Non-Consensual Personalization

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

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'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.

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.