alt Hacker NewsYou ever notice how Apple never really lets the user say "no" to their nudges?
It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"
Replies
I’ve noticed that most companies do that, not just Apple.
I have this one notification asking me if I want to enable the Personal focus when I’m at home. I don’t want my iPhone to care if I’m at home or not, so the past two years whenever it pops up I click Later.
It will probably never stop asking.
This hostile behavior has unfortunately grown over the years. Notice how often you cannot really unsubscribe from newsletters, because clicking the small link in the email will only unsubscribe you from 1 of 25 "topics" or whatever and they will gladly re-define the "topics" every 6 months and re-enable them all.
i see this virtually everywhere, and worked at several places where PMs proactively changed text banners to not equate to "no"
severe industry brainrot
And Sync Immediately's only affirmative option is "For Today", so I get to set a daily reminder to remind the setting that I do in fact want it to be ON.
I get the annoyance at "ask me again later", but "maybe later" or "not now" is helpful - there's no way to trigger dialogs by yourself, so this is a promise that even if you say "no" in the dialog, you can still go into settings to change your mind. Gives me less anxiety about the choice.
I don't have a solution, but on this topic I let Fable write a browser extension I called "Nee, krijg de tering". It's "No, fuck off" in English, but the Dutch feels more visceral for me. It's really rough, but it tries to find these "Maybe later", "No, thank you" etc. buttons and replace the No button.. I guess it's kind of self-explanatory. Does not really do anything, but it is cathartic (and also messes with a lot of UIs to the point where unfortunately the blocklist of domains this should not be used on is growing a lot :'( ).
I feel this pattern is really abusive. Like I am offering to slap you in the face, giving you two answer options: Yes and "Maybe later/no, thank you". As though you have any obligation to be forced to answer this question again at some late time, or to be very polite while you refuse to be slapped in the face. The correct answer is obviously "No, fuck off".