The Cookie Banner Paradox
Description
A three-panel comic strip by 'The Jenkins Comic' depicting a user interacting with a website. In the first panel, a simple cartoon character is looking at a monitor displaying a dialog box that says, 'This website doesn't use cookies.' with a button below it that reads, 'Got it, don't show again'. The user's mouse cursor is shown clicking this button. The second panel shows the character looking concerned, then clicking the browser's refresh button. The third panel shows the exact same 'This website doesn't use cookies' dialog box has reappeared, much to the character's dismay. The humor comes from the technical irony: for a website to remember the user's choice to 'not show again,' it would need to store that preference, typically in a cookie or localStorage. Since the banner reappears, the website is truthfully not using cookies, but in doing so, it creates a frustrating user experience, defeating the purpose of the dismiss button
Comments
13Comment deleted
It's the only cookie banner that's 100% compliant and 100% annoying. To remember you don't want to be remembered, it has to remember you. This site chose malicious compliance instead
Schrödinger’s UX: marketing demands a “don’t show again” button while the 12-factor architect forbids all state, so the banner is both dismissed and re-rendered every page load
The beautiful irony of needing a cookie to remember you don't want cookies - it's like implementing a distributed consensus protocol just to agree that you don't need consensus. Next we'll need blockchain-verified localStorage just to persist a boolean flag
The classic 'This website doesn't use cookies' banner that requires cookies to remember you dismissed it - a perfect example of the frontend engineer's Catch-22. The real tragedy isn't the modal reappearing after refresh; it's that somewhere in the codebase, there's probably a localStorage.setItem('hideModal', 'true') that's wrapped in an if(cookiesEnabled) check, and nobody's noticed the irony for three years because the PM prioritized the new gradient button over fixing state persistence
SessionStorage for 'don't show again'? Survives tabs, nuked by reload - frontend's favorite CAP theorem violation
Privacy-by-design: we don’t use cookies, so “Don’t show again” is a stateless no-op - proof that the only thing persistent in our stack is the compliance banner
Implementing “don’t show again” on a site that “doesn’t use cookies” is basically writing to /dev/null and calling it privacy by design
Local Storage Comment deleted
sorry i just copied from google Comment deleted
It works Comment deleted
Local storage. Session storage. Web workers. Cached image. Browser fingerprint + IP. Comment deleted
khaby Comment deleted
So true Comment deleted