Example: Google Calendar personalizes an event mentioning dinner with my wife with an illustration of a steak dinner. We're vegetarian.
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Non-Consensual Personalization
41–50 of 239 posts
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#42I actually cancelled Netflix a few years ago because of this. Then my mobile carrier (T-Mobile) offered me an almost-free subscription, so I joined back.
Maybe it's my paranoid streak, but it almost seemed as though Netflix was not just offering me content that their AI thought I would enjoy, but they were progressively offering me content that was right on the edge of what my value system would accept -- as though they were reprogramming me. Eventually it reached the point where I could not find anything I wanted to watch, which is why I cancelled.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#43I dig it though. I like telling Spotify what songs I like
In fact my grocery app (BigBasket) suggests things based on when I bought them and how soon they run out.. I like that too
And the proof of the pudding is in the results... I think machine learning on Youtube must have added at least $100B to its value
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#44I dig it though. I like telling Spotify what songs I like In fact my grocery app (BigBasket) suggests things based on when I bought them and how soon they run out.. I like that too And the proof of the pudding is in the results... I think machine learning on Youtube must have added at least $100B to its value
You're talking about using ML to recommend similar products/shows to what you want. Finding new content. The article is about customizing the UI to make it easier to find what you want. "I like mysteries next to action" or whatever on Netflix. Reordering buttons.
They are very different things.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#45I actually cancelled Netflix a few years ago because of this. Then my mobile carrier (T-Mobile) offered me an almost-free subscription, so I joined back. Maybe it's my paranoid streak, but it almost seemed as though Netflix was not just offering me content that their AI thought I would enjoy, but they were progressively offering me content that was right on the edge of what my value system would accept -- as though t…
I think 'reprogramming' is a stretch, but I definitely noticed a gradual slide in actively exposed content from the stuff I actually wanted to watch towards mockbusters and foreign imports, and it became increasingly obvious they were trying to get me to watch stuff that was cheap to license, instead of the backlog of quality films I was used to from the DVD days.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#46The author mentions linux... but where does this happen on linux? I love using a desktop that does exactly what I tell it. Yes it takes longer to set up. But I use a computer every day, it's worth it.
I also strongly disagree with the author. They're probably referring to things like Gnome and Unity and PopOS. The thing is, these are opinionated options in addition to everything else you can do with Linux, rather than replacements that restrict your options. You've also got things like NixOS, which is definitely going in the opposite direction, allowing you basically infinite customization.
The majority of people using Linux (well, on a desktop/laptop) use things like Gnome and Unity and PopOS. I mean, sure you can run Linux from a command line only. But that's not the common use case, and that's not usually what people even mean when they talk about Linux on a laptop.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#47I reject the framing. The problem isn’t the lack of personalizabilty(?) or customizability. The problem is that we’ve collectively allowed providers of content to warp the www into a state where they have the ability to control our experience. Consider what the web would look like if instead of html and JavaScript, it only consisted of a content description language devoid of any ability to control layout, fonts, col…
> Although most of the time the styles of a web-page's author would suffice, the Opera browser has long provided facilities for its users to modify the appearance of the page, and all recent Opera versions up to and including 12.17 allow user style-sheets. Versions beyond this point, version 15.xx was essentially next, have not permitted such facilities. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Style_Presentation_Modes_in_Op...…
Old Opera was the greatest, I stopped using it after the jump from 12, but about a 1-1.5yr later in late 2014 I discovered the pre-alpha version of Vivaldi, made by the original Opera team who did a Jerry McGuire and decided to make their own browser following their original vision. I've been using it daily as my main browser ever since.
It still doesn't have some of the later features of old opera, but it has rocker gestures, speed dial, tab panels, and a bunch of cool features for maximum usability in a range of workstyles.
They also released an android version with some neat cross-compatibility like accessing open tabs from other devices through the cloud and sending pages from your desktop to your phone.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#48I 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 there's no point in even bothering to do this.
And if people actually want to pirate your stuff, the DRM empirically isn't stopping them anyway. It's just a pointless farce.
> You could have the worst software and the best content and probably win.
There's winning and then there's winning.
You're not going to get any subscribers with no content, true. But Netflix has the content. Now suppose they had a better interface. Better experience, people spend more time watching Netflix, Netflix is more valuable and can charge more or gets more subscribers. It's not useless just because it's not the dominant factor.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#49Instead of asking me what I want, they decide what I want. I'm not sure if authoritarianism is the right name for this trend, but I think it's also related to companies no longer wanting users to think of themselves as owning the products they bought, and the shift to subscription-based services. They want to turn users into dumb, docile, obedient cows to be milked for $$$, and what better than to start them down tha…
It is also done in part to hide just how thin most catalogs are. Notice how Netflix does not allow hiding any of their offerings. Imagine you had the ability to never see particular movies / shows / genres / movies you'd seen paraded before you again — when you cut out all the junk and things you'd never watch, you see the 10 choices left you might, depending on how bored you are, actually watch. Once you're there, you go for the cancel button and that is not what they want to see happen. Yes, they're seeking to guide consumers (that term is chosen purposefully) along predetermined paths, but that is only part of what's going on.
Re: Non-Consensual Personalization
#50I dig it though. I like telling Spotify what songs I like In fact my grocery app (BigBasket) suggests things based on when I bought them and how soon they run out.. I like that too And the proof of the pudding is in the results... I think machine learning on Youtube must have added at least $100B to its value
> machine learning on Youtube must have added at least $100B to its value
I would argue that the share price really doesn't capture everything we value in society.
Case in point: oil companies are destroying the planet yet have excellent share prices.
And then there are stock market bubbles. Who knows if a price rise is stable or about to pop?