Non-Consensual Personalization | Hacker News Reader

Non-Consensual Personalization

amitp.blogspot.com

331 pointszdw234 comments

I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy.

Maybe it's from looking too much at the data? There seems to be this notion that if the users don't immediately understand the interface, then it's a bad interface. But that's ignoring that human beings learn by fumbling. That doesn't make the world bad or the thing poorly designed.

If you take away every opportunity to learn and figure things out, to make mistakes, then you haven't helped anyone, you've made them helpless.

We should be thinking a lot more about how we can enhance user agency, how we can allow them to make deliberate choices, rather than how we can take that ability away and how to corral them into some particular behavior of our own preference.

A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment.

They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on.

It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new designers on the idea that there isn't that much of a difference between software users and chicken in a farm.

Ironically if there's one thing utterly useless as a way of conveying information it would be a singular button.

I think there's a middle ground. Providing clear options and deliberate choices can be done through not having a thousand options and buttons.

Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do.

If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia:

<https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/encarta.png>

<https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/wikipedia.png>

It's clearly very different. The Encarta design is a lot more quiet. If you're reading, then you are reading. There are sparse inline links, but nothing near the shotgun linkedness of Wikipedia.

I've experimented with stripping down Wikipedia, producing this:

<https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Plato>

It's definitely several steps too far (but taking things too far is the best way to get the feel for an idea), but I find that much easier to read, because the choices are moved out of the text and into the bottom of the text. That is, you read first, and decide what to do next once you are finished reading.

All I see on the Marginalia Plato article is a site that forces an uncomfortably narrow article width on me, while eschewing almost all the advantages of hypertext in the name of some ill-conceived notion of "quieter reading".

I'm not saying it's all bad, though - it's something that could be an option offered to the unfortunate people with attention deficit disorder.

The forced text width, however, is inexcusable.

Yeah I think that's probably from my own habit of never using full screen windows. Though I'm not sure how to deal with the fact that it's very hard to read long lines of text. Most printed books, newspapers, and so forth use that width (max 60ch) specifically because it's hard to follow lines longer than that. I chose to follow book guidelines specifically because that format has been largely stable for some thousand years and is at this point the gold standard for legibility. Usually when things stagnate for that long, it's not because nobody has thought to try something different in all that time.

Maybe multiple columns could be an option, I guess. Not sure how to do that well with varying paragraph sizes, though.

On Firefox mobile, it's more like 11 characters wide. Pretty much unusable.

Hmm, strange. It doesn't have these proportions? <https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/encyclopedia-mobile.png>

I sadly can't diagnose since my phone isn't powerful enough to run Firefox. Looks as intended on Firefox desktop with emulation mode, though.

Huh. It looks fine now. Did you change anything?

Not a thing.

Works for me on Firefox for Android (Firefox for iOS being just a safari skin). I get 6-7 words per line (looks like the site authors emulated screenshot), so like 40 or so characters

I'd prefer if web designers used relative max width of maybe 80 or 90%, and left it to users to resize their browser windows accordingly. But I realize that is a pipe dream, people are too lazy for that, so I just use custom CSS browser extensions to adjust this on sites I visit regularly.

I also actually prefer wider lines, as I don't find following them difficult, and prefer wider lines and having to do less scrolling. It's also fun seeing how a lot of random blog articles which seem long in a narrow layout are in fact very short. :)

I like the page and, instead of finding the fixed width “inexcusable”, see it as an element of tasteful design that makes the text easy to read, as you’ve chosen an ideal width. The justification would work better if there were hyphenation, though.

Not much to add except wanted to say that I enjoyed becoming aware of the impact Wikipedia's design decision had on me, as a reader.

Seeing the encarta/marginalia version vs the wikipedia one really drives home the point. It's interesting how the design had a strong impact on my experience, and yet I never really noticed it before.

I feel a bit like a fish suddenly aware of the water they're in.

I was confused by the claim that the Encarta version is quieter until I read that it was because of the inline links. I thought the Wikipedia version was quieter because it doesn't have a distracting background image. I think this confusion is evidence that inline links are actually not distracting. I don't feel I have to make a decision whenever I see one because I know they'll still be there later.

Maybe it's individual variations? I struggle immensely reading text with inline links. I immediately start skimming and my attention is strongly drawn to the linked words.

Maybe you can add custom CSS rules that make links the same color? I also much prefer the wikipedia interface to the alternatives.

This pretty much is a custom CSS. I was also more than a bit annoyed by the huge downloads and 30 second page loads.

The Encarta version is much better if you want to learn about Plato, while Wikipedia makes it much easier to learn about thing related to Plato.

The notion that the relation to other things is at least as important as the thing itself permeates Wikipedia. Many smaller articles, like e.g. Differentiable Programming [1] probably link to more topics than the article itself has words.

I think a "stripped down" Wikipedia is an experiment worth trying, but it would serve a subtly different purpose, with some use cases being left behind and some being better served.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiable_programming

I think the big problem with Wikipedia's design is that it caters to too many audiences with disparate needs using the same interface, both reading and navigating and cross-referencing and editing.

I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.

> I think the big problem with Wikipedia's design is that it caters to too many audiences with disparate needs using the same interface, both reading and navigating and cross-referencing and editing.

> I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.

I think what this thread is missing is that Encarta and Wikipedia are vastly different products. If Wikipedia had multiple views for different needs it would literally die, because it's community edited. If its UI encouraged staying withing a narrow lane, then it would have even more problems with getting readers to cross over to being editors.

I read something once that when you come across a link, your mind subconsciously hesitates whether or not to open it and that these thoughts detract from your focus on the material at hand.

I often wonder if it would be more beneficial for websites to transition to footnotes with all pertinent links at the bottom of the page.

If you want to strip away the MediaWiki adornments and editing/interactivity tools from Wikipedia, you just have to go to the mobile page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato

It is still consumption-oriented and stripped down, but retains far more non-textual information than your experiment.

> one should be the main button that people really should click on

I don't think there's something wrong with CTAs.

You can misuse/abuse this technology as you can with every, but providing a structured way to achieve a desired result is not bad per se.

It helps build muscle/"brain" memory and can help you perform your task better/quicker.

There was an item posted here this week with the same exact conversation. It's honestly a bit eye opening with the way UX is going. I am all for sensible defaults, but being able to tweak things here and there should really be an option, and not one seen as a failure by the designers...

Agreed, but the reason this happens is not in a bubble. "User interface design" is not a natural category of design. People in the field will point to "The Design of Everyday Things" as some sort of progenitor of the field, but if you read it, it is kind of just a pop-psychology book.

The truth is (IMO) that UX is more closely related to marketing than it is to technical design work. The entire point of having a UX designer is to get marketing speak and advertising techniques right into the heart of the engineering process.

If engineers just built tools in the way that was the most sensible to them, they would have too many options and give the user far too much control. Ostensibly the reason given why this is bad is that it is 'confusing' for the user, but the reality is that it allows the end user to use the product in ways that do not maximize the profit. Even worse, users might use the product in a way that does not reflect the spirit of The Brand. It is telling that UX revolves around creating user stories, because this is exactly how advertising is done; “Martha, a woman in her mid thirties, is trying to balance home life with her need to efficiently walk her dog…”

> there should never be more than one button

... which you have to look at, because the position and function changes. There is no muscle memory with dynamic UI.

I recall a visually impaired woman who couldn't hail an Uber. I could tell she was very fast with the old UI. But, the button had shifted. She was going to call her Husband to drive over from Oakland to pick her up in San Francisco. Instead, I showed her where the button was.

I think it is mostly a trade off.

Using modern design philosophy you won't risk getting a really terrible UI but the trade off is you will not get something new and innovative.

I am sure there are all kinds of issues with the scale of complexity also. It would seem nearly impossible for a designer to come up with a good innovative UI if they are not an expert in using the system themselves so the chicken in a farm ends up being the least bad option.

Children are the best target demographic for marketers. Considering the demographic decline and the diminishing numbers of children, the next best solution is to infantilize adults.

Once again we are reminded that advertising and marketing are the source of a great number of societal ills.

ah the anti-marketing dollar, huge market :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Mn2NbjlqU

> There seems to be this notion that if the users don't immediately understand the interface, then it's a bad interface.

This might make sense for b2c public services, or areas where a high cost of training on continually 'new' users hits the bottom line.

It makes far less sense for internal services/apps, and it's something I end up 'fighting' with with clients sometimes. They'll have 'design teams' who justify their "ux of the day" decisions with data from public services.

