17 ms·

Non-Consensual Personalization

331 points by zdw 5y ago

reactspa 5y ago
The most bizarre case is Twitter forcing me to see tweets in order of some algorithm instead of in chrono order. They let me switch to chrono order. And then automatically switch back after a month or so. And then I switch back to chrono order. And so on. Resulting in a constant kabuki.
- underclocked 5y ago
  I stopped screwing around with the official twitter app years ago. I switched to Tweetbot and never looked back. No ads and chronological order are worth whatever the app costs to me.
  - reactspa 5y ago
    I'm addicted to Twitter, so I force myself to view it in the web app (because it's a little more friction compared to apps). It's not even that the Twitter algorithm is any good. Sometimes when showing a thread, it'll start with the most popular tweet of the thread instead of the first tweet of the thread.
cercatrova 5y ago
Is this perhaps related or written in reaction to yesterday's post "Settings are not a design failure? [0]" It seems quite similar to comments written on that HN thread. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181291
- amitp 5y ago
  It is similar in topic but not written in reaction to. I had written the post almost a year ago and posted it a few days ago.
doomrobo 5y ago
This is my main issue with so many services. The reason I don't use Instagram is because Instagram gives me no control over what I see. You want to look at pictures without seeing comments? Too bad. It doesn't matter that the top comment on one of the accounts I follow was an anti-Semitic jab at the account owner, I have to read it because Instagram knows what's best for me. Ditto YouTube comments & suggestions, Twitter ordering & suggestions, TikTok ordering & suggestions, and just ads in general. It's a catch-22 for me: if I cede control I get sucked into these addictive cycles, and if I don't cede control I miss out on the primary means of social communication for people my age. How did we get here? This repo has a nice list of attention-respecting frontends. https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends/issues https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends/issues
- reidjs 5y ago
  One thing you used to be able to do on Instagram is mute everyone you follow and only view people’s profiles when you feel like it. Unfortunately they changed the frontend so now it will endless scroll posts from people you don’t know, which is arguably worse.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  > and if I don't cede control I miss out on the primary means of social communication for people my age. What I do: Fight it by being part of the solution rather than contributing to the problem by continuing to use these platforms. This is obvious, but the only thing that makes it the “primary” means of communication is the people using it. Don’t be one of those people, and tell your friends the preferred way to get in touch with you. If they are really your friends they will roll with it.
  - em-bee 5y ago
    that doesn't work if you want to make new friends.
    - bigjimmyjohnson 5y ago
      I'm honestly not sure what Instagram is used for, never had an accent, but I still make new friends without it. I use sms to talk to the ones with no mutual online chat services.
san_dimitri 5y ago
Personalizing my MacBook OS should be like personalizing my car while personalizing Netflix/Amazon etc should be like me expecting my local Walmart and Target to let me personalize their store. Is that a fair comparison?
- shukantpal 5y ago
  I don't think so. Based on this article, Netflix is also forcing pixels on their screen to be color black -- and I want them to be green.
  - perihelions 5y ago
    uBlock filters can do that, e.g. something like: netflix.com##:xpath(//div):style(background-color: green !important) https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#subjectstylearg https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...
  - ImaCake 5y ago
    There are extensions to get around this for any webpage. I use https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/ but there are others too.
- zuminator 5y ago
  The article isn't demanding that services be personalized. It's just saying that if they are going to personalize things, the user should have control over it, and not some obscure algorithm. It's like if you walked into Target and everything on the main floor was orange juice and socks because you happened to buy OJ and socks on your last visit. And every time you went back to Target, the shelves would be completely rearranged based upon your previous purchases. That's great if you buy the same 3 or 4 things every time. But then one day you go in there looking for a jumper for a nephew, and there's no discrete boys' section because it doesn't fit your single childless demographic. Just rows and rows of orange juice, and also apple juice which you hate, but it 94% matches your predicted preferences.
- Schroedingersat 5y ago
LAC-Tech 5y ago
The 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.
- lmm 5y ago
  GNOME removed a lot of configurability that was present in previous versions.
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    Yeah but linux is configurable. Don't like your UI? Rip it out. It's not locked down like windows or mac. SO feels very weird to blame linux here and not... GNOME.
    - lmm 5y ago
      Plenty of major Linux distributions have made GNOME the primary or only "supported" UI, and plenty of site administrators don't want you to switch it out and may enforce that to a lesser or greater extent (e.g. not installing anything else). I do blame GNOME, but they're pretty much the face of Linux these days (I'd say ever since Mandriva went bankrupt tbh. - RedHat in particular is very closely involved in GNOME development). And "don't like your UI? Rip it out" is less and less true now that modern linux is adding more tight integrations with rapidly-shifting interfaces. E.g. if you're running Wayland then a lot of stuff (e.g. screenrecording) only works with the GNOME compositor. Some of the modern app distribution stuff (Docker? Snap?) requires your DE to be running the right DBus sessions / process namespaces / etc. . If you use one application from a DE it's maybe expecting more things to be running - PulseAudio, clipboard management, ... It's possible, but these days I'm not sure how big the practical difference is from using something like BB4Win.
      - bzzzt 5y ago
        Then don't run Wayland or Gnome and see how far you get without going insane. You seem to be forgetting that systems have become a lot more complex than 20 years ago and most people prefer for things to 'just work' instead of fiddling with the terminal to fix their wireless network or bluetooth headphone. And after that there are some pesky security things like every X client being able to read and inject keystrokes in every other window. If you want meaningful security it's useless to cling to the decades old way of doing things.
smoldesu 5y ago
I've given GNOME (perhaps unfairly) a lot of flak in previous threads, but I think this is one of the main things responsible for the degrading software experience right here: > One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color. But in most ways MacOS doesn't allow me to personalize things. Now, it's an open secret that GNOME grabs a majority of it's design cues from MacOS, but this is one of the things that they don't need to and shouldn't copy. Desktop Linux has always lead the pack in this regard by allowing the user to directly manipulate the way "native" apps render, be it in Qt or GTK, and the effort to lock it all down for some perceived user/developer benefits are just silly. Does anyone really think people would be using Linux if they didn't want to directly control the computer they're interacting with? Isn't that what software freedom is all about? I don't think anyone wants middlemen limiting what they're capable of doing on a computer. Sure, you might want sensible defaults or better accessibility for those settings (which is something desktop environments can definitely improve), but there are very few people lobbying for less control over their applications. I say this as both a user and a dev; stop taking things away from me. Not just CSS theming, but options for my dock and settings for my mouse. Arguably, this attempt to "centralize" the Linux experience has led to even more fragmentation with third-party tweak tools and countless extensions that break update-after-update. It's infuriating, and the author has hit the nail right on the head here: you can deliver a good default experience for the users and give people the tools they need to extend or modify that experience. The two are not mutually exclusive.
kdamica 5y ago
Not sure whether this is common, but the definitions I use are: Customization - decisions that you make for yourself Personalization - decisions made for you based on implicit and explicit signals
- scim-knox-twox 5y ago
  But we already have definitions: Customization: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/customization https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/customization Personalization: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/personalization https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/personalization If I can't tweak something like I want, then it's not personalized.
sebastien_b 5y ago
The post describes it without saying it: arrogance.
jrockway 5y ago
I 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 and they specifically want to prevent you from writing a program that saves the downloaded bytes to disk. So I guess there is no way to achieve their business goals (make sure you pay $20/month forever to watch stuff, and make sure the "rights holders" get to sell you the same thing multiple times) without doing more work, which they simply chose not to do because they don't have to. Going one level deeper, I guess that video streaming is a weird market. You could have the worst software and the best content and probably win. So you can't compete with Netflix by making a video streaming service that has more UI features. I guess what this means is that copyright is deterring innovation. I think I've heard that one before. Sigh!
