Enshittification. The UX is not for you—it’s to maximize you.
But what if I want a faster horse?
621–630 of 632 posts
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#622Agree. I want an advanced filtering system, not an algorithm curated list of movies based on what I've seen before. How many times does "Bright" have to keep appearing on my list before it goes away, even after I've watched it already???
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#623I've heard this called the "Tyranny of the Marginal User". To keep the line going up, platforms have to appeal to wider and wider swaths of a population, eventually lapping at the shores of a population that really doesn't care or want this service. But if you can hook them with some dopamine in a 5-second video, or a quest to rediscover some neat thing that they saw two page-loads ago but is now mysteriously gone fr…
Thank you for that term! I finally know what to call these idiotic trends that I've learned to recognise but couldn't name. The one that grind my gears the most has been Microsoft breaking decades-old Windows paradigms to cater for Linux-developers-on-Windows, which is a very marginal, even actively disinterested group. All this at the expense of the 99.9% of their loyal user base. For example, VS Code had the opposi…
oh, that's extra dumb, since there's no canonical[1] Linux desktop. that said they should offer shortcut presets, like JetBrains products. changing the default is just whack.
[1] oh, what the hell!? pun unintended, but now at least the name makes sense
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#624Ironically the old horses were faster! Run XP on modern hardware (if you can get it running at all) and you'll see what I mean. Explorer opens fully rendered in the span of a single frame (0.016 seconds). And XP was very slow and bloated for its time! It'll do this even in VirtualBox, running about 20x snappier than the native host, which boggles my mind.
To be fair even with modern software bloat the overall experience is a lot better now than it was in the XP days. I think it's mainly due to SSDs. They were a huge step change in performance and we fortunately haven't regressed back to the slowness of the HDD era. At least on most hardware. I have a shitty Dell laptop for work that's basically permanently thermally throttled... :(
it's ridiculously worse. getting things done on the computer got more tiresome, almost every part (booting is still slow, login is still slow, after login starting the browser is slow, rendering the start menu is slow - which should be in cache, the browser starts fast, but then it takes some time to somehow start loading and rendering the last opened page - which should be in cache, and so on) and yes, you can do a lot more things nowadays "on the computer", but it's mostly "online"
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars I mean that's not really the case for paid services without ads like Netflix. They lose money the more you watch. Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.
>Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything. There's a good planet money episode about the economy of gyms. Many really want members , not users. But members who never used would (eventually) cancel. So some had massage chairs in reception or free pizza slice tuesdays to keep the people who rarely came to work out feeling like they were still using the gym, forgetting it was just for…
Makes sense; it's definitely the case for me. I first started my Netflix subscription many years ago, because they had Star Trek shows (and in particular, they were to have the about-to-come TNG remaster). Since then, I've seen pretty much all that I wanted there, but I keep the subscription running... because of Star Trek. If they ever drop those shows, I'll cancel.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". I'm curious to know the name of that digital bank.
Sounds like NuBank
Well NuBank might have a similar trajectory I don't know but I'm talking about Banco Inter who explicitly talks about the term "SuperApp"
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#627For any given thing or category of thing , a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing , but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing . For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into car…
Just for protocol: In your example the peasant rabble recommend Chrome, while the enthusiasts with deep technical knowledge, broad perspective, wisdom, charm and good looks recommended Firefox.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything. There's a good planet money episode about the economy of gyms. Many really want members , not users. But members who never used would (eventually) cancel. So some had massage chairs in reception or free pizza slice tuesdays to keep the people who rarely came to work out feeling like they were still using the gym, forgetting it was just for…
Makes sense; it's definitely the case for me. I first started my Netflix subscription many years ago, because they had Star Trek shows (and in particular, they were to have the about-to-come TNG remaster). Since then, I've seen pretty much all that I wanted there, but I keep the subscription running... because of Star Trek. If they ever drop those shows, I'll cancel.
For some reason I thought they had already dropped Star Trek when it all moved to Paramount+. That's how I watch Star Trek these days anyway. If all you watch is Star Trek it's probably worth switching, because Paramount+ is cheaper than Netflix.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched. This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning. > It could handle more tabs. This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning. > It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser. This is definitely a win for Chrome and something we eventually s…
No, it was not just JS. They were the first to do a ton of other optimizations such as prefetching. https://www.igvita.com/2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-pref...
No, they weren't.
Link Prefetching was in Firefox 1.0 and DNS Prefetching was added in Firefox 3.5. Both were supported in the first release of Chrome, but DNS Prefetching hadn't ratified as a standard yet. The first stable release of Chrome was on December 11th, 2008. Firefox 1.0 came out on November 9th, 2004 and Firefox 3.5 came out on June 30th, 2009. Firefox 2 (October 24, 2006) already had support for the control headers for DNS Prefetching, but the standard wasn't ratified until later, which is when Firefox brought it into support.
That's not to say that Chrome didn't have different approaches to predicting and triggering prefetching compared to Firefox, and that in some ways those methods were better, but both Link Prefetching and DNS Prefetching were ideas before Chrome exists, Link Prefetching was ratifed and in Firefox before Chrome existed, and DNS Prefetching was shipped in Firefox as soon as the standard was ratified (Chrome shipped it in the first release before the standards process had concluded).
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#630That Netflix screenshot looks fucking great : clear, usable, no distractions, more than 5 items on a page. What a mess "modern" UX/UI has turned into.
I think there's psychological research that showing too many options leads to less engagement, supposedly for fear of making the wrong choice. If you give fewer options, people are more confident they picked something good.