An internal reporting system with 10-12 dedicated users who will use it 3 hrs per day as their main operating function should have more levers/buttons/filters/etc than a marketing website aimed at getting people to buy a specific brand of dog food.

But that marketing site looks so 'good' and 'inviting' because... there's only 2 buttons, in particular shades, etc. The reporting interface should be warm and inviting right? With smooth transitions to bring a sense of calm to the users, rather than induce tension, right?

A well-informed user may decide to switch to a competitor. Users who turn off tracking and data collection are less profitable. It doesn't matter how terrible and interface is, as long as people stay on the site and remain engaged as they are fed ads disguised as content.

I agree there is a UX crisis happening now, but fixing these pathologies requires changing the incentive structures around commercial software. I think the best we can do realistically is get people into open source.

Users who turn off tracking and data collection are less profitable.

For ads maybe, but if anyone thinks this for retail it's either because they are relying on the invasive tracking for (mis)attribution, or because they broke the checkout flow by putting a non-optional call to an analytics function in the button handler without a try/catch.

Some days I think it's learned helplessness, some days I think it is inborn helplessness.

I myself always searched for customization, starting with toys I dissembled and put together in a way I liked. Whenever I went to the toy store I looked for screws and not glue. To my first computers, I loved DOS and when it went away for Windows GUI I took to the registry and then searched for something else and found Linux. Tinkering is my destination and I am never happy with what I have. This drive is the way I am built, I think, and no matter what anybody would want me to do I simply can not. I must have things my way.

There's the opposite kind of people, who just want something that works right out of the box and find any tweaking to be a distraction from getting shit done. They are the majority and products are geared towards them because the market for tinkerers is too small for the economies of scale. I used to blame companies but now I just think they make what they can sell. And they must sell to people who actually hate computers and technology, they just like the products of it.

It always depends on the product. I have a hypothesis that almost everyone is a "power user" of something, but that something varies from person to person.

For me, I am a power user of computers and technology, but I couldn't care less about my car and just want it to get me places.

Other people are the opposite, and love tinkering with their cars. Or maybe they are a power user of carpentry tools, while others (like me) just need a basic drill.

I think one thing that worries me is that there are markets that cater to power users in other areas (cars, tools) but the way software is going, almost all software is being stripped down and power being taken away from all users since the non-power-user base is so large. This is especially true with mobile technology, but it is creeping into desktops/laptops as well.

The enthusiast car users are suffering the same thing for the same reasons. You can see the age of the modified cars - most are 20 years old or more.

I agree. This constant pressure to "delight" users is just a race to the bottom. Reminds me of the scene in Idiocracy with the hospital diagnosis buttons. https://youtu.be/LXzJR7K0wK0

> I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy.

On a similar note, constantly redesigning UI just to redesign them encourages this too -- why develop expertise or skill when it will be undermined because some UX designer wants to make his mark?

I get the strong impression that UX has stopped being about the users and has become more about the designer's ego or his employer's interests. It's the best explanation I can think of for all the redesigns that no one wanted or asked for.

IMHO, the first questions any UX designer should ask themselves are:

1. Is the new design a useless side-grade from what we already have (i.e. just doing something differently to do it differently)?

2. Are the advantages over the existing design significant? Is it really worth invalidating existing user knowledge?

I've had a few run-ins with UI designers and architects (of the building kind) as an end user, and they've left a sour taste in my mouth. A lot of dismissing user feedback with pablum about "change being hard" or insistence that the changes are popular with some silent majority.

I'd have to disagree. Most changes, at least at large companies, are driven by dollars, not ego.

A small change in user engagement can mean millions in revenue. Or billions, in the largest cases.

Things are extensively a/b tested to validate that the change drives revenue. And most companies are fine with forcing the user to learn, as long at it increases profits.

Dunno, my experience with large companies is that there is a lot of office politics, some are making overtures for career advancement by short-sighted but ostensibly profitable changes they hope will be noticed by higher-ups, others want to protect their fiefdom by sabotaging and delaying up-and-comers.

Most everyone is looking at their paycheck and status, not the bottom line.

It is very easy to tip an A/B test in the direction you'd like it to go by picking what you measure and handwaving away bad metrics.

If we want to be hyperbolic about the social import of these kinds of UI choices, I'm game.

I interact with plenty of interfaces that are difficult to learn but rewarding. I'm happy to spend my time working on the interface between my trumpet and my lips, or my piano and my fingers. Or hell, I will happily futz around with various synthesizers for hours, customizing which knobs control which parts of the matrix of the sound-shaping going on in the device.

I don't like to spend time learning UI that are difficult to learn but not rewarding.

I am a-okay not having to think about what color I want for the buttons the AWS console. I'm a-okay with google autocorrecting my misspellings or sending me to a different keyword, as I've taken the time to learn just enough about their interface to know how to circumvent that when it doesn't work well.

It's much more rewarding to learn the interfaces that I do want to make deliberate choices about than it is to have to master interfaces for things that about whose choices I do not care about; I feel like that choice engenders empowerment rather than helplessness.

Having to make interface decisions for the myriad of things I interact with on a day-to-day basis would be exhausting.

I feel like the implication is that people prevent you from customizing stuff for ego reasons, but isn't it a lot of code and testing to implement the personalization UI?

But thinking about it more, I suppose the answer is to let the users write their own clients. Netflix should have a JSON API that's a list of all the programs, and each record should contain a link to video file. They don't do that because of DRM and they specifically want to prevent you from writing a program that saves the downloaded bytes to disk. So I guess there is no way to achieve their business goals (make sure you pay $20/month forever to watch stuff, and make sure the "rights holders" get to sell you the same thing multiple times) without doing more work, which they simply chose not to do because they don't have to.

Going one level deeper, I guess that video streaming is a weird market. You could have the worst software and the best content and probably win. So you can't compete with Netflix by making a video streaming service that has more UI features. I guess what this means is that copyright is deterring innovation. I think I've heard that one before. Sigh!

They could do that but you deeplink back into the Netflix app to actually watch to solve the DRM issue. Which I think shows that it's about more than just DRM. They want to control the experience.

Of course they do.

If they ever have any hope of improving margins, they need to argue that “our curation drives content discovery” to get better deals out of content providers.

they've abandoned the content acquisition strategy. that went out the boat a long time ago. netflix is a content creation company now, competing with HBO, NBC, etc.

That doesn't change the value they provide to the people actually making the shows.

As a producer/show runner, who would you rather make a series for, Netflix or a streaming service you've never heard of? Which would you accept less money upfront from?

Suppose you choose Netflix to fund your philosophical sci-fi show? Netflix tell you they will put it at the top of the main menu for everyone who's ever watched the new Star Trek as long as you agree to X. Do you agree to X?

Thank you. It's always a struggle to communicate to people in 'labor' industries that creative content is ruled by 'talent,' so even if you employ the 'talent,' they still have the upper-hand as the owners of their IP and abilities.

Importantly, to get the data to learn from it to improve faster than their competitors can.

We realized our competitors were copying us at a company long ago. We geofenced a/b tests so they wouldn’t see what we were testing and intentionally made the web app worse for that area (mostly as a “fun” 20% type project). Interestingly, the “worse” version starting doing really well even though we were giving them “control” for all older features. We ended up rolling back several months of changes to the entire product and we saw a huge burst in revenue.

It wouldn’t be until years later until I understood the Simpson paradox and that a/b testing improves the mean of whatever metric you’re trying to improve, usually by decreasing some important segment and improving some unimportant segment.

That's why you should measure many things - especially all your important things - in every a/b test [=

With the Simpson paradox, even if your metrics go up, across all your segments, it’s actually going down. Measuring only takes you so far.

Sure - this is why Google Search constantly makes less money. Measuring only takes it so far.

I would love to read a blog post with more details

That description of Simpson's Paradox doesn't really agree with my understanding. Simpson's paradox goes with how the same data is cut into subgroups and can invert the numbers.

That is, it's less about "metrics up, other unmeasured metrics down" and more "we're up in all subgroups, so we never noticed that our numbers across when we combine the subgroups are down."

There's no practical difference between the two.

DRM doesn't effectively keep you from finding everything anyway, and much DRM is flimsy, easy-to-bypass pro forma DRM; because DRM -is- about controlling the experience, first and foremost.