- phantom784 5y ago
  They could do that but you deeplink back into the Netflix app to actually watch to solve the DRM issue. Which I think shows that it's about more than just DRM. They want to control the experience.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Importantly, to get the data to learn from it to improve faster than their competitors can.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      We realized our competitors were copying us at a company long ago. We geofenced a/b tests so they wouldn’t see what we were testing and intentionally made the web app worse for that area (mostly as a “fun” 20% type project). Interestingly, the “worse” version starting doing really well even though we were giving them “control” for all older features. We ended up rolling back several months of changes to the entire product and we saw a huge burst in revenue. It wouldn’t be until years later until I understood the Simpson paradox and that a/b testing improves the mean of whatever metric you’re trying to improve, usually by decreasing some important segment and improving some unimportant segment.
efitz 5y ago
I 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, colors, etc. My browser, under MY control, can present the content to me in whatever way I prefer. There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser. Just because the web currently acts a certain way doesn’t mean that things HAVE to be that way.
- titzer 5y ago
  Right on! Imagine if the web served up content and I could write my own processors for it to lay it out however I want...man, that'd be great. But the Web became about branding the moment they introduced images and font choices. I remember designing a website for my local skate rink in 1997 that had a left navbar with buttons I did in photoshop and cut-n-paste javascript to add a lens flare when you moused-over them. Haha! Suh-weet.
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    This was at least the direction we were headed with XHTML. The source document could be something more akin to raw data and the presentation could be rendered on the client with an XSL stylesheet. Instead we got... something else.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    > Imagine if cars came in a kit and I could assemble it and choose the fittings myself ... man, that'd be great. I mean, for a niche certain audience, yes it is great. But for mass market, people don't necessarily want to take on a whole new hobby in order to experience the thing. Worse, it's contextual within the same individual: the person who wants to customise the car doesn't want to make their own sourdough pizza from type-00 flour, and customised web browser. And vice versa: each thinks "why waste time on that other thing"?
ashtonbaker 5y ago
Funny the article mentions macOS - I actually had an issue with this recently, when I upgraded to the new OS version, my desktop background was changed to the new default macOS image, and I actually had to re-download the one I was using before. I'm a relatively new macOS user, so not sure if that's common/expected when upgrading, but I really didn't like it.
dwelch2344 5y ago
Except instead of corporations sneaking in your house to paint your room green during the middle of the night, it’s the corporations deliveratelu choosing to paint their lobby green + you just happen to frequent their lobby
donatj 5y ago
I really miss customizing Mac OS X with full blown custom themes back in the day. Making my machine feel like my own. These days it seems like most people don't even customize their wallpaper. It feels so strange to me. There used to be whole vibrant OS customization communities and they just disappeared overnight with some decisions made by Cupertino and Redmond.
- xerox13ster 5y ago
  The willing user can probably still go in and gut the windows registry to make the shell be and do what they want it to, but it's definitely more trouble than its worth these days. I've been tempted to dig around and add a few context menu shortcuts for QOL improvements I'd like to see, but I can't be bothered if it's going to break next update and I have to go digging again.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  They still exist: Windows: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rainmeter/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Rainmeter/ Linux (and occasionally mac): https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ I customise my windows and macos desktops quite a bit. The way I use my macbook is very different to how it looks in the marketing videos anyway. Overall, I feel I notice the customisation problem with things like netflix, but not with windows or macOS. A smart user can do a lot to both.
userbinator 5y ago
Instead 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 that path by slowly taking away control and convincing them to "embrace the changes" forced upon them.
- flenserboy 5y ago
  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.
  - OneLeggedCat 5y ago
    Yes. And Google. There are so many domains I want to never have show up in my search results. Think of one of the domains you hate, the ones that are never truthful, like oann.com is to me. Or all of the zillions of low-quality content farms that are generally ruining all Google results. I would be happy to just keep manually blocking all of them from ever showing up in my results. Google knows that a lot of people would want to do that, and will NEVER allow it. Google wants to steer me.
    - franga2000 5y ago
      Luckily, the web is still open enough that you can do that yourself: https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist
    - 5y ago
markstos 5y ago
Example: Google Calendar personalizes an event mentioning dinner with my wife with an illustration of a steak dinner. We're vegetarian.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
- iqanq 5y ago
  Wow, that is vile.
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    Doubly so, because it influences how even non-vegans think about that dinner now. If you hadn't thought about what that dinner would be, you'd now be thinking about steak. You might otherwise have picked a lot of other things. I think it's unethical for them to manipulate you that way, even unintentionally.
    - boomlinde 5y ago
      In general I think it's quite dangerous how much influence a few entities have over language and symbolism...words like "friend" and "like" being hijacked to represent concepts of surveillance capitalism. One of my pet peeves is with how people in the last few years have been conditioned to refer to any creative works as "content" in the abstract, totally removed from the case-by-case specifics of what exactly it is and what exactly contains it, even when you know the specifics and can describe it more exactly using just as many words. It's sort of like the euphemistic language use by military or paramilitary organizations (e.g. "neutralizing" instead of killing or maiming or "conflict" instead of war) in that it's clearly meant to take our minds off something, except it's unclear to me yet what exactly "content" is meant to take our minds off and why. Like yeah, you make video clips and I work in a breakfast cereal factory. We're both content creators! You figure out what defines the difference and I'll go create some content for the toilet bowl in the mean time.
scim-knox-twox 5y ago
Heh, again someone wrote my thoughts :D
Barrin92 5y ago
there should be a sort of 'right to algorithmic transparency'. Any service that personalizes content should give the user the control to either turn it off and just present data in some generic fashion, or let users introspect and change how they're being personalized. I'm pretty sure any large company already has tools for this internally anyway.
anonymousiam 5y ago
I 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.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  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.
  - selcuka 5y ago
    I think the aim is to get you out of your comfort zone, so that you can find more things to watch and don't cancel your subscription.
- gordaco 5y ago
  This is exactly what Youtube does.
firasd 5y ago
I 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
- HWR_14 5y ago
  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.
- floodle 5y ago
  > 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?
- HunchedOver 5y ago
  Spotify's insistence that it display Podcasts on the Home Screen is very frustrating, these are shows (often political) I've no intention of ever listening to or wanting to know even exist & there's no means of hiding them or telling Spotify I'm not interested. A quick online search shows many others equally frustrated by this "feature". I wouldn't mind so much if the product was free, but I'm paying and don't appreciate having extreme political content thrust toward me each time I open the App.
  - firasd 5y ago
    That's kind of the opposite of personalization right? It's the 'cold start' where they've put the popular podcasts in your face. But I get the general point you're making that they put every feature on the home screen as a feed rather than you having to explicitly go to a podcasts section. I suppose feed UIs like that should have a 'less like this' feature where it generally learns you're not into podcasts
nyanpasu64 5y ago
YouTube Music suggests random playlists on the homepage. It seems to somehow both suggest music I don't want, and keep feeding me songs and artists I've already listened to too many times recently. And it shuffles my supermix and discover mix's contents, and discards and recomputes my "Up Next" list seemingly at random. Any time I see a song I like, I have to save it or else it will probably disappear forever.
