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Slide to Unlock

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Re: Slide to Unlock

#171

Post by kristopolous »

bheadmaster wrote: post #167
kristopolous wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics. They're the ones that will click on ads and "browse" a site. They interact in a much richer way than I do. I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to. I've been frequently…

> I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics. Holy shit, you just blew my mind. This explains so much of the mainstream internet's degeneration into a family-friendly dumbed-down version of it. The dangers of having big corporations raising a new generation of people (instead of their parents doing it) are even more concerning. I bet that's t…

That's not really what I meant. I was talking user flow, CTA placement, sizing, color, presentation medium (such as video versus text), length of text content (toddlers find lots of words less attractive than colorful drawings and big letters), ad placement and design, recommendation algorithms biasing towards repetition, whimsical animal and "America's funniest home videos" style content, animations, bright colors, things like that.

All these techniques capture the attention of children who then get miscategorized as their parents.

What you're talking about is companies trying to maximize their customer base by trying not to offend or alienate people. That makes things less direct, more bland and less specialized. That's because there's been efforts to decrease localization of international marketing and expand customer bases.

Starbucks, for instance, is so boring because it's identical in every country and thus caters to the sensibilities of everyone. They avoid shapes, flavors, numbers and colors that are off-putting in other cultures and use ingredients that can be globally sourced. That's just international industrial capitalism trying to be efficient.

The real problem is suburbia has been robbed of local color and all you have left there is Starbucks. It's a soulless corporate wasteland that totally sucks. I agree. That's a city planning and urban development problem.

Re: Slide to Unlock

#172

Post by Neekerer »

oefrha wrote: post #144
hombre_fatal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. That’s a feature you’d expect at the top of an HN brainstorm for comically bad, far fetched phone ideas.

I’ve witnessed a good number of online interactions that went like “where do I buy your blouse/dress”, “I don’t recall, just use ’s AI feature to recognize it”. I’ve witnessed it once or twice in meatspace as well. So it’s absolutely a thing that real people find useful, especially among women who are into clothes shopping.

Taobao's image search is excellent. I haven't had a need to use a western service but Taobao can find just about anything via a picture search.

Re: Slide to Unlock

#173

Post by Fatnino »

fowl2 wrote: post #132

Errors in Firefox 114.0b9 (Windows), both using mouse and touchscreen: Uncaught TypeError: can't access property Symbol.iterator, _0x2129b3.changedTouches is undefined touchEnded https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/slide/slide.js:1 _onmouseup https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/p5.js/1.6.0/p5.min.js...

Doesn't work on Firefox for android either.

Re: Slide to Unlock

#174

Post by TeMPOraL »

schmorptron wrote: post #161
PebblesRox wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already bad enough that my toddler can order photo canvases of a picture of himself getting ketchup out of the fridge via the Google Photos app. (He even chose expedited shipping . . . to our old address!) Fortunately we got a refund from customer service the first time. The second time, I saw the email soon enough to cancel within the 2 hour deadline. (This was after removing all our payment info from the phone…

I wouldve just had them change the shipping address, that sort of album / canvas is the stuff you as parents will be cackling over for decades to come :D

Assuming it doesn't completely blank out or disintegrate by then.

When it comes to durability, I have little trust in companies today, and the quality of techniques and materials they use - not in a hyper-optimized economy we have now. Especially when we're talking about prints ordered through a button in an app made by an advertising company, one that wants you to stay subscribed to their digital playground (instead of focusing on physical ownership of media, such as photo albums), one "products" (services, really) have a half-life on the same order as digital print/ad shops.

Nah, the very presence of this "feature" actually pushed me away from Google Photos. In a perfect world, it would make sense. In the real world, it's just first-party user interface spam.

Re: Slide to Unlock

#175

Post by groestl »

kristopolous wrote: post #151
PebblesRox wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already bad enough that my toddler can order photo canvases of a picture of himself getting ketchup out of the fridge via the Google Photos app. (He even chose expedited shipping . . . to our old address!) Fortunately we got a refund from customer service the first time. The second time, I saw the email soon enough to cancel within the 2 hour deadline. (This was after removing all our payment info from the phone…

I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics. They're the ones that will click on ads and "browse" a site. They interact in a much richer way than I do. I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to. I've been frequently…

This absolutely makes sense.