Its sheer presence activates the DMCA felony protection of circumventing copyright. This is why Cory Doctorow always calls copyright evasion "felony contempt of business model". It's there so the company can control the experience and squash any attempt to bypass that control; in that sense, the DRM on the UX is more important than the DRM on the content itself.

Obligatory Cory Doctorow "Unauthorized Bread" link: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...

I've wanted that model for music streaming for a long while now. Let me pay for a streaming API key and plug it into third party software that doesn't have a flavor of the day interface and set of features.

Apple Music does this.

Is the protocol documented anywhere?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi

How does that let me stream the actual song? It provides access to metadata only, as far as I can tell.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs

I think you can use it in conjunction with this JS library: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs/musicki...

Musi.sh my friend.

There was an article on HN the other day that suggested that (and I'm paraphrasing) "only failed products have settings".

We hear a lot about simplicity and how it's easier to study users and optimize for desired outcomes: conversions, upsells, continued use, whatever. Having a simple product nudges the user in the direction you want them to go and makes your product intuitive.

I think there's another reason for simplicity: incompetence. Your team doesn't care enough about the product that they're actually using it. There are no in house power users. They're not making it for themselves, so they simply do not care. They're there to finish the Jira tickets and shovel out a Fischer Price product that meets the requirements doc.

You can tell which software was created by power users. Vim. Linux. Blender.

> Vim. Linux. Blender.

All of which are famous for having user interfaces/experiences that aren't very intuitive for the newbie. Which is okay, but perhaps different segments of the population have different needs and therefore are best served by different software.

> Linux

To be fair a couple of mainstream distros are far easier to get than Windows or Mac, only people have a lot of previous Windows experience by the time they encounter Linux.

These days iPads of course are at a different level, but that wouldn't be a fair comparison.

Source: I had a 6 years of power user experience from Windows when I first started using Linux.

>To be fair a couple of mainstream distros are far easier to get than Windows or Mac

Until you try to plug in a WiFi Dongle, printer, SD Card reader or pretty much any other piece of hardware that isn't a keyboard or mouse.

Those all mostly work out of the box these days. Even devices that don't get driver support on newer Windows anymore.

Depends on your definition of "work". I've had issues with every device I listed on Kubuntu 20.04.

I, on the other hand, had an issue with every type of device you have listed using Windows, but none on Arch Linux.

And I can add to the list devices like: an SATA to USB adapter, gamepad (not only DualShock, but also X1 Gamepad [sic!]), external CD-ROM, Wacom tablet

With each of them there was an issue on Windows, but on Linux it's Plug-n-Play; heck, even my gaming mouse needed drivers on Windows for all buttons to work, while on Linux noting additional was required

A while ago I bought a used Nikon Coolscan negative scanner. The last edition of those came out in around 2004 and the last driver only supports Vista.

It came with a PCI Firewire card. My installation process on Arch was installing the card, rebooting plugging everything in and installing SANE. That's it, I could now scan my negatives.

It's very hardware-specific so it's impossible to generalize, but usually stuff will either work out of the box or not work at all on free systems (Linux, BSD). The exception is if your distro refuses to ship with proprietary software (good!) in which case you need to install extra drivers (eg. firmware-linux) for stuff to work.

Something to consider is how old the hardware is. Typically, drivers will land in Linux kernel 1-2 years after hardware is released, so you need to use slightly older hardware and/or a distro which keeps up to date on a rolling-release basis. For example, good luck finding 802.11ax hardware supported by free systems right now: 802.11ac on the other hand (spec from 2013) works perfectly for 90% of chipsets.

To be clear if you're not familiar with driver development: this is 100% the fault of crappy hardware manufacturers who are doing everything except their job. Their job is to produce hardware and publish datasheets for them: problem is due to corporate/copyright culture and abuse of dominant position from Microsoft since 90s (see IBM/Microsoft scandals and the threats to dismantle Microsoft), they stopped to publish datasheets and instead publish a crappy windows driver that's full of bugs and will stop working with new releases.

We should not be supporting these vampires with our money but hey the problem is the hardware vendors who do distribute their datasheets can be counted on our fingers and their hardware doesn't have the raw power of your latest NVINTELDIARM.

Excellent usenix talk on this topic: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke...

Previous HN discussion on this topic, about Lenovo more precisely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977175

Since around 2008 most of the stuff I use have been better supported on mainstream Linux than on Windows.

Literal plug and play.

>All of which are famous for having user interfaces/experiences that aren't very intuitive for the newbie.

Does any other vim alternative have less features and settings? Notepad is not an alternative. I am not a vim fan but my text editor and my IDE are power user tools and have settings.

Linux, probably the OC is referring to the kernel, otherwise GNOME is famous for it idiotic simplicity where you must modify your work to fit the software and not adapt your server to fit your work.

Blender , what does Maya (or other alternatives) has less settings and menus?

I think you missed the point, pro users are not all identical, working all n the exact same way on the exact same things, your application that targets professional needs to adapt or reject from the start a big part of the user base.

> Does any other vim alternative have less features and settings?

As a long-time vim user who doesn't use the power features (except search/replace patterns) i've found micro to be a very decent alternative to vim/nano to teach to people new to CLI land. Select text with shift, save with ^S, quit with ^Q, find with ^F... it's just like windows notepad, but with colors/indentation out of the box.

There were also some conversations a few years back in emacs mailing list about the choice of defaults. Some people argued emacs defaults should try to accomodate people who've never used emacs before but are familiar with other key bindings and UI paradigms, because power users will always find how to configure their favorite workflows but newbies will leave if they can't accomplish the most basic tasks without reading a 50 page manual.

You don't need a default war, you hopefully have intelligent enough users so you can show them a popup where they can select a profile that is more comfortable for them.

I hated vim so I can't say too much about it, just that I hate when it is set as default on some servers (or some colleague thought is cool to make it default) but I would not attempt to attack the vim project or vim users for their choices, I understand that it is perfect for them and we need hyper-complex-text=editors too, it would be stupid if Notepad users will start writing blogs that say Notepad++. vim and emacs are complex because the developers or users are stupid and are using Notepad wrong.

The reason I stopped hating vim is because they added instructions on how to quit it, so I can quit it and rerun my commands with EDITOR=nano in front when vim pops up unexpectedly.

Are we really at the point where having a button to disable personalization makes you a "power user"? I'm by no means a twitter power user, but I do want to just make my timeline chronological and remove all the "tweets you might be interested in" garbage.

This! I did not explicitly ask for my entire feed to contain "threads" of startup advice from random people.

One big problems with "settings" is it's easy for people to change them, then get confused.

You used to be able to move the taskbar around the screen, and make it taller / shorter. I'm sure some people loved this. On the other hand, I would often find people whose computers were "broken", as their taskbar was invisible, or took half the screen.

Even experts can fall for this -- I've had a few open source projects where someone complains "I did X from the documentation, but it didn't work". After a while we discover they, months ago, switched off X (or something related to X).

I'm not saying there shouldn't be settings, but they aren't a clear win. Even ignoring the fact they all need testing, they provide pain points for many users.

Yeah, I think the real problem here is that nobody wants to support anything anymore. The only way to continue shipping products is to basically ship generic throw-away happy meal toys that are incapable of being misused.

> They don't do that because of DRM and they specifically want to prevent you from writing a program that saves the downloaded bytes to disk.

This seems like a 20th century philosophy.

The point of a subscription service is to watch whatever you want. This one came out last week. You didn't know that one existed until today. You can't have downloaded it before it existed or before you knew you wanted to watch it. So there's no point in even bothering to do this.

And if people actually want to pirate your stuff, the DRM empirically isn't stopping them anyway. It's just a pointless farce.

> You could have the worst software and the best content and probably win.

There's winning and then there's winning.

You're not going to get any subscribers with no content, true. But Netflix has the content. Now suppose they had a better interface. Better experience, people spend more time watching Netflix, Netflix is more valuable and can charge more or gets more subscribers. It's not useless just because it's not the dominant factor.

Or maybe they found a balance between ppl watching just enough to keep their subscriptions and not get bored of Netflix.

Just thought about this and it made me a bit scared tbh. :D

> And if people actually want to pirate your stuff, the DRM empirically isn't stopping them anyway. It's just a pointless farce.

Indeed, if the past 30 years of digital piracy have taught us anything it is this. It should be obvious: it is impossible to both allow consumption of something while simultaneously preventing its duplication. All DRM does is make life worse for your customers.

