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“No” is just a decorative toggle for Google at this point. I have to set on a weekly basis no auto play on thumbnail hover, no auto play next video when the cu

“No” is just a decorative toggle for Google at this point. I have to set on a weekly basis no auto play on thumbnail hover, no auto play next video when the current one is over, I don't want this user as my main Gmail account, etc. In fact, user input is probably only regarded on the million/billion scale. I quote strings on search, ask for suggestions to be only in the languages that I speak rather than my geolocation… all bluntly ignored. The best one can hope for these days is to add its own grain of sand to the pile to slightly nudge the algorithm.

shadowgovt 5y ago
Out of curiosity, are you using uBlock or tossing your Google cookies frequently? Plugins like uBlock interfere with a function of a web page in ways that are very hard to predict by page developers, so there's no telling what's going on if you have that enabled (maybe it thinks a request to a server to fetch your settings is going to an ad server and blocking it). And some of those settings, of course, are stored locally in cookies. > million / billion scale That is true. "Don't optimize for the uncommon case" is something I've had a Googler tell me as a software best practice.
- fluoridation 5y ago
  "Don't optimize for the uncommon case" and "don't handle the uncommon case" are different, though. Google seems to go for the latter, more often than not.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    The thing being optimized is developer time.
- boredumb 5y ago
  "Don't optimize for the uncommon case" A fun way to ensure the case you focused on and optimize for is always the most common case since the other use cases are suboptimal and frustrating.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  Nope, no uBlock. Just Safari on multiple devices.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Oh, I missed the other thing you mentioned: > I don't want this user as my main Gmail account, etc. Google's multilogin support is notoriously broken. That's a huge bug on their end; I'd be willing to wager it's screwing up and dropping your setting on the floor because you're soft-logged-in as a different user. I solve this issue by running multiple accounts under Chrome, because log-in-as-someone-else is just so inconsistent and bad on Google's properties.
- kroltan 5y ago
  I thought it was some blocking, but I disabled my uBlock, Firefox's tracking protection, as well as the router-level DNS adblock, and it still toggled back on sporadically. I would turn it off, close the page, and bam, there it was again enabled. It got back working a few days later though, so I guess it was some idiotic A/B test.
- tomrod 5y ago
  That's likely a good metric on whether the page developer is exceeding reasonable bounds. If their content looks like an ad as detected by the best, hardened, most widely used protection software, it's reasonable that the developer should reconsider the implementation or feature altogether.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    I've had uBlock reject an image served from my server because it was a particular size and had the substring "ad" in its URL (the image names were just GUIDs, and "ad" is, of course, valid hexadecimal). There's a two-way communication problem with expecting ad blockers to work on arbitrary sites without breaking the sites; they aren't a web standard so developers can't code against them, and there's no way that blockers can predict every valid configuration. False positives will, of course, occur, and since code is changing continuously in both pages and the blocker, making them work with each other is a moving target. When someone reports an issue with my sites, "disable uBlock and try again" is the first thing I recommend. Failing to do so is like trying to debug an issue in MacOS back in the day without asking the user to first disable extensions.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      Sounds like we agree in principle and on assessment. Perhaps the daylight is that I believe users should be able to anticipate that sites will work under common configurations like use of ublock, which puts the onus on the dev.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        Since uBlock isn't a web standard (and runs on a constantly-shifting set of heuristics), it's unrealistic to expect devs to chase it successfully. To be sure, they will chase it to maximize user eyeballs, but expecting that to be the correct course of action is like expecting devs to adapt their sites to IE6 quirks. I thought we went through a whole standard development process to get away from the need to handle user-agent issues.
deleted 5y ago
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shadowgovt 5y ago

Out of curiosity, are you using uBlock or tossing your Google cookies frequently? Plugins like uBlock interfere with a function of a web page in ways that are very hard to predict by page developers, so there's no telling what's going on if you have that enabled (maybe it thinks a request to a server to fetch your settings is going to an ad server and blocking it). And some of those settings, of course, are stored locally in cookies. > million / billion scale That is true. "Don't optimize for the uncommon case" is something I've had a Googler tell me as a software best practice.

fluoridation 5y ago
"Don't optimize for the uncommon case" and "don't handle the uncommon case" are different, though. Google seems to go for the latter, more often than not.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  The thing being optimized is developer time.
boredumb 5y ago
"Don't optimize for the uncommon case" A fun way to ensure the case you focused on and optimize for is always the most common case since the other use cases are suboptimal and frustrating.
tambourine_man 5y ago
Nope, no uBlock. Just Safari on multiple devices.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Oh, I missed the other thing you mentioned: > I don't want this user as my main Gmail account, etc. Google's multilogin support is notoriously broken. That's a huge bug on their end; I'd be willing to wager it's screwing up and dropping your setting on the floor because you're soft-logged-in as a different user. I solve this issue by running multiple accounts under Chrome, because log-in-as-someone-else is just so inconsistent and bad on Google's properties.
kroltan 5y ago
I thought it was some blocking, but I disabled my uBlock, Firefox's tracking protection, as well as the router-level DNS adblock, and it still toggled back on sporadically. I would turn it off, close the page, and bam, there it was again enabled. It got back working a few days later though, so I guess it was some idiotic A/B test.
tomrod 5y ago
That's likely a good metric on whether the page developer is exceeding reasonable bounds. If their content looks like an ad as detected by the best, hardened, most widely used protection software, it's reasonable that the developer should reconsider the implementation or feature altogether.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  I've had uBlock reject an image served from my server because it was a particular size and had the substring "ad" in its URL (the image names were just GUIDs, and "ad" is, of course, valid hexadecimal). There's a two-way communication problem with expecting ad blockers to work on arbitrary sites without breaking the sites; they aren't a web standard so developers can't code against them, and there's no way that blockers can predict every valid configuration. False positives will, of course, occur, and since code is changing continuously in both pages and the blocker, making them work with each other is a moving target. When someone reports an issue with my sites, "disable uBlock and try again" is the first thing I recommend. Failing to do so is like trying to debug an issue in MacOS back in the day without asking the user to first disable extensions.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Sounds like we agree in principle and on assessment. Perhaps the daylight is that I believe users should be able to anticipate that sites will work under common configurations like use of ublock, which puts the onus on the dev.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Since uBlock isn't a web standard (and runs on a constantly-shifting set of heuristics), it's unrealistic to expect devs to chase it successfully. To be sure, they will chase it to maximize user eyeballs, but expecting that to be the correct course of action is like expecting devs to adapt their sites to IE6 quirks. I thought we went through a whole standard development process to get away from the need to handle user-agent issues.

deleted 5y ago

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