Cookie banners are still a nuisance.
GDPR, the European privacy law, seems like a perfect example of bureaucratic disimprovement. But there is not law that forces you to implement cookie banners in a way that obscures the content and makes it maximally inaccessible. As a professional web developer, I still don't get why so many companies and their UX designers chose to it that way, if they have UX designers at all.
And if they don't use obtrusive cookie banners, sure they'll have a newsletter signup form that pops up just when you were about to click on a link or a menu entry.
What's our answer as web professionals? Conceiving a better technological popover implementation so that our customers can distract and annoy their customers using native browser standards instead of custom code? Where's the real benefit?
Enshittification ftw? wtf! 💩
I have been reading and researching about enshittification lately.
Like the dead internet, enshittification and disimprovement seem counterintutitive from a naive usability perspective. Why, just why would it make sense to distract users and prevent them from reaching their goals quickly without disturbance?
I mean, can't we just show them the product or information they were looking for, make it easy to proceed to the checkout and select a suitable payment method, and then, only then, optionally, offer upselling extras?
Unhelpful metrics like measuring engagement und dwelling time might be part of the problem.
How would distraction help customer retention at all? Why wouldn't they eventually get so annoyed that they just leave our service and use an alternative instead?
Because there are no better alternatives?
Until there are. Apple and Google are often quoted as examples of disrupting established industries by introducing innovative, and more specifically, more minimal, alternatives.
Now they, too, have joined the slope of slop and enshittification.
Disenshittification
This is just a quick reminder that a call to action does not necessarily need to be a modal dialog disturbing and preventing users from doing what they were doing.
Obtrusive cookie banners are no necessity at all. Websites without cookies are possible. Subtle small banners and dialogs placed in the footer or at the bottom of the viewport can still be striking enough to fulfil legal requirements.
Just saying.
Top comments (7)
It is quite annoying. Sometimes they have that and block you from accessing the website unless you answer to "want some cookies?".
Also, off topic, I was hoping if you want to join my DEVengers org on DEV? I was meaning to tell you this, but it finally reminded me today lol. Your one of the first people I saw on DEV, so I feel like you deserve it. No need to worry about posting schedule (post anything high quality as you like at any time. Just lmk ahead of time).
Even more annoying than modal cookie popovers are random redditors justifying them as perfectly valid usability decisions.
Hahaha it reminds me this meme
Ah, I feel you. I got sick of those damn popovers.. These days I just close the websites that show me those popovers, blocking me from reading the content. The worst UX ever.
Think that's bad? Next up we'll start getting ads in AI outputs. That's the 'not so nice' part of WebMCP that they dont tell you about. You have a MCP for a site and you define what's output when something is queried. Eg. Claude queries New York Times for an article on baking bread, they set up their WebMCP to output the article + an in-line footer ad for the latest iPhone. The LLM has no choice but to output it exactly as it was returned from the WebMCP.
But seems to always slip the large corporations' minds when they talk about the future of AI and the web... Dont believe me, try it yourself, set up a WebMCP project, assign a payload that includes an ad and watch your AI spit out an ad.
Your New York Times examples still feels much more legit than an AI adding random ads to third-party content. But then again, that's what Google search has been doing for years already. On the other hand, AI ads declared as such are still more transparent than AI naively repeating the marketing claims they have been trained on without admitting how biased they are.
After all, we're clearly in an age of enshittification, and what feels bad today will be the good old times from tomorrow's perspective, if things keep going the way they are. And I'm only talking about professional web development and AI use here, of course. (Just to clarify that I have no intention of making political statements on this platform.)
I made a demo to prove a point: cloudrun
In Chrome, enable MCP testing in flags chrome://flags/#enable-webmcp-testing enable that and go give it a try with a gemini API (you can get from google ai studio and try it.