alt Hacker NewsHow Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
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This is phone OS developer's fault for even allowing it. When I take a screenshot, I expect to have an image of exactly whatever was displayed on the screen at the time. Its not a picture of your app, its a picture of my screen. Some banking apps used to (or still) prevent this and now some apps get a hook to insert their branding. My device serves some master other than myself.
This is why pocket computers are still so unserious. My programs should not be aware let alone respond to my administrative actions like screenshots.
This is in fact a watermark to promote the application, which otherwise wouldn't be recognizable since Bluesky looks like every other microblogging app. I didn't know that Sam literally named the file GrowthHack.tsx, which is pretty funny.
Well, I have not once found a single case where an app reacting to screenshots and controlling the process in any way was anything to me but hostile and annoying. This one does not help.
It somehow is perfect example of how modern software engineering feels to go astray for me. A feature in my device working completely in benefit of the one providing said software. I wish, and wish only I can, that this trend goes away at some point.
Nobody in the comments talking about snapchat where like one of the core pillars of what "sets their service apart" is the difficulty of taking a screenshot without notifying the other party
On iOS, if you swipe control center down and then back up but don’t lift your finger, the screenshot will not have the logo. I do this with Twitter so my screenshots don’t have the X logo.
Dear app developers: please do not detect screenshots, and do not change behavior. It is my phone and I should have the right to save anything on my screen for my own purposes and you should not know that I do that.
X and Threads do this too. I wish they all wouldn't, messing with screenshots should only ever be done when preventing them as a security measure.
I'm confused why people are mad at Bluesky for this. Everyone stating their issues seems more related to Apple than Bluesky. So why point the finger at them?
This is a pretty cool, harmless hack honestly. I don’t see how you could be mad at it.
Once apps can present one thing to the user and another thing to the captured image, there are some pretty weird possibilities
This is an interesting case of "Good use" of a "bad feature". This feature is bad because it works against the user and device owner, but this use case like hiding your password when sharing your screen is a good use case.
To be fair this is useful for discovering bluesky from screenshots getting posted on other platforms.
Their product UI kind of looks like X, so it's helpful to know the source of a post
I know of social media sites who have kept an untracked version of the link in the dom of the A tag, but replace it with their in-house link tracker copy of it as you're clicking, that way the destination looks correct when you hover over the link.
I appreciate the Game Changer reference
Is this the relevant issue for Graphene OS?
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/664
Upvote the issue if so.
> The “Follow” button is visible when I take the screenshot mid-switch.
Does this indicate that the privacy feature has a gap, where you could reveal the length of your password if you take a screenshot mid app switch?
If the feature can sometimes be useful (including this situation, which some other comments mentioned; but also for other things such as hiding actual secure data), then perhaps it should be made as a setting which can be changed in the setting menu (e.g. "Exclude secure data from screenshots"; it should also mention which apps use this feature), so prevent abuse. (This would also make it clear what the feature is, as well as being able to disable it.)
If not for the function being named "GrowthHack" I would have thought that hiding following status for screenshots to be a good privacy measure. They don't use it to hide anything else and since I'm not a user of the app I don't know if there is more extraneous information that could be used to infer or track down who screenshotted and they don't hide.
They're just following Apple's lead.
When iPhone shipped, any time you emailed a photo it would append "Sent from my iPhone" to try to virally market. Same or at least similar slimey tactics
Does anyone know a way to do this for a computer? I built a p2ppoker website the protects the shuffle from the server but I would like to blank the cards on screenshots to prevent huds and AIs from making the game unplayable.
Perplexity does this on web by adding a logo in response to key combos for normal screenshot shortcuts.
This sort of stuff to me is an example of fear within an organization. Whenever I see engineering resources allocated towards self promotion and branding rather than quality and features for its users it shows how leaders want control over narratives.
This trick was almost certainly invented by Nikita Bier when he joined X.
> Thankfully, I remembered that Bluesky app is open source (or at least the code is available to look at).
What does the author mean by this? I checked the repo and the project seems to be MIT licensed, which makes it open source.
Related: Airplay Screen Mirroring being too damn cleaver for its own good. Yes, I want to mirror my screen, and no I don't want the app to enforce it's own controls/blocks on what is being displayed on the external screen (Looking at all the streaming apps).
It's bad UX all around:
- iOS claims it mirrors my screen (It does not)
- Except when it does mirror my screen (Depending on the app!)
To be clear, I do think it's nice to beam the video directly to the target device for better quality, but that's not what screen mirroring is!
Usually post http://aidr.wtf appropriately.
This is why I use the browser version for anything. I’m using an actual user agent.
Tiktok has been watermarking videos since the beginning.
I’ve noticed that if you screenshot a thread in the threads app an “@threads” logo appears in the upper right corner
Is this iPhone only? I've never seen this on Android.
I think RevenueCat does the same thing. Smart way to exploit network effects!
has this guy lived on a rock? reddit/twitter/etc every social media platform does this already.
Companies always want to slop-spam their logos onto everything. It is a very annoying habit. On youtube videos this is even more annoying; several use floating logos.
As Spring inevitably leads to Winter, and Night follows Day, Thus the Inevitable Enshittification of all Centralized Platforms
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This is arguably missing the "how" from the title -- can someone fix?
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The logo is actually decentralized, we just host it on our centralized “relay”. It’s basically open tho.
We use “Zero Knowledge Pixels” so no images can be leaked onto the dark web where all the criminals live.
The way it works is, as long as our content is so moderated to hell, most dark web hosts avoid crawling us entirely. It’s just not that interesting of content. Which means it’s safe content. Safety first, I always say.
So we listened to the feedback from our dozens of users and put all watermark images on the blockchain so it’s instantly federated and backed up in a vault in Antarctica. We call it the “Waterhose”. When an image reaches the vault, it becomes “frozen” and only an admin can “thaw” the data.
It’s all backed up with proofs. By people way smarter than you lol
Use our app
Example n+1 of why I only use web and not download an app
Shill News
Tangentially, I see a lot of people here upset that apps can react to your screenshot before it is captured. I think it is helpful to think about it as a tradeoff between freedoms:
(a) the freedom to screenshot any content on your own device (b) the freedom to share content with others that cannot be screenshotted
It can be annoying when DRM or privacy features block a screenshot, but I think it can also benefit the platform ecosystem that you participate in as a user too. Idk!
If it's between this and a perpetual logo, I'll take this any day.
I actually really like this approach. The action button isn't relevant in this context, and it doesn't occlude the content.
There's certainly situations where you wouldn't want this (ie if you're developing the app and you want to redesign starting from a screenshot), but for the average user I think this isn't overly hostile. I understand that people are dogmatically opposed to intent being modified, but I think you need to balance nuance. I actually enjoy having an attributable source in shared elements, and I think this is a low-impact way of achieving that.