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Non-Consensual Personalization

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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#231

Post by lnenad »

axiomsEnd wrote: post #142
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And then there was non enthusiast software and it won, so I guess that's what the people want.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#232

Post by marginalia_nu »

morsch wrote: post #208
marginalia_nu wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not a thing.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#233

Post by simion314 »

southerntofu wrote: post #137
simion314 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

You don't need a default war, you hopefully have intelligent enough users so you can show them a popup where they can select a profile that is more comfortable for them.

I hated vim so I can't say too much about it, just that I hate when it is set as default on some servers (or some colleague thought is cool to make it default) but I would not attempt to attack the vim project or vim users for their choices, I understand that it is perfect for them and we need hyper-complex-text=editors too, it would be stupid if Notepad users will start writing blogs that say Notepad++. vim and emacs are complex because the developers or users are stupid and are using Notepad wrong.

The reason I stopped hating vim is because they added instructions on how to quit it, so I can quit it and rerun my commands with EDITOR=nano in front when vim pops up unexpectedly.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#234

Post by _tom_ »

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…

I'd have to disagree. Most changes, at least at large companies, are driven by dollars, not ego.

A small change in user engagement can mean millions in revenue. Or billions, in the largest cases.

Things are extensively a/b tested to validate that the change drives revenue. And most companies are fine with forcing the user to learn, as long at it increases profits.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#235

Post by EastSmith »

> On Netflix, I'd love to change the order of the various categories. But I can't. Netflix decides for me what the order should be.

I am paying for Netflix and 3 others and finding myself more and more watching the content I am still paying for, well ... somewhere else. For exactly this reason.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#236

Post by Kwpolska »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #48
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…

> They don't do that because of DRM and they specifically want to prevent you from writing a program that saves the downloaded bytes to disk. This seems like a 20th century philosophy. The point of a subscription service is to watch whatever you want. This one came out last week. You didn't know that one existed until today. You can't have downloaded it before it existed or before you knew you wanted to watch it. So…

> You didn't know that one existed until today. You can't have downloaded it before it existed or before you knew you wanted to watch it.

Why not? If Netflix made their catalog DRM-free and available via an API, then you could download all of Netflix, and then unsubscribe. Sure, you’re missing out on the new stuff, and it could take a lot of disk space to store all of Netflix, but you still have 6k titles [0] to watch for $20 (assuming you’ve got an ultra fast connection and manage to download it in a month, of course). And if you somehow run out of content (over 36k hours of it, according to a slightly older source [1]), another $20 will let you expand your library.

[0] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/netflix-library-by-the... [1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/how-long-would-it-take...

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#237

Post by nitrogen »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #222
nitrogen wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

The only must-have feature from a given new phone for me is the upgraded camera. In most other regards, reusing stuff from previous generations where profitability peaked should be fine, giving a dozen niche manufacturers enough clout to build customizations off a common base.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#238

Post by marginalia_nu »

_tom_ wrote: post #234
tablespoon wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'd have to disagree. Most changes, at least at large companies, are driven by dollars, not ego. A small change in user engagement can mean millions in revenue. Or billions, in the largest cases. Things are extensively a/b tested to validate that the change drives revenue. And most companies are fine with forcing the user to learn, as long at it increases profits.

Dunno, my experience with large companies is that there is a lot of office politics, some are making overtures for career advancement by short-sighted but ostensibly profitable changes they hope will be noticed by higher-ups, others want to protect their fiefdom by sabotaging and delaying up-and-comers.

Most everyone is looking at their paycheck and status, not the bottom line.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#239

Post by saagarjha »

_tom_ wrote: post #234
tablespoon wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'd have to disagree. Most changes, at least at large companies, are driven by dollars, not ego. A small change in user engagement can mean millions in revenue. Or billions, in the largest cases. Things are extensively a/b tested to validate that the change drives revenue. And most companies are fine with forcing the user to learn, as long at it increases profits.

It is very easy to tip an A/B test in the direction you'd like it to go by picking what you measure and handwaving away bad metrics.
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