mohanmcgeek 5y ago
Google search is becoming increasingly annoying. It randomly starts mixing results in local language. Worse they detect my location incorrectly and start showing results in languages that I can't even read.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  Yes, “location” based localization is the worst when in a different country. The browser sends the preferred locale, they should use that instead.
  - MandieD 5y ago
    I’ve been calling this phenomenon “over-internationalization, but “over-localization” is a bit snappier.
- MandieD 5y ago
  The “best” part: when Google Maps auto-translates German business names into English, making it especially useless for a non-fluent German speaker to find them while driving. For example, a fabric shop named “Stoffe Bauer” was rendered as “Fabric farmer” (Bauer is a very common German family name, and literally means “farmer”). Flip side: when sites force me onto the German homepage because there’s not a German translation of the English-language article I clicked a link to. Stop trying to be so clever, and instead just make the language switch button visible at the top of the page for people who really want a translation. Like you did 15-20 years ago.
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    I'll do one better: it translates perfect English names to the local language and names like "Max muscle Gym" get translated to something like "way too much muscle" cuz there's no word for maximum
jh00ker 5y ago
We often talk about a spectrum that spans from "Easy to use" to "Feature rich." One approach to adding more features without becoming hard to use that I often see is removing the customization settings and selecting default values. This is basically what he's referring to. A great example of this is a recent change to the Android YouTube app's seek bar. In the current version, the only way to seek is to click on the red dot representing the current position and dragging it. I believe this is standard behavior for all slider bars across all iOS, but for Android it's not. In the prior versions of the YouTube app on Android, clicking anywhere on the seek bar would jump to that position. YouTube made the change to conform their iOS and Android apps to behave the same way. But they essentially removed a feature and didn't provide a setting to toggle it back on. I think the "Advanced" section in settings menus could be used more. Here, the motivated user can still customize, but the user that wants things to simply "just work" can leave those settings alone. Also, an advanced section that requires an extra step to open/display can help shy users stay away.
- albert_e 5y ago
  I tried YouTube on Android and found this additional nuance you CAN seek to any arbitrary point on the timeline...but you have to tap AND DRAG a little. (facepalm) Not sure why a simple tap was deemed not enough to skip to that point in the video ...seems straightforward and intuitive UX that way.
Lamad123 5y ago
The worst example of such douchebaggery is when you google something in say French, but you get only results in English or mixed results in both languages.. Even worse is searching youtube some other language.. The results are artificially translated into the searched language but you only discover that when you click on the video..
- 3np 5y ago
  Depending on your IP and browser headers, you may just get the opposite problem (only finding things in French, not in English)
dfee 5y ago
> One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color. I now feel the need to change my button color in System Preferences. Jarring for those on Zoom screen shares, but that’s half the fun.
simion314 5y ago
It is all about dev or designer giant ego. Someone responded me recently that the difficulty level in video games could be removed and replaced with smart code that adapts the difficulty for you, on short the developer knows better then you what you want from the game.
RamblingCTO 5y ago
This thread is so weird. Webservices are most often products company build. If you don't like the product, don't buy it. Most of the commenters have never build products on their own apparently. You carefully weigh the benefits and yes, ROI, if you discuss a feature. What ROI would you get when you would allow netflix customization? You would confuse users most probably.
- js8 5y ago
  What can I do if I don't like all products? And yet, something I would like existed in the past and even had customers?
  - RamblingCTO 5y ago
    Build it yourself. You don't have a right for a company to do exactly what you want. Weird understanding of the economy to be honest.
bagels 5y ago
Who even has time to play with settings of every application or website? I understand that some people may want it, but I sure cannot relate to caring one bit what color my buttons are.
- account42 5y ago
  In the past you could set a system wide theme and most applications followed that. These days most applications feel the need to do their own thing.
- leppr 5y ago
  You don't care because apps these days have mostly sensible defaults (when it comes to visual design at least), and most often both light and dark themes. If the YouTube or Twitter UI was bright yellow backgrounds with comic sans MS font, you might find it distracting and wish for a customization option.
kumarvvr 5y ago
The thing is that when the product/service is a mass market thing, most users are confused by choice that goes too deep. Most folks are happy with some amount of choice, that focuses on functionality, rather than looks. When my brother watches NF, he doesn't bother about colors or where comes what. He idly browses through the list (if he has no pre-idea what to watch) and chooses it. The interface is not efficient for me, I'd rather it have complex search and filters readily available for use, but it is efficient for him because he doesn't have to use complex search to find shows. He is happy with what is recommended or just browse.
- nicbou 5y ago
  Sensible defaults should sort that out
fbn79 5y ago
"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black." Henry Ford
shadowgovt 5y ago
The things the author is describing as "non-consensual personalization" are features and (in the case of Netflix) the point of the product. If the issue is that everybody's doing it, author is an example of a market that someone could serve to disrupt the trend. But if he represents a tiny market, then probably not.
scary-size 5y ago
I don't know whether the order of Netflix categories is something I wanted to change. Of course they optimise for people's attention (time spent in the app). And they use what works for most users. And it's nothing new, supermarkets have been doing this for ever.
_def 5y ago
> One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color. This is interesting. My experience with macOS is the opposite, but that's because I like to personalize the technical parts of my OS.
wheels 5y ago
The article mentions "correcting" searches as an instance of this. I find that particularly infuriating on Amazon. I often search for a specific thing, let's say, "CRI 95 LED light bulb", and it'll return thing that it determines are close enough. In this case, a CRI 96 or CRI 98 bulb would be fine, but it determines that because a CRI 80 bulb also has the same word in it, that it's close enough. (For context, the "color rendering index" expresses about how close an LED bulb is to an incandescent, and CRI 80 is just a standard cheapo bulb.) I often end up returning things because I searched for something specific, and Amazon returned a bunch of things that were not that. (And it shows that for similarity search, that the "corrections" do need to have domain-specific awareness.)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Amazon search is so bad it borders on completely useless. I've actually had an easier time using other search engines pointed at Amazon.
  - fmajid 5y ago
    It's on purpose, like the omission of negative search terms, something almost every single search engine offers. Udi Manber was the relevant VP at Amazon and he literally wrote the book on search engines. I sometimes just switch to DuckDuckGo to search Amazon, because it doesn't treat my search keywords as mere suggestions. What I really need to do is fully kick the Amazon habit.
netcan 5y ago
So... two thoughts. Thought one is that while personalisation can be really desirable to those who really desire it, it isn't desirable to most people for most things. Most people gravitate towards the easiest, quickest to understand option. There's a trade off between powerful, personalised approaches and easy mass market approaches. It's not an absolute conflict, but it's often there. For a mass market entertainment app like netflix... personalisation is rarely going to "win." Thought two is that controlling users' experience, the content they see, how they see it, when... that stuff is power. I don't think FB, for example, would be the company it is today if they didn't seek and guard the power of UI. The power to choose what goes in users' feed and control over how they interact with it. You can think of an app as a tool that users use to do what they want. Users manipulate the app to achieve their goals. You can think of it the other way around. An app is a tool for manipulating users to achieve the app's goals. Ultimately, the web era of software lends naturally to the latter. You design an ecommerce check-out UI. The goal is sale completion. No one is going to design a check out UI for user power. They're going to design it for sale completion. Social software (like FB, or even HN) is similar. The app has goals and it needs users to behave certain ways to achieve it. FB wants reactions, shares and whatnot from users. It wants lengthy scroll sessions and habit building. HN wants good submissions and comments, for HN's definition of submissions and comments. Social software does not want users doing whatever they want to do with the software, which might be flame wars, joke memes or spam. That's the paradigm.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
