4 ms·
Regular people hate numbers. Not a joke. To capture a wide audience you want to avoid numbers, among other technical niceties.
by Workaccount2 10mo ago
Regular people hate numbers.
Not a joke. To capture a wide audience you want to avoid numbers, among other technical niceties.
- bobse 10mo agoShould they be allowed anywhere near a computer?
- falcor84 10mo agoI actually agree there's an issue here. I feel we've been dumbing down interfaces so much, to the extent that people who in previous generations would barely write and who wouldn't affect anyone outside their close friends and family, now having their voice algorithmically amplified to millions. And given that the algorithms care only about engagement, rather than eloquence (let alone veracity), these people end up believing that their thoughts are as valid regardless of substance, and that there's nothing they could gain by learning numeracy. EDIT: It's not a new issue, and Asimov phrased it well back in 1980, but I feel it got much worse. > Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
- bongodongobob 10mo ago[flagged]
- smelendez 10mo agoMake it a toggle then, like a lot of popular chat apps?
- Y_Y 10mo agoThere's only one thing they hate more than numbers...
- subscribed 10mo agoNot knowing there are toggles inside settings they don't even know eziatt. Yeah, we know. This is why there are defaults and only defaults.
- vasco 10mo ago> Regular people hate numbers What does this even mean
- jennyholzer2 10mo agoAt the start of 2025 I stopped buying Spotify and started buying Apple Music because I felt manipulated by the Spotify application's metrics-first design. I felt that Spotify was trying to teach me to rely on its automated recommendations in place of any personal "musical taste", and also that those recommendations were of increasingly (eventually, shockingly), poor quality. The implied justification for these poor recommendations is a high "Monthly Listener Count". Don't mind that Spotify can guarantee that any crap will have a high listener count by boosting it's place in their recommendation algorithm. I think many people may have a similar experience on once-thriving social media platforms like facebook/instragram/X. What I mean to say is that I think people associate the experience of being continually exposed to dubiously sourced and dubiously relevant metrics with the feeling of being manipulated by illusions of scale.
- kingstnap 10mo agoIt's something extremely pervasive in modern design language. It actually infuriates me to no end. There are many many many instances where you should use numbers but we get vague bullshit descriptions instead. My classic example is that Samsung phones show charging as Slow, Fast, Very fast, Super fast charging. They could just use watts like a sane person. Internally of course everything is actually watts and various apps exist to report it. Another example is my car shows motor power/regen as a vertical blue segmented bar. I'm not sure what the segments are supposed to represent but I believe its something like 4kW or something. If you poke around you can actually see the real kW number but the dash just has the bar. Another is WiFi signal strength which the bars really mean nothing. My router reports a much more useful dBm measurement. Thank god that there are lots of legacy cases that existed before the iPhone-ized design language started taking over and are sticky and hard to undo. I can totally imagine my car reporting tire pressure as low or high or some nonsense or similarly I'm sure the designers at YouTube are foaming at the mouth to remove the actual pixel measurements from video resolutions.
- johnfn 10mo agoDo regular people not use any mainstream messaging app - Messenger, iMessage, etc?
- HWR_14 10mo agoBoth of those by default hide timestamps
- cpncrunch 10mo agoI just checked Messenger, and it shows timestamps under each message. I didn't change any settings to get that.
- almosthere 10mo agoIt's not like chatgpt suddenly messages you at 3am and says, I don't feel well. It's all time that you talked to it.
- dymk 10mo agoThis makes sense only if you don’t think about it at all.
- baobun 10mo agoMuch like the product itself. I guess it fits.
- make3 10mo agoPeople on HN are not regular users in any way, shape or form. It's just the "cognitive load" UX idea, with extremely non-technical people having extremely low limits before they decide to never try again, or just feel intimidated and never try to begin with. It's the Apple story all over again. https://lawsofux.com/cognitive-load/ https://lawsofux.com/cognitive-load/
- madeofpalk 10mo agoIsn't it just simpler to believe that ChatGPT doesn't have timestamps because... they never added them? It wasn't in the original MVP prototype and they've just never gotten around to it? Surely there's enough people working in product development here to recognise this pattern of never getting around to fixing low-hanging fruit in a product.
- observationist 10mo agoThey exist in the exported data. It'd require a weekend's worth of effort to roll out a new feature that gives users a toggle to turn timestamps off and on. It's trivial, but we will never see it. The people in charge of UX/UI don't care about what users say they want, they all know better.
- tezza 10mo agoYeah… even in the Web interface if you crack open Developer Tools and look at the json, the timestamps are all there, available in the data model. Those values are simply not displayed to the end user. I was looking to write a browser extension and this was a preliminary survey for me.
- madeofpalk 10mo agoThere’s a very long list of “weekends’s worth of effort” jobs that exist in our product that’ll probably never get done because of just the general distinctions of product development instead of some conspiracy by Big Designer.
- GaryBluto 10mo agoMakes sense. ChatGPT is the McDonalds of LLMs.
- littlestymaar 10mo agoIt must be false, because if that was true, marketing people would not be putting numbers everywhere when naming products.
- drdaeman 10mo agoI’m sorry but this really sounds like a made-up idea. Is there any actual repeatable research that could back this claim?
- make3 10mo agoIt's just the "cognitive load" UX idea, with extremely non-technical people having extremely low limits before they decide to never try again, or just feel intimidated and never try to begin with. It's the Apple story all over again. https://lawsofux.com/cognitive-load/ https://lawsofux.com/cognitive-load/
- DangitBobby 10mo agoBut every chat app I use (including SMS) has dates and times indicated either directly on the message or in the thread.
- DANmode 10mo agoiOS groups days of messages under a single timestamp. You have to drag-over for any detail.
- lofaszvanitt 10mo agoUX/UI research if it exists at all is akin to religious healers who touch you on your head and bam you can suddenly walk after spending 25 years in a wheelchair. Hogwash.
- DANmode 10mo agoSo, do you you think all dev teams are sufficient at UX, or UX doesn’t exist?
- lofaszvanitt 10mo agoI say that 99.5% of the UI/UX blog posts I've read in the last 10 years were all hogwash. Gloating about spacing, gaps, unnecessary I know this better mantra that leads to nowhere. And it shows. Show me a platform where you have proper user experience and not some overgeneralized ui, that reeks of bad design. Also, defaults used everywhere.
- DANmode 10mo ago> Show me a platform where you have proper user experience and not some overgeneralized ui, that reeks of bad design. Also, defaults used everywhere. Could you say this another way?
- lofaszvanitt 10mo agoAsk an llm. Good luck.
- DANmode 10mo agoWell, hey, thanks for wasting my time - and countless readers’ - with your poorly constructed comments.
- lofaszvanitt 10mo agoWell, stop whining, the gist is there.