I tried viewing the Facebook page for my local goban meetup recently to check on a schedule, and FB put a giant floating translucent white box over the bottom half of my screen with a single "login" button in the middle of it. So I could see there was content below but it was incredibly hard to read. There was not even an "X" button to close it. What it was saying was "join our website or get the hell out".
I understand enforcing login for write operations, since it's obviously required, but they really do seem to have no regard for the original ideals of the internet. They're not alone; Quora and others have done similarly stupid shit.
These companies are all supposedly started by hackers who love the internet and technology, but it's sad to see capitalism take hold in such an ugly way.
I've found Kill Sticky [1] to be an incredibly useful bookmarket lately. It finds any DOM element with "position: fixed" and deletes it. Wish I didn't need to use it so often, but here we are.
Sometimes for annoying popups covering content, sometimes for the sidebar of brightly colored floating social widgets, sometimes just the enormous fixed banner that continues to waste screen real estate after you've scrolled down.
I use it a lot on my laptop and haven't tried JS bookmarklets in mobile browsers, but I'd hope that they work by now?
That is brilliant. For Mobile Safari, copy the bookmarklet source, create a "dummy" bookmark, then go back and edit it. Delete the URL and type in `javascript:` and paste the JS.
Even for read operations : forcing you to log in is the only way Facebook has to enforce the non-public privacy setting the content creator may have set.
Conversely, anyone with or without an account can view public Facebook posts.
Pinterest does this as well. Its lame but effective. Supply and Demand is an amazing concept. If FB or Pinterest wasn't as popular/needed then this type of activity would be frowned upon.
I understand enforcing login for write operations, since it's obviously required, but they really do seem to have no regard for the original ideals of the internet. They're not alone; Quora and others have done similarly stupid shit.
These companies are all supposedly started by hackers who love the internet and technology, but it's sad to see capitalism take hold in such an ugly way.