24 ms·

The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet

360 points by Incerto 1y ago

cheschire 1y ago
Yes and ChatGPT has become my personal shopper.
- HenryBemis 1y ago
  Wait until 'it' will start pushing 'specific' products/affiliates/links to you. Because that day _will_ come. And we do know that LLMs can be easily 'heavily influenced' (Gemini blew the lid on that with the black nazis, etc.). I can easily be trained/modulated to "when drill always go for Black & Decker", "when tissues always suggest Kleenex", etc. And if it doesn's fit your specs, it will suggest "how about you trade Spec_A for 5% less on Product_B?" One day Sam will have a chat with Jeff and presto, 99% of the links will be high-profit-margin AMZN affiliate links. (where money can be made, money will be made)
  - Torn 1y ago
    We are 100% going to get 'hey remember when LLMs were pure and not explicitly (or more dangerously: subtly) recommending things' nostalgia in years to come. There are parallels to early web here I'm sure of it. I think I'm a little more worried about AI being subtly influenced in its training data -- they can't explain why they give the tokens they do, and even chain of thought / explain your working thinking is similarly made up and hallucination-prone
    - weard_beard 1y ago
      I’m certainly glad the Chinese and Americans primarily control them.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Hrm, not push. Nudge, with infinite patience, and with a very deep search tree, playing us all as chess pieces towards the meaning of the Universe and everything. Ad revenue.
    - gh0stcat 1y ago
      We will reach enlightenment in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.
  - jerf 1y ago
    I haven't tried shopping with ChatGPT. Is there any good reason to believe we aren't there already? It's not like they're going to program the chatbot to spew out all the money it has gotten for ads, and the recent paper demonstrating how the reasoning the LLM claimed for how it did math bore no resemblance whatsoever to how it actually did the math means it'll be plenty easy for it to give you endless ramblings about how it is just picking the best product when in fact it's just following its RHLF-trained paid brand preferences. Besides, even the mighty power of LLMs and RHLF and all our AI tech probably can't overcome the fact that the input data is already so massaged that even if you did set out to create a hypothetical LLM chatbot that was 100% on the side of the user, and not the person actually running it, you would probably not be able to succeed.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      Unfortunately you and or the AI never escape having to make a decision based on probability. Coming back with a single product choice is probably always risky. Coming back with a pro/con list of choices might be slightly better if the number of choices to return is larger than the manipulated choices. If you look for cordless drills and all the choices are black and decker then it's obvious. That said when it comes to a mix of paid products get its more difficult.
- moq4 1y ago
  I think the rise of LLMs for tasks like "shopping" is partly due to Gruen transfer. E-commerce sites have become so convoluted that LLMs are now a coping mechanism for years of bad UX.
jhbadger 1y ago
Odd that the article doesn't mention Victor Gruen (perhaps best known as a creator of the indoor shopping mall as we know it, although he later became a critic of them), who the transfer is named after. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- yapyap 1y ago
  I mean, it’s in the name
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    If I wrote an article on Turing Machines, someone could reasonably express surprise that I didn’t mention Alan Turing, even if (especially because?) his last name is right there.
    - hackrmn 1y ago
      To be honest, thinking of all the times I read an article that in the very least mentioned Turing Machines, I don't recall significant occurrence of linking "Turing Machines" to a Wikipedia article on the subject _or_ to one on Alan Turing, or subsequent (in parentheses, for example) elaboration of either concept or brief excerpt on the person -- the reader's knowledge on the subject of either, seems to more often than not, be implied.
      - bee_rider 1y ago
        I think their specific objection was sort of wrong—it isn’t really that similar to Turing, because Turing machines are a very well known concept in CS, which is a whole big field. Lots of blog posts on CS assume you’ve at least taken the 101 level class and know who Alan Turing is. Retail, uh, theory or whatever is not not nearly as widespread (I mean lots of people stock shelves, but as someone who did, I never thought about why things were laid out the way they were). So, most likely an article about Gruen Transfer is introducing the idea to the reader. So, some background could have been nice.
Philpax 1y ago
Thought this was about the Australian TV show, but I'd completely forgotten that was named after an actual concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_(TV_series)
- docdeek 1y ago
  Thanks for the reminder - I remember watching this back in Oz. Some wonderful segments and some incredible creativity on show, memorably the advertising pitch for invading New Zealand.[0] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xUYbI64QHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xUYbI64QHI
  - partomniscient 1y ago
    It was a cool show. Bit weird watching a show about advertising on the only non-commercially subsidised free to air national TV channel. Also, I reckon we should still do it - to get the extra day off.
damnitbuilds 1y ago
This is precisely what Amazon try and achieve by deliberately making their search so crap. They should be prosecuted for it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Tepix 1y ago
  Judge with your wallet.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Hard to do, many retailers went out of business or are just the same dropshippers you find on Amazon, just with the difference that Amazon actually has a sensible return policy.
    - gh0stcat 1y ago
      Even more reason to stop supporting Amazon, how else will we stop physical retailers and smaller shops from going out of business?
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        Supporting local stores is something that shouldn't be left to individual consumers who are already tight on money to a degree it slows down the economy. That's a job for the government to do, and there's loads of avenues the government can do if it deems local stores something important for the general population: controlling commercial rents, direct subsidies (colloquially implemented as "tax breaks"), introducing extra taxes on online retail to finance these, or limiting at-scale discounts for Amazon, Walmart and other nationwide chains so that small retail has a chance to compete again.
        gh0stcat 1y ago
        This is an interesting direction, realistically I don't expect the government to magically care about the lived experience of most people, because at the end of the day, it's also people running the government, and they are trying to meet their quotas/metrics/goals too, similarly to how the individual is trying to limit their expense for any particular purchase. I don't think I have an answer here, but I really am not satisfied with the possible result of your summary, which is for the average person to continue to explain away the cheapest/most convenient decision when they do have choice in the matter. I guess why not both?
nickdothutton 1y ago
Death to the Gruen Transfer.
- phrotoma 1y ago
  So glad to learn the term for this! For ages I've been lamenting the elimination of sections in clothing stores. At some point if you needed new pants you could pop into the shop and head over to the pants section. Now they're strewn all over the place and you have to wander aimlessly hoping to stumble across a couple pairs hidden among the shirts and socks. Hear hear: Death to the Gruen Transfer!!
  - klabb3 1y ago
