[HN Gopher] They made computers behave like annoying salesmen
___________________________________________________________________
They made computers behave like annoying salesmen
Author : NotInOurNames
Score : 229 points
Date : 2025-04-23 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rakhim.exotext.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rakhim.exotext.com)
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Related joke going around right now:
|
| Does Microsoft understand consent? Yes / Ask me again later
|
| In general, options like "never ask me again" seem to have
| disappeared, and we should bring them back.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Legislation will be necessary. Otherwise, why would they
| bother?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Or refusing to use software that does this kind of thing, and
| using more respectful software instead.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The problem with that is that this is often not a real
| choice. You don't get to pick individual properties, you
| get to pick from a (usually pretty small) selection of
| products which bundle a lot of properties together, and
| these annoyances are usually not deal-breaking enough to
| cancel the other reasons why you are using that product.
|
| Often, there simply is no respectful alternative because
| everyone is doing it, or the respectful alternative is
| utterly useless due to other issues, or the disrespectful
| platform is the exclusive distributor for some content that
| you really want to access.
|
| The platforms/apps know this and generally get more abusive
| the less alternatives you have.
| otterley wrote:
| You might be surprised to learn just how much technology
| and entertainment you can live without.
| ikiris wrote:
| You think a few niche individuals refusing to use Microsoft
| os is going to make a noticeable difference in their stats
| in the slightest? Even apple is a fairly small fraction of
| that market share and the next smaller option is a rounding
| error.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I'm not suggesting that a _few_ people doing this is
| enough, or that individual choice is going to be
| successful. But I do think it 's one of many reasons for
| people to systematically use Open Source wherever
| possible, and it's a case study in what you get by doing
| so.
| ndiddy wrote:
| I think we're seeing the effects of Microsoft's treatment
| of their users. Windows 11 has been out for years now and
| we're a few months away from Windows 10 being
| unsupported, but 10 is still the most popular version of
| Windows. I expect that hundreds of millions of users will
| choose to run 10 unsupported rather than upgrade to 11.
| Since 11 came out, desktop Linux market share has
| increased from 1.5% to 4% and Mac OS has seen significant
| gains as well. I think the more relevant factor is that
| Microsoft simply doesn't care. We reached "peak desktop"
| in the mid-2010s and now Microsoft is simply following
| the MBA playbook of what to do when you have a widely
| used product in a market that's stopped growing (spend
| the bare minimum on maintenance, redirect revenue to
| developing products in markets that are growing like
| cloud and AI services, use your market position to push
| existing Windows customers to use your new products in
| growth markets).
| andrepd wrote:
| Many problems with that approach.
|
| - Most users just use what is preinstalled on their device.
| That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome,
| Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
|
| - As the blogpost points out, many people don't even
| _realise_ there 's an option.
|
| - Which sometimes there is not: either literally or in
| practice. E.g. I'm forced to maintain at the very least a
| whatsapp and a facebook account to perform basic everyday
| tasks.
|
| - Finally, what I think is the most important point: _these
| behaviours give a competitive advantage, therefore there
| needs to be a floor enforced by law_. It 's much like
| environmental protections, it's not enough to say "the
| customers should pick the greener choice", because dumping
| waste into a river is cheaper than processing it or
| recycling. You need to enforce a level playing field via
| laws, to ensure this does not happen.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > these behaviours give a competitive advantage
|
| That's not inherently the case. Scummy dark patterns like
| these might show short-term advantages in numbers, but
| doing that burns user trust.
|
| It's a pretty stark difference between classes of
| companies. Consider how people feel about Comcast and
| Facebook, versus how people feel about Stripe and
| Vanguard. (Random examples of companies with wildly
| different reputations.)
| esafak wrote:
| Comcast and Facebook are B2C companies while Microsoft is
| also B2B, where this problem is most pervasive.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Facebook is B2B when it comes to advertising and also its
| use as a communications and promotional tool outside of
| advertising.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome,
| Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
|
| That seems counterfactual when talking about Chrome.
| Microsoft has tried every trick in the book - short of
| simply blocking Chrome - to get people using Edge on
| Windows. It's been somewhat effective, but Chrome still
| retains a dominant lead. This is entirely due people
| going out of their way to install Chrome.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Don't forget two sided markets. Now that your mother in
| law is on Facebook and is never going to jump platforms,
| _you_ are stuck on Facebook.