There's a lot of non-consensual stuff going on in the software world in general. Non-consensual interface changes. Non-consensual functionality changes. Non-consensual software updates. Non-consensual deprecation of browser support. (No, I don't think "security" is a good enough argument for dropping support for a client which is someone's only device for accessing their life-essential service through a secure network.) Non-consensual changes to user data. Non-consensual service and software deprecation and retirement. I got past most of this by switching to FOSS everything. Not that FOSS in general is immune, and I had to switch to different FOSS several times for most things, but by now my things have mostly stabilized. I think most people are only starting to wake up to this being an option, not a given, and whoever provides the ability to easily own your own device, software, AND data stands to benefit others and themselves quite a bit.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > Not that FOSS in general is immune As GNOME is intent on proving...
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy. Maybe it's from looking too much at the data? There seems to be this notion that if the users don't immediately understand the interface, then it's a bad interface. But that's ignoring that human beings learn by fumbling. That doesn't make the world bad or the thing poorly designed. If you take away every opportunity to learn and figure things out, to make mistakes, then you haven't helped anyone, you've made them helpless. We should be thinking a lot more about how we can enhance user agency, how we can allow them to make deliberate choices, rather than how we can take that ability away and how to corral them into some particular behavior of our own preference.
- Swenrekcah 5y ago
  A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment. They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on. It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new designers on the idea that there isn't that much of a difference between software users and chicken in a farm.
  - contravariant 5y ago
    Ironically if there's one thing utterly useless as a way of conveying information it would be a singular button.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I think there's a middle ground. Providing clear options and deliberate choices can be done through not having a thousand options and buttons. Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do. If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia: <https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/encarta.png https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/encarta.png> <https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/wikipedia.png https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/wikipedia.png> It's clearly very different. The Encarta design is a lot more quiet. If you're reading, then you are reading. There are sparse inline links, but nothing near the shotgun linkedness of Wikipedia. I've experimented with stripping down Wikipedia, producing this: <https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Plato https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Plato> It's definitely several steps too far (but taking things too far is the best way to get the feel for an idea), but I find that much easier to read, because the choices are moved out of the text and into the bottom of the text. That is, you read first, and decide what to do next once you are finished reading.
MandieD 5y ago
Related: over-internationalization. Just because I’m browsing from an IP address that appears to be in Germany, doesn’t mean that I want your site autotranslated into German with no way to switch back, even when I type “/en” or take other active measures to indicate that no, I really do want to read it in the original English. I also don’t want to be protected from seeing English-language content you’ve not yet translated to German by being popped over to the German homepage when I clicked a link to an article that’s only in English.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  Browsers have the Accept-Language header just for this. You can provide a list of languages, in order of preference, for the site to decide what you want to see. But nope. No-one uses it. (I know, I have had it set for a decade at least.) This is even worse when I run a service on a VPS in France and I get pages in French, just because of the location.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dtjohnnyb 5y ago
From an accessibility perspective it's a disaster too. My granny is visually impaired, but loves watching tv. She's been able to get by for decades by memorizing the commands needed to get where she wants to go (she had a list of nintendo cheat code-like instructions on how to get to various channels she wanted on the satellite e.g. down-down-left-left-enter gets her to her show) We tried to get her into Netflix, but the menus change far too often for this strategy to be of any use. Of course you can use the screen reader/narrator, but you can imagine how frustrating it is trying to find the carousel you're looking for by waiting for the screen reader to tell you, it's frustrating enough doing it visually!!
flint 5y ago
Amitp only has 2 comments on his blog
- amitp 5y ago
  That's more than most of my blog posts :-) Blogger says I have "20 followers" but some people subscribe via RSS. I would normally get ~50 views and ~0 comments.
ajmurmann 5y ago
Netflix is an interesting example since it also has devolved so much over the years. Back in the olden days before streaming was a thing there was a table view of all their content. The table allowed you to sort by the different columns and I think you even were able to filter. I loved that view. It became more hidden and then went away. They also had an API to pull content info. I used the API to write a little Ruby script that just listed all their movies ordered by how much Netflix thought I'd like them. This worked really well since their predictions were surprisingly accurate. More surprising was that many of the movies that they predicted I'd like a lot were never recommend by their own UI. Of course the API went away soon after as well. Ever since I noticed that Netflix's UI wasn't suggesting what they accurately thought I'd like I've been wondering what they are actually optimizing for. Around that time there was also a lot of buzz around their contest to predict this stuff. Why would they put all this effort in and then not use it? Is their content that they benefit from more of I watch it? Are there licensing deals were Netfkix pays when I watch? Are they saving infrastructure and data transfer costs if everyone streams the same stuff? All this has gotten way worth when they moved from making DVDs to streaming. Edit: I think what might originally have been a driver for this when they went to streaming is to hide how small the library actually was. We all had still been used to a world where we could watch almost everything we wanted via DVDs from a single service. That's almost unfathomable in our new world where most perks are at least subscribed to a handful of services and still don't have the same access, especially to movies, as we had with Netflix DVDs. Edit2: another problem is of course that what I might like isn't necessarily what if watch in any given moment. I might give Andre Rublev five stars, but an I likely to watch a 3+ hour movie with subtitles on a whim on a week night?
scotty79 5y ago
I think we should build client side AI that filters out content from various providers according to your personalized needs. And passes your interests back to providers as simulated interaction so the providers know what to serve you more of. Sort of AI content browser built as a client, running locally. Adjusted to you. With as much or as little manual tweaking as you wish.
aww_dang 5y ago
Requesting a page with en_US has become meaningless. YouTube search must be one of the worst offenders. Results are regionalized into entirely unrelated content.
tyingq 5y ago
Good timing. Outlook decided today to switch me into dark mode, presumably because it detected I have a dark-ish theme set in my Windows Desktop, for quite a long time now. Outlook must have updated itself and added this "auto-detect" dark theme thing. Outlook didn't ask me, and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off normally. Instead, I had to set it to the "white" theme, which I don't think is the same as "disable auto-switch to dark mode".
unixbane 5y ago
Software doesn't need to be updated constantly (and certainly should not be web based). It shouldn't have a single vuln. Vulns are because of hobbiest amateurs from the 90s who don't know what they're doing. Real vulns like side channels (no, not the intel bullshit) occur once every 20 years. So there should be an update once every 20 years. I can still use an image viewer from the 2000s for modern use cases. It should have been finalized in 2000 and the dependencies shoudve stayed the same. Gnome 3 was not needed.
mattymf 5y ago
So, you're living inside someone else's product, yet are upset because you can't personalize it as you please? Google just changed my entire phone's theming system when I changed the background. I love it! I don't have time to personally pick and choose colors, so I'm very happy with this. Also, it matches the background! 10/10, please don't ask for my consent on this Google, I have enough popups from companies begging for my attention.
EastSmith 5y ago
> On Netflix, I'd love to change the order of the various categories. But I can't. Netflix decides for me what the order should be. I am paying for Netflix and 3 others and finding myself more and more watching the content I am still paying for, well ... somewhere else. For exactly this reason.