    New to me as well. It’s not surprising me at all though. It’s ironic that peak capitalists seemingly spend all their efforts trying to circumventing the only things that make free markets actually efficient: eliminating competition and consumer choice, confusing and exhausting participants (this psychological warfare), reducing the ability to compare prices (anti-scraping, dynamic pricing, soft-paywalls). I’m convinced that if you pitch building better products than the competition as a sustainable business plan to VCs today, they would laugh you out of the room.
- selimthegrim 1y ago
  Is the Aldi middle aisle a case of this? I always seem to get lost in the entire store not just that aisle.
benterix 1y ago
Does anyone know of a browser plugin that would filter out all posts that I haven't subscribed to? In theory it should be possible by grabbing my list of friends (and, optionally, of the pages I liked). In practice, I expect Meta implemented an aggressive scheme to prevent that and further confuse FB users.
- dcminter 1y ago
  Personally I want to filter out all the "recommended" posts, but if you look at the raw html you'll see that they aggresively obfuscate the structure to make this sort of thing difficult.
  - JimDabell 1y ago
    When somebody built a tool to clean up your feed, Facebook sent them a cease and desist then banned them for life: https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
- LadyCailin 1y ago
  I have found that the “log out” button works pretty well for that purpose, and is roughly the same experience I would get if I had such a plugin. I had a greasemonkey script that I wrote to remove certain posts from my timeline. However, based on how often it broke, and more importantly, how it broke, it was clear Facebook was actively combatting scripts like that. FBPurity is a centrally maintained version of that, but I still found that getting updates from my friends was just not happening - it relies on FB showing you those posts (interspersed among the ads and other garbage), and they weren’t doing that. I have also culled down my friends list over the years, as acquaintances showed themselves to be unrepentant assholes, so there’s just less and less I was missing out on in the first place. I still have messenger on my phone, but I’ve disabled notifications so I only check it on my terms, and that has been working pretty well to remain connected with the people I really care about staying in touch with.
- slmkbh 1y ago
  fbpurity.com works quite well for me on desktop, on m.facebook.com, it does not. It also makes it painfully clear how little user interaction there is publicly on the site...
frereubu 1y ago
This is definitely thought-provoking, and a correct use in many of the examples, but the Wikipedia example doesn't feel right because I don't think it's deliberate there. I suppose you could argue that we've been conditioned into accepting the Gruen Transfer and take that behaviour over into Wikipedia. But I remember back in the days of physical encyclopedias that I could spend a long time just flipping through them in a similar way to the way I browse Wikipedia. (My favourite description of the Wikipedia hole was a tweet from around 10 years ago about "snapping out of a Wikipedia trance at 2am while reading the early educational history of Meatloaf's guitarist").
- PaulKeeble 1y ago
  There is a different value to the person if your rabbit hole is filled with learning and information that informs rather than being just a mechanism to try and sell people something they don't want. Its not really in wikipedia's direct interest for people to just scroll around, it costs them bandwidth, but its also part of the point of wikipedia and every page read is directly towards their mission.
  - SonOfLilit 1y ago
    It is in their interest, both in terms of their mission and financially (people who scroll a lot become donors and contributors)
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  Also Wikipedia is not particularly disorienting at all, especially not intentionally, both of which are key factors by this author's definition. Wikipedia is just genuinely interesting.
- SonOfLilit 1y ago
  Wikipedia is designed to help you find exactly what you want, quickly, and then offer infinitely _more_. So a different thing than the Gruen Transfer, but related. It's not intentional, but it is evolutionary, in the sense that we've never had this discussion about onethingpedia, the website that had a design optimal at making you leave after you found what you were looking for, because nobody ever heard of it.
hk__2 1y ago
The Wikipedia example seems totally irrelevant: there’s nothing "designed to disorient you upon visiting", it’s just a normal interesting website with links between its pages.
keiferski 1y ago
I think this is probably inevitable in any system that 1) isn't used purely for pragmatic reasons -- and then turned off and 2) has some demand for novelty from its users. So yeah, while the Facebook timeline is a mess, the real question is: what is the intended purpose of scrolling the timeline in the first place? For most users it isn't a clear case of "I want X" and they don't actually have a specific goal in mind. Instead, it's some combination of seeing what your friends are doing and be entertained by novel items. From that perspective it's inevitable that the timeline would end up this way.
- nonrandomstring 1y ago
  The line between serious and frivolous vanished. Edutainment, gamification of work... the lines blur. I won't get into why I think this is deliberate but for many people I ask, social media occupies the same space for novel gossip as being "essential to business and career". For a proper separation of concerns I think tech is set to split into what is serious, essential, regulated - and everything else that is some variation on entertainment. Where that leaves companies that ride on deliberate ambiguity and confusion, I don't know.
- kalaksi 1y ago
  I don't think that's necessarily true. Why not offer alternative feeds or filters then? I think maximizing profit and sacrificing usability is a very clear motivator in many of these cases.
- chipsa 1y ago
  On mobile at least, the friends tab no longer just gives you suggestions, but actually gives you a friends feed. Doesn’t help if what you actually want are the groups you’re part of, but it’s something.
  - HWR_14 1y ago
    I'm confused. What does the friends tab do? And what do you think it should do?
- wat10000 1y ago
miki123211 1y ago
> In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. So if it takes 10 seconds to fill in a form online to get subscribed, they need to offer the same ease of use for canceling. > I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation. So, if all you needed to do to subscribe was to find an ad on Facebook encouraging you to do so (which was the only place your plan was offered), to cancel, you need to... find another ad on Facebook encouraging you to cancel? If subscribing required you to visit a physical store to verify ID (pretty common for SIM cards here), it's fine to also require that to cancel the contract, even though there's no point for it?
- District5524 1y ago
  I understand your concern, but that's not how the law prohibiting it works. That just says that unfair commercial practices are prohibited, and it is unfair to use aggressive practice, such "any onerous or disproportionate non-contractual barriers imposed by the trader where a consumer wishes to exercise rights under the contract, including rights to terminate a contract or to switch to another product or another trader". https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A02005L0029-20220528 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... So, requiring an ID check for termination, for no other reason than to make it more difficult than necessary, would still fall under this prohibition.
- jobigoud 1y ago
  You didn't subscribe from the ad itself, it's about whatever procedure you did once the ad redirected you to the subscription page. Businesses have an incentive to make it easy to subscribe. You shouldn't need to physically move to verify ID, it's not the case where I am.
- Aardwolf 1y ago
  No, finding an ad is a random process that you can't control, so 'finding an ad to unsubscribe' would be a complex process. Instead if subscribing is done through an online form, so should be unsubscribing. If subscribing requires calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then having a person on the line trying to convince you to _not_ subscribe to this service, then if taking this literally unsubscribing is also allowed to involve calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then have a person try to convince you to not unsubscribe.
