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by wdr1 164 days ago
> I consider this abuse of the visitor.

Why can't anything simply be "disliked" anymore?

I get you don't like it.

But abused?

Because there's a slide-in?

On a site run by volunteers?

For open source software you get for free?

That you freely choose to visit?

Calling that abuse seems... off. I have no concerns with people saying the don't like something. But the current nature to be hyperbolic is off-putting to me.

4 comments

It is abuse.

It's not a flavor of ice cream.

It's an intentional act performed by a party upon another party, in the full conscious deliberate knowing intent to do something other than be nice or even neutral to the other party, but to bother and annoy them, to consume attention and time that they did not willingly give.

It's not the worst crime of the century and so it is a small abuse, but abuse is still the correct word. And it's not a small abuse when performed on a million people instead of one.

If you don't think so then you must be ok with me stealing a single cent from you, and everyone else. Surely you merely dislike that and would defend my behavior against anyone trying to do something so dramatic and hyperbolic as to involve law enforcement over something so small.

Surely the abuse is caused by your browser showing you the slide in.

python.org might be asking your user agent to do it, or it might be asking a third party to do this; either way the interpretation of how to display that is down to the user agent. I don't see any popover/slidein but I'm running uBO which is probably blocking this. I do this because I don't want the 'abuse'.

"Surely the abuse is caused by your browser showing you the slide in."

The only time that is true is when Edge throws up it's own popups when you go to a chrome or firefox download page.

Outside of that singularly outrageous example, the browser is doing everything it promised to do and everything the user asked it to do, which is to render the data coming from a server, as so no, the browser is not the abuser.

Unless you are still just a kid or something that has just never really thought about anything yet, then you understand this perfectly well, and so your attempt to think up some contrary argument is not merely in honest error but disingenuous.

That's an excellent example of victim blaming.
How about "user-hostile"?

A thing that the user does not want, but is presented on top of content that they do want, is not serving user intent.

Of course, it's serving the needs of the project, theoretically. (Organizational capture of organizational perpetuation at the expense of organizational goals are a common problem, but I don't have any opinion or knowledge of this case.)

Adopting the user-hostile behaviours of advertising and perpetual fundraising are not a great way to make users happy. But they work, I guess. At some cost.

Don't ask me, I voted by disabling JavaScript and running Firefox. I don't have these problems.

There's a thread (now locked) on the Python discourse forum about the popup: https://discuss.python.org/t/accessibility-issues-in-the-pyp...
It's actually kind of embarassing seeing someone from the org chime in and say ~"this is our first time doing this, so we expected feedback" ... and separately infuriating ~"we will take this into account for next year".

  a) Any Internet-enabled human should have seen and avoided this problem from a million miles away.
  b) "We expected feedback" ?? this phrase is fucking insulting, sorry.
  c) Not next year. Take it down now and preserve some credibility. What is wrong with you people?
On mobile it is actually worse than the (now locked) thread suggests where it is merely covering 5% of screen area. On mobile the popup takes up more than 50% of screen area for me as it's by default opened up all the way.

Thinking about making a new thread to ask it to be taken down for good.

I looked out of curiosity and on my 15 inch laptop screen it does take up probably about 40%. I'm surprised by how egregious it is. And it looks like they changed it (or there's an A/B test?) since the thread. It also now jokes about how banners are cringe, actually taking up more space!
The initial thread showed only the second "minimized" version of the 2 step process (Maximized -> Minimized -> Dismissed). Here's the banner code which looks heavily LLM coded to me: https://web.archive.org/web/20251211092050js_/https://donate...
> What is wrong with you people?

Unmitigated arrogance combined with scathing contempt for their user base, perhaps?

I'd expect nothing less from the people that botched the Python 2.x to 3.x transition, burning billions of dollars of software value and countless hours of development effort in the process. Or the people who repeatedly failed to come up with a sane library and package system.

Python demonstrates that having a standards body and caring about backward compatibility are not bad things, and that a platform's most important job is to absorb pain, not multiply it across millions of users.

It comes as no surprise that even their web site would migrate to the latter camp.

> we expected feedback. That way we’d have something to ignore lol
Abuse has a meaning of misuse or use in an unintended way, as in “bringing a large bottle to take home is an abuse of the restaurant’s free refill policy”.

It doesn’t imply the strength of the word in “sexual abuse” or other law-related contexts.

It's abuse. Sugar coating it will only empower the perpetrators. Is it the most inhumane thing possible? No, obviously not. But these sites are taking advantage of the fact that you're there to do something, learn something, get something done, etc and they have your eyeballs. What they're doing is intentional, distracting and getting worse.

I don't care what the commercial status of the site is that I'm visiting, you will not hijack my attention.