4 ms·

> but somehow, news sites have a video that plays This is so annoying, engaging in such obviously obnoxious UX patterns should be regulated and punished with f

> but somehow, news sites have a video that plays This is so annoying, engaging in such obviously obnoxious UX patterns should be regulated and punished with fines when user-intent tries to be circumvented. The "just dont visit that website lol"-trope really doesn't cut it anymore; operating a news paper organization nowadays is such a cutthroat business that you simply can't not do it if your competition does it, there really needs to be regulation to level the playing field to stop this kind of bullshit

symlinkk 6y ago
It’s the free market working as intended - if most people cared, the first site to stop doing auto playing videos would get more traffic and other sites would follow. As of right now, the benefit of auto playing videos outweighs the cost of pissing off the few users who care.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  The free market is the best algorithm for hill-climbing a society into feudalism, one A/B test at a time.
  - sequoia 6y ago
    Can you expand on this? I'm curious what you mean.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      This topic really deserves an essay, but I'll try to give a few of the seed crystals for my thoughts: - There's no real mechanism in the free market for long-term goal setting, apart from massive capital or collective action. Collective action is pretty hard to organize without capital. - People have vices and virtues. Long-term thinking tends to lead to better outcomes. Long-term thinking tends toward virtues. Short-term instinct tends toward vices. See e.g. the marshmallow experiment. - A/B tests and the concept of "revealed preference" optimize for vice without regard to long-term good. If you ask a smoker if they want to quit, they'll often say yes. But their "revealed preference" shows that they want to keep smoking. So "revealed preference" optimizes for vice. - There's a feedback cycle between the most effective micro-optimizers and the accumulation of capital. So those who have the most money, can afford the most micro-optimizations. And those micro-optimizations favor the holders of the capital at the expense of society at large. Thus we are gradually optimizing ourselves into the will and control of the wealthy, AKA feudalism. We can see this playing out in operating systems, too. Windows, despite MS's antitrust sins, and much as the Slashdot crowd loved to hate it, used to be very focused on compatibility and widespread use. There used to be a saying, "80% of your users only use 20% of your features, but they all use a different 20%". Now everything's gone from focus groups to telemetry. In other words, from planning and virtue, to reactionism and "revealed preference". Anything not used by 100% of users, or anything that doesn't favor the holders of the keys, is at risk of being destroyed in the next automatic update.
  - mancerayder 6y ago
    A thread about Firefox descended into a conversation about the free market. But is that really warranted? What I mean is, Firefox is an open source product, right? So isn't it just a matter of a feature to hijack the "the video turns into a little box" javascript function so it doesn't do that, or blocking it and detecting in some other way? I'm no web developer, but it seems like a feature or add-on should conquer it.
  - patentatt 6y ago
    Thank you for this, I love it!
- godelski 6y ago
  > It’s the free market working as intended - if most people cared, the first site to stop doing auto playing videos would get more traffic and other sites would follow. The problem with these "free market" explanations is that comparisons aren't being made equally and there's a lot of tech illiteracy when quantifying metrics. To the unfair comparison, who is going to stop the videos? A small news publishing site? You're going to argue that everything else besides the autoloading video is the same? Including the knowledge of the existence and quality to the public? I thought it was pretty well known in the tech community that a superior product isn't guaranteed to win, even if it is able to be manufactured at the same rate. These arguments barely work on paper and have a long history of not working in reality. (BTW, this isn't an anti-capitalism comment as you are already thinking.) As to the quantifying metrics, well sites see that "engagement" goes up. So why would they stop? Don't believe me? Well see this comment[0]. Metrics are only good metrics if you know what they mean and how to interpret them. Goodhart's Law is especially prevalent when people are illiterate. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24063801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24063801

symlinkk 6y ago

It’s the free market working as intended - if most people cared, the first site to stop doing auto playing videos would get more traffic and other sites would follow. As of right now, the benefit of auto playing videos outweighs the cost of pissing off the few users who care.

nitrogen 6y ago
The free market is the best algorithm for hill-climbing a society into feudalism, one A/B test at a time.
- sequoia 6y ago
  Can you expand on this? I'm curious what you mean.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    This topic really deserves an essay, but I'll try to give a few of the seed crystals for my thoughts: - There's no real mechanism in the free market for long-term goal setting, apart from massive capital or collective action. Collective action is pretty hard to organize without capital. - People have vices and virtues. Long-term thinking tends to lead to better outcomes. Long-term thinking tends toward virtues. Short-term instinct tends toward vices. See e.g. the marshmallow experiment. - A/B tests and the concept of "revealed preference" optimize for vice without regard to long-term good. If you ask a smoker if they want to quit, they'll often say yes. But their "revealed preference" shows that they want to keep smoking. So "revealed preference" optimizes for vice. - There's a feedback cycle between the most effective micro-optimizers and the accumulation of capital. So those who have the most money, can afford the most micro-optimizations. And those micro-optimizations favor the holders of the capital at the expense of society at large. Thus we are gradually optimizing ourselves into the will and control of the wealthy, AKA feudalism. We can see this playing out in operating systems, too. Windows, despite MS's antitrust sins, and much as the Slashdot crowd loved to hate it, used to be very focused on compatibility and widespread use. There used to be a saying, "80% of your users only use 20% of your features, but they all use a different 20%". Now everything's gone from focus groups to telemetry. In other words, from planning and virtue, to reactionism and "revealed preference". Anything not used by 100% of users, or anything that doesn't favor the holders of the keys, is at risk of being destroyed in the next automatic update.
- mancerayder 6y ago
  A thread about Firefox descended into a conversation about the free market. But is that really warranted? What I mean is, Firefox is an open source product, right? So isn't it just a matter of a feature to hijack the "the video turns into a little box" javascript function so it doesn't do that, or blocking it and detecting in some other way? I'm no web developer, but it seems like a feature or add-on should conquer it.
- patentatt 6y ago
  Thank you for this, I love it!
godelski 6y ago
> It’s the free market working as intended - if most people cared, the first site to stop doing auto playing videos would get more traffic and other sites would follow. The problem with these "free market" explanations is that comparisons aren't being made equally and there's a lot of tech illiteracy when quantifying metrics. To the unfair comparison, who is going to stop the videos? A small news publishing site? You're going to argue that everything else besides the autoloading video is the same? Including the knowledge of the existence and quality to the public? I thought it was pretty well known in the tech community that a superior product isn't guaranteed to win, even if it is able to be manufactured at the same rate. These arguments barely work on paper and have a long history of not working in reality. (BTW, this isn't an anti-capitalism comment as you are already thinking.) As to the quantifying metrics, well sites see that "engagement" goes up. So why would they stop? Don't believe me? Well see this comment[0]. Metrics are only good metrics if you know what they mean and how to interpret them. Goodhart's Law is especially prevalent when people are illiterate. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24063801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24063801