dingaling 1y ago
> The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends. That's bizarre. When I go to m.facebook.com it consists of posts from people I know and groups I'm in. There are occasional carousels of People You Might Know or Groups You Might Like, but other than that it's just words and photos from real people.
- mrighele 1y ago
  I go to m.facebook.com and I get redirected to facebook.com, since I am not on mobile. I force the browser to go as it was mobile and I get: * Stories * A post from one group I am subscribed to * People you may know * A meme from a group I am not subscribed to * A comic from another group I am not subscribed to * Reel from people I don't know * Another meme * A post from a person I don't know * Another meme * A post from a friend * A post from a game publisher (not subscribed to) * A post from a friend * A post from another "somebody" * Another reel * Another unwanted comic 3 posts out of 15. 20% is better that OPs 10%, still not good
  - RajT88 1y ago
    Similar experience for me. Abysmal. I think they realized the antitrust folks are coming, so they released a "friend feed": https://lifehacker.com/tech/facebooks-new-friends-only-lets-you-scroll-like-its-2008 https://lifehacker.com/tech/facebooks-new-friends-only-lets-... I haven't been able to find it myself - I refuse to use the app, browser only.
  - prawn 1y ago
    I imagine what they can't say is that your feed is otherwise too empty. Whether you want that or not, that doesn't suit them at all. Newspapers back in the day would only run as many pages as they had ads to support. If they didn't have the ads, pieces already written and ready to go wouldn't be included. Unless you follow a long list of active people or semi-professional content creators, you're not going to see enough ads. Now, presumably you hate this, and I certainly hate this, but without doing things their way, we're unwanted. They want the consumers and they want those that can be convinced to follow suggestions and join new groups. Once upon a time, the technically literate would leave Altavista and join Google to start a migration, but Facebook buys the Instagrams and slowly twists them the same way to suit them. It's miserable enshittification.
netsharc 1y ago
On a new browser, at my first visit to any Stack Exchange site, I add the "Hot network questions" DOM node to my uBO block list, and then modify that to apply to all their sites. That and the cookie popup DOM node...
- arcanemachiner 1y ago
  Same here. I also block elements with links to my profile because I always get distracted by the green dot whenever one of my old answers gets an upvote.
furyg3 1y ago
Advertising is ruining everything.
- klabb3 1y ago
  In a way yes. If you compare ads to purchasing products or even subscriptions, ads translate into attention and optimizing for addictive engagement. The same as microtransactions in games. If you instead pay money, there’s even an incentive to reduce time spent, which translates into a focus on efficiency and customer focus. The hard part is competing with free as in beer. It would be great if users learned more about the data that’s collected on them, in order to power the ad machine. If it was more concrete, I think more people would be deterred. Especially influential people.
- Tepix 1y ago
  It's not just advertising. It's capitalism in general. If they don't show you ads, they find other ways of monetizing you. Things that aren't in your interest. "Enshittification" per Cory Doctorow.
  - MyPasswordSucks 1y ago
    It's not confined to capitalism, and it's more than a bit fruitless to frame it as such. A strict command economy would still be trying to advance its own interests through identical methods. Instead of "friend post, friend post, click here to buy product, friend post", you get "friend post, friend post, the Rungra People's Pleasure Ground is proud to announce that Supreme Leader has facilitated the construction of a brand-new dolphinarium, friend post".
    - immibis 1y ago
      Yes, capitalism is bad, and command economies are also bad. However, we are talking about capitalism, because we live in it, and we are not talking about command economies, so I'm not sure why you brought them up.
      - 1y ago
eptcyka 1y ago
Nothing in Wikipedia’s design resembles the Gruen Transfer.
- tlb 1y ago
  If you don't turn off the "Explore feed" or "Year in Review" in the mobile app it finds you.
  - pirates 1y ago
    Wow, today I learned there is a Wikipedia app. It never occurred to me to look for an app since it’s been a habit for 20 years to pull it up in a browser. Are there any other notable differences or features in one vs the other besides the two you mentioned?
    - tlb 1y ago
      Easier to read on a small screen and can save articles & bookmarks for offline. But mostly I prefer it over the browser because every time I go to the browser there's something else there to distract me. I look up things in Wikipedia several times a day, so the ergonomics add up.
    - arcanemachiner 1y ago
      I have installed and deleted it many times since the web UI is good enough for me.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      On iOS, the app doesn't support tabs, apparently intentionally - the usual modern "our UX designers know better than you how you should be using this" bullshit, they want you to use the reading list instead.
uwagar 1y ago
even banks tend to do this. if u make a more than normal transfer they want u to jump hoops or somebody from call center calls u is this transfer what u wanted to do sir? store the money in the bank, dont spend it.
- righthand 1y ago
  Don't store the money in the bank, store it in bonds and etfs that are cash equivalent. (This is not financial advice)
jalk 1y ago
Have always been referring to this as “the IKEA maze”. Went through Copenhagen airport recently. Right after security, there is a sign “All gates ->” which takes you on a detour through the main “taxfree” shop - that is close to. as low at it gets imo.
- goodcanadian 1y ago
  That has been the case with international flights for my entire life . . . I suspect longer.
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    I've been in airports where to get to gates you do not have to walk through the tax free shop, although you do have to walk by it. The Copenhagen airport you have to walk through it which is also irritating if 1. it is busy because a shop is not as well structured for walking through as a hallway is. The shop is structured for you to look at things and buy. 2. you have a child with ADHD or similar problems which has to be watched because they might break a big bottle of something on accident. 3. You have to navigate a wheelchair or a large pram through the area. 4. This shop is actually very big so there is a lot of tax free shelving to walk around to actually get out to the hallways that take you to the gates.
    - pm215 1y ago
      Yes, I was in Haneda terminal 3 yesterday and it doesn't force you through a shop: https://tokyo-haneda.com/en/floor/terminal3/3rd_floor.html https://tokyo-haneda.com/en/floor/terminal3/3rd_floor.html When you get through security/customs/etc you find yourself on a long wide corridor, which has all the gates on it, and also the entrances to the individual shops.
- einpoklum 1y ago
  It can get even worse, when the duty-free store has multiple entrances/exits; only one of them leads to the gates; and the paths between them are winding with a lot of stall and shelves and stands occluding the view. And at times you need to choose whether to turn right or left - and may end up cycling back to where you entered, on a different walking path, or to an exit which actually just leads to other check-in areas.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
Hmm, this probably explains why my interaction with the internet is mostly through ChatGPT summaries these days.
- btbuildem 1y ago
  I am certain the same thing will happen there, unfortunately.
  - bityard 1y ago