331 points by zdw 5y ago

The most bizarre case is Twitter forcing me to see tweets in order of some algorithm instead of in chrono order. They let me switch to chrono order. And then automatically switch back after a month or so. And then I switch back to chrono order. And so on. Resulting in a constant kabuki.

underclocked 5y ago
I stopped screwing around with the official twitter app years ago. I switched to Tweetbot and never looked back. No ads and chronological order are worth whatever the app costs to me.
- reactspa 5y ago
  I'm addicted to Twitter, so I force myself to view it in the web app (because it's a little more friction compared to apps). It's not even that the Twitter algorithm is any good. Sometimes when showing a thread, it'll start with the most popular tweet of the thread instead of the first tweet of the thread.

cercatrova 5y ago

Is this perhaps related or written in reaction to yesterday's post "Settings are not a design failure? [0]" It seems quite similar to comments written on that HN thread. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181291

amitp 5y ago
It is similar in topic but not written in reaction to. I had written the post almost a year ago and posted it a few days ago.

doomrobo 5y ago

This is my main issue with so many services. The reason I don't use Instagram is because Instagram gives me no control over what I see. You want to look at pictures without seeing comments? Too bad. It doesn't matter that the top comment on one of the accounts I follow was an anti-Semitic jab at the account owner, I have to read it because Instagram knows what's best for me. Ditto YouTube comments & suggestions, Twitter ordering & suggestions, TikTok ordering & suggestions, and just ads in general. It's a catch-22 for me: if I cede control I get sucked into these addictive cycles, and if I don't cede control I miss out on the primary means of social communication for people my age. How did we get here? This repo has a nice list of attention-respecting frontends. https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends/issues https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends/issues

reidjs 5y ago
One thing you used to be able to do on Instagram is mute everyone you follow and only view people’s profiles when you feel like it. Unfortunately they changed the frontend so now it will endless scroll posts from people you don’t know, which is arguably worse.
ryandrake 5y ago
> and if I don't cede control I miss out on the primary means of social communication for people my age. What I do: Fight it by being part of the solution rather than contributing to the problem by continuing to use these platforms. This is obvious, but the only thing that makes it the “primary” means of communication is the people using it. Don’t be one of those people, and tell your friends the preferred way to get in touch with you. If they are really your friends they will roll with it.
- em-bee 5y ago
  that doesn't work if you want to make new friends.
  - bigjimmyjohnson 5y ago
    I'm honestly not sure what Instagram is used for, never had an accent, but I still make new friends without it. I use sms to talk to the ones with no mutual online chat services.

san_dimitri 5y ago

Personalizing my MacBook OS should be like personalizing my car while personalizing Netflix/Amazon etc should be like me expecting my local Walmart and Target to let me personalize their store. Is that a fair comparison?

shukantpal 5y ago
I don't think so. Based on this article, Netflix is also forcing pixels on their screen to be color black -- and I want them to be green.
- perihelions 5y ago
  uBlock filters can do that, e.g. something like: netflix.com##:xpath(//div):style(background-color: green !important) https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#subjectstylearg https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...
- ImaCake 5y ago
  There are extensions to get around this for any webpage. I use https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/ but there are others too.
zuminator 5y ago
The article isn't demanding that services be personalized. It's just saying that if they are going to personalize things, the user should have control over it, and not some obscure algorithm. It's like if you walked into Target and everything on the main floor was orange juice and socks because you happened to buy OJ and socks on your last visit. And every time you went back to Target, the shelves would be completely rearranged based upon your previous purchases. That's great if you buy the same 3 or 4 things every time. But then one day you go in there looking for a jumper for a nephew, and there's no discrete boys' section because it doesn't fit your single childless demographic. Just rows and rows of orange juice, and also apple juice which you hate, but it 94% matches your predicted preferences.
Schroedingersat 5y ago

LAC-Tech 5y ago

The 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.

lmm 5y ago
GNOME removed a lot of configurability that was present in previous versions.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  Yeah but linux is configurable. Don't like your UI? Rip it out. It's not locked down like windows or mac. SO feels very weird to blame linux here and not... GNOME.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Plenty of major Linux distributions have made GNOME the primary or only "supported" UI, and plenty of site administrators don't want you to switch it out and may enforce that to a lesser or greater extent (e.g. not installing anything else). I do blame GNOME, but they're pretty much the face of Linux these days (I'd say ever since Mandriva went bankrupt tbh. - RedHat in particular is very closely involved in GNOME development). And "don't like your UI? Rip it out" is less and less true now that modern linux is adding more tight integrations with rapidly-shifting interfaces. E.g. if you're running Wayland then a lot of stuff (e.g. screenrecording) only works with the GNOME compositor. Some of the modern app distribution stuff (Docker? Snap?) requires your DE to be running the right DBus sessions / process namespaces / etc. . If you use one application from a DE it's maybe expecting more things to be running - PulseAudio, clipboard management, ... It's possible, but these days I'm not sure how big the practical difference is from using something like BB4Win.
    - bzzzt 5y ago
      Then don't run Wayland or Gnome and see how far you get without going insane. You seem to be forgetting that systems have become a lot more complex than 20 years ago and most people prefer for things to 'just work' instead of fiddling with the terminal to fix their wireless network or bluetooth headphone. And after that there are some pesky security things like every X client being able to read and inject keystrokes in every other window. If you want meaningful security it's useless to cling to the decades old way of doing things.

smoldesu 5y ago

I've given GNOME (perhaps unfairly) a lot of flak in previous threads, but I think this is one of the main things responsible for the degrading software experience right here: > One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color. But in most ways MacOS doesn't allow me to personalize things. Now, it's an open secret that GNOME grabs a majority of it's design cues from MacOS, but this is one of the things that they don't need to and shouldn't copy. Desktop Linux has always lead the pack in this regard by allowing the user to directly manipulate the way "native" apps render, be it in Qt or GTK, and the effort to lock it all down for some perceived user/developer benefits are just silly. Does anyone really think people would be using Linux if they didn't want to directly control the computer they're interacting with? Isn't that what software freedom is all about? I don't think anyone wants middlemen limiting what they're capable of doing on a computer. Sure, you might want sensible defaults or better accessibility for those settings (which is something desktop environments can definitely improve), but there are very few people lobbying for less control over their applications. I say this as both a user and a dev; stop taking things away from me. Not just CSS theming, but options for my dock and settings for my mouse. Arguably, this attempt to "centralize" the Linux experience has led to even more fragmentation with third-party tweak tools and countless extensions that break update-after-update. It's infuriating, and the author has hit the nail right on the head here: you can deliver a good default experience for the users and give people the tools they need to extend or modify that experience. The two are not mutually exclusive.

kdamica 5y ago

Not sure whether this is common, but the definitions I use are: Customization - decisions that you make for yourself Personalization - decisions made for you based on implicit and explicit signals

scim-knox-twox 5y ago
But we already have definitions: Customization: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/customization https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/customization Personalization: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/personalization https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/personalization If I can't tweak something like I want, then it's not personalized.

sebastien_b 5y ago

The post describes it without saying it: arrogance.

