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Non-Consensual Personalization

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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#131

Post by southerntofu »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #125
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" Have you tested that supposition against the percentage of users that can write software and compared it to the percentage of users that don't code for a living?

Well first yes it's been tested: that's how email, DNS, WWW, XMPP, Matrix (and others) work. Heck, that's how most of the Internet works!

But also, maybe the problem is we often develop apps as a fragile monolith which is definitely not intended to be customized in terms of UI. When the core or your application is designed library-first so that your executable is only an opinionated wrapper (client) around the lib, you make it easier for others to reach their usecase by implementing a different wrapper. I don't see a reason this wouldn't apply to composable/reusable GUI components: early Mozilla (XUL) is a famous example of that.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#132

Post by LAC-Tech »

bzzzt wrote: post #107
lmm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Then don't run Wayland or Gnome and see how far you get without going insane. You seem to be forgetting that systems have become a lot more complex than 20 years ago and most people prefer for things to 'just work' instead of fiddling with the terminal to fix their wireless network or bluetooth headphone. And after that there are some pesky security things like every X client being able to read and inject keystrokes…

Even with minimalist distros you fiddle with your terminal to get wifi and x working once and then it's done. It's not like you have to do it all the time (unlike windows 10 which would mute my headphones every single time it updated. still can't remember how to fix that even though it happened twice it was so non-obvious).

Also I haven't touched gnome in years, it's either been i3 or openbox. Feel pretty sane.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#133

Post by js8 »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #90

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.

What can I do if I don't like all products? And yet, something I would like existed in the past and even had customers?

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#134

Post by LAC-Tech »

iqanq wrote: post #110
LAC-Tech wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know about Mac, but on Windows you can change everything from the start menu to the taskbar to Explorer to anything else you like.

How do you replace the window manager? the default one is really bad

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#135

Post by southerntofu »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #92
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…

>You could have the worst software and the best content and probably win. You should see the apps from commercial broadcasters in Australia. Last time I tried using 10play/7plus (to be fair, this was 2 or so years ago), I swore off of using them ever again. No progress tracking, batshit insane navigation, episodes playing out of order and there was a bug where it would semi-regularly not even load the right video. Of…

And that's why video broadcasters should be mandated by law to follow standards for interop: whether it's HTTP+HLS over a specified API, or simply FTP/NFS. When you think of it, it's crazy how backwards we've gone now that you need a netflix client to play netflix videos and a youtube client to play youtube videos: it's like VLC/mplayer never existed!

To be fair, it's possible to use 3rd party youtube clients, but Youtube changes its pages/APIs just often enough (~ once/month) to break everyone's apps which is evil.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#136

Post by vanderZwan »

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…

One of the most insightful comments I've ever read here (lost the link to it, sadly) pointed out that search engines don't have to give you the best result to your query, they only have provide you with a result that you accept as a valid, good enough result.

In fact, it probably benefits them to avoid giving you the best result immediately, because once you found what you're looking for you stop searching, and if you keep searching they get to show you more ads.

(this insight generalizes to market places of all kinds, but one domain where I feel this particularly rings true is dating apps)

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#137

Post by southerntofu »

simion314 wrote: post #87
selestify wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Does any other vim alternative have less features and settings?

As a long-time vim user who doesn't use the power features (except search/replace patterns) i've found micro to be a very decent alternative to vim/nano to teach to people new to CLI land. Select text with shift, save with ^S, quit with ^Q, find with ^F... it's just like windows notepad, but with colors/indentation out of the box.

There were also some conversations a few years back in emacs mailing list about the choice of defaults. Some people argued emacs defaults should try to accomodate people who've never used emacs before but are familiar with other key bindings and UI paradigms, because power users will always find how to configure their favorite workflows but newbies will leave if they can't accomplish the most basic tasks without reading a 50 page manual.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#138

Post by withinboredom »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #105
phantom784 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Importantly, to get the data to learn from it to improve faster than their competitors can.

We realized our competitors were copying us at a company long ago. We geofenced a/b tests so they wouldn’t see what we were testing and intentionally made the web app worse for that area (mostly as a “fun” 20% type project). Interestingly, the “worse” version starting doing really well even though we were giving them “control” for all older features. We ended up rolling back several months of changes to the entire product and we saw a huge burst in revenue.

It wouldn’t be until years later until I understood the Simpson paradox and that a/b testing improves the mean of whatever metric you’re trying to improve, usually by decreasing some important segment and improving some unimportant segment.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#139

Post by albert_e »

jh00ker wrote: post #79

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…

I tried YouTube on Android and found this additional nuance

you CAN seek to any arbitrary point on the timeline...but you have to tap AND DRAG a little. (facepalm)

Not sure why a simple tap was deemed not enough to skip to that point in the video ...seems straightforward and intuitive UX that way.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#140

Post by jallasprit »

trophycase wrote: post #97
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…

Are we really at the point where having a button to disable personalization makes you a "power user"? I'm by no means a twitter power user, but I do want to just make my timeline chronological and remove all the "tweets you might be interested in" garbage.

This! I did not explicitly ask for my entire feed to contain "threads" of startup advice from random people.
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