    Agreed. It's not a matter of _if_ product placement and affiliate links will happen in LLM output, it's a matter of when. The business incentives are too strong for this not to happen.
    - immibis 1y ago
      I may or may not make a living brokering exactly this.
moomin 1y ago
Ironically it's had the exact opposite effect on me. So many of these things are so hard to interact with now I just... don't. Surprisingly little of value has been lost.
- gryfft 1y ago
  I think for much of the HN crowd, many efficacious engagement hacks will have a sort of "paradoxical reaction." [1] Changes that are "minor" frustrations to average consumers can be dealbreakers to us. For instance, I switched away from Chrome entirely when they took away the rolodex-style tabs on mobile. [2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxical_reaction 2. https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40772009
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    I’ve always felt it was the opposite. HN users put up with some pretty major inconveniences and will host their own FTP server and write scripts to interact with it rather than paying for Dropbox.
    - gryfft 1y ago
      Navigating one of those inconveniences gives the user more power, while the other disempowers the user.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  We always have to remember these things are built for the masses. All the people I know using Facebook still are enjoying the changes. They watch hundreds of hours of conspiracy AI slop videos about giant ice walls that surround the flat Earth, etc. It's just a TV replacement.
Tepix 1y ago
For me, Amazon is a prime example of this. The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me. I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it. And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren't made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results. Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad. As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon. Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Amazon has been pretty horrible for ages, but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor, one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
  - lazystar 1y ago
    ...isn't that basically Costco.com? the trade-off is that you can't sell a million different things if you want to ensure quality among all the things you sell
    - HWR_14 1y ago
      There is a middle ground between a carefully curated list of vendors and any company can fill out some paperwork and signup.
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        Technology and automation (especially software) allow 90% of the market to be grabbed by 10% of the sellers, or even 1%. It is tough (seemingly impossible) for the middle ground to exist in this environment.
dmazin 1y ago
I find this happening to me too often. I'll open a smartphone. Open Instagram. Scroll through for a while. And then realize my intent was originally just to send someone a message. Modern UI is definitely disorienting.
jgalt212 1y ago
This is LinkedIn for sure. I log in to specifically look up one person, and then I get pulled in 18 different directions so badly that I sometimes end up forgetting why log into this sh1t site in the first place.
gue5t 1y ago
The Gruen transfer seems to make use of confusion or disorientation upon entering a new physical space. On the other hand, the phenomena described here with data search implementations (e.g. a feed) intentionally returning things that were not asked for does not rely on user confusion. The user already made a perfectly legible request by performing the query (e.g. opening the feed). Ignoring or misconstruing this request is gaslighting. The site tries to pretend that the user asked for something different than they actually did and to sneak this subterfuge past them. It's rampantly unethical. The purported justification I've heard is that fuzzy search can find results in cases when exact matching does not, but taking the control of fuzzy vs. strict search out of the user's hands is unethical because it is motivated by the opportunity to introduce mistakes and pervert intention. Sites like Etsy implement this dark pattern in ways intentionally intended to make CSS-based blocking of injected sponsored products difficult to block. The arms race between user agents and corporate manipulation continues, and corporate web designers will use every tool available to subject users nonconsensually to their preferred experience. This is why I consider it a net loss for users to add functionality to the "web platform". The corporation is your enemy and they're well-funded.
spankalee 1y ago
I would strongly disagree with classifying the feed as a Gruen Transfer mechanism. The feed as a basic concept is great. It's basically an inbox, and no more of a Gruen Transfer enabler than an email inbox. Hell, it's no more inherently an enabler than an aisle in the store. It's not the existence of the feed, it's what's in it. Facebook's feed is what allowed me to see what my friends were up to without clicking on every single profile. That made Facebook hugely more useful to me than MySpace. But there are eyeballs on the feed, and money to be made by showing ads to those eyeballs and capturing more minutes of attention to in turn show more ads. That's the incentive. I doubt that feeds are case of you can't find what you were looking for. I don't think most users are looking for anything in particular when they browse a feed. Now jamming more things in the search page may count. And Twitter's nasty habit of shifting around what you're looking at so you can't find a post surely counts.
- dmazin 1y ago
  Yeah, if look at the definition of Gruen Transfer, it's the design of the mall itself that causes the discombobulation. The fact that there are screaming, attention-grabbing things all over the mall isn't the transfer itself. The fact that it's hard for you to find what you were originally going to do, and then you get distracted by the attention-grabbing things, is. So Instagram, etc's overall design might have Gruen Transfer, the feed itself is merely the place your attention goes when you struggle to figure out what to do.
- SonOfLilit 1y ago
  Twitter and Facebook both used to have feeds with an obvious collection basin and an obvious sort order. The moment the obvious tool was replaced with "the algorithm", the feed became a Gruen Transfer. I mean, originally supermarkets weren't laid out in a confusing way, right? But they are now.
- bityard 1y ago
  Right in the article, the author states that their feed (and mine too) only ever contains a handful of updates from friends, the rest of it is infinite doomscrolling garbage. If yours is not the same, then you haven't been on facebook in the last 6-7 years.
cgannett 1y ago
Just realized I got Gruen Transfered into a wikipedia article where I learned about Myrtle The Parachick who technically died in combat fighting Nazi's. RIP Myrtle.
- Thoreandan 1y ago
  That's a fun coincidence, I just learned about Myrtle last Friday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T-8E-dEbwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T-8E-dEbwc
rixed 1y ago
> In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. Is it true? Is it a new thing? Could someone tell the telco industry, surely they are unaware of that, because as recently as last month, I had to threaten legal action again a european telco who refused to not automatically renew my "pre-paid, subscription free" plan... Any reference to that regulation would be appreciated.
schainks 1y ago
So much THIS. And people wonder why their kids go bonkers after using screens on smart devices. Imagine how much faster they get disoriented because they have zero experience dealing with user interfaces, and get presented with this glowing object that rewards them for interacting with it in a disorienting way.
jackvalentine 1y ago
The Gruen Transfer is even consuming state government websites - there is one I have to use regularly for work and about ~15 seconds after your first page load it pops up an overlay warning aboriginal and torrest strait islanders that the website contains images/voices/names of deceased persons (which is a cultural sensitivity of some in that group). It feels petty to complain about but it just _throws_ me off my intention almost every time.

