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.
Non-Consensual Personalization
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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#32I 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 an…
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 simp…
> 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.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#33Instead 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.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#34The 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.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#35Example: Google Calendar personalizes an event mentioning dinner with my wife with an illustration of a steak dinner. We're vegetarian.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#36Heh, again someone wrote my thoughts :D
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#37I 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, col…
> 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?...
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#38I 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 an…
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.
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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#39there 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.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#40I 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 an…
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.