Maybe a silly question but: is this by accident or a dark pattern? I hate it when this happens in the wild, but I never know if I should be suspicious of a dark patter or not.
This looks like an accident. Even many of the suspicious sites that do it seem to be an accidental side effect. The ones that annoy me the most are the news articles that trigger a history event on scroll. I think they do it as part of a tracking mechanism to detect scroll position, but the result is you have to press back twice to leave. I can't see the benefit, not like anyone is going to press back then say, "oh i guess i can't leave so I'll click an ad".
The site wealthygorilla[.]com alters your history by erasing the current contents and replacing it with more of their articles. It irritated more way more then it should've the one time I went to their site. I went through and found the JS where they implemented that "feature".
Safari on ios too. I assume it is a bug because it would be a very counterproductive feature to use when presenting a project. As others have said: good idea, but with no release the risk of forgetting about it is high. I have starred many github projects but only gone back to see progress on few of them.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