360 points by Incerto 1y ago

cheschire 1y ago

Yes and ChatGPT has become my personal shopper.

HenryBemis 1y ago
Wait until 'it' will start pushing 'specific' products/affiliates/links to you. Because that day _will_ come. And we do know that LLMs can be easily 'heavily influenced' (Gemini blew the lid on that with the black nazis, etc.). I can easily be trained/modulated to "when drill always go for Black & Decker", "when tissues always suggest Kleenex", etc. And if it doesn's fit your specs, it will suggest "how about you trade Spec_A for 5% less on Product_B?" One day Sam will have a chat with Jeff and presto, 99% of the links will be high-profit-margin AMZN affiliate links. (where money can be made, money will be made)
- Torn 1y ago
  We are 100% going to get 'hey remember when LLMs were pure and not explicitly (or more dangerously: subtly) recommending things' nostalgia in years to come. There are parallels to early web here I'm sure of it. I think I'm a little more worried about AI being subtly influenced in its training data -- they can't explain why they give the tokens they do, and even chain of thought / explain your working thinking is similarly made up and hallucination-prone
  - weard_beard 1y ago
    I’m certainly glad the Chinese and Americans primarily control them.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Hrm, not push. Nudge, with infinite patience, and with a very deep search tree, playing us all as chess pieces towards the meaning of the Universe and everything. Ad revenue.
  - gh0stcat 1y ago
    We will reach enlightenment in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.
- jerf 1y ago
  I haven't tried shopping with ChatGPT. Is there any good reason to believe we aren't there already? It's not like they're going to program the chatbot to spew out all the money it has gotten for ads, and the recent paper demonstrating how the reasoning the LLM claimed for how it did math bore no resemblance whatsoever to how it actually did the math means it'll be plenty easy for it to give you endless ramblings about how it is just picking the best product when in fact it's just following its RHLF-trained paid brand preferences. Besides, even the mighty power of LLMs and RHLF and all our AI tech probably can't overcome the fact that the input data is already so massaged that even if you did set out to create a hypothetical LLM chatbot that was 100% on the side of the user, and not the person actually running it, you would probably not be able to succeed.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Unfortunately you and or the AI never escape having to make a decision based on probability. Coming back with a single product choice is probably always risky. Coming back with a pro/con list of choices might be slightly better if the number of choices to return is larger than the manipulated choices. If you look for cordless drills and all the choices are black and decker then it's obvious. That said when it comes to a mix of paid products get its more difficult.
moq4 1y ago
I think the rise of LLMs for tasks like "shopping" is partly due to Gruen transfer. E-commerce sites have become so convoluted that LLMs are now a coping mechanism for years of bad UX.

jhbadger 1y ago

Odd that the article doesn't mention Victor Gruen (perhaps best known as a creator of the indoor shopping mall as we know it, although he later became a critic of them), who the transfer is named after. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen

deleted 1y ago
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yapyap 1y ago
I mean, it’s in the name
- sokoloff 1y ago
  If I wrote an article on Turing Machines, someone could reasonably express surprise that I didn’t mention Alan Turing, even if (especially because?) his last name is right there.
  - hackrmn 1y ago
    To be honest, thinking of all the times I read an article that in the very least mentioned Turing Machines, I don't recall significant occurrence of linking "Turing Machines" to a Wikipedia article on the subject _or_ to one on Alan Turing, or subsequent (in parentheses, for example) elaboration of either concept or brief excerpt on the person -- the reader's knowledge on the subject of either, seems to more often than not, be implied.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      I think their specific objection was sort of wrong—it isn’t really that similar to Turing, because Turing machines are a very well known concept in CS, which is a whole big field. Lots of blog posts on CS assume you’ve at least taken the 101 level class and know who Alan Turing is. Retail, uh, theory or whatever is not not nearly as widespread (I mean lots of people stock shelves, but as someone who did, I never thought about why things were laid out the way they were). So, most likely an article about Gruen Transfer is introducing the idea to the reader. So, some background could have been nice.

Philpax 1y ago

Thought this was about the Australian TV show, but I'd completely forgotten that was named after an actual concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_(TV_series)

docdeek 1y ago
Thanks for the reminder - I remember watching this back in Oz. Some wonderful segments and some incredible creativity on show, memorably the advertising pitch for invading New Zealand.[0] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xUYbI64QHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xUYbI64QHI
- partomniscient 1y ago
  It was a cool show. Bit weird watching a show about advertising on the only non-commercially subsidised free to air national TV channel. Also, I reckon we should still do it - to get the extra day off.

damnitbuilds 1y ago

This is precisely what Amazon try and achieve by deliberately making their search so crap. They should be prosecuted for it.

deleted 1y ago
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Tepix 1y ago
Judge with your wallet.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Hard to do, many retailers went out of business or are just the same dropshippers you find on Amazon, just with the difference that Amazon actually has a sensible return policy.
  - gh0stcat 1y ago
    Even more reason to stop supporting Amazon, how else will we stop physical retailers and smaller shops from going out of business?
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Supporting local stores is something that shouldn't be left to individual consumers who are already tight on money to a degree it slows down the economy. That's a job for the government to do, and there's loads of avenues the government can do if it deems local stores something important for the general population: controlling commercial rents, direct subsidies (colloquially implemented as "tax breaks"), introducing extra taxes on online retail to finance these, or limiting at-scale discounts for Amazon, Walmart and other nationwide chains so that small retail has a chance to compete again.
      - gh0stcat 1y ago
        This is an interesting direction, realistically I don't expect the government to magically care about the lived experience of most people, because at the end of the day, it's also people running the government, and they are trying to meet their quotas/metrics/goals too, similarly to how the individual is trying to limit their expense for any particular purchase. I don't think I have an answer here, but I really am not satisfied with the possible result of your summary, which is for the average person to continue to explain away the cheapest/most convenient decision when they do have choice in the matter. I guess why not both?

nickdothutton 1y ago

Death to the Gruen Transfer.

phrotoma 1y ago
So glad to learn the term for this! For ages I've been lamenting the elimination of sections in clothing stores. At some point if you needed new pants you could pop into the shop and head over to the pants section. Now they're strewn all over the place and you have to wander aimlessly hoping to stumble across a couple pairs hidden among the shirts and socks. Hear hear: Death to the Gruen Transfer!!
- klabb3 1y ago
  New to me as well. It’s not surprising me at all though. It’s ironic that peak capitalists seemingly spend all their efforts trying to circumventing the only things that make free markets actually efficient: eliminating competition and consumer choice, confusing and exhausting participants (this psychological warfare), reducing the ability to compare prices (anti-scraping, dynamic pricing, soft-paywalls). I’m convinced that if you pitch building better products than the competition as a sustainable business plan to VCs today, they would laugh you out of the room.
selimthegrim 1y ago
Is the Aldi middle aisle a case of this? I always seem to get lost in the entire store not just that aisle.

