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Non-Consensual Personalization

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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#51

Post by xerox13ster »

userbinator wrote: post #33

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 tha…

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

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#52

Post by xerox13ster »

donatj wrote: post #29

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.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#53

Post by ImaCake »

donatj wrote: post #29

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.

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.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#54

Post by ImaCake »

shukantpal wrote: post #10
san_dimitri wrote: post #5

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.

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

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#55

Post by skinkestek »

selestify wrote: post #32
echelon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#56

Post by nyanpasu64 »

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.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#57

Post by CamperBob2 »

eclipxe wrote: post #40
z0r wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#58

Post by HunchedOver »

firasd wrote: post #43

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

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.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#59

Post by martimarkov »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #48
jrockway wrote: post #15

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 an…

> 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…

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

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