Re: Slide to Unlock

#177

Post by TeMPOraL »

kristopolous wrote: post #151
PebblesRox wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already bad enough that my toddler can order photo canvases of a picture of himself getting ketchup out of the fridge via the Google Photos app. (He even chose expedited shipping . . . to our old address!) Fortunately we got a refund from customer service the first time. The second time, I saw the email soon enough to cancel within the 2 hour deadline. (This was after removing all our payment info from the phone…

I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics. They're the ones that will click on ads and "browse" a site. They interact in a much richer way than I do. I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to. I've been frequently…

Oh my god. As a father of two small kids (4 y.o. and ~1.75 y.o), I've been watching this happen in front of me every day for years, yet somehow the implications never registered. Thank you for writing this - and yes, I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree.

Even though we're way below what seems to be average in terms of exposing kids to digital content, at this point my wife's digital activity on Spotify, YouTube, Netflix and Storytel is actually between ~30% (YouTube) to 95% (Spotify) the activity of our kids. Spotify only plays music they like to sing or dance to. Storytel is pretty much only ever playing kids' stories (to the point that even with kids asleep, we sometimes let those stories play as background noise). YouTube much less, plus I tend to yt-dlp any music/show we intend to play to kids often (which probably generates its own interesting telemetry stream, as we play those files from my wife's previous phone). Netflix... Netflix has Paw Patrol.

I bet that her advertising profile is in half really an advertising profile of our kids. And I imagine the effect is much, much stronger with moms that hand their phones to their toddlers (we don't).

On that note, I remember "learning" more than a decade ago that apparently casual games are a huge market, very popular with adult women. I kind of accepted it as fact, even though it went entirely against my life experience ("they must be right and I must be wrong, after all they've measured it, they're doing Data Science!" - thought the naive me, not yet aware just how much bullshit this "data science" is). But now I'm reconsidering - it would make much, much more sense if those results were actually coming from kids (up to teenage years) playing those games on their parents' computers / phones, logged in to their accounts.

EDIT: interesting corollary - IIRC, the thing about causal games and adult women came up around the time Zynga became a big deal, and was quoted to explain and justify investing in/developing these kinds of games. But if it's really just a misclassification - i.e. the market is real, but it's not the women after 30 that play those games, but their kids, then Zynga and all the follow-up companies were effectively targeting kids, while thinking (or pretending) they're targeting adults.

Re: Slide to Unlock

#178

Post by kristopolous »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #177
kristopolous wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics. They're the ones that will click on ads and "browse" a site. They interact in a much richer way than I do. I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to. I've been frequently…

Oh my god. As a father of two small kids (4 y.o. and ~1.75 y.o), I've been watching this happen in front of me every day for years, yet somehow the implications never registered. Thank you for writing this - and yes, I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree. Even though we're way below what seems to be average in terms of exposing kids to digital content, at this point my wife's digital activity on Spotify, YouTube, Netfli…

Right, the vast invisible army of 30-something suburban female gamers playing Roblox and Minecraft on weekdays between 3-5pm.

It's worth noting adult advertising fetches a higher rate than child advertising and ad networks will fill at a much greater rate, especially in RTB systems.

So even if they do realize it, it's um, better to stay quiet and pretend.

Re: Slide to Unlock

#179

Post by bheadmaster »

kristopolous wrote: post #171
bheadmaster wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics. Holy shit, you just blew my mind. This explains so much of the mainstream internet's degeneration into a family-friendly dumbed-down version of it. The dangers of having big corporations raising a new generation of people (instead of their parents doing it) are even more concerning. I bet that's t…

That's not really what I meant. I was talking user flow, CTA placement, sizing, color, presentation medium (such as video versus text), length of text content (toddlers find lots of words less attractive than colorful drawings and big letters), ad placement and design, recommendation algorithms biasing towards repetition, whimsical animal and "America's funniest home videos" style content, animations, bright colors,…

> That's not really what I meant.

I wasn't trying to mirror your opinions, I just gave my own thoughts.

If toddler's usage in analytics can drive UI design, I don't see why would it be implausible that it also drives content policies. I get reminded of it every time I open youtube from a fresh browser - all I get is a bunch of toddler-level videos with people doing stupid shit like spilling a barrel of hot chocolate on the table while shouting "CHOCOLATE!" in an obnoxious toddler-like manner.

Re: Slide to Unlock

#180

Post by politelemon »

_yb2s wrote: post #106
hombre_fatal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. That’s a feature you’d expect at the top of an HN brainstorm for comically bad, far fetched phone ideas.

The next version: When you touch an item in a photo you automatically buy it. There is supposedly a way to see that this is happening and cancel it, but that part of the interface isn't intuitive and attempts to cancel more often result in additional purchases. This cannot be turned off, and the new phone can't be used in the first place until you set up credit card billing. It also seems to trigger "automatically" a…

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