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I think this can be generalised as "more power to users." You might want to filter Pinterest. OP wants to avoid mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/prod

I think this can be generalised as "more power to users." You might want to filter Pinterest. OP wants to avoid mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/product sites. This requires users to be involved. Filters, refinement, user preferences. etc etc. Search is a powerful tool, and the power has been growing exponentially since 1995. But, almost all of that power is channeled into instant results, intuitiveness, "sane defaults" and such. All the capabilities are in the background and the assumed user is lowest denominator on all fronts. The low effort, low technical capabilities, low understanding, etc. This is most people (me included) most of the time, but not all of the time. Maybe I want to filter seo spam (like pinterest) more aggressively. Etc. This isn't a slam on google really. One thing can't do everything and the thing google search does is what most people need most of the time. It's definitely the thing that makes the most money. But... none of a search engines power has been channeled into making search a power tool. It's a tool that everyone uses many times per day, but there is no learning curve. No getting better. You can't really invest effort and get rewarded for that effort. Pity really, all this power is there. It's right under the surface. Let us be more than the lazy, dumb user sometimes. Google have reversed the User Interface paradigm. Instead of users learning the software and telling it what to do, the software learns the user. I don't necessarily mean NNs or personalisation. I mean that the paraign is software-centric. "If the user does X, how should the software respond?" instead of "If the user user wants Y, how does she make the software do it?" That's great for intuitiveness, but it also creates a frame where the software gets better over time but the user never does.

visarga 6y ago
> think this can be generalised as "more power to users." I agree, we need more power to control. There should be more than one recipe for ranking and filtering, and we should have more to say about what information is being hidden from us. Society is diverse, a single formula automatically discriminates some groups. Let people make the choice.
abraae 6y ago
Yeah, I also want filters, refinement, user preferences. etc. And I want it to be social - I want to search using the same filters that Tim Bray uses. Or I want to use the filters that the people use who in aggregate tend to click through to the same results pages that I visit. So much amazing stuff could be done, but here we are controlled by algorithms that treat us all as brain dead sheep who only want to know about what the Kardashians are up to. I suspect that Google knows about these desires, but would prefer the world where everyone is a sheep.
smichel17 6y ago
> Google have reversed the User Interface paradigm. Instead of users learning the software and telling it what to do, the software learns the user. I don't necessarily mean NNs or personalisation. I mean that the paraign is software-centric. "If the user does X, how should the software respond?" instead of "If the user user wants Y, how does she make the software do it?" That's great for intuitiveness, but it also creates a frame where the software gets better over time but the user never does. May I quote you on this? It is a great description of the 3rd premise in a talk proposal I submitted to LibrePlanet 2021, which goes something like: - Software freedom is predicated on the notion that users ought to be in control of what runs on their computers. - I claim that tech literacy is necessary to exercise this control. - "Google Design" presumes that "nontechnical users" are not and will never be capable of tech literacy. If all of these are true, then "Google Design" is incompatible with the idea that Software Freedom is for everyone. And indeed, we see this borne out in many people's disdain for copyleft licenses, which impose restrictions on developers in order to guarantee freedoms for end users. That's a logical viewpoint, if you believe that end users wouldn't benefit from software freedom, anyway. "Google Design" does make software more accessible to end users… at the cost of turning your computer into an appliance. Which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. People don't magically become tech literate; they intentionally learn the skills so they can achieve something. Remove the power from the tools, and you take away their motivation to become tech literate. I have a great story about my grandma to illustrate this point. If our goal is to make computing (and, by extension, software freedom) more accessible to everyone, then we need to change our approach. We need to prioritize education and teaching tech literacy. And most of all, we need to write software that is powerful enough that users will see the benefit in learning to use it. That's they key points from the first half of the talk. The second half is about how we can create software that is powerful without sacrificing usability. It basically boils down to "make simple things easy and hard things possible" — creating software that Just Works™ without configuration, but allows you to customize its behavior if/when you want to. In particular, I'm a fan of embedded scripting interfaces (e.g. spreadsheets), which allow a vast amount of customization without creating "settings overload" that is typical of many FLO[1] programs. [1]: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open#flo https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open#flo

visarga 6y ago

> think this can be generalised as "more power to users." I agree, we need more power to control. There should be more than one recipe for ranking and filtering, and we should have more to say about what information is being hidden from us. Society is diverse, a single formula automatically discriminates some groups. Let people make the choice.

abraae 6y ago

Yeah, I also want filters, refinement, user preferences. etc. And I want it to be social - I want to search using the same filters that Tim Bray uses. Or I want to use the filters that the people use who in aggregate tend to click through to the same results pages that I visit. So much amazing stuff could be done, but here we are controlled by algorithms that treat us all as brain dead sheep who only want to know about what the Kardashians are up to. I suspect that Google knows about these desires, but would prefer the world where everyone is a sheep.

smichel17 6y ago

> Google have reversed the User Interface paradigm. Instead of users learning the software and telling it what to do, the software learns the user. I don't necessarily mean NNs or personalisation. I mean that the paraign is software-centric. "If the user does X, how should the software respond?" instead of "If the user user wants Y, how does she make the software do it?" That's great for intuitiveness, but it also creates a frame where the software gets better over time but the user never does. May I quote you on this? It is a great description of the 3rd premise in a talk proposal I submitted to LibrePlanet 2021, which goes something like: - Software freedom is predicated on the notion that users ought to be in control of what runs on their computers. - I claim that tech literacy is necessary to exercise this control. - "Google Design" presumes that "nontechnical users" are not and will never be capable of tech literacy. If all of these are true, then "Google Design" is incompatible with the idea that Software Freedom is for everyone. And indeed, we see this borne out in many people's disdain for copyleft licenses, which impose restrictions on developers in order to guarantee freedoms for end users. That's a logical viewpoint, if you believe that end users wouldn't benefit from software freedom, anyway. "Google Design" does make software more accessible to end users… at the cost of turning your computer into an appliance. Which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. People don't magically become tech literate; they intentionally learn the skills so they can achieve something. Remove the power from the tools, and you take away their motivation to become tech literate. I have a great story about my grandma to illustrate this point. If our goal is to make computing (and, by extension, software freedom) more accessible to everyone, then we need to change our approach. We need to prioritize education and teaching tech literacy. And most of all, we need to write software that is powerful enough that users will see the benefit in learning to use it. That's they key points from the first half of the talk. The second half is about how we can create software that is powerful without sacrificing usability. It basically boils down to "make simple things easy and hard things possible" — creating software that Just Works™ without configuration, but allows you to customize its behavior if/when you want to. In particular, I'm a fan of embedded scripting interfaces (e.g. spreadsheets), which allow a vast amount of customization without creating "settings overload" that is typical of many FLO[1] programs. [1]: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open#flo https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open#flo