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A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

minimizedistraction.com

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Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#21

Post by agency »

echelon wrote: post #4

This is great and all of it true, but the needs of these companies are counter to the goals presented here. Ad funded products need to steal time and attention to be profitable. Apple might be in a position to do something, but Facebook, Twitter, and Google depend on ad revenue. Even subscription companies like Netflix are hyper focused on engagement. I was daydreaming yesterday about a national mandate to shut down…

Yeah to be honest this feels like a Googler trying to deal with their guilty conscience by starting a "movement" that fundamentally cannot go anywhere because it runs entirely counter to the economic incentives that animate ad tech companies.

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#22

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

zmix wrote: post #17

Very nice document, speaks from my heart. But the document's format sucks! I do not even get an address in the addressbar in Vivaldi. I would love to download this as PDF or in any other presentation format, but it seems to be impossible, without going through the code.

Go back to the website and append in the address bar "/img/" without the quote marks on the end and boom you get a full list of slide. Enjoy.

Very easy to find since it only took 5 sec to load up the console and bam it is right there.

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#23

Post by cratermoon »

zmix wrote: post #17

Very nice document, speaks from my heart. But the document's format sucks! I do not even get an address in the addressbar in Vivaldi. I would love to download this as PDF or in any other presentation format, but it seems to be impossible, without going through the code.

I generated a PDF using img2pdf. It's 4.8MB.

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#25

Post by aresant »

This presentation is wonderful for its PR value "people here care" but naïve bordering on malicious in its approach and understanding of Google's business.

11 years ago PG called the iPad the "hip flask" of the internet (1) and it's 10x worse today than it was then.

The incentives of every major ad-supported tech platform are the same - maximize engagement to maximize profit.

Every dollar of profit, every promotion, every individual incentive is tied to that metric outside of some lip-service like this to keep HRs job manageable.

If you don't like it, quit and work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement.

Full stop.

(1) http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#26

Post by jrochkind1 »

cmehdy wrote: post #2

For other readers: this seems to be an internal google presentation made public to tell engineers to respect users' attention. I guess as a user of the website it didn't respect my attention enough to make me want to click through the whole thing. I dropped out after twenty or so clicks, having read less and less stuff after a few slides.

That was my reaction. Terrible UI with grainy graphics, took a long time to get to the point. Talk about wasting time! I gave up about 20 slides in too.

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#27

Post by rglullis »

echelon wrote: post #4

This is great and all of it true, but the needs of these companies are counter to the goals presented here. Ad funded products need to steal time and attention to be profitable. Apple might be in a position to do something, but Facebook, Twitter, and Google depend on ad revenue. Even subscription companies like Netflix are hyper focused on engagement. I was daydreaming yesterday about a national mandate to shut down…

I agree with your overall point, but I believe that this could (and hopefully will) change without any top-down mandate. I think we just need a minority group of people who are unbreakable in their intolerance of ad-funded services, much like RMS and the first FOSS developers were intolerant of running any type of proprietary software.

It dawned on me with the whole WhatsApp thing of fucking around with the privacy policy: I didn't mind using it before, but that was the final nail in the coffin. I uninstalled it and I told my friends/family that whoever wanted to reach me could do with Matrix, phone or plain email. I also would gladly help set an account for them on my communick group plan. Of course not all of them did, but the ones who did realized that it was not the end of the world to use a new app and were glad to be able to say that they were not enslaved to whatever Facebook had to offer. Some of these friends even signed up for their own plan, so they could invite more people on their own, etc...

Re: A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

#29

Post by TheJoeMan »

teawrecks wrote: post #24

I honestly can't tell if this is a joke. It's got some good ideas, but the way it's presented violates all of their suggestions.

I know right? "Let users know how long of a commitment they're making" and then not one progress bar or slide counter like 1/23,085 .
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