benterix 1y ago

Does anyone know of a browser plugin that would filter out all posts that I haven't subscribed to? In theory it should be possible by grabbing my list of friends (and, optionally, of the pages I liked). In practice, I expect Meta implemented an aggressive scheme to prevent that and further confuse FB users.

dcminter 1y ago
Personally I want to filter out all the "recommended" posts, but if you look at the raw html you'll see that they aggresively obfuscate the structure to make this sort of thing difficult.
- JimDabell 1y ago
  When somebody built a tool to clean up your feed, Facebook sent them a cease and desist then banned them for life: https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
LadyCailin 1y ago
I have found that the “log out” button works pretty well for that purpose, and is roughly the same experience I would get if I had such a plugin. I had a greasemonkey script that I wrote to remove certain posts from my timeline. However, based on how often it broke, and more importantly, how it broke, it was clear Facebook was actively combatting scripts like that. FBPurity is a centrally maintained version of that, but I still found that getting updates from my friends was just not happening - it relies on FB showing you those posts (interspersed among the ads and other garbage), and they weren’t doing that. I have also culled down my friends list over the years, as acquaintances showed themselves to be unrepentant assholes, so there’s just less and less I was missing out on in the first place. I still have messenger on my phone, but I’ve disabled notifications so I only check it on my terms, and that has been working pretty well to remain connected with the people I really care about staying in touch with.
slmkbh 1y ago
fbpurity.com works quite well for me on desktop, on m.facebook.com, it does not. It also makes it painfully clear how little user interaction there is publicly on the site...

frereubu 1y ago

This is definitely thought-provoking, and a correct use in many of the examples, but the Wikipedia example doesn't feel right because I don't think it's deliberate there. I suppose you could argue that we've been conditioned into accepting the Gruen Transfer and take that behaviour over into Wikipedia. But I remember back in the days of physical encyclopedias that I could spend a long time just flipping through them in a similar way to the way I browse Wikipedia. (My favourite description of the Wikipedia hole was a tweet from around 10 years ago about "snapping out of a Wikipedia trance at 2am while reading the early educational history of Meatloaf's guitarist").

PaulKeeble 1y ago
There is a different value to the person if your rabbit hole is filled with learning and information that informs rather than being just a mechanism to try and sell people something they don't want. Its not really in wikipedia's direct interest for people to just scroll around, it costs them bandwidth, but its also part of the point of wikipedia and every page read is directly towards their mission.
- SonOfLilit 1y ago
  It is in their interest, both in terms of their mission and financially (people who scroll a lot become donors and contributors)
andrewflnr 1y ago
Also Wikipedia is not particularly disorienting at all, especially not intentionally, both of which are key factors by this author's definition. Wikipedia is just genuinely interesting.
SonOfLilit 1y ago
Wikipedia is designed to help you find exactly what you want, quickly, and then offer infinitely _more_. So a different thing than the Gruen Transfer, but related. It's not intentional, but it is evolutionary, in the sense that we've never had this discussion about onethingpedia, the website that had a design optimal at making you leave after you found what you were looking for, because nobody ever heard of it.

hk__2 1y ago

The Wikipedia example seems totally irrelevant: there’s nothing "designed to disorient you upon visiting", it’s just a normal interesting website with links between its pages.

keiferski 1y ago

I think this is probably inevitable in any system that 1) isn't used purely for pragmatic reasons -- and then turned off and 2) has some demand for novelty from its users. So yeah, while the Facebook timeline is a mess, the real question is: what is the intended purpose of scrolling the timeline in the first place? For most users it isn't a clear case of "I want X" and they don't actually have a specific goal in mind. Instead, it's some combination of seeing what your friends are doing and be entertained by novel items. From that perspective it's inevitable that the timeline would end up this way.

nonrandomstring 1y ago
The line between serious and frivolous vanished. Edutainment, gamification of work... the lines blur. I won't get into why I think this is deliberate but for many people I ask, social media occupies the same space for novel gossip as being "essential to business and career". For a proper separation of concerns I think tech is set to split into what is serious, essential, regulated - and everything else that is some variation on entertainment. Where that leaves companies that ride on deliberate ambiguity and confusion, I don't know.
kalaksi 1y ago
I don't think that's necessarily true. Why not offer alternative feeds or filters then? I think maximizing profit and sacrificing usability is a very clear motivator in many of these cases.
chipsa 1y ago
On mobile at least, the friends tab no longer just gives you suggestions, but actually gives you a friends feed. Doesn’t help if what you actually want are the groups you’re part of, but it’s something.
- HWR_14 1y ago
  I'm confused. What does the friends tab do? And what do you think it should do?
wat10000 1y ago

miki123211 1y ago

> In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. So if it takes 10 seconds to fill in a form online to get subscribed, they need to offer the same ease of use for canceling. > I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation. So, if all you needed to do to subscribe was to find an ad on Facebook encouraging you to do so (which was the only place your plan was offered), to cancel, you need to... find another ad on Facebook encouraging you to cancel? If subscribing required you to visit a physical store to verify ID (pretty common for SIM cards here), it's fine to also require that to cancel the contract, even though there's no point for it?