> You didn't know that one existed until today. You can't have downloaded it before it existed or before you knew you wanted to watch it.

Why not? If Netflix made their catalog DRM-free and available via an API, then you could download all of Netflix, and then unsubscribe. Sure, you’re missing out on the new stuff, and it could take a lot of disk space to store all of Netflix, but you still have 6k titles [0] to watch for $20 (assuming you’ve got an ultra fast connection and manage to download it in a month, of course). And if you somehow run out of content (over 36k hours of it, according to a slightly older source [1]), another $20 will let you expand your library.

[0] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/netflix-library-by-the... [1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/how-long-would-it-take...

> You could have the worst software and the best content and probably win

I definitely get where you're coming from. As a counter example, my parents aren't great with tech and have written off platforms with content they want because they find them annoying. For example, they find Amazon Video way too confusing. What's free? Why are there channels that aren't free that they already have somewhere else?

> I suppose the answer is to let the users write their own clients

Netflix definitely doesn't want this. They want people to turn on their TV and open Netflix. If people have a third-party client that can show Netflix content alongside content from HBO, Amazon, Apple, and Disney, people might start watching their competitors more.

Not only that, but Netflix wants to be able to push your viewing in certain ways. If everyone starts watching a show at the same time, it can create buzz. Netflix's big promotion of Squid Game got to that critical mass for buzz to happen.

If they're able to determine what comes up where in the UI, they can also prioritize shows that are cheap for them. Getting someone interested in an owned show is better than getting someone interested in a show that they're renting from a third party.

That said, there are third party UIs like JustWatch that allow you to integrate with multiple services. We also saw Movie of the Night (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862588) featured here a little while back offering an API and it does offer links to shows in Netflix.

I think the issue is that it takes work to build a third-party UI and it takes money to actually collect the data (or pay someone else for the data) while the streaming companies aren't totally happy about giving you that data.

Really, everyone is looking for an edge. Google wants their Android TV to serve you ads for shows. They want Hulu to pay them money for them to push Hulu shows in their UI even if you don't have Hulu. Roku wants to sell advertising space on their Home Screen. Every content provider would love to become your primary destination while you ignore the other apps on your system and forget that they have content too.

>I suppose the answer is to let the users write their own clients

What happens when Netflix wants to release a new feature or change an API? Do they now have to worry about getting everyone else to update their clients? What if some customization is put behind a paywall. What should happen if a third party client gives it away for free?

>You could have the worst software and the best content and probably win.

You should see the apps from commercial broadcasters in Australia. Last time I tried using 10play/7plus (to be fair, this was 2 or so years ago), I swore off of using them ever again.

No progress tracking, batshit insane navigation, episodes playing out of order and there was a bug where it would semi-regularly not even load the right video.

Of course, good content can make up for some minor software annoyances, but if the experience is bad enough the content doesn't even matter any more.

And that's why video broadcasters should be mandated by law to follow standards for interop: whether it's HTTP+HLS over a specified API, or simply FTP/NFS. When you think of it, it's crazy how backwards we've gone now that you need a netflix client to play netflix videos and a youtube client to play youtube videos: it's like VLC/mplayer never existed!

To be fair, it's possible to use 3rd party youtube clients, but Youtube changes its pages/APIs just often enough (~ once/month) to break everyone's apps which is evil.

> but isn't it a lot of code and testing to implement the personalization UI?

But thinking about it more, I suppose the answer is to let the users write their own clients.

That's certainly one reason (on the operational layer), but I very much doubt it's the main reason. Otherwise, companies wouldn't go out of their way to prevent you from writing your own client.

My suspicion is, there is an additional layer between data gathering and customisation that is extremely interesting for companies: the target metric.

If you're allowed to customize things yourself, you supply your own target metric to judge if the current settings work well for you. It's mostly implicit, but I'd guess in most cases, it would be about ergonomics, how easy you can archieve things that are important to you, how much it matches your personal visual style, etc.

Telemetry and "forced personalisation" allow the company to supply their own target metric instead. Yes, ergonomics and personal preferences play a role, but the company can easily mix in other things, such as retention, which are exclusively important for them but not for you.

"I suppose the answer is to let the users write their own clients"

Have you tested that supposition against the percentage of users that can write software and compared it to the percentage of users that don't code for a living?

Well first yes it's been tested: that's how email, DNS, WWW, XMPP, Matrix (and others) work. Heck, that's how most of the Internet works!

But also, maybe the problem is we often develop apps as a fragile monolith which is definitely not intended to be customized in terms of UI. When the core or your application is designed library-first so that your executable is only an opinionated wrapper (client) around the lib, you make it easier for others to reach their usecase by implementing a different wrapper. I don't see a reason this wouldn't apply to composable/reusable GUI components: early Mozilla (XUL) is a famous example of that.

> but isn't it a lot of code and testing to implement the personalization UI?

Most of the stuff cited as example come from additional features changing an existing behavior. Allowing to disable it would be overhead, but really not much I think.

Another example: Youtube started to automatically translate “foreign” video titles. Having a “never translate anything ever” toggle in settings would smallish, there is no other UI impact, and they must already have that kind of setting internally for testing or legacy purpose.

People who create and build things tend to have strong emotional needs to control that thing. This includes for example, the ui designers at netflix, and the people who run the company. You see this in all kinds of domains from filmmakers who don’t want their movie released on certain formats even though fans want it, to game designers nerfing beloved tricks because content gets skipped, and making cutscenes unskippable, apple wanting control of what apps you put on your phone and how you repair it and so on.

Often there is a profit motive as well but I think the underlying prime cause of this stuff is just control

Netflix has some vision for how their service should be used, and they don’t want you fucking with it, and various weird contractual obligations and profit optimizations are gonna get you less and less choice.

The people who want to customize are a small minority so there isn’t any competitive advantage to offer it, and niche players can’t exist in domains like netflix, or iphone.

niche players can’t exist

This is where the world has gone astray. We would be much better off with a thousand three comma companies taking the place of a single four comma company.

Also, niches used to be considered socially acceptable. What has taken all the air out of the room?

Sure but in domains like running a streaming tv service, or building a phone, catering to a small subset of users means you are a smaller company, and then it is very hard to build a decent phone, or create something like netflix.

But why is that? Phones are more expensive at retail and more profitable than ever. Why should it be so difficult to make one even with a billion dollars? And it wasn't hard to run a video rental store 25 years ago. What changed?

Phone profit margins have been declining even for Apple (about ~60%) and are already fairly thin for the rest of the market (~13%). The problem is that getting the kind of customization we're talking about here probably means rolling your own phone OS which is a non-starter.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/12/22/global-...

The only must-have feature from a given new phone for me is the upgraded camera. In most other regards, reusing stuff from previous generations where profitability peaked should be fine, giving a dozen niche manufacturers enough clout to build customizations off a common base.

I reject the framing.

The problem isn’t the lack of personalizabilty(?) or customizability. The problem is that we’ve collectively allowed providers of content to warp the www into a state where they have the ability to control our experience.

Consider what the web would look like if instead of html and JavaScript, it only consisted of a content description language devoid of any ability to control layout, fonts, colors, etc. My browser, under MY control, can present the content to me in whatever way I prefer. There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser.

Just because the web currently acts a certain way doesn’t mean that things HAVE to be that way.

Right on! Imagine if the web served up content and I could write my own processors for it to lay it out however I want...man, that'd be great.

But the Web became about branding the moment they introduced images and font choices. I remember designing a website for my local skate rink in 1997 that had a left navbar with buttons I did in photoshop and cut-n-paste javascript to add a lens flare when you moused-over them. Haha! Suh-weet.

This was at least the direction we were headed with XHTML. The source document could be something more akin to raw data and the presentation could be rendered on the client with an XSL stylesheet. Instead we got... something else.

> Imagine if cars came in a kit and I could assemble it and choose the fittings myself ... man, that'd be great.

I mean, for a niche certain audience, yes it is great.

But for mass market, people don't necessarily want to take on a whole new hobby in order to experience the thing.

Worse, it's contextual within the same individual: the person who wants to customise the car doesn't want to make their own sourdough pizza from type-00 flour, and customised web browser. And vice versa: each thinks "why waste time on that other thing"?

Instant messaging in 200x was based on "naked content" that could be parsed by anyone, so there was a lot of different programs supporting various forms of communications. If you weren't a programmer you simply relied on 3rd-party software and that worked quite nicely.