|
| I find it shocking how many community organizations are
| completely dependent on Meta. I saw a poster for a club
| that gets together to play board games that simply had a
| heading that said "Board Game Club" and a QR code but no
| meeting times or places, no contact phone, email or web
| site url. The QR code points to... a Facebook page. If
| you want to engage with this organization you have no
| choice but to use Facebook and be subject to their system
| of pernicious personalization.
|
| Many student organizations at Cornell use Instagram as
| their primary or only communications tool. There are so
| many problem with that, not least that you can't engage
| with that platform without giving a mobile phone number
| with a real cellular carrier and that doesn't have
| metadata about events so you get notifications on your
| phone about events that happened a month ago. It's
| absurd, but you'd make yourself a hermit if you eschewed
| these platforms.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The legislation required is allowing reverse engineering for
| interoperability. If there was a legal, alternative Youtube
| frontend that everyone used and didn't do this crap -
| YouTube's UI would be forced to compete. As it is, writing
| such a client/frontend (even if you preserve the ads) will
| probably land you in legal hot water.
|
| See also: how reddit shut down superior competing UIs by
| changing their API terms.
| dayvigo wrote:
| One can publish their client/frontend pseudonymously, using
| Tor if necessary. Not like one is gonna profit off it
| anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| That massively limits your audience. And without
| something like the EU's Digital Markets Act locked down
| platforms like iOS would be a non-starter as well.
|
| I don't think YouTube is going to feel compelled to
| change their UI if 1% of users are using some alternative
| UI off of Tor.
| dayvigo wrote:
| No, I mean the developer publishes under a pseudonym, and
| said developer can use Tor if needed to hide their tracks
| so they can't be served legally, as no one knows who they
| are in real life. Joe Public isn't risking going to
| prison or being sued to bankruptcy because they
| downloaded some random YouTube client, so they don't have
| to use Tor.
| grishka wrote:
| It depends on the country. In some, reverse engineering a
| proprietary product for the purpose of interoperability is
| explicitly allowed.
|
| In the US, as far as I know, there hasn't yet been a
| precedent about this.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Unfortunately the government seems to have taken on the idea
| that its primary responsibility is legislation forbidding the
| government from passing legislation on given topics. This is
| because it's wholly owned by the people it's supposed to
| regulate.
| retrac wrote:
| This is what software freedom means in concrete terms. I wonder
| if it will be easier to explain the principles of the FLOSS
| purists to the average person now that multiple facets of their
| lives are being meddled with by aggressively hostile software,
| and not just being stung now and then with dropped support,
| format lock-in, or forced obsolescence.
| whateveracct wrote:
| PMs don't like it when their funnel gets shut off. They hate
| true rejection and always think the user is just some finagling
| away from falling down the funnel.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| And they don't understand that respecting users (and non-
| users) has value, and changes how people see your company.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| It's going to take a cultural shift in awareness of how
| abusing peoples freedom harms society before this really
| changes. Probably 95% of people on hackernews works for
| corporations that do this. Do what you can to shift the
| awareness.
| ikiris wrote:
| They understand it just fine. Their reward metrics only
| care about the impact they had, not the externalities.
| izacus wrote:
| Respecting the users does not have value FOR THEM. That's
| how the job works - they're measured on how much people
| they trick into falling into their feature so they can put
| together a slide deck with nice DAU numbers.
|
| Same for engineers - user respect doesn't have value for
| them either, you'll get the laziest, easiest implementation
| of a given ticket. Or the most complex and one if they're
| up for promotion or want to learn a new tech.
|
| Afterwards, both groups will happily run towards greener
| pastures by the time any of this "respect value"
| materializes.
| grishka wrote:
| The more general problem is that software companies started
| having their own goals that are at odds with just serving the
| damn users that pay them money.
| astrange wrote:
| It's surprisingly hard to do this. Never means never and then
| you have to remember the flag and decide what later things it
| applies to.
| rozap wrote:
| ....what? persistence is a solved problem.
|
| i hate it when engineers do this song and dance "well
| actually it's really hard to do that" in order to justify the
| position that they already had before the conversation
| started. no it isn't, it literally isn't, it's just smoke and
| mirrors to justify your position.
