Hacker News Reader

Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

This is definitely thought-provoking, and a correct use in many of the examples, but the Wikipedia example doesn't feel right because I don't think it's deliberate there. I suppose you could argue that we've been conditioned into accepting the Gruen Transfer and take that behaviour over into Wikipedia. But I remember back in the days of physical encyclopedias that I could spend a long time just flipping through them in a similar way to the way I browse Wikipedia. (My favourite description of the Wikipedia hole was a tweet from around 10 years ago about "snapping out of a Wikipedia trance at 2am while reading the early educational history of Meatloaf's guitarist").

View on HN

Don't sites like Wikipedia and TVTropes count as a control group that challenge the Gruen transfer theory itself.

They do not have any intention to confuse or distract, yet the effect of causing people to linger and browse remains.

In the comments here, Amazon and AliExpress have been pointed to, but again this does not seem to be confusing by intent. There is a degree of deception by some vendors but that exists purely to get people to buy their product.

On the other hand, I have always thought that one of the primary uses of A/B testing, was to abdecate the moral responsibility of decision making. You no longer need to intend to coerce, cheat, deceive, or confuse. A/B testing let's you only intend to make money and all of the malicious descions are taken out of your hands.

The original article does not make this clear, but the concept of a Gruen transfer is distinct from the idea of consciously including them to maximize impulse shopping and retention. Faced with a sea of links to interesting content, I often undergo a Gruen transfer. Is that the intent of TVTropes, or simply emergent?

There is a different value to the person if your rabbit hole is filled with learning and information that informs rather than being just a mechanism to try and sell people something they don't want. Its not really in wikipedia's direct interest for people to just scroll around, it costs them bandwidth, but its also part of the point of wikipedia and every page read is directly towards their mission.

It is in their interest, both in terms of their mission and financially (people who scroll a lot become donors and contributors)

Wikipedia is designed to help you find exactly what you want, quickly, and then offer infinitely _more_. So a different thing than the Gruen Transfer, but related.

It's not intentional, but it is evolutionary, in the sense that we've never had this discussion about onethingpedia, the website that had a design optimal at making you leave after you found what you were looking for, because nobody ever heard of it.

Onethingpedia sounds like a Borges short story.

I definitely felt this guy was a little bit hyperbolic because the more social media gets the way he describes the more I see people disconnect from it

I don't know anyone other than people over 50 who still check their facebook feeds and the kids are out enjoying the sun today

Replace facebook with instagram (another meta property) or tiktok or snapchat to address the under 50 crowd.

Instagram is the single most garbage app on my phone, and I also have Snapchat installed so that's saying something. It's constantly starting itself up in the background and then using so much memory I can't also have a browser and a keyboard open. Whenever this happens I know I have to go and force-stop Instagram.

Google and/or Samsung doesn't provide a setting to never run this app in the background because that would be bad for their own data collection, I'm sure. Or, you know, let me install my own software on the phone.

> It's constantly starting itself up in the background

I'm astonished by the idea that Android allows apps to start themselves.

Surely I'm misunderstanding your comment.

If not, then the rot runs deeper than Instagram. Which is also saying something.

Also Wikipedia is not particularly disorienting at all, especially not intentionally, both of which are key factors by this author's definition. Wikipedia is just genuinely interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com