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Non-Consensual Personalization

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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#221

Post by RC_ITR »

wikfwikf wrote: post #120
forgotmysn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they've abandoned the content acquisition strategy. that went out the boat a long time ago. netflix is a content creation company now, competing with HBO, NBC, etc.

That doesn't change the value they provide to the people actually making the shows. As a producer/show runner, who would you rather make a series for, Netflix or a streaming service you've never heard of? Which would you accept less money upfront from? Suppose you choose Netflix to fund your philosophical sci-fi show? Netflix tell you they will put it at the top of the main menu for everyone who's ever watched the ne…

Thank you. It's always a struggle to communicate to people in 'labor' industries that creative content is ruled by 'talent,' so even if you employ the 'talent,' they still have the upper-hand as the owners of their IP and abilities.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#222

Post by Hermitian909 »

nitrogen wrote: post #207
gameswithgo wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Phone profit margins have been declining even for Apple (about ~60%) and are already fairly thin for the rest of the market (~13%). The problem is that getting the kind of customization we're talking about here probably means rolling your own phone OS which is a non-starter.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/12/22/global-...

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#223

Post by RamblingCTO »

js8 wrote: post #133
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?

Build it yourself. You don't have a right for a company to do exactly what you want. Weird understanding of the economy to be honest.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#224

Post by zwkrt »

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…

Agreed, but the reason this happens is not in a bubble. "User interface design" is not a natural category of design. People in the field will point to "The Design of Everyday Things" as some sort of progenitor of the field, but if you read it, it is kind of just a pop-psychology book.

The truth is (IMO) that UX is more closely related to marketing than it is to technical design work. The entire point of having a UX designer is to get marketing speak and advertising techniques right into the heart of the engineering process.

If engineers just built tools in the way that was the most sensible to them, they would have too many options and give the user far too much control. Ostensibly the reason given why this is bad is that it is 'confusing' for the user, but the reality is that it allows the end user to use the product in ways that do not maximize the profit. Even worse, users might use the product in a way that does not reflect the spirit of The Brand. It is telling that UX revolves around creating user stories, because this is exactly how advertising is done; “Martha, a woman in her mid thirties, is trying to balance home life with her need to efficiently walk her dog…”

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#225

Post by tablespoon »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #182
wongarsu wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Encarta version is much better if you want to learn about Plato, while Wikipedia makes it much easier to learn about thing related to Plato. The notion that the relation to other things is at least as important as the thing itself permeates Wikipedia. Many smaller articles, like e.g. Differentiable Programming [1] probably link to more topics than the article itself has words. I think a "stripped down" Wikipedia…

I think the big problem with Wikipedia's design is that it caters to too many audiences with disparate needs using the same interface, both reading and navigating and cross-referencing and editing. I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.

> I think the big problem with Wikipedia's design is that it caters to too many audiences with disparate needs using the same interface, both reading and navigating and cross-referencing and editing.

> I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.

I think what this thread is missing is that Encarta and Wikipedia are vastly different products. If Wikipedia had multiple views for different needs it would literally die, because it's community edited. If its UI encouraged staying withing a narrow lane, then it would have even more problems with getting readers to cross over to being editors.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#226

Post by musesum »

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…

> there should never be more than one button

... which you have to look at, because the position and function changes. There is no muscle memory with dynamic UI.

I recall a visually impaired woman who couldn't hail an Uber. I could tell she was very fast with the old UI. But, the button had shifted. She was going to call her Husband to drive over from Oakland to pick her up in San Francisco. Instead, I showed her where the button was.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#227

Post by scarecrowbob »

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…

If we want to be hyperbolic about the social import of these kinds of UI choices, I'm game.

I interact with plenty of interfaces that are difficult to learn but rewarding. I'm happy to spend my time working on the interface between my trumpet and my lips, or my piano and my fingers. Or hell, I will happily futz around with various synthesizers for hours, customizing which knobs control which parts of the matrix of the sound-shaping going on in the device.

I don't like to spend time learning UI that are difficult to learn but not rewarding.

I am a-okay not having to think about what color I want for the buttons the AWS console. I'm a-okay with google autocorrecting my misspellings or sending me to a different keyword, as I've taken the time to learn just enough about their interface to know how to circumvent that when it doesn't work well.

It's much more rewarding to learn the interfaces that I do want to make deliberate choices about than it is to have to master interfaces for things that about whose choices I do not care about; I feel like that choice engenders empowerment rather than helplessness.

Having to make interface decisions for the myriad of things I interact with on a day-to-day basis would be exhausting.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#228

Post by lariati »

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 it is mostly a trade off.

Using modern design philosophy you won't risk getting a really terrible UI but the trade off is you will not get something new and innovative.

I am sure there are all kinds of issues with the scale of complexity also. It would seem nearly impossible for a designer to come up with a good innovative UI if they are not an expert in using the system themselves so the chicken in a farm ends up being the least bad option.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#229

Post by [deleted] »

tablespoon wrote: post #220
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…

> 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. On a similar note, constantly redesign…

[deleted]

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#230

Post by trabant00 »

sseagull wrote: post #214
trabant00 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some days I think it's learned helplessness, some days I think it is inborn helplessness. I myself always searched for customization, starting with toys I dissembled and put together in a way I liked. Whenever I went to the toy store I looked for screws and not glue. To my first computers, I loved DOS and when it went away for Windows GUI I took to the registry and then searched for something else and found Linux. Ti…

It always depends on the product. I have a hypothesis that almost everyone is a "power user" of something , but that something varies from person to person. For me, I am a power user of computers and technology, but I couldn't care less about my car and just want it to get me places. Other people are the opposite, and love tinkering with their cars. Or maybe they are a power user of carpentry tools, while others (lik…

The enthusiast car users are suffering the same thing for the same reasons. You can see the age of the modified cars - most are 20 years old or more.
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