Exactly. likewise most people go to a dealer and get a "third party car" that works quite nicely on the shared infrastructure of roads, signs, gas stations etc. Maybe with a few configurable options such as color.

And then there was non enthusiast software and it won, so I guess that's what the people want.

This is sort of what Reader Mode and Pocket achieve. However Pocket is now trying to get into the recommendation game, and devoted some of its interface to this sort of personalization.

We could all pass around something closer to the notion of pure data (JSON, plug for EDN) but we don’t. Even when we could. Maybe we should more? I don’t find “companies make us do otherwise” to be a compelling answer of why we’re not. Even in spaces where that isn’t a constraint it doesn’t happen much.

> There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser.

To what extent would you vs the author control these experiences? The author may express their freedom by giving different experiences to different people based on how we respond. Then we’re back where we are.

There’s a bit of a freedom vibe through this whole conversation, but there’s also a strong element of control. It’s a “my house my rules”, libertarian, property owner, “you’re free to do whatever I want” vibe.

The author’s analogy of a company painting their walls seems off. It seems more like a wall that paints itself. And since this criticism is going against software I wouldn’t call critical infrastructure, it’s more like an invited house guest that isn’t singing the songs you want.

The CSS standard defined user stylesheets and specified their behaviour.

Unfortunately, it seems most browser vendors are slowly attempting to destroy this feature.

Which is sad, because in real life many users really want this feature.

"--Can you please implement dark mode for your site/webapp?"

"--Dude, just use whatever css you want."

Actually, it's possible with https://userstyles.world/

> Although most of the time the styles of a web-page's author would suffice, the Opera browser has long provided facilities for its users to modify the appearance of the page, and all recent Opera versions up to and including 12.17 allow user style-sheets. Versions beyond this point, version 15.xx was essentially next, have not permitted such facilities.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Style_Presentation_Modes_in_Op...

I really miss old Opera and it's features: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Features_of_the_Opera_web_browser?...

Old Opera was the greatest, I stopped using it after the jump from 12, but about a 1-1.5yr later in late 2014 I discovered the pre-alpha version of Vivaldi, made by the original Opera team who did a Jerry McGuire and decided to make their own browser following their original vision. I've been using it daily as my main browser ever since.

It still doesn't have some of the later features of old opera, but it has rocker gestures, speed dial, tab panels, and a bunch of cool features for maximum usability in a range of workstyles.

They also released an android version with some neat cross-compatibility like accessing open tabs from other devices through the cloud and sending pages from your desktop to your phone.

That's a ridiculous idea. 99.9% of people want a default experience that works well without configuring anything.

I don't think you took this part into account.

> There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser.

If 0.1% of people can build and customize things, the other 99.9% benefit without having to work for it.

But the moment the default stops working well, there had better be a configuration somewhere to change it so it works well again.

95% of people also want a stable experience, and dislike changes. Which is violated when they don't control the interface.

Spotify is the worst. Elements "randomly" change spatial location all the time.

You said the same thing that the author did..

That sounds a bit like Gemini.

"Gemini" can be a bit tricky to search for, so here's a link for the curious: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

It genuinely strives to do essential what the top-level comment describes. It presents content in a very raw form. All styling and presentation details are left up to the client applications. Gemini users are a small, but passionate, little corner of the internet.

> Consider what the web would look like if instead of html and JavaScript, it only consisted of a content description language devoid of any ability to control layout, fonts, colors, etc.

Then another web will be invented with all the controls, and companies will use that instead. Web app proponents are constantly campaigning for more capabilities even today.

Instead of asking me what I want, they decide what I want.

I'm not sure if authoritarianism is the right name for this trend, but I think it's also related to companies no longer wanting users to think of themselves as owning the products they bought, and the shift to subscription-based services. They want to turn users into dumb, docile, obedient cows to be milked for $$$, and what better than to start them down that path by slowly taking away control and convincing them to "embrace the changes" forced upon them.

It is also done in part to hide just how thin most catalogs are. Notice how Netflix does not allow hiding any of their offerings. Imagine you had the ability to never see particular movies / shows / genres / movies you'd seen paraded before you again — when you cut out all the junk and things you'd never watch, you see the 10 choices left you might, depending on how bored you are, actually watch. Once you're there, you go for the cancel button and that is not what they want to see happen. Yes, they're seeking to guide consumers (that term is chosen purposefully) along predetermined paths, but that is only part of what's going on.

Yes. And Google. There are so many domains I want to never have show up in my search results. Think of one of the domains you hate, the ones that are never truthful, like oann.com is to me. Or all of the zillions of low-quality content farms that are generally ruining all Google results. I would be happy to just keep manually blocking all of them from ever showing up in my results. Google knows that a lot of people would want to do that, and will NEVER allow it. Google wants to steer me.

Luckily, the web is still open enough that you can do that yourself: https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist

It goes beyond that.

Google hides the things that are not low quality content farms, forcing high quality content to mimic low quality content to survive.

It is worse than no search engine at all.

One of the most insightful comments I've ever read here (lost the link to it, sadly) pointed out that search engines don't have to give you the best result to your query, they only have provide you with a result that you accept as a valid, good enough result.

In fact, it probably benefits them to avoid giving you the best result immediately, because once you found what you're looking for you stop searching, and if you keep searching they get to show you more ads.

(this insight generalizes to market places of all kinds, but one domain where I feel this particularly rings true is dating apps)

I would love to see all my statistics.

Netflix know what I watch, how long, what time of day etc. These are statistics about me, so I should have full access to it.

Preferably with additional option to get JSON, so I could parse them as I want.

GDPR mandates it, but it's not happening.

I believe the practice is called grooming and it makes me feel gaslit and controlled by my own technology.

Corporations are authoritarian by default.

I think the trend becomes visible when the people who use the service are no longer customers - they don't get the quite so friendly face of the corporation.

When we users are just free users, we don't pay, and we are the product - we are the audience for ads or other systems, we see this more "authoritarian" face.

I think Paternalism best describes the practice in this context. It is fairly annoying to not have options in most facets of software, and especially vexing that I can't own something I pay for wrt to subscriptions.

However, I'm fairly young and despite thinking that my fellow cohort would be "digital natives" and interested in controlling the preferences in their hard/software, the vast majority do not care.

If there is a step to change something for their stated benefit that requires more than a button press and some siping gestures, I've seen people just giving up and living with it. This is worrying to me, because that apathy will be the herald to something of far greater import in the years to come, whether that's politically, economically, or just a microcosm of society. And it does not bode well to me.

Paternalism is the term that comes to mind

This is my main issue with so many services. The reason I don't use Instagram is because Instagram gives me no control over what I see. You want to look at pictures without seeing comments? Too bad. It doesn't matter that the top comment on one of the accounts I follow was an anti-Semitic jab at the account owner, I have to read it because Instagram knows what's best for me. Ditto YouTube comments & suggestions, Twitter ordering & suggestions, TikTok ordering & suggestions, and just ads in general.

It's a catch-22 for me: if I cede control I get sucked into these addictive cycles, and if I don't cede control I miss out on the primary means of social communication for people my age. How did we get here?

This repo has a nice list of attention-respecting frontends. https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends/issues

One thing you used to be able to do on Instagram is mute everyone you follow and only view people’s profiles when you feel like it. Unfortunately they changed the frontend so now it will endless scroll posts from people you don’t know, which is arguably worse.

> and if I don't cede control I miss out on the primary means of social communication for people my age.

What I do: Fight it by being part of the solution rather than contributing to the problem by continuing to use these platforms. This is obvious, but the only thing that makes it the “primary” means of communication is the people using it. Don’t be one of those people, and tell your friends the preferred way to get in touch with you. If they are really your friends they will roll with it.

that doesn't work if you want to make new friends.

I'm honestly not sure what Instagram is used for, never had an accent, but I still make new friends without it. I use sms to talk to the ones with no mutual online chat services.

You got downvoted, but this is the only sensible response I have read here so far. It's like hearing all these spoiled kids complain about how company X or software Y should do this or that for them. Everybody on here deep down knows how it works, but it's all talk and no action.

Related: over-internationalization. Just because I’m browsing from an IP address that appears to be in Germany, doesn’t mean that I want your site autotranslated into German with no way to switch back, even when I type “/en” or take other active measures to indicate that no, I really do want to read it in the original English.

I also don’t want to be protected from seeing English-language content you’ve not yet translated to German by being popped over to the German homepage when I clicked a link to an article that’s only in English.

