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Non-Consensual Personalization

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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#81

Post by Schroedingersat »

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?

Walmart doesn't rearrange its shelves when you start heading there. Everyone gets the same experience.

The insidious part is shaping your world based on what is known of you in an attempt to modify your behavior without telling you why or how. It is not dissimilar to gaslighting.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#82

Post by Lamad123 »

The worst example of such douchebaggery is when you google something in say French, but you get only results in English or mixed results in both languages.. Even worse is searching youtube some other language.. The results are artificially translated into the searched language but you only discover that when you click on the video..

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#83

Post by gordaco »

anonymousiam wrote: post #42

I actually cancelled Netflix a few years ago because of this. Then my mobile carrier (T-Mobile) offered me an almost-free subscription, so I joined back. Maybe it's my paranoid streak, but it almost seemed as though Netflix was not just offering me content that their AI thought I would enjoy, but they were progressively offering me content that was right on the edge of what my value system would accept -- as though t…

This is exactly what Youtube does.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#84

Post by charcircuit »

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…

>I suppose the answer is to let the users write their own clients

What happens when Netflix wants to release a new feature or change an API? Do they now have to worry about getting everyone else to update their clients? What if some customization is put behind a paywall. What should happen if a third party client gives it away for free?

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#85

Post by dfee »

> One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color.

I now feel the need to change my button color in System Preferences. Jarring for those on Zoom screen shares, but that’s half the fun.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#86

Post by simion314 »

It is all about dev or designer giant ego. Someone responded me recently that the difficulty level in video games could be removed and replaced with smart code that adapts the difficulty for you, on short the developer knows better then you what you want from the game.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#87

Post by simion314 »

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.

>All of which are famous for having user interfaces/experiences that aren't very intuitive for the newbie.

Does any other vim alternative have less features and settings? Notepad is not an alternative. I am not a vim fan but my text editor and my IDE are power user tools and have settings.

Linux, probably the OC is referring to the kernel, otherwise GNOME is famous for it idiotic simplicity where you must modify your work to fit the software and not adapt your server to fit your work.

Blender , what does Maya (or other alternatives) has less settings and menus?

I think you missed the point, pro users are not all identical, working all n the exact same way on the exact same things, your application that targets professional needs to adapt or reject from the start a big part of the user base.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#88

Post by oefrha »

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…

> 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, colors, etc.

Then another web will be invented with all the controls, and companies will use that instead. Web app proponents are constantly campaigning for more capabilities even today.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#89

Post by lmm »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #62
lmm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNOME removed a lot of configurability that was present in previous versions.

Yeah but linux is configurable. Don't like your UI? Rip it out. It's not locked down like windows or mac. SO feels very weird to blame linux here and not... GNOME.

Plenty of major Linux distributions have made GNOME the primary or only "supported" UI, and plenty of site administrators don't want you to switch it out and may enforce that to a lesser or greater extent (e.g. not installing anything else). I do blame GNOME, but they're pretty much the face of Linux these days (I'd say ever since Mandriva went bankrupt tbh. - RedHat in particular is very closely involved in GNOME development).

And "don't like your UI? Rip it out" is less and less true now that modern linux is adding more tight integrations with rapidly-shifting interfaces. E.g. if you're running Wayland then a lot of stuff (e.g. screenrecording) only works with the GNOME compositor. Some of the modern app distribution stuff (Docker? Snap?) requires your DE to be running the right DBus sessions / process namespaces / etc. . If you use one application from a DE it's maybe expecting more things to be running - PulseAudio, clipboard management, ...

It's possible, but these days I'm not sure how big the practical difference is from using something like BB4Win.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#90

Post by RamblingCTO »

This thread is so weird. Webservices are most often products company build. If you don't like the product, don't buy it. Most of the commenters have never build products on their own apparently. You carefully weigh the benefits and yes, ROI, if you discuss a feature. What ROI would you get when you would allow netflix customization? You would confuse users most probably.
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