Also:
> all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends.
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...
A Facebook page that I'm following paying money to reach me is an ad according to Facebook. To me, that's extortion.
On the other side, we have notifications about friend suggestions. You can't turn them off in the notification settings. That to me is an "ad" for Facebook itself, even if nobody payed them money. It's an undesired content that pulls my attention away from what I came there to do in order to promote a product.
How would you fix that? The only thing I can think of would be a chronological feed where everybody sees every post.
The model they currently use serves two goals: to extort money from fanpages, and to hook users up by intermittent reinforcement.
They probably already record every item displayed on screen (and how long for, and whether my cursor hovered it, etc.) so a list of items I saw (on any device) in the chronological order I saw them should just be a simple db lookup away.
If you build a cockpit by measuring everyone's dimensions and averaging them, you'll end up with a cockpit that fits nobody[0]. I believe the same is true for feeds as well.
There's an amount of information that works for the average Facebook user. However, none of us are precisely on that average. By building algorithms whose mission is max consumption by the average user, they've made their product useless to everyone.
[0] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
Honestly, everything this company does is shady beyond all shame.
Twitter keeps fucking around with their timeline feed, but they've preserved a "chronological, show me everything" option through all of their other bad ideas.
After a few refreshes of my Twitter homepage in a short time span, I did a little research: I've edited the CSS to make the distinction of "liked" tweets more obvious. Over 50% of "fresh" content turned out to be likes by the people I follow that are in no way chronological.
You can fight it... for now, but I assume not for long. I've stopped relying on Twitter for that same reason I've stopped relying on Facebook.
Is that the name for the "recent tweet from X" notifications? Those have made Twitter notifications completely useless for me. :(
As far as I know, there's no universal term for them. Since we already associate darkness with bad UX patterns, "shadow notifications" as a subset of "dark patterns" has a nice ring to it.
We've long had the ability to set a minimum font size, but I suspect browser vendors have viewed that purely as an accessibility feature.
(Tangent: I've also been increasingly disappointed that browsers let sites make text unselectable. I understand that there was originally a use case, but I only ever encounter it as an anti-feature these days.)
Breaking up a word into multiple tags is very different from inserting invisible extraneous content into the middle of a word. The latter is what I'm questioning the usefulness of; the former I can see as occasionally useful, but should be avoided when it breaks screen readers and search engines.
Take a modal for example - the text is not visible until the modal is opened. Let's think about menus that display on hover - they wouldn't work. What about tooltips or other sorts of floating label type things? What about other text that only appears on hover, or when some action is performed?
Sure, you could wait to insert these things into the page until the last second, but it would be less performant and complexity would be higher.
If you saw what the web looked like without display: none and visibility: hidden, I think you'd change your mind. There are infinite applications.
Aside, this reminds me of the brief period of time where "hacking" SEO by pasting huge volumes of keywords in text the same color as the background and/or hidden by other page elements was a relatively common trick. Search engines simply switched to more sophisticated methods of page ranking, I wonder what change could be made remedying this which would be similarly non-disruptive outside the bad actors.
But can anyone honestly claim that putting an invisible 'sponsored' on non-sponsored posts is ethically OK? Can't we all agree that ads should be readily identifiable as such?
By human users for sure. Scripts are a whole other question.
BTW. to the extent clearly marking ads/sponsored content is required by law, I wonder whether Facebook could be sued for making this difficult for users with disabilities - after all, accessibility tools like screen readers are scripts and rely on machine-readable metadata.
I disagree entirely.
(By 3rd party ads I mean all ads that are advertising anything not directly sold or provided by the owner of the service showing that ad. That's to resolve the immediate objection of whether telling people about new features is an ad or not.)
Man can dream.
EDIT: But this man would also vote for the person pushing for such legislation.
Personally I'm stuck with voting for "the party not dismantling the NHS who stand a chance of getting in".
Maybe in my kids lifetime we'll get proper PR at the national level (UK).
...also brexit ;-)
I've used a similar add-on for Google search (the add-on made some human-like Google searches in the background), but I can't remember its name now.
Facebook would be a pointless exercise, since the <div> names are automatically generated. You can't even hide the sidebars you never use using CSS because they'll all change their <div> IDs on refresh. That and the murkiness of what exactly is an ad on Facebook makes even the most thorough adblockers struggling to work properly even in an otherwise-ideal situation (a desktop browser with an adblocker).
[0] https://adnauseam.io/