jrockway 5y ago

I 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 and they specifically want to prevent you from writing a program that saves the downloaded bytes to disk. So I guess there is no way to achieve their business goals (make sure you pay $20/month forever to watch stuff, and make sure the "rights holders" get to sell you the same thing multiple times) without doing more work, which they simply chose not to do because they don't have to. Going one level deeper, I guess that video streaming is a weird market. You could have the worst software and the best content and probably win. So you can't compete with Netflix by making a video streaming service that has more UI features. I guess what this means is that copyright is deterring innovation. I think I've heard that one before. Sigh!

phantom784 5y ago
They could do that but you deeplink back into the Netflix app to actually watch to solve the DRM issue. Which I think shows that it's about more than just DRM. They want to control the experience.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Importantly, to get the data to learn from it to improve faster than their competitors can.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    We realized our competitors were copying us at a company long ago. We geofenced a/b tests so they wouldn’t see what we were testing and intentionally made the web app worse for that area (mostly as a “fun” 20% type project). Interestingly, the “worse” version starting doing really well even though we were giving them “control” for all older features. We ended up rolling back several months of changes to the entire product and we saw a huge burst in revenue. It wouldn’t be until years later until I understood the Simpson paradox and that a/b testing improves the mean of whatever metric you’re trying to improve, usually by decreasing some important segment and improving some unimportant segment.

efitz 5y ago

I 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, colors, etc. My browser, under MY control, can present the content to me in whatever way I prefer. There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser. Just because the web currently acts a certain way doesn’t mean that things HAVE to be that way.

titzer 5y ago
Right on! Imagine if the web served up content and I could write my own processors for it to lay it out however I want...man, that'd be great. But the Web became about branding the moment they introduced images and font choices. I remember designing a website for my local skate rink in 1997 that had a left navbar with buttons I did in photoshop and cut-n-paste javascript to add a lens flare when you moused-over them. Haha! Suh-weet.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  This was at least the direction we were headed with XHTML. The source document could be something more akin to raw data and the presentation could be rendered on the client with an XSL stylesheet. Instead we got... something else.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > Imagine if cars came in a kit and I could assemble it and choose the fittings myself ... man, that'd be great. I mean, for a niche certain audience, yes it is great. But for mass market, people don't necessarily want to take on a whole new hobby in order to experience the thing. Worse, it's contextual within the same individual: the person who wants to customise the car doesn't want to make their own sourdough pizza from type-00 flour, and customised web browser. And vice versa: each thinks "why waste time on that other thing"?

ashtonbaker 5y ago

Funny the article mentions macOS - I actually had an issue with this recently, when I upgraded to the new OS version, my desktop background was changed to the new default macOS image, and I actually had to re-download the one I was using before. I'm a relatively new macOS user, so not sure if that's common/expected when upgrading, but I really didn't like it.

dwelch2344 5y ago

Except instead of corporations sneaking in your house to paint your room green during the middle of the night, it’s the corporations deliveratelu choosing to paint their lobby green + you just happen to frequent their lobby

donatj 5y ago

I really miss customizing Mac OS X with full blown custom themes back in the day. Making my machine feel like my own. These days it seems like most people don't even customize their wallpaper. It feels so strange to me. There used to be whole vibrant OS customization communities and they just disappeared overnight with some decisions made by Cupertino and Redmond.

xerox13ster 5y ago
The willing user can probably still go in and gut the windows registry to make the shell be and do what they want it to, but it's definitely more trouble than its worth these days. I've been tempted to dig around and add a few context menu shortcuts for QOL improvements I'd like to see, but I can't be bothered if it's going to break next update and I have to go digging again.
ImaCake 5y ago
They still exist: Windows: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rainmeter/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Rainmeter/ Linux (and occasionally mac): https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ I customise my windows and macos desktops quite a bit. The way I use my macbook is very different to how it looks in the marketing videos anyway. Overall, I feel I notice the customisation problem with things like netflix, but not with windows or macOS. A smart user can do a lot to both.

userbinator 5y ago

Instead 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 that path by slowly taking away control and convincing them to "embrace the changes" forced upon them.

flenserboy 5y ago
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.
- OneLeggedCat 5y ago
  Yes. And Google. There are so many domains I want to never have show up in my search results. Think of one of the domains you hate, the ones that are never truthful, like oann.com is to me. Or all of the zillions of low-quality content farms that are generally ruining all Google results. I would be happy to just keep manually blocking all of them from ever showing up in my results. Google knows that a lot of people would want to do that, and will NEVER allow it. Google wants to steer me.
  - franga2000 5y ago
    Luckily, the web is still open enough that you can do that yourself: https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist
  - 5y ago

markstos 5y ago

Example: Google Calendar personalizes an event mentioning dinner with my wife with an illustration of a steak dinner. We're vegetarian.

alisonkisk 5y ago
iqanq 5y ago
Wow, that is vile.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  Doubly so, because it influences how even non-vegans think about that dinner now. If you hadn't thought about what that dinner would be, you'd now be thinking about steak. You might otherwise have picked a lot of other things. I think it's unethical for them to manipulate you that way, even unintentionally.
  - boomlinde 5y ago
    In general I think it's quite dangerous how much influence a few entities have over language and symbolism...words like "friend" and "like" being hijacked to represent concepts of surveillance capitalism. One of my pet peeves is with how people in the last few years have been conditioned to refer to any creative works as "content" in the abstract, totally removed from the case-by-case specifics of what exactly it is and what exactly contains it, even when you know the specifics and can describe it more exactly using just as many words. It's sort of like the euphemistic language use by military or paramilitary organizations (e.g. "neutralizing" instead of killing or maiming or "conflict" instead of war) in that it's clearly meant to take our minds off something, except it's unclear to me yet what exactly "content" is meant to take our minds off and why. Like yeah, you make video clips and I work in a breakfast cereal factory. We're both content creators! You figure out what defines the difference and I'll go create some content for the toilet bowl in the mean time.

scim-knox-twox 5y ago

Heh, again someone wrote my thoughts :D

Barrin92 5y ago

there should be a sort of 'right to algorithmic transparency'. Any service that personalizes content should give the user the control to either turn it off and just present data in some generic fashion, or let users introspect and change how they're being personalized. I'm pretty sure any large company already has tools for this internally anyway.

anonymousiam 5y ago

I 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.

crooked-v 5y ago
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.
- selcuka 5y ago
  I think the aim is to get you out of your comfort zone, so that you can find more things to watch and don't cancel your subscription.
gordaco 5y ago
This is exactly what Youtube does.

firasd 5y ago

I 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

HWR_14 5y ago
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.
floodle 5y ago
> 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?
HunchedOver 5y ago
Spotify's insistence that it display Podcasts on the Home Screen is very frustrating, these are shows (often political) I've no intention of ever listening to or wanting to know even exist & there's no means of hiding them or telling Spotify I'm not interested. A quick online search shows many others equally frustrated by this "feature". I wouldn't mind so much if the product was free, but I'm paying and don't appreciate having extreme political content thrust toward me each time I open the App.
- firasd 5y ago
  That's kind of the opposite of personalization right? It's the 'cold start' where they've put the popular podcasts in your face. But I get the general point you're making that they put every feature on the home screen as a feed rather than you having to explicitly go to a podcasts section. I suppose feed UIs like that should have a 'less like this' feature where it generally learns you're not into podcasts

nyanpasu64 5y ago

YouTube Music suggests random playlists on the homepage. It seems to somehow both suggest music I don't want, and keep feeding me songs and artists I've already listened to too many times recently. And it shuffles my supermix and discover mix's contents, and discards and recomputes my "Up Next" list seemingly at random. Any time I see a song I like, I have to save it or else it will probably disappear forever.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago

