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I really do think that would be annoying enough to snap a good amount of people out of the mindless autoscrolling loop. There's a reason why companies love 1 cl
by rafabulsing 11mo ago
I really do think that would be annoying enough to snap a good amount of people out of the mindless autoscrolling loop. There's a reason why companies love 1 click buying, for example. At scale, any extra interactions costs real money. The example of the ad is a good one where that's already a kind of high friction interaction, so one extra click is not that much more annoying, but that's not the case for the vast majority of interactions.
Granted, some people will certainly have a higher tolerance for this kind of enshittification. If companies find that the amount of money they can extract from highly targeting a given amount of users is greater than the amount of money they can make from more numerous but less targeted users, then they could choose to go down that path. That's a function of how tolerant the average user is of the confirmation prompts, and how much more money they can make from a targeted user.
We can't control that last variable, but we ultimately could control that first one. If we find that a simple confirmation prompt is not annoying enough for as many people as we'd like, we could make the confirmation prompts more annoying. Maybe make every confirmation prompt have to be shown for at least 5 seconds. Or require a cooldown between multiple confirmations. Or add captcha like challenges. And so on.
In the limit, I think you'd agree that if you had to wait 24 hours before confirming, that would probably be enough to dissuade almost everyone from going through with it, to the point most platforms would try to not have any personalization at all. (I wouldn't be happy with this end result either)
I think even a single, instant confirmation prompt would be enough to cause a sizeable difference. Maybe not enough. Maybe you're right, and it would make barely any difference at all. Then I'd be totally in favor of these more annoying requirements. But as a first step, I'd be happy with a small requirement like this, and progressively making requirements stringier if it proves not enough.