121–130 of 130 posts
Microsoft can't learn a thing from their own history. Perhaps if they made a product that was useful and not deceiving their users they'd have more success. It seems they aren't capable of that anymore.
Scout sounds like an excitable little dog that runs headlong into trees when trying to catch a frisbee. Given Microsoft's long history of failure with personal assistants I'm looking forward to this one! Clippy, Cortana, Copilot! Wasn't an animated dog called rover one of these way back? The best of all was unquestionably Ms. Dewey for Microsoft Windows Live Search who is almost forgotten.
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No that’s just the goal of bad companies. I work for a company that does not, in fact, want our product to be addictive. We want our product to help people. Stop normalizing this behavior as ‘just business’ and start calling out bad people for what they are.
Name and praise?
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You can't be a good designer if you aren't thinking about how to get your users to love your product so much that they keep coming back. There are good and bad ways to keep users coming back. The good way is to simply make the product very useful. The bad way is to make the user psychologically dependent on your product in some way.
Yet almost everyone uses dark patterns, which imply they don't think their product is good enough for users to return on their own volition. In fact, I can't think of a single for-profit company that doesn't use at least one dark pattern.
Scout sounds like an excitable little dog that runs headlong into trees when trying to catch a frisbee. Given Microsoft's long history of failure with personal assistants I'm looking forward to this one! Clippy, Cortana, Copilot! Wasn't an animated dog called rover one of these way back? The best of all was unquestionably Ms. Dewey for Microsoft Windows Live Search who is almost forgotten.
Don't forget about Tay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
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Yet almost everyone uses dark patterns, which imply they don't think their product is good enough for users to return on their own volition. In fact, I can't think of a single for-profit company that doesn't use at least one dark pattern.
I can think of one such company. Full disclosure: I work for them. It's a successful startup where the entire retention strategy is for our product to be so freaking amazing you'll never want to use anything else. It's been working very well so far. But our product really is freaking amazing.
"We forced all the employees into AI, and now apparently, our internal AI usage is high; this means this project will get high usage from general consumers." When your dogfood is really an opiate, you might have a problem.
It‘s not an opiate, it‘s salvia divinorum or rather something even more awful like diphenhydramin. Psychonaut wiki: Notably, it is frequently reported to produce significant nausea and bodily discomfort ("body load"). Most people who try diphenhydramine do not report positive effects and do not wish to repeat the experience. It is generally considered to have low abuse potential due to its dysphoric effects.
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They are also just bad at almost everything they do. I'd really be worried if a competent company was trying to make people addicted. Although maybe it doesn't take much, given that it sounded at one point like the Microsoft execs were addicted already.
I'd really be worried if a competent company was trying to make people addicted. This is absolutely a thing. Social media, mobile games, LLMs, tobacco.
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But do you go out and buy nails and screws just for fun when you’re not working on a hardware project? Do you think Home Depot’s marketing suggests you should be building day in and day out? That the average person should have five projects going at the same time and compulsively start a new project even when they’re not feeling like it? Addiction is a real thing with a real definition and real consequences and it’s…
If you look up the medical definition of addiction I think you'll be surprised to see that in order for it to be considered a disorder the key is that is has to be past the point of self-abuse or adverse consequences. You can say something is "addictive" without implying it's a substance abuse disorder. When people at Microsoft say the goal of AI is to be addictive, they're clearly implying that they want their produ…
I really truly, madly, deeply, in the big picture of this, think that you’re wrong. They could choose a different word and they don’t. We could debate the nuances and their are multitudes, but I think the actions of the industry align themselves much more with the accurate definition of addiction then something else.