Google search is becoming increasingly annoying. It randomly starts mixing results in local language. Worse they detect my location incorrectly and start showing results in languages that I can't even read.

withinboredom 5y ago
Yes, “location” based localization is the worst when in a different country. The browser sends the preferred locale, they should use that instead.
- MandieD 5y ago
  I’ve been calling this phenomenon “over-internationalization, but “over-localization” is a bit snappier.
MandieD 5y ago
The “best” part: when Google Maps auto-translates German business names into English, making it especially useless for a non-fluent German speaker to find them while driving. For example, a fabric shop named “Stoffe Bauer” was rendered as “Fabric farmer” (Bauer is a very common German family name, and literally means “farmer”). Flip side: when sites force me onto the German homepage because there’s not a German translation of the English-language article I clicked a link to. Stop trying to be so clever, and instead just make the language switch button visible at the top of the page for people who really want a translation. Like you did 15-20 years ago.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  I'll do one better: it translates perfect English names to the local language and names like "Max muscle Gym" get translated to something like "way too much muscle" cuz there's no word for maximum

jh00ker 5y ago

We often talk about a spectrum that spans from "Easy to use" to "Feature rich." One approach to adding more features without becoming hard to use that I often see is removing the customization settings and selecting default values. This is basically what he's referring to. A great example of this is a recent change to the Android YouTube app's seek bar. In the current version, the only way to seek is to click on the red dot representing the current position and dragging it. I believe this is standard behavior for all slider bars across all iOS, but for Android it's not. In the prior versions of the YouTube app on Android, clicking anywhere on the seek bar would jump to that position. YouTube made the change to conform their iOS and Android apps to behave the same way. But they essentially removed a feature and didn't provide a setting to toggle it back on. I think the "Advanced" section in settings menus could be used more. Here, the motivated user can still customize, but the user that wants things to simply "just work" can leave those settings alone. Also, an advanced section that requires an extra step to open/display can help shy users stay away.

albert_e 5y ago
I tried YouTube on Android and found this additional nuance you CAN seek to any arbitrary point on the timeline...but you have to tap AND DRAG a little. (facepalm) Not sure why a simple tap was deemed not enough to skip to that point in the video ...seems straightforward and intuitive UX that way.

Lamad123 5y ago

The worst example of such douchebaggery is when you google something in say French, but you get only results in English or mixed results in both languages.. Even worse is searching youtube some other language.. The results are artificially translated into the searched language but you only discover that when you click on the video..

3np 5y ago
Depending on your IP and browser headers, you may just get the opposite problem (only finding things in French, not in English)

dfee 5y ago

> One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color. I now feel the need to change my button color in System Preferences. Jarring for those on Zoom screen shares, but that’s half the fun.

simion314 5y ago

It is all about dev or designer giant ego. Someone responded me recently that the difficulty level in video games could be removed and replaced with smart code that adapts the difficulty for you, on short the developer knows better then you what you want from the game.

RamblingCTO 5y ago

This thread is so weird. Webservices are most often products company build. If you don't like the product, don't buy it. Most of the commenters have never build products on their own apparently. You carefully weigh the benefits and yes, ROI, if you discuss a feature. What ROI would you get when you would allow netflix customization? You would confuse users most probably.

js8 5y ago
What can I do if I don't like all products? And yet, something I would like existed in the past and even had customers?
- RamblingCTO 5y ago
  Build it yourself. You don't have a right for a company to do exactly what you want. Weird understanding of the economy to be honest.

bagels 5y ago

Who even has time to play with settings of every application or website? I understand that some people may want it, but I sure cannot relate to caring one bit what color my buttons are.

account42 5y ago
In the past you could set a system wide theme and most applications followed that. These days most applications feel the need to do their own thing.
leppr 5y ago
You don't care because apps these days have mostly sensible defaults (when it comes to visual design at least), and most often both light and dark themes. If the YouTube or Twitter UI was bright yellow backgrounds with comic sans MS font, you might find it distracting and wish for a customization option.

kumarvvr 5y ago

The thing is that when the product/service is a mass market thing, most users are confused by choice that goes too deep. Most folks are happy with some amount of choice, that focuses on functionality, rather than looks. When my brother watches NF, he doesn't bother about colors or where comes what. He idly browses through the list (if he has no pre-idea what to watch) and chooses it. The interface is not efficient for me, I'd rather it have complex search and filters readily available for use, but it is efficient for him because he doesn't have to use complex search to find shows. He is happy with what is recommended or just browse.

nicbou 5y ago
Sensible defaults should sort that out

fbn79 5y ago

"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black." Henry Ford

shadowgovt 5y ago

The things the author is describing as "non-consensual personalization" are features and (in the case of Netflix) the point of the product. If the issue is that everybody's doing it, author is an example of a market that someone could serve to disrupt the trend. But if he represents a tiny market, then probably not.

scary-size 5y ago

I don't know whether the order of Netflix categories is something I wanted to change. Of course they optimise for people's attention (time spent in the app). And they use what works for most users. And it's nothing new, supermarkets have been doing this for ever.

_def 5y ago

> One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color. This is interesting. My experience with macOS is the opposite, but that's because I like to personalize the technical parts of my OS.

wheels 5y ago

The article mentions "correcting" searches as an instance of this. I find that particularly infuriating on Amazon. I often search for a specific thing, let's say, "CRI 95 LED light bulb", and it'll return thing that it determines are close enough. In this case, a CRI 96 or CRI 98 bulb would be fine, but it determines that because a CRI 80 bulb also has the same word in it, that it's close enough. (For context, the "color rendering index" expresses about how close an LED bulb is to an incandescent, and CRI 80 is just a standard cheapo bulb.) I often end up returning things because I searched for something specific, and Amazon returned a bunch of things that were not that. (And it shows that for similarity search, that the "corrections" do need to have domain-specific awareness.)

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Amazon search is so bad it borders on completely useless. I've actually had an easier time using other search engines pointed at Amazon.
- fmajid 5y ago
  It's on purpose, like the omission of negative search terms, something almost every single search engine offers. Udi Manber was the relevant VP at Amazon and he literally wrote the book on search engines. I sometimes just switch to DuckDuckGo to search Amazon, because it doesn't treat my search keywords as mere suggestions. What I really need to do is fully kick the Amazon habit.

netcan 5y ago

So... two thoughts. Thought one is that while personalisation can be really desirable to those who really desire it, it isn't desirable to most people for most things. Most people gravitate towards the easiest, quickest to understand option. There's a trade off between powerful, personalised approaches and easy mass market approaches. It's not an absolute conflict, but it's often there. For a mass market entertainment app like netflix... personalisation is rarely going to "win." Thought two is that controlling users' experience, the content they see, how they see it, when... that stuff is power. I don't think FB, for example, would be the company it is today if they didn't seek and guard the power of UI. The power to choose what goes in users' feed and control over how they interact with it. You can think of an app as a tool that users use to do what they want. Users manipulate the app to achieve their goals. You can think of it the other way around. An app is a tool for manipulating users to achieve the app's goals. Ultimately, the web era of software lends naturally to the latter. You design an ecommerce check-out UI. The goal is sale completion. No one is going to design a check out UI for user power. They're going to design it for sale completion. Social software (like FB, or even HN) is similar. The app has goals and it needs users to behave certain ways to achieve it. FB wants reactions, shares and whatnot from users. It wants lengthy scroll sessions and habit building. HN wants good submissions and comments, for HN's definition of submissions and comments. Social software does not want users doing whatever they want to do with the software, which might be flame wars, joke memes or spam. That's the paradigm.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