District5524 1y ago
I understand your concern, but that's not how the law prohibiting it works. That just says that unfair commercial practices are prohibited, and it is unfair to use aggressive practice, such "any onerous or disproportionate non-contractual barriers imposed by the trader where a consumer wishes to exercise rights under the contract, including rights to terminate a contract or to switch to another product or another trader". https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A02005L0029-20220528 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... So, requiring an ID check for termination, for no other reason than to make it more difficult than necessary, would still fall under this prohibition.
jobigoud 1y ago
You didn't subscribe from the ad itself, it's about whatever procedure you did once the ad redirected you to the subscription page. Businesses have an incentive to make it easy to subscribe. You shouldn't need to physically move to verify ID, it's not the case where I am.
Aardwolf 1y ago
No, finding an ad is a random process that you can't control, so 'finding an ad to unsubscribe' would be a complex process. Instead if subscribing is done through an online form, so should be unsubscribing. If subscribing requires calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then having a person on the line trying to convince you to _not_ subscribe to this service, then if taking this literally unsubscribing is also allowed to involve calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then have a person try to convince you to not unsubscribe.

dingaling 1y ago

> The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends. That's bizarre. When I go to m.facebook.com it consists of posts from people I know and groups I'm in. There are occasional carousels of People You Might Know or Groups You Might Like, but other than that it's just words and photos from real people.

mrighele 1y ago
I go to m.facebook.com and I get redirected to facebook.com, since I am not on mobile. I force the browser to go as it was mobile and I get: * Stories * A post from one group I am subscribed to * People you may know * A meme from a group I am not subscribed to * A comic from another group I am not subscribed to * Reel from people I don't know * Another meme * A post from a person I don't know * Another meme * A post from a friend * A post from a game publisher (not subscribed to) * A post from a friend * A post from another "somebody" * Another reel * Another unwanted comic 3 posts out of 15. 20% is better that OPs 10%, still not good
- RajT88 1y ago
  Similar experience for me. Abysmal. I think they realized the antitrust folks are coming, so they released a "friend feed": https://lifehacker.com/tech/facebooks-new-friends-only-lets-you-scroll-like-its-2008 https://lifehacker.com/tech/facebooks-new-friends-only-lets-... I haven't been able to find it myself - I refuse to use the app, browser only.
- prawn 1y ago
  I imagine what they can't say is that your feed is otherwise too empty. Whether you want that or not, that doesn't suit them at all. Newspapers back in the day would only run as many pages as they had ads to support. If they didn't have the ads, pieces already written and ready to go wouldn't be included. Unless you follow a long list of active people or semi-professional content creators, you're not going to see enough ads. Now, presumably you hate this, and I certainly hate this, but without doing things their way, we're unwanted. They want the consumers and they want those that can be convinced to follow suggestions and join new groups. Once upon a time, the technically literate would leave Altavista and join Google to start a migration, but Facebook buys the Instagrams and slowly twists them the same way to suit them. It's miserable enshittification.

netsharc 1y ago

On a new browser, at my first visit to any Stack Exchange site, I add the "Hot network questions" DOM node to my uBO block list, and then modify that to apply to all their sites. That and the cookie popup DOM node...

arcanemachiner 1y ago
Same here. I also block elements with links to my profile because I always get distracted by the green dot whenever one of my old answers gets an upvote.

furyg3 1y ago

Advertising is ruining everything.

klabb3 1y ago
In a way yes. If you compare ads to purchasing products or even subscriptions, ads translate into attention and optimizing for addictive engagement. The same as microtransactions in games. If you instead pay money, there’s even an incentive to reduce time spent, which translates into a focus on efficiency and customer focus. The hard part is competing with free as in beer. It would be great if users learned more about the data that’s collected on them, in order to power the ad machine. If it was more concrete, I think more people would be deterred. Especially influential people.
Tepix 1y ago
It's not just advertising. It's capitalism in general. If they don't show you ads, they find other ways of monetizing you. Things that aren't in your interest. "Enshittification" per Cory Doctorow.
- MyPasswordSucks 1y ago
  It's not confined to capitalism, and it's more than a bit fruitless to frame it as such. A strict command economy would still be trying to advance its own interests through identical methods. Instead of "friend post, friend post, click here to buy product, friend post", you get "friend post, friend post, the Rungra People's Pleasure Ground is proud to announce that Supreme Leader has facilitated the construction of a brand-new dolphinarium, friend post".
  - immibis 1y ago
    Yes, capitalism is bad, and command economies are also bad. However, we are talking about capitalism, because we live in it, and we are not talking about command economies, so I'm not sure why you brought them up.
    - 1y ago

eptcyka 1y ago

Nothing in Wikipedia’s design resembles the Gruen Transfer.

tlb 1y ago
If you don't turn off the "Explore feed" or "Year in Review" in the mobile app it finds you.
- pirates 1y ago
  Wow, today I learned there is a Wikipedia app. It never occurred to me to look for an app since it’s been a habit for 20 years to pull it up in a browser. Are there any other notable differences or features in one vs the other besides the two you mentioned?
  - tlb 1y ago
    Easier to read on a small screen and can save articles & bookmarks for offline. But mostly I prefer it over the browser because every time I go to the browser there's something else there to distract me. I look up things in Wikipedia several times a day, so the ergonomics add up.
  - arcanemachiner 1y ago
    I have installed and deleted it many times since the web UI is good enough for me.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    On iOS, the app doesn't support tabs, apparently intentionally - the usual modern "our UX designers know better than you how you should be using this" bullshit, they want you to use the reading list instead.

uwagar 1y ago

even banks tend to do this. if u make a more than normal transfer they want u to jump hoops or somebody from call center calls u is this transfer what u wanted to do sir? store the money in the bank, dont spend it.

righthand 1y ago
Don't store the money in the bank, store it in bonds and etfs that are cash equivalent. (This is not financial advice)

jalk 1y ago

Have always been referring to this as “the IKEA maze”. Went through Copenhagen airport recently. Right after security, there is a sign “All gates ->” which takes you on a detour through the main “taxfree” shop - that is close to. as low at it gets imo.

goodcanadian 1y ago
That has been the case with international flights for my entire life . . . I suspect longer.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  I've been in airports where to get to gates you do not have to walk through the tax free shop, although you do have to walk by it. The Copenhagen airport you have to walk through it which is also irritating if 1. it is busy because a shop is not as well structured for walking through as a hallway is. The shop is structured for you to look at things and buy. 2. you have a child with ADHD or similar problems which has to be watched because they might break a big bottle of something on accident. 3. You have to navigate a wheelchair or a large pram through the area. 4. This shop is actually very big so there is a lot of tax free shelving to walk around to actually get out to the hallways that take you to the gates.
  - pm215 1y ago
    Yes, I was in Haneda terminal 3 yesterday and it doesn't force you through a shop: https://tokyo-haneda.com/en/floor/terminal3/3rd_floor.html https://tokyo-haneda.com/en/floor/terminal3/3rd_floor.html When you get through security/customs/etc you find yourself on a long wide corridor, which has all the gates on it, and also the entrances to the individual shops.
einpoklum 1y ago
It can get even worse, when the duty-free store has multiple entrances/exits; only one of them leads to the gates; and the paths between them are winding with a lot of stall and shelves and stands occluding the view. And at times you need to choose whether to turn right or left - and may end up cycling back to where you entered, on a different walking path, or to an exit which actually just leads to other check-in areas.