Browsers have the Accept-Language header just for this. You can provide a list of languages, in order of preference, for the site to decide what you want to see.

But nope. No-one uses it. (I know, I have had it set for a decade at least.)

This is even worse when I run a service on a VPS in France and I get pages in French, just because of the location.

Example: Google Calendar personalizes an event mentioning dinner with my wife with an illustration of a steak dinner. We're vegetarian.

Wow, that is vile.

Doubly so, because it influences how even non-vegans think about that dinner now. If you hadn't thought about what that dinner would be, you'd now be thinking about steak. You might otherwise have picked a lot of other things. I think it's unethical for them to manipulate you that way, even unintentionally.

In general I think it's quite dangerous how much influence a few entities have over language and symbolism...words like "friend" and "like" being hijacked to represent concepts of surveillance capitalism.

One of my pet peeves is with how people in the last few years have been conditioned to refer to any creative works as "content" in the abstract, totally removed from the case-by-case specifics of what exactly it is and what exactly contains it, even when you know the specifics and can describe it more exactly using just as many words.

It's sort of like the euphemistic language use by military or paramilitary organizations (e.g. "neutralizing" instead of killing or maiming or "conflict" instead of war) in that it's clearly meant to take our minds off something, except it's unclear to me yet what exactly "content" is meant to take our minds off and why.

Like yeah, you make video clips and I work in a breakfast cereal factory. We're both content creators! You figure out what defines the difference and I'll go create some content for the toilet bowl in the mean time.

The article mentions "correcting" searches as an instance of this. I find that particularly infuriating on Amazon. I often search for a specific thing, let's say, "CRI 95 LED light bulb", and it'll return thing that it determines are close enough. In this case, a CRI 96 or CRI 98 bulb would be fine, but it determines that because a CRI 80 bulb also has the same word in it, that it's close enough. (For context, the "color rendering index" expresses about how close an LED bulb is to an incandescent, and CRI 80 is just a standard cheapo bulb.)

I often end up returning things because I searched for something specific, and Amazon returned a bunch of things that were not that. (And it shows that for similarity search, that the "corrections" do need to have domain-specific awareness.)

Amazon search is so bad it borders on completely useless. I've actually had an easier time using other search engines pointed at Amazon.

It's on purpose, like the omission of negative search terms, something almost every single search engine offers. Udi Manber was the relevant VP at Amazon and he literally wrote the book on search engines.

I sometimes just switch to DuckDuckGo to search Amazon, because it doesn't treat my search keywords as mere suggestions. What I really need to do is fully kick the Amazon habit.

The most bizarre case is Twitter forcing me to see tweets in order of some algorithm instead of in chrono order.

They let me switch to chrono order.

And then automatically switch back after a month or so.

And then I switch back to chrono order. And so on. Resulting in a constant kabuki.

I stopped screwing around with the official twitter app years ago. I switched to Tweetbot and never looked back. No ads and chronological order are worth whatever the app costs to me.

I'm addicted to Twitter, so I force myself to view it in the web app (because it's a little more friction compared to apps).

It's not even that the Twitter algorithm is any good. Sometimes when showing a thread, it'll start with the most popular tweet of the thread instead of the first tweet of the thread.

Google search is becoming increasingly annoying.

It randomly starts mixing results in local language. Worse they detect my location incorrectly and start showing results in languages that I can't even read.

Yes, “location” based localization is the worst when in a different country. The browser sends the preferred locale, they should use that instead.

I’ve been calling this phenomenon “over-internationalization, but “over-localization” is a bit snappier.

The “best” part: when Google Maps auto-translates German business names into English, making it especially useless for a non-fluent German speaker to find them while driving. For example, a fabric shop named “Stoffe Bauer” was rendered as “Fabric farmer” (Bauer is a very common German family name, and literally means “farmer”).

Flip side: when sites force me onto the German homepage because there’s not a German translation of the English-language article I clicked a link to.

Stop trying to be so clever, and instead just make the language switch button visible at the top of the page for people who really want a translation. Like you did 15-20 years ago.

I'll do one better: it translates perfect English names to the local language and names like "Max muscle Gym" get translated to something like "way too much muscle" cuz there's no word for maximum

There's a lot of non-consensual stuff going on in the software world in general.

Non-consensual interface changes.

Non-consensual functionality changes.

Non-consensual software updates.

Non-consensual deprecation of browser support. (No, I don't think "security" is a good enough argument for dropping support for a client which is someone's only device for accessing their life-essential service through a secure network.)

Non-consensual changes to user data.

Non-consensual service and software deprecation and retirement.

I got past most of this by switching to FOSS everything. Not that FOSS in general is immune, and I had to switch to different FOSS several times for most things, but by now my things have mostly stabilized.

I think most people are only starting to wake up to this being an option, not a given, and whoever provides the ability to easily own your own device, software, AND data stands to benefit others and themselves quite a bit.

> Not that FOSS in general is immune

As GNOME is intent on proving...

I actually cancelled Netflix a few years ago because of this. Then my mobile carrier (T-Mobile) offered me an almost-free subscription, so I joined back.

Maybe it's my paranoid streak, but it almost seemed as though Netflix was not just offering me content that their AI thought I would enjoy, but they were progressively offering me content that was right on the edge of what my value system would accept -- as though they were reprogramming me. Eventually it reached the point where I could not find anything I wanted to watch, which is why I cancelled.

I think 'reprogramming' is a stretch, but I definitely noticed a gradual slide in actively exposed content from the stuff I actually wanted to watch towards mockbusters and foreign imports, and it became increasingly obvious they were trying to get me to watch stuff that was cheap to license, instead of the backlog of quality films I was used to from the DVD days.

I think the aim is to get you out of your comfort zone, so that you can find more things to watch and don't cancel your subscription.

This is exactly what Youtube does.

We often talk about a spectrum that spans from "Easy to use" to "Feature rich."

One approach to adding more features without becoming hard to use that I often see is removing the customization settings and selecting default values. This is basically what he's referring to.

A great example of this is a recent change to the Android YouTube app's seek bar. In the current version, the only way to seek is to click on the red dot representing the current position and dragging it. I believe this is standard behavior for all slider bars across all iOS, but for Android it's not. In the prior versions of the YouTube app on Android, clicking anywhere on the seek bar would jump to that position. YouTube made the change to conform their iOS and Android apps to behave the same way. But they essentially removed a feature and didn't provide a setting to toggle it back on.

I think the "Advanced" section in settings menus could be used more. Here, the motivated user can still customize, but the user that wants things to simply "just work" can leave those settings alone. Also, an advanced section that requires an extra step to open/display can help shy users stay away.

I tried YouTube on Android and found this additional nuance

you CAN seek to any arbitrary point on the timeline...but you have to tap AND DRAG a little. (facepalm)

Not sure why a simple tap was deemed not enough to skip to that point in the video ...seems straightforward and intuitive UX that way.

The thing is that when the product/service is a mass market thing, most users are confused by choice that goes too deep.

Most folks are happy with some amount of choice, that focuses on functionality, rather than looks.

When my brother watches NF, he doesn't bother about colors or where comes what. He idly browses through the list (if he has no pre-idea what to watch) and chooses it. The interface is not efficient for me, I'd rather it have complex search and filters readily available for use, but it is efficient for him because he doesn't have to use complex search to find shows. He is happy with what is recommended or just browse.

Sensible defaults should sort that out

I really miss customizing Mac OS X with full blown custom themes back in the day. Making my machine feel like my own.

These days it seems like most people don't even customize their wallpaper. It feels so strange to me.

There used to be whole vibrant OS customization communities and they just disappeared overnight with some decisions made by Cupertino and Redmond.

The willing user can probably still go in and gut the windows registry to make the shell be and do what they want it to, but it's definitely more trouble than its worth these days.

I've been tempted to dig around and add a few context menu shortcuts for QOL improvements I'd like to see, but I can't be bothered if it's going to break next update and I have to go digging again.

They still exist:

Windows: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rainmeter/ Linux (and occasionally mac): https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

I customise my windows and macos desktops quite a bit. The way I use my macbook is very different to how it looks in the marketing videos anyway.

Overall, I feel I notice the customisation problem with things like netflix, but not with windows or macOS. A smart user can do a lot to both.

The author mentions linux... but where does this happen on linux?

I love using a desktop that does exactly what I tell it. Yes it takes longer to set up. But I use a computer every day, it's worth it.

