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@kris @anildash Malicious compliance by corporations just needs a big hammer to replace the slap..

@kris @anildash I don't see what a "browser-supported consent standard" would look like. They refused to honor the one we had before (DNT) and instead turned it into a tracking vector itself.

Any browser-based consent-to-track that doesn't default to no-consent is not consent respecting.

Any one that defaults to no-consent is going to have the surveillance capitalist shitheads saying "well we're not going to honor it because the user didn't actually select that, it was just a default in the browser" unless or until we can impose sufficient consequences to make them honor it. And indeed it might as well not exist, because nobody's going to say "I want to be tracked". This is just equivalent to what should be done: banning all tracking.

In any case it all comes down to power to make them stop.

@dalias right, a standard alone won't fix it... but requiring more consent without one is going to be an enormous mess for experience (cookie consent alone already is)... app experience keeps chipping away at web experience

other efforts, like google having to sell off chrome are probably more important!

@kris Google selling Chrome off will almost surely make it even more toxic. Any solution that's not establishing an entity without conflicts of interest with user as the stewards is going to be worse than the status quo. We'll end up with OpenAI or Oracle or something owning it.

@dalias perhaps! but the current state of Google being an ad company resistant to ad-tracking protections in their browser clearly isn't a tenable situation either

@kris Oh absolutely. It's just that anyone who could both afford to buy Chrome and have a financially viable reason (see: fiduciary duty) to *want to buy Chrome* is going to be *even worse than Google*.

@dalias yeah true, maybe this is a necessary "worse before it gets better" situation that can force more legislation

@kris That's accelerationism and accelerationism is always bad.

@nwd okay. You can also just close that and it won’t come back.

@anildash It won't come back only if people keep the cookie you set. These are hardly the worst web crimes, but there is certainly some irony considering the topic.

@leeloo @nwd heh, not... really? anyway, it's gone now, i switched it out for a regular form at the top. but you can block me, sure.

@davidga @nwd well, it was using local storage since those tend to be kept a little better than cookies, but i switched it out for a regular form at the top anyway. it's still dismissible but I figure folks who object to this form are just trying to fuss at this point.

@mekkaokereke @nwd @anildash I’ve been reading your blog and following you on RSS and social media since the early 2000s, and the first time I saw that pop-up, I hated it. And as somebody who reads you on multiple platforms, I get to see it multiple times. I get the reasoning, but it’s still a dark pattern in comparison to just having a subscription sign-up callout. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@anildash (I mean, it’s not like I’m going to stop reading your stuff, mind you.)

@anildash What if it appeared in the margin, not as an interruption but an option?

I'm a fan of your writing, and email subscriptions, but not of mid-stream-of-thought insertions.

@metagrrrl @anildash same same.

@Wevah @anildash Yes, but it has to be clear that that's not the end of the page. If the section winds up in too satisfying a way, it's easy not to scroll over the subscribe blurb to see that there's more article. That's why I like it on the side. In a bigger view it can be the whole blurb, and on a phone, just a little protruding tab that moves out when touched, maybe with the text wrapping around its space a little to make it intriguing.

@metagrrrl @Wevah I had played with a bunch of those variations, and that's honestly how it ended up where it was (I can see how the designers on other sites ended up with that choice) — it's *really* hard to get right when most of the audience is on mobile. I just punted and put the subscribe form at the top, folks can figure it out, or not. Some of it is all fairly performative from folks who were never going to subscribe (by email or RSS or whatever) anyway, but just want to make a point.

@anildash I had a feeling it might be a bear to get to behave.

@jwz @nwd Okey doke. I pulled the popup out and just made a little thing at the top that can be dismissed. I really had only put the other style of form in because multiple people had literally asked for a substack-style subscription form since that's what they're used to. I think this is really just the collision between my normie business audience and my audience of people who are actual internet people.

@anildash @jwz @nwd I’m one of the internet people who hates popups. So thanks for removing it! However, now it just blends in perfectly with the menu (at first I didn’t find it even though I was looking for it) If you want people to see it, I would make it huge, and perhaps at the end of the article, or in the middle?