There's a lot of non-consensual stuff going on in the software world in general. Non-consensual interface changes. Non-consensual functionality changes. Non-consensual software updates. Non-consensual deprecation of browser support. (No, I don't think "security" is a good enough argument for dropping support for a client which is someone's only device for accessing their life-essential service through a secure network.) Non-consensual changes to user data. Non-consensual service and software deprecation and retirement. I got past most of this by switching to FOSS everything. Not that FOSS in general is immune, and I had to switch to different FOSS several times for most things, but by now my things have mostly stabilized. I think most people are only starting to wake up to this being an option, not a given, and whoever provides the ability to easily own your own device, software, AND data stands to benefit others and themselves quite a bit.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Not that FOSS in general is immune As GNOME is intent on proving...

marginalia_nu 5y ago

I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy. Maybe it's from looking too much at the data? There seems to be this notion that if the users don't immediately understand the interface, then it's a bad interface. But that's ignoring that human beings learn by fumbling. That doesn't make the world bad or the thing poorly designed. If you take away every opportunity to learn and figure things out, to make mistakes, then you haven't helped anyone, you've made them helpless. We should be thinking a lot more about how we can enhance user agency, how we can allow them to make deliberate choices, rather than how we can take that ability away and how to corral them into some particular behavior of our own preference.

Swenrekcah 5y ago
A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment. They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on. It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new designers on the idea that there isn't that much of a difference between software users and chicken in a farm.
- contravariant 5y ago
  Ironically if there's one thing utterly useless as a way of conveying information it would be a singular button.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I think there's a middle ground. Providing clear options and deliberate choices can be done through not having a thousand options and buttons. Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do. If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia: <https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/encarta.png https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/encarta.png> <https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/wikipedia.png https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/wikipedia.png> It's clearly very different. The Encarta design is a lot more quiet. If you're reading, then you are reading. There are sparse inline links, but nothing near the shotgun linkedness of Wikipedia. I've experimented with stripping down Wikipedia, producing this: <https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Plato https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Plato> It's definitely several steps too far (but taking things too far is the best way to get the feel for an idea), but I find that much easier to read, because the choices are moved out of the text and into the bottom of the text. That is, you read first, and decide what to do next once you are finished reading.

MandieD 5y ago

Related: over-internationalization. Just because I’m browsing from an IP address that appears to be in Germany, doesn’t mean that I want your site autotranslated into German with no way to switch back, even when I type “/en” or take other active measures to indicate that no, I really do want to read it in the original English. I also don’t want to be protected from seeing English-language content you’ve not yet translated to German by being popped over to the German homepage when I clicked a link to an article that’s only in English.

theshrike79 5y ago
Browsers have the Accept-Language header just for this. You can provide a list of languages, in order of preference, for the site to decide what you want to see. But nope. No-one uses it. (I know, I have had it set for a decade at least.) This is even worse when I run a service on a VPS in France and I get pages in French, just because of the location.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dtjohnnyb 5y ago

From an accessibility perspective it's a disaster too. My granny is visually impaired, but loves watching tv. She's been able to get by for decades by memorizing the commands needed to get where she wants to go (she had a list of nintendo cheat code-like instructions on how to get to various channels she wanted on the satellite e.g. down-down-left-left-enter gets her to her show) We tried to get her into Netflix, but the menus change far too often for this strategy to be of any use. Of course you can use the screen reader/narrator, but you can imagine how frustrating it is trying to find the carousel you're looking for by waiting for the screen reader to tell you, it's frustrating enough doing it visually!!

flint 5y ago

Amitp only has 2 comments on his blog

amitp 5y ago
That's more than most of my blog posts :-) Blogger says I have "20 followers" but some people subscribe via RSS. I would normally get ~50 views and ~0 comments.

ajmurmann 5y ago

Netflix is an interesting example since it also has devolved so much over the years. Back in the olden days before streaming was a thing there was a table view of all their content. The table allowed you to sort by the different columns and I think you even were able to filter. I loved that view. It became more hidden and then went away. They also had an API to pull content info. I used the API to write a little Ruby script that just listed all their movies ordered by how much Netflix thought I'd like them. This worked really well since their predictions were surprisingly accurate. More surprising was that many of the movies that they predicted I'd like a lot were never recommend by their own UI. Of course the API went away soon after as well. Ever since I noticed that Netflix's UI wasn't suggesting what they accurately thought I'd like I've been wondering what they are actually optimizing for. Around that time there was also a lot of buzz around their contest to predict this stuff. Why would they put all this effort in and then not use it? Is their content that they benefit from more of I watch it? Are there licensing deals were Netfkix pays when I watch? Are they saving infrastructure and data transfer costs if everyone streams the same stuff? All this has gotten way worth when they moved from making DVDs to streaming. Edit: I think what might originally have been a driver for this when they went to streaming is to hide how small the library actually was. We all had still been used to a world where we could watch almost everything we wanted via DVDs from a single service. That's almost unfathomable in our new world where most perks are at least subscribed to a handful of services and still don't have the same access, especially to movies, as we had with Netflix DVDs. Edit2: another problem is of course that what I might like isn't necessarily what if watch in any given moment. I might give Andre Rublev five stars, but an I likely to watch a 3+ hour movie with subtitles on a whim on a week night?

scotty79 5y ago

I think we should build client side AI that filters out content from various providers according to your personalized needs. And passes your interests back to providers as simulated interaction so the providers know what to serve you more of. Sort of AI content browser built as a client, running locally. Adjusted to you. With as much or as little manual tweaking as you wish.

aww_dang 5y ago

Requesting a page with en_US has become meaningless. YouTube search must be one of the worst offenders. Results are regionalized into entirely unrelated content.

tyingq 5y ago

Good timing. Outlook decided today to switch me into dark mode, presumably because it detected I have a dark-ish theme set in my Windows Desktop, for quite a long time now. Outlook must have updated itself and added this "auto-detect" dark theme thing. Outlook didn't ask me, and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off normally. Instead, I had to set it to the "white" theme, which I don't think is the same as "disable auto-switch to dark mode".

unixbane 5y ago

Software doesn't need to be updated constantly (and certainly should not be web based). It shouldn't have a single vuln. Vulns are because of hobbiest amateurs from the 90s who don't know what they're doing. Real vulns like side channels (no, not the intel bullshit) occur once every 20 years. So there should be an update once every 20 years. I can still use an image viewer from the 2000s for modern use cases. It should have been finalized in 2000 and the dependencies shoudve stayed the same. Gnome 3 was not needed.

mattymf 5y ago

So, you're living inside someone else's product, yet are upset because you can't personalize it as you please? Google just changed my entire phone's theming system when I changed the background. I love it! I don't have time to personally pick and choose colors, so I'm very happy with this. Also, it matches the background! 10/10, please don't ask for my consent on this Google, I have enough popups from companies begging for my attention.

EastSmith 5y ago

> On Netflix, I'd love to change the order of the various categories. But I can't. Netflix decides for me what the order should be. I am paying for Netflix and 3 others and finding myself more and more watching the content I am still paying for, well ... somewhere else. For exactly this reason.