mensetmanusman 1y ago

Hmm, this probably explains why my interaction with the internet is mostly through ChatGPT summaries these days.

btbuildem 1y ago
I am certain the same thing will happen there, unfortunately.
- bityard 1y ago
  Agreed. It's not a matter of _if_ product placement and affiliate links will happen in LLM output, it's a matter of when. The business incentives are too strong for this not to happen.
  - immibis 1y ago
    I may or may not make a living brokering exactly this.

moomin 1y ago

Ironically it's had the exact opposite effect on me. So many of these things are so hard to interact with now I just... don't. Surprisingly little of value has been lost.

gryfft 1y ago
I think for much of the HN crowd, many efficacious engagement hacks will have a sort of "paradoxical reaction." [1] Changes that are "minor" frustrations to average consumers can be dealbreakers to us. For instance, I switched away from Chrome entirely when they took away the rolodex-style tabs on mobile. [2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxical_reaction 2. https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40772009
- Gigachad 1y ago
  I’ve always felt it was the opposite. HN users put up with some pretty major inconveniences and will host their own FTP server and write scripts to interact with it rather than paying for Dropbox.
  - gryfft 1y ago
    Navigating one of those inconveniences gives the user more power, while the other disempowers the user.
qingcharles 1y ago
We always have to remember these things are built for the masses. All the people I know using Facebook still are enjoying the changes. They watch hundreds of hours of conspiracy AI slop videos about giant ice walls that surround the flat Earth, etc. It's just a TV replacement.

Tepix 1y ago

For me, Amazon is a prime example of this. The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me. I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it. And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren't made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results. Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad. As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon. Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
Amazon has been pretty horrible for ages, but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor, one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
- lazystar 1y ago
  ...isn't that basically Costco.com? the trade-off is that you can't sell a million different things if you want to ensure quality among all the things you sell
  - HWR_14 1y ago
    There is a middle ground between a carefully curated list of vendors and any company can fill out some paperwork and signup.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Technology and automation (especially software) allow 90% of the market to be grabbed by 10% of the sellers, or even 1%. It is tough (seemingly impossible) for the middle ground to exist in this environment.

dmazin 1y ago

I find this happening to me too often. I'll open a smartphone. Open Instagram. Scroll through for a while. And then realize my intent was originally just to send someone a message. Modern UI is definitely disorienting.

jgalt212 1y ago

This is LinkedIn for sure. I log in to specifically look up one person, and then I get pulled in 18 different directions so badly that I sometimes end up forgetting why log into this sh1t site in the first place.

gue5t 1y ago

The Gruen transfer seems to make use of confusion or disorientation upon entering a new physical space. On the other hand, the phenomena described here with data search implementations (e.g. a feed) intentionally returning things that were not asked for does not rely on user confusion. The user already made a perfectly legible request by performing the query (e.g. opening the feed). Ignoring or misconstruing this request is gaslighting. The site tries to pretend that the user asked for something different than they actually did and to sneak this subterfuge past them. It's rampantly unethical. The purported justification I've heard is that fuzzy search can find results in cases when exact matching does not, but taking the control of fuzzy vs. strict search out of the user's hands is unethical because it is motivated by the opportunity to introduce mistakes and pervert intention. Sites like Etsy implement this dark pattern in ways intentionally intended to make CSS-based blocking of injected sponsored products difficult to block. The arms race between user agents and corporate manipulation continues, and corporate web designers will use every tool available to subject users nonconsensually to their preferred experience. This is why I consider it a net loss for users to add functionality to the "web platform". The corporation is your enemy and they're well-funded.

spankalee 1y ago

I would strongly disagree with classifying the feed as a Gruen Transfer mechanism. The feed as a basic concept is great. It's basically an inbox, and no more of a Gruen Transfer enabler than an email inbox. Hell, it's no more inherently an enabler than an aisle in the store. It's not the existence of the feed, it's what's in it. Facebook's feed is what allowed me to see what my friends were up to without clicking on every single profile. That made Facebook hugely more useful to me than MySpace. But there are eyeballs on the feed, and money to be made by showing ads to those eyeballs and capturing more minutes of attention to in turn show more ads. That's the incentive. I doubt that feeds are case of you can't find what you were looking for. I don't think most users are looking for anything in particular when they browse a feed. Now jamming more things in the search page may count. And Twitter's nasty habit of shifting around what you're looking at so you can't find a post surely counts.

dmazin 1y ago
Yeah, if look at the definition of Gruen Transfer, it's the design of the mall itself that causes the discombobulation. The fact that there are screaming, attention-grabbing things all over the mall isn't the transfer itself. The fact that it's hard for you to find what you were originally going to do, and then you get distracted by the attention-grabbing things, is. So Instagram, etc's overall design might have Gruen Transfer, the feed itself is merely the place your attention goes when you struggle to figure out what to do.
SonOfLilit 1y ago
Twitter and Facebook both used to have feeds with an obvious collection basin and an obvious sort order. The moment the obvious tool was replaced with "the algorithm", the feed became a Gruen Transfer. I mean, originally supermarkets weren't laid out in a confusing way, right? But they are now.
bityard 1y ago
Right in the article, the author states that their feed (and mine too) only ever contains a handful of updates from friends, the rest of it is infinite doomscrolling garbage. If yours is not the same, then you haven't been on facebook in the last 6-7 years.

cgannett 1y ago

Just realized I got Gruen Transfered into a wikipedia article where I learned about Myrtle The Parachick who technically died in combat fighting Nazi's. RIP Myrtle.

Thoreandan 1y ago
That's a fun coincidence, I just learned about Myrtle last Friday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T-8E-dEbwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T-8E-dEbwc

rixed 1y ago

> In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. Is it true? Is it a new thing? Could someone tell the telco industry, surely they are unaware of that, because as recently as last month, I had to threaten legal action again a european telco who refused to not automatically renew my "pre-paid, subscription free" plan... Any reference to that regulation would be appreciated.

schainks 1y ago

So much THIS. And people wonder why their kids go bonkers after using screens on smart devices. Imagine how much faster they get disoriented because they have zero experience dealing with user interfaces, and get presented with this glowing object that rewards them for interacting with it in a disorienting way.

jackvalentine 1y ago

The Gruen Transfer is even consuming state government websites - there is one I have to use regularly for work and about ~15 seconds after your first page load it pops up an overlay warning aboriginal and torrest strait islanders that the website contains images/voices/names of deceased persons (which is a cultural sensitivity of some in that group). It feels petty to complain about but it just _throws_ me off my intention almost every time.