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> Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attenti
by marginalia_nu 4y ago
> Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens.
This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the expense of maintaining it.
- bick_nyers 4y agoThat's if you want to capture someone's focus, not their attention.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIf you capture their focus, are you not also capturing their attention?
- bick_nyers 4y agoYes, but not necessarily the other way around. I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but I think the 2 different UIs are serving 2 different goals. Focus requires commitment at some level, and I don't think most websites are predicated on the notion that the average user is committed, at least initially. Maybe once you make a sale to them and they get access to your product you can safely prioritize focus because you now have that commitment. I think engineers generally are above average on the skill of summoning focus, as you kind of need it in order to perform math, analysis, and logic.
- brookst 4y agoIt’s more about selling someone’s attention than holding it. The best possible outcome for both websites and Google is for a user to click on on a website from search and then immediately click on an ad. To the extent you find the site useful and don’t need what’s being advertised, that’s a fail for both of them.
- OccamsMirror 4y agoMore like they monetise it at the expense of maintaining it.