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Non-Consensual Personalization

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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#71

Post by yupper32 »

efitz wrote: post #17

I 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…

That's a ridiculous idea. 99.9% of people want a default experience that works well without configuring anything.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#72

Post by fouc »

efitz wrote: post #17

I 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…

You said the same thing that the author did..

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#73

Post by bo1024 »

yupper32 wrote: post #71
efitz wrote: post #17

I 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…

That's a ridiculous idea. 99.9% of people want a default experience that works well without configuring anything.

I don't think you took this part into account.

> There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser.

If 0.1% of people can build and customize things, the other 99.9% benefit without having to work for it.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#74

Post by enriquto »

userbinator wrote: post #28
efitz wrote: post #17

I 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…

The CSS standard defined user stylesheets and specified their behaviour. Unfortunately, it seems most browser vendors are slowly attempting to destroy this feature.

Which is sad, because in real life many users really want this feature.

"--Can you please implement dark mode for your site/webapp?"

"--Dude, just use whatever css you want."

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#75

Post by franga2000 »

OneLeggedCat wrote: post #61
flenserboy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also done in part to hide just how thin most catalogs are. Notice how Netflix does not allow hiding any of their offerings. Imagine you had the ability to never see particular movies / shows / genres / movies you'd seen paraded before you again — when you cut out all the junk and things you'd never watch, you see the 10 choices left you might, depending on how bored you are, actually watch. Once you're there, y…

Yes. And Google. There are so many domains I want to never have show up in my search results. Think of one of the domains you hate, the ones that are never truthful, like oann.com is to me. Or all of the zillions of low-quality content farms that are generally ruining all Google results. I would be happy to just keep manually blocking all of them from ever showing up in my results. Google knows that a lot of people w…

Luckily, the web is still open enough that you can do that yourself: https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#76

Post by _Qeomash_ »

yupper32 wrote: post #71
efitz wrote: post #17

I 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…

That's a ridiculous idea. 99.9% of people want a default experience that works well without configuring anything.

But the moment the default stops working well, there had better be a configuration somewhere to change it so it works well again.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#78

Post by pabs3 »

efitz wrote: post #17

I 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…

That sounds a bit like Gemini.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#79

Post by jh00ker »

We often talk about a spectrum that spans from "Easy to use" to "Feature rich."

One approach to adding more features without becoming hard to use that I often see is removing the customization settings and selecting default values. This is basically what he's referring to.

A great example of this is a recent change to the Android YouTube app's seek bar. In the current version, the only way to seek is to click on the red dot representing the current position and dragging it. I believe this is standard behavior for all slider bars across all iOS, but for Android it's not. In the prior versions of the YouTube app on Android, clicking anywhere on the seek bar would jump to that position. YouTube made the change to conform their iOS and Android apps to behave the same way. But they essentially removed a feature and didn't provide a setting to toggle it back on.

I think the "Advanced" section in settings menus could be used more. Here, the motivated user can still customize, but the user that wants things to simply "just work" can leave those settings alone. Also, an advanced section that requires an extra step to open/display can help shy users stay away.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#80

Post by Schroedingersat »

OneLeggedCat wrote: post #61
flenserboy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also done in part to hide just how thin most catalogs are. Notice how Netflix does not allow hiding any of their offerings. Imagine you had the ability to never see particular movies / shows / genres / movies you'd seen paraded before you again — when you cut out all the junk and things you'd never watch, you see the 10 choices left you might, depending on how bored you are, actually watch. Once you're there, y…

Yes. And Google. There are so many domains I want to never have show up in my search results. Think of one of the domains you hate, the ones that are never truthful, like oann.com is to me. Or all of the zillions of low-quality content farms that are generally ruining all Google results. I would be happy to just keep manually blocking all of them from ever showing up in my results. Google knows that a lot of people w…

It goes beyond that.

Google hides the things that are not low quality content farms, forcing high quality content to mimic low quality content to survive.

It is worse than no search engine at all.

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