I also strongly disagree with the author. They're probably referring to things like Gnome and Unity and PopOS. The thing is, these are opinionated options in addition to everything else you can do with Linux, rather than replacements that restrict your options. You've also got things like NixOS, which is definitely going in the opposite direction, allowing you basically infinite customization.

Oh, for some reason I read that bit as "the Linux kernel non-consensually personalizes." You're right, though: it's definitely referring to userspace libraries, not the kernel itself. And yes, you can still easily avoid GNOME, Unity, and anything else you don't want to use: Openbox, i3, dmenu, and countless other window managers and GUI applications exist and work perfectly well (as they did a decade ago). That plethora of choice makes "Linux" nearly immune to the effect that the author's talking about.

In general I agree with you about the ability to customize Linux, but the author could be referring to systemd, which (from what I've seen) has been the target of many complaints about being too central and hard to replace, especially with how it is required by so many projects in the Linux ecosystem (from distros like Debian and Arch to DEs like GNOME).

On the other hand, it is extremely configurable, whatever else you might think about it.

The majority of people using Linux (well, on a desktop/laptop) use things like Gnome and Unity and PopOS. I mean, sure you can run Linux from a command line only. But that's not the common use case, and that's not usually what people even mean when they talk about Linux on a laptop.

GNOME removed a lot of configurability that was present in previous versions.

Yeah but linux is configurable. Don't like your UI? Rip it out. It's not locked down like windows or mac.

SO feels very weird to blame linux here and not... GNOME.

Plenty of major Linux distributions have made GNOME the primary or only "supported" UI, and plenty of site administrators don't want you to switch it out and may enforce that to a lesser or greater extent (e.g. not installing anything else). I do blame GNOME, but they're pretty much the face of Linux these days (I'd say ever since Mandriva went bankrupt tbh. - RedHat in particular is very closely involved in GNOME development).

And "don't like your UI? Rip it out" is less and less true now that modern linux is adding more tight integrations with rapidly-shifting interfaces. E.g. if you're running Wayland then a lot of stuff (e.g. screenrecording) only works with the GNOME compositor. Some of the modern app distribution stuff (Docker? Snap?) requires your DE to be running the right DBus sessions / process namespaces / etc. . If you use one application from a DE it's maybe expecting more things to be running - PulseAudio, clipboard management, ...

It's possible, but these days I'm not sure how big the practical difference is from using something like BB4Win.

Then don't run Wayland or Gnome and see how far you get without going insane. You seem to be forgetting that systems have become a lot more complex than 20 years ago and most people prefer for things to 'just work' instead of fiddling with the terminal to fix their wireless network or bluetooth headphone. And after that there are some pesky security things like every X client being able to read and inject keystrokes in every other window. If you want meaningful security it's useless to cling to the decades old way of doing things.

>Then don't run Wayland or Gnome and see how far you get without going insane.

Pretty far? GNOME isn't by any means the best DE out there? And Wayland is still in infancy?

Even with minimalist distros you fiddle with your terminal to get wifi and x working once and then it's done. It's not like you have to do it all the time (unlike windows 10 which would mute my headphones every single time it updated. still can't remember how to fix that even though it happened twice it was so non-obvious).

Also I haven't touched gnome in years, it's either been i3 or openbox. Feel pretty sane.

I don't know about Mac, but on Windows you can change everything from the start menu to the taskbar to Explorer to anything else you like.

How do you replace the window manager? the default one is really bad

What don't you like about it? Maybe there are some options you'd be interested in trying.

I hate it when people blame linux but they're actually referring to the software that runs on linux (GNOME, PopOS, Unity, etc.) not linux itself

The worst example of such douchebaggery is when you google something in say French, but you get only results in English or mixed results in both languages.. Even worse is searching youtube some other language.. The results are artificially translated into the searched language but you only discover that when you click on the video..

Depending on your IP and browser headers, you may just get the opposite problem (only finding things in French, not in English)

there should be a sort of 'right to algorithmic transparency'. Any service that personalizes content should give the user the control to either turn it off and just present data in some generic fashion, or let users introspect and change how they're being personalized. I'm pretty sure any large company already has tools for this internally anyway.

I've given GNOME (perhaps unfairly) a lot of flak in previous threads, but I think this is one of the main things responsible for the degrading software experience right here:

> One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color. But in most ways MacOS doesn't allow me to personalize things.

Now, it's an open secret that GNOME grabs a majority of it's design cues from MacOS, but this is one of the things that they don't need to and shouldn't copy. Desktop Linux has always lead the pack in this regard by allowing the user to directly manipulate the way "native" apps render, be it in Qt or GTK, and the effort to lock it all down for some perceived user/developer benefits are just silly.

Does anyone really think people would be using Linux if they didn't want to directly control the computer they're interacting with? Isn't that what software freedom is all about? I don't think anyone wants middlemen limiting what they're capable of doing on a computer. Sure, you might want sensible defaults or better accessibility for those settings (which is something desktop environments can definitely improve), but there are very few people lobbying for less control over their applications. I say this as both a user and a dev; stop taking things away from me. Not just CSS theming, but options for my dock and settings for my mouse. Arguably, this attempt to "centralize" the Linux experience has led to even more fragmentation with third-party tweak tools and countless extensions that break update-after-update. It's infuriating, and the author has hit the nail right on the head here: you can deliver a good default experience for the users and give people the tools they need to extend or modify that experience. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Netflix is an interesting example since it also has devolved so much over the years. Back in the olden days before streaming was a thing there was a table view of all their content. The table allowed you to sort by the different columns and I think you even were able to filter. I loved that view. It became more hidden and then went away.

They also had an API to pull content info. I used the API to write a little Ruby script that just listed all their movies ordered by how much Netflix thought I'd like them. This worked really well since their predictions were surprisingly accurate. More surprising was that many of the movies that they predicted I'd like a lot were never recommend by their own UI. Of course the API went away soon after as well.

Ever since I noticed that Netflix's UI wasn't suggesting what they accurately thought I'd like I've been wondering what they are actually optimizing for. Around that time there was also a lot of buzz around their contest to predict this stuff. Why would they put all this effort in and then not use it? Is their content that they benefit from more of I watch it? Are there licensing deals were Netfkix pays when I watch? Are they saving infrastructure and data transfer costs if everyone streams the same stuff?

All this has gotten way worth when they moved from making DVDs to streaming.

Edit: I think what might originally have been a driver for this when they went to streaming is to hide how small the library actually was. We all had still been used to a world where we could watch almost everything we wanted via DVDs from a single service. That's almost unfathomable in our new world where most perks are at least subscribed to a handful of services and still don't have the same access, especially to movies, as we had with Netflix DVDs.

Edit2: another problem is of course that what I might like isn't necessarily what if watch in any given moment. I might give Andre Rublev five stars, but an I likely to watch a 3+ hour movie with subtitles on a whim on a week night?

From an accessibility perspective it's a disaster too. My granny is visually impaired, but loves watching tv. She's been able to get by for decades by memorizing the commands needed to get where she wants to go (she had a list of nintendo cheat code-like instructions on how to get to various channels she wanted on the satellite e.g. down-down-left-left-enter gets her to her show) We tried to get her into Netflix, but the menus change far too often for this strategy to be of any use. Of course you can use the screen reader/narrator, but you can imagine how frustrating it is trying to find the carousel you're looking for by waiting for the screen reader to tell you, it's frustrating enough doing it visually!!

YouTube Music suggests random playlists on the homepage. It seems to somehow both suggest music I don't want, and keep feeding me songs and artists I've already listened to too many times recently. And it shuffles my supermix and discover mix's contents, and discards and recomputes my "Up Next" list seemingly at random. Any time I see a song I like, I have to save it or else it will probably disappear forever.

So... two thoughts.

Thought one is that while personalisation can be really desirable to those who really desire it, it isn't desirable to most people for most things. Most people gravitate towards the easiest, quickest to understand option. There's a trade off between powerful, personalised approaches and easy mass market approaches. It's not an absolute conflict, but it's often there.

For a mass market entertainment app like netflix... personalisation is rarely going to "win."

Thought two is that controlling users' experience, the content they see, how they see it, when... that stuff is power. I don't think FB, for example, would be the company it is today if they didn't seek and guard the power of UI. The power to choose what goes in users' feed and control over how they interact with it.

You can think of an app as a tool that users use to do what they want. Users manipulate the app to achieve their goals. You can think of it the other way around. An app is a tool for manipulating users to achieve the app's goals. Ultimately, the web era of software lends naturally to the latter.

