4 ms·
These are hilarious and infuriating but also, perhaps, correct? My gf (who used to work in the sector) says a lot of people like to sit in front of the TV and
by gumby 3y ago
These are hilarious and infuriating but also, perhaps, correct?
My gf (who used to work in the sector) says a lot of people like to sit in front of the TV and “watch what’s on” — one of the reasons broadcast TV still exists.
You see this with sites like Netflix becoming decreasingly useful, urging you to simply click on something rather than consult your curated watch list. Some of them now hide your watch list!
She suggests the same applies to shopping: some people just want to push the buy button, which is well known in brick and mortar retail, especially low margin ones like grocery shops: end caps, mid shelves and all sorts of other strategies are used to get you to either buy on impulse or buy the version they’d rather sell of what you have in mind.
So for these sites the same applies: show a few options and the customer will simply pick one. Spam the tags, DWIM the customer’s ill-formed, uninformed, or simply unsatisfiable query, and see if the punter buys.
For nerds like us this is a pessimization. But perhaps for the majority this works better.
- pc86 3y agoI've noticed a lot of streaming services will inconsistently show your watch list and/or show it in different locations on the home screen. I've long wondered if it's a mix of certain services just not being available or taking too long to respond when loading the lolomo (to use Netflix's term) and automated A/B tests trying to maximize some metric other than "starts watching something."
- pixl97 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice Mentally when I'm at a store and I have 3 options to pick from I seemingly enjoy the process better then if I had 6 or 10. Eventually the picking itself becomes work. If it's a topic I enjoy like motherboards or RAM then all the choices are fine, I can spend hours on that, but if I'm picking tomato sauce for a quick and sloppy dish I don't want to spend the time selecting.
- mmahemoff 3y agoYep. YouTube search has become smart about this, blending search with browsing. It typically gives you a handful of reasonably close matches, followed by a whole lot of wildly offtopic suggestions based on subscriptions, watch history, or who even knows. And this happens even when there would be more relevant results to show, i.e., there's not even a pretence of trying to give the N most relevant results. The game is to populate search with whatever users will click on.
- alexhsamuel 3y agoWhat you're describing isn't "search", designed to give me information I asked for. It's a recommendation engine, designed to induce a behavior in me, whose input is the "search term" I entered (plus god knows what other tracking data). The distinction is important: the recommendation engine is designed to get me to buy something (not necessarily what I came to buy), whereas my intention was to buy something (or buy nothing, if they don't have it). Calling this recommendation engine "search" is IMO deceptive. Maybe if I'm on Netflix to watch what's on, that's fine. But e.g. on Amazon, I find "search" so adversarial that I often close the tab and go somewhere else, or give up.