislike it when software does this too, but specifically for OS updates I think it’s somewhat justified.
Back when Microsoft let users actually ignore updates (XP, Vista, 7), a lot of people did exactly that. The problem is that many in this group wouldn’t just ignore updates for a few weeks and then update when convenient, they’d simply never update at all. Vast numbers of computers wound up being many months or years out of date, making them extremely vulnerable and prime feedstock for botnets, spam sending malware networks, etc.
And so Microsoft started forcing people to update whether they liked it or not, as did Google with Chrome for similar reasons. Even Firefox does it now.
The technically capable among us probably aren’t too worried about getting infected on devices running intentionally-outdated software, but we’re not a majority by any stretch of the imagination. The general populous isn’t the strongest when it comes to avoiding these things and so to some extent forced updates for internet connected software seem difficult to avoid if developers are to try to stymie malware infection rates and protect users.
My issue with that is that they would automatically update and restart several times when I was in the middle of time sensitive complex work.
A delay this update a few hours one time per day button would have saved me a lot of frustration, anger and grief. I hate Microsoft for this.
I agree that running up to date sw is usually the right thing. However forcing any updates is problematic, it creates a culture that makes it significantly easier to push anti-features in them as was amply demonstrated in previous years. Not to mention modifying the system against the will of the user at all.
A scary red cross in Windows 7 to disable updates is fine(not to mention the easy, user friendly, unhidden selection of update packages in the os), requiring hacky workarounds, hidden settings or blocking internet traffic to disable updates creates what we see now.
The ones that really bother me are the notification to sign into Apple that opens the login page when I dismiss it and the stupid popups taking me "Verifying outlook" or whatever office tool is feeling needy today.
This is my work machine, I'm not logging in to Apple with it. That also means I can't remove the office stuff, they just put it back because reasons.
The mobile reddit app pop-up mostly reminds me why I left Reddit.
I've spent years getting to the point where I got rid of most of these annoyances.
I use Librewolf with setting that basically mean the browser is like new everytime I open it, I don't leave anything signed in and no history saved. The only thing saved is the extensions I use and my bookmarks. I use Tampermonkey scripts, libredirect, ublock with everything enabled in the languages I use and auto reject cookies; I don't even see the cookie warnings on most sites anymore they get rejected instantly and if a site doesn't let me do that I just close the window since it's rare I actually need to get on it.
I also moved to Linux (ZorinOS specifically) a couple of years ago because windows is such a bloated data harvesting tool and I find that sure there's a few more things I need to google to work out but the actual user experience of using linux feels like using an old version of windows but modernised.
Took the same attitude with my phone and use a locked down browser (Mull) and predominately free opensource apps when I can. It's a real pain though as it required a fair bit of learning and trial and error before I got to this point all to use my own devices that I paid for as I see fit rather than in a way that's profitable for a corporation.
If they're going to put a cookie on my computer, let it be about never seeing that stupid thing again, thank you!
On my Android phone the Discover feed (left of home screen) every once in a while shows me "trending searches". I don't care at all what other people are searching for (seems to be a lot of celebrity gossip) but I can only opt to "see less of this." How about none? Never? It's so annoying.
With apps wanting repeatedly to leave a rating: Do so! Leave a 1* (or zero if possible) and wrote one line commentary "This app askedme for rating over and over and over again, so here it is."
With bank: Go therey say them you don't want to be bothered by their shit (use milder words) and that you want them (the person you talk to) to acknowledge your request. If it doean't change, file a complaint against the specific person yu talked to and who acknowledged your request. They want war, they should get it. Leave the bank for another one if they don't cope.
With Windows: Stop using Windows. It is easier than ever today. You could either buy some Mac for totally trouble-free experience (probably) or go Linux. If you use something you absolutely can't run on those systems and there is no alternative to your needed software, then good luck... Microsoft will press harder and harder. I use Linux for almost 15 years now and I can do what I need on it (including playing new games, video editing, electronics projects amd so on).
I totally.agree with you on the premise "yes" or "not now". Such practices are shit and shouldn't be used. The only thing we can do about it is going next door where such practices are not used (use other OS or bank) or using our wits to circumvent or fight against them (ie. the app rating).
I feel like this domestic violence thought experiment is not one which makes the problem easier to understand? In fact for me it makes it harder to understand the original (relatively simple) problem because now I'm thinking about the structures of abusive interpersonal relationships (which are pretty complex), rather than companies doing bad things (pestering you until you choose the option that is better for them and worse than you) to make more money (much simpler).
I recall not long ago being on a website that straight-up told me they were going to be using cookies (it didn't look like a UI where one can reject or customize cookies) and the action button said "Ok, thanks!" and it's like... No, website, that's not what I'm thinking at all when I press that button.