I just wanted to take a moment to enjoy how clean the web can be
I happened to click a link that took me to the associated twitterX account for something I was interested in and was greeted by not one, not two, but four modern day web popups.
I know it's nothing new. I've got a couple of firefox plugins that are usually quite good at hiding this sort of nonsense, but I guess they failed me today (or, I shudder to think, there were even more that were blocked, and this is what got through)
What's the worst new/not-signed-in user experience you've encountered recently?
If this were a competent company, I'd say that they're entirely aware of it and how fucking awful it is, but that there's a mandate coming from somewhere that the page MUST include x, y and z and so they add x, y and z but usually try to at least make the site usable.
This being Twitter, though, I'm sure it's because a screaming man-child threw a sink at someone and told them to do it or they'll be fired and so they did it in the most half-assed obnoxious way they could manage.
I do a lot of my browsing from an iPhone 11. At least twice a day, a page will crash and reload halfway through whatever article I was trying to read. I get it’s a few generations old, but since when do you need state of the art tech to view what should be a static page.
They know exactly. Once you create a Twitter account, consent to cookies and link your Google account (AKA give them all your data) you'll never see these pop-ups again.
It's diminishing customer experience creep, except the company doesn't understand what the user data means. They run A/B tests of different layouts, seeing what kind of feedback each gets to learn more about design choices and users. Each version should get its own feedback and then that data is compiled by data scientists into actionable feedback, things that can be done to improve the website in the direction the company thinks is an "improvement".
Twitter abandoned those data scientists with the initial layoffs. There is no one to tell them what works and what impacts the customer experience, which is why each time the internal question of "how do we open up for engagement?" they answer it the same way, "Use existing user bases by linking their account to Twitter." The result is several login requests all looking for the same cookie.
It's lazy or inexperienced management. Knowing the type of person Elon hires, it's probably both.
on top of what others have said - directing you to the app and login - it’s also likely just that teams don’t talk and make decisions that solve their local issue without too much for the whole, and then say “ugh team x solved this so inelegantly! we were forced to do our thing that wasn’t as nice!”