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I like how Google has been slowly making street names harder to see in maps, which I presume is a behavioral nudge to make you rely more and more on their turn
by tehjoker 7y ago
I like how Google has been slowly making street names harder to see in maps, which I presume is a behavioral nudge to make you rely more and more on their turn by turn directions, which allows them increasingly direct control over the motion of the physical world.
- cowpig 7y agoI dunno, I think Maps has gotten progressively worse in most ways over the past decade (with a particularly precipitous drop after whatever refactor they released in 2014 or so. Google maps is * Much, much slower * Harder to read/understand, especially street names * Much worse text parsing e.g. I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions. In fact most of the time I can't even type in a major intersection and have them understand * Obnoxiously spammy: they push new "features" on me all the time that I don't want to use (including a recent popup mid-directions when I turned on location tracking because I was lost on a busy, complicated highway intersection, which felt dangerous), and the phone version asks me to turn on location tracking EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN THE APP * Addresses seem to be getting replaced by some weird google maps-designed address format in Colombia (maybe other countries?) that are useless to humans Even if a little can be explained by a desire to control the world, I think most is just the traditional corporate rot that happens to any successful company. Like Steve Jobs describes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZ6ypueK8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZ6ypueK8M