You design an ecommerce check-out UI. The goal is sale completion. No one is going to design a check out UI for user power. They're going to design it for sale completion. Social software (like FB, or even HN) is similar. The app has goals and it needs users to behave certain ways to achieve it. FB wants reactions, shares and whatnot from users. It wants lengthy scroll sessions and habit building. HN wants good submissions and comments, for HN's definition of submissions and comments. Social software does not want users doing whatever they want to do with the software, which might be flame wars, joke memes or spam. That's the paradigm.

Funny the article mentions macOS - I actually had an issue with this recently, when I upgraded to the new OS version, my desktop background was changed to the new default macOS image, and I actually had to re-download the one I was using before. I'm a relatively new macOS user, so not sure if that's common/expected when upgrading, but I really didn't like it.

Is this perhaps related or written in reaction to yesterday's post "Settings are not a design failure? [0]" It seems quite similar to comments written on that HN thread.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181291

It is similar in topic but not written in reaction to. I had written the post almost a year ago and posted it a few days ago.

"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black." Henry Ford

The post describes it without saying it: arrogance.

> One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color.

I now feel the need to change my button color in System Preferences. Jarring for those on Zoom screen shares, but that’s half the fun.

Software doesn't need to be updated constantly (and certainly should not be web based). It shouldn't have a single vuln. Vulns are because of hobbiest amateurs from the 90s who don't know what they're doing. Real vulns like side channels (no, not the intel bullshit) occur once every 20 years. So there should be an update once every 20 years. I can still use an image viewer from the 2000s for modern use cases. It should have been finalized in 2000 and the dependencies shoudve stayed the same. Gnome 3 was not needed.

Good timing. Outlook decided today to switch me into dark mode, presumably because it detected I have a dark-ish theme set in my Windows Desktop, for quite a long time now. Outlook must have updated itself and added this "auto-detect" dark theme thing.

Outlook didn't ask me, and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off normally. Instead, I had to set it to the "white" theme, which I don't think is the same as "disable auto-switch to dark mode".

So, you're living inside someone else's product, yet are upset because you can't personalize it as you please?

Google just changed my entire phone's theming system when I changed the background. I love it! I don't have time to personally pick and choose colors, so I'm very happy with this. Also, it matches the background! 10/10, please don't ask for my consent on this Google, I have enough popups from companies begging for my attention.

Not sure whether this is common, but the definitions I use are:

Customization - decisions that you make for yourself

Personalization - decisions made for you based on implicit and explicit signals

But we already have definitions:

Customization: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/customization

Personalization: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/personalization

If I can't tweak something like I want, then it's not personalized.

I think we should build client side AI that filters out content from various providers according to your personalized needs. And passes your interests back to providers as simulated interaction so the providers know what to serve you more of.

Sort of AI content browser built as a client, running locally. Adjusted to you. With as much or as little manual tweaking as you wish.

The things the author is describing as "non-consensual personalization" are features and (in the case of Netflix) the point of the product.

If the issue is that everybody's doing it, author is an example of a market that someone could serve to disrupt the trend. But if he represents a tiny market, then probably not.

> On Netflix, I'd love to change the order of the various categories. But I can't. Netflix decides for me what the order should be.

I am paying for Netflix and 3 others and finding myself more and more watching the content I am still paying for, well ... somewhere else. For exactly this reason.

I don't know whether the order of Netflix categories is something I wanted to change. Of course they optimise for people's attention (time spent in the app). And they use what works for most users. And it's nothing new, supermarkets have been doing this for ever.

I dig it though. I like telling Spotify what songs I like

In fact my grocery app (BigBasket) suggests things based on when I bought them and how soon they run out.. I like that too

And the proof of the pudding is in the results... I think machine learning on Youtube must have added at least $100B to its value

You're talking about using ML to recommend similar products/shows to what you want. Finding new content. The article is about customizing the UI to make it easier to find what you want. "I like mysteries next to action" or whatever on Netflix. Reordering buttons.

They are very different things.

> machine learning on Youtube must have added at least $100B to its value

I would argue that the share price really doesn't capture everything we value in society.

Case in point: oil companies are destroying the planet yet have excellent share prices.

And then there are stock market bubbles. Who knows if a price rise is stable or about to pop?

Spotify's insistence that it display Podcasts on the Home Screen is very frustrating, these are shows (often political) I've no intention of ever listening to or wanting to know even exist & there's no means of hiding them or telling Spotify I'm not interested. A quick online search shows many others equally frustrated by this "feature".

I wouldn't mind so much if the product was free, but I'm paying and don't appreciate having extreme political content thrust toward me each time I open the App.

That's kind of the opposite of personalization right? It's the 'cold start' where they've put the popular podcasts in your face.

But I get the general point you're making that they put every feature on the home screen as a feed rather than you having to explicitly go to a podcasts section. I suppose feed UIs like that should have a 'less like this' feature where it generally learns you're not into podcasts

> Spotify's insistence that it display Podcasts on the Home Screen is very frustrating.

100%. In the top 7 Rows, the 1st,3rd, 5th rows are Spotify displaying me podcasts about things I don't care about. I use Spotify to just listen to music but its frustrating to see top rows just filled with podcasts. I thought of giving a random podcast a chance, big mistake. Now it just displays me shows related to it and I cannot even turn it off in settings. I don't understand this aggressive push by spotify on promoting Podcasts.

It is all about dev or designer giant ego. Someone responded me recently that the difficulty level in video games could be removed and replaced with smart code that adapts the difficulty for you, on short the developer knows better then you what you want from the game.

> One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color.

This is interesting. My experience with macOS is the opposite, but that's because I like to personalize the technical parts of my OS.

Personalizing my MacBook OS should be like personalizing my car while personalizing Netflix/Amazon etc should be like me expecting my local Walmart and Target to let me personalize their store. Is that a fair comparison?

I don't think so. Based on this article, Netflix is also forcing pixels on their screen to be color black -- and I want them to be green.

uBlock filters can do that, e.g. something like:

    netflix.com##:xpath(//div):style(background-color: green !important)

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...

There are extensions to get around this for any webpage. I use https://darkreader.org/ but there are others too.

The article isn't demanding that services be personalized. It's just saying that if they are going to personalize things, the user should have control over it, and not some obscure algorithm. It's like if you walked into Target and everything on the main floor was orange juice and socks because you happened to buy OJ and socks on your last visit. And every time you went back to Target, the shelves would be completely rearranged based upon your previous purchases. That's great if you buy the same 3 or 4 things every time. But then one day you go in there looking for a jumper for a nephew, and there's no discrete boys' section because it doesn't fit your single childless demographic. Just rows and rows of orange juice, and also apple juice which you hate, but it 94% matches your predicted preferences.

Walmart doesn't rearrange its shelves when you start heading there. Everyone gets the same experience.

The insidious part is shaping your world based on what is known of you in an attempt to modify your behavior without telling you why or how. It is not dissimilar to gaslighting.

Who even has time to play with settings of every application or website? I understand that some people may want it, but I sure cannot relate to caring one bit what color my buttons are.

In the past you could set a system wide theme and most applications followed that. These days most applications feel the need to do their own thing.

You don't care because apps these days have mostly sensible defaults (when it comes to visual design at least), and most often both light and dark themes.

If the YouTube or Twitter UI was bright yellow backgrounds with comic sans MS font, you might find it distracting and wish for a customization option.

Requesting a page with en_US has become meaningless. YouTube search must be one of the worst offenders. Results are regionalized into entirely unrelated content.

Heh, again someone wrote my thoughts :D

This thread is so weird. Webservices are most often products company build. If you don't like the product, don't buy it. Most of the commenters have never build products on their own apparently. You carefully weigh the benefits and yes, ROI, if you discuss a feature. What ROI would you get when you would allow netflix customization? You would confuse users most probably.

What can I do if I don't like all products? And yet, something I would like existed in the past and even had customers?

Build it yourself. You don't have a right for a company to do exactly what you want. Weird understanding of the economy to be honest.

Amitp only has 2 comments on his blog

That's more than most of my blog posts :-) Blogger says I have "20 followers" but some people subscribe via RSS. I would normally get ~50 views and ~0 comments.

Except instead of corporations sneaking in your house to paint your room green during the middle of the night, it’s the corporations deliveratelu choosing to paint their lobby green + you just happen to frequent their lobby

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