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Non-Consensual Personalization

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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#201

Post by dahfizz »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #171
mrob wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was confused by the claim that the Encarta version is quieter until I read that it was because of the inline links. I thought the Wikipedia version was quieter because it doesn't have a distracting background image. I think this confusion is evidence that inline links are actually not distracting. I don't feel I have to make a decision whenever I see one because I know they'll still be there later.

Maybe it's individual variations? I struggle immensely reading text with inline links. I immediately start skimming and my attention is strongly drawn to the linked words.

Maybe you can add custom CSS rules that make links the same color? I also much prefer the wikipedia interface to the alternatives.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#202

Post by nitrogen »

yummypaint wrote: post #186
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 well-informed user may decide to switch to a competitor. Users who turn off tracking and data collection are less profitable. It doesn't matter how terrible and interface is, as long as people stay on the site and remain engaged as they are fed ads disguised as content. I agree there is a UX crisis happening now, but fixing these pathologies requires changing the incentive structures around commercial software. I t…

Users who turn off tracking and data collection are less profitable.

For ads maybe, but if anyone thinks this for retail it's either because they are relying on the invasive tracking for (mis)attribution, or because they broke the checkout flow by putting a non-optional call to an analytics function in the button handler without a try/catch.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#203

Post by nicbou »

kumarvvr wrote: post #94

The thing is that when the product/service is a mass market thing, most users are confused by choice that goes too deep. Most folks are happy with some amount of choice, that focuses on functionality, rather than looks. When my brother watches NF, he doesn't bother about colors or where comes what. He idly browses through the list (if he has no pre-idea what to watch) and chooses it. The interface is not efficient fo…

Sensible defaults should sort that out

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#204

Post by nitrogen »

gameswithgo wrote: post #165
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…

People who create and build things tend to have strong emotional needs to control that thing. This includes for example, the ui designers at netflix, and the people who run the company. You see this in all kinds of domains from filmmakers who don’t want their movie released on certain formats even though fans want it, to game designers nerfing beloved tricks because content gets skipped, and making cutscenes unskippa…

niche players can’t exist

This is where the world has gone astray. We would be much better off with a thousand three comma companies taking the place of a single four comma company.

Also, niches used to be considered socially acceptable. What has taken all the air out of the room?

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#205

Post by marginalia_nu »

dahfizz wrote: post #201
marginalia_nu wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's individual variations? I struggle immensely reading text with inline links. I immediately start skimming and my attention is strongly drawn to the linked words.

Maybe you can add custom CSS rules that make links the same color? I also much prefer the wikipedia interface to the alternatives.

This pretty much is a custom CSS. I was also more than a bit annoyed by the huge downloads and 30 second page loads.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#206

Post by gameswithgo »

nitrogen wrote: post #204
gameswithgo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who create and build things tend to have strong emotional needs to control that thing. This includes for example, the ui designers at netflix, and the people who run the company. You see this in all kinds of domains from filmmakers who don’t want their movie released on certain formats even though fans want it, to game designers nerfing beloved tricks because content gets skipped, and making cutscenes unskippa…

niche players can’t exist This is where the world has gone astray. We would be much better off with a thousand three comma companies taking the place of a single four comma company. Also, niches used to be considered socially acceptable. What has taken all the air out of the room?

Sure but in domains like running a streaming tv service, or building a phone, catering to a small subset of users means you are a smaller company, and then it is very hard to build a decent phone, or create something like netflix.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#207

Post by nitrogen »

gameswithgo wrote: post #206
nitrogen wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

niche players can’t exist This is where the world has gone astray. We would be much better off with a thousand three comma companies taking the place of a single four comma company. Also, niches used to be considered socially acceptable. What has taken all the air out of the room?

Sure but in domains like running a streaming tv service, or building a phone, catering to a small subset of users means you are a smaller company, and then it is very hard to build a decent phone, or create something like netflix.

But why is that? Phones are more expensive at retail and more profitable than ever. Why should it be so difficult to make one even with a billion dollars? And it wasn't hard to run a video rental store 25 years ago. What changed?

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#208

Post by morsch »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #162
morsch wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Firefox mobile, it's more like 11 characters wide. Pretty much unusable.

Hmm, strange. It doesn't have these proportions? https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/encyclopedia-mobile.png > I sadly can't diagnose since my phone isn't powerful enough to run Firefox. Looks as intended on Firefox desktop with emulation mode, though.

Huh. It looks fine now. Did you change anything?

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#209

Post by HWR_14 »

withinboredom wrote: post #138
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

That description of Simpson's Paradox doesn't really agree with my understanding. Simpson's paradox goes with how the same data is cut into subgroups and can invert the numbers.

That is, it's less about "metrics up, other unmeasured metrics down" and more "we're up in all subgroups, so we never noticed that our numbers across when we combine the subgroups are down."

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#210

Post by tyingq »

Good timing. Outlook decided today to switch me into dark mode, presumably because it detected I have a dark-ish theme set in my Windows Desktop, for quite a long time now. Outlook must have updated itself and added this "auto-detect" dark theme thing.

Outlook didn't ask me, and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off normally. Instead, I had to set it to the "white" theme, which I don't think is the same as "disable auto-switch to dark mode".

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