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Non-Consensual Personalization

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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#141

Post by Swenrekcah »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #130

I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy. Maybe it's from looking too much at the…

A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment.

They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on.

It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new designers on the idea that there isn't that much of a difference between software users and chicken in a farm.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#142

Post by axiomsEnd »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #108
titzer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on! Imagine if the web served up content and I could write my own processors for it to lay it out however I want...man, that'd be great. But the Web became about branding the moment they introduced images and font choices. I remember designing a website for my local skate rink in 1997 that had a left navbar with buttons I did in photoshop and cut-n-paste javascript to add a lens flare when you moused-over them.…

> Imagine if cars came in a kit and I could assemble it and choose the fittings myself ... man, that'd be great. I mean, for a niche certain audience, yes it is great. But for mass market, people don't necessarily want to take on a whole new hobby in order to experience the thing. Worse, it's contextual within the same individual: the person who wants to customise the car doesn't want to make their own sourdough pizz…

Instant messaging in 200x was based on "naked content" that could be parsed by anyone, so there was a lot of different programs supporting various forms of communications. If you weren't a programmer you simply relied on 3rd-party software and that worked quite nicely.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#144

Post by contravariant »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #141
marginalia_nu wrote: post #130

I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy. Maybe it's from looking too much at the…

A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment. They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on. It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new design…

Ironically if there's one thing utterly useless as a way of conveying information it would be a singular button.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#145

Post by withinboredom »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #77

Google search is becoming increasingly annoying. It randomly starts mixing results in local language. Worse they detect my location incorrectly and start showing results in languages that I can't even read.

Yes, “location” based localization is the worst when in a different country. The browser sends the preferred locale, they should use that instead.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#146

Post by southerntofu »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #101
ginko wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those all mostly work out of the box these days. Even devices that don't get driver support on newer Windows anymore.

Depends on your definition of "work". I've had issues with every device I listed on Kubuntu 20.04.

It's very hardware-specific so it's impossible to generalize, but usually stuff will either work out of the box or not work at all on free systems (Linux, BSD). The exception is if your distro refuses to ship with proprietary software (good!) in which case you need to install extra drivers (eg. firmware-linux) for stuff to work.

Something to consider is how old the hardware is. Typically, drivers will land in Linux kernel 1-2 years after hardware is released, so you need to use slightly older hardware and/or a distro which keeps up to date on a rolling-release basis. For example, good luck finding 802.11ax hardware supported by free systems right now: 802.11ac on the other hand (spec from 2013) works perfectly for 90% of chipsets.

To be clear if you're not familiar with driver development: this is 100% the fault of crappy hardware manufacturers who are doing everything except their job. Their job is to produce hardware and publish datasheets for them: problem is due to corporate/copyright culture and abuse of dominant position from Microsoft since 90s (see IBM/Microsoft scandals and the threats to dismantle Microsoft), they stopped to publish datasheets and instead publish a crappy windows driver that's full of bugs and will stop working with new releases.

We should not be supporting these vampires with our money but hey the problem is the hardware vendors who do distribute their datasheets can be counted on our fingers and their hardware doesn't have the raw power of your latest NVINTELDIARM.

Excellent usenix talk on this topic: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke...

Previous HN discussion on this topic, about Lenovo more precisely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977175

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#147

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

> but isn't it a lot of code and testing to implement the personalization UI?

Most of the stuff cited as example come from additional features changing an existing behavior. Allowing to disable it would be overhead, but really not much I think.

Another example: Youtube started to automatically translate “foreign” video titles. Having a “never translate anything ever” toggle in settings would smallish, there is no other UI impact, and they must already have that kind of setting internally for testing or legacy purpose.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#148

Post by marginalia_nu »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #141
marginalia_nu wrote: post #130

I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy. Maybe it's from looking too much at the…

A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment. They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on. It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new design…

I think there's a middle ground. Providing clear options and deliberate choices can be done through not having a thousand options and buttons.

Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do.

If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia:

https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/encarta.png>

https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/wikipedia.png>

It's clearly very different. The Encarta design is a lot more quiet. If you're reading, then you are reading. There are sparse inline links, but nothing near the shotgun linkedness of Wikipedia.

I've experimented with stripping down Wikipedia, producing this:

https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Plato>

It's definitely several steps too far (but taking things too far is the best way to get the feel for an idea), but I find that much easier to read, because the choices are moved out of the text and into the bottom of the text. That is, you read first, and decide what to do next once you are finished reading.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#149

Post by kzrdude »

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.

95% of people also want a stable experience, and dislike changes. Which is violated when they don't control the interface.

Spotify is the worst. Elements "randomly" change spatial location all the time.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#150

Post by kzrdude »

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…

Corporations are authoritarian by default.

I think the trend becomes visible when the people who use the service are no longer customers - they don't get the quite so friendly face of the corporation.

When we users are just free users, we don't pay, and we are the product - we are the audience for ads or other systems, we see this more "authoritarian" face.

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