| namaria wrote:
| I know a guy who made a career out of advising management
| about this sort of foot dragging in software engineering.
| He is very wealthy.
| dayvigo wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone who finds it difficult to write values to
| file and read from them later should be working on commercial
| software. I genuinely struggle to think of any single feature
| that could be _more_ trivial than this is.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| We? If "we" want this ability, we first have to stop using
| software by Google, et al. and instead use FOSS. Google isn't
| going to add this into YT for us. They aren't driven by our
| satisfaction...
| tremon wrote:
| I have begun calling this practice "rapey software" in casual
| conversation. People usually object when they first hear the
| term, but when I ask them why they would defend such practices
| they usually fold.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| "Enshittified rapeware" ... does have a bit of a ring to it,
| no? Think I'll stick with malware.
| pndy wrote:
| I said this last year here: it's not a choice nor consent but a
| plain harassment. And it won't stop until you give up and let
| the software/company do what they want.
|
| I doubt anything can be done nowadays without some law
| enforcement. We're long gone from times when companies offered
| actual options and features for the user and not for
| themselves.
| lud_lite wrote:
| Never ask me again is available here:
| https://www.debian.org/distrib/
| nipponese wrote:
| Why are UX designers getting the heat? The PM is the one forcing
| their hand.
| andrepd wrote:
| Just following orders amirite
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Like everyone else, UX designers have a choice to follow
| unethical orders or refuse them.
|
| Yes yes, labor market, visas, etc. It's still a choice to do
| something evil, even if you're coerced.
| exsomet wrote:
| There are degrees of evil though, surely?
|
| I am not sure you're making a reasonable or realistic
| argument when you are saying that someone should risk or give
| up their job, personal security, and stability of their
| family rather than implement a button to turn off iPhone
| notifications.
|
| I don't disagree with the principle at all, but if it's ever
| going to change the conversation has to start somewhere
| rational. "Destroy your life because your UI offends me"
| isn't it.
| dogleash wrote:
| Nick Naylor: [out loud] "I just need to pay the mortgage."
| Nick Naylor: [to self] The Yuppie Nuremberg defense.
| nkrisc wrote:
| There's a difference though between "unethical" and just
| "shitty experience". A shitty experience is not inherently
| unethical. As a UX designer, I never did anything I believed
| to be unethical, but I did design many things that I thought
| were a shitty experience. I voiced my concerns, suggested
| some alternatives, and was told do design it to work the
| shitty way. If they want to pay me to design a shitty
| experience, then OK, the money's the same either way.
|
| I just made sure to save the emails/documentation/etc. in
| case anyone tried to blame it on me when it failed or users
| complained. If the order came down from high enough up the
| org, a UX manager or director might also go on the record
| opposing it to cover for those under them in the org.
|
| I think of it like hiring someone to replace all the
| beautiful hardwood floors in your home with thick, orange
| shag carpet. It's a bad idea and it will probably hurt the
| resale value of your home, but there's nothing unethical
| about the contractor accepting the work and taking your money
| as long as everything's done properly and to code.
| lud_lite wrote:
| I'd be out of work entirely if I quit every job when I saw
| something disgusting. There are levels though.
| nurettin wrote:
| Programmers are pretty innocent, but UX Designers by trade
| should disallow dark patterns that worsen User's eXperience,
| right?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Programmers are the ones implementing these designs, so they
| at the very least _share_ culpability.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| PM has a product strategy for sure, but it's still downstream
| of the main business strategy and will be based off that. So
| your ultimate accountability here rests with some greedy CEO or
| investor.
| leoc wrote:
| From the title I assumed it was going to be about LLMs!
| qwerpy wrote:
| I deeply hate this behavior. Another example: The Health app on
| iOS has a closeable banner for the "Health Checklist" UI, which
| gives me the option to turn on things like crash detection, fall
| detection, etc. All of which are notifications. I hate
| notifications so I will never turn these on. I dutifully scanned
| through it the first time and verified everything was turned off,
| and the banner went away. But like clockwork, the banner comes
| back every 2 weeks and asks me to go through the checklist again.
| I suspect there's a "right answer" here. If I consent to turn
| everything on, it'll stop nagging me. But this badly needs a
| Never button, not a X button that actually means "nag me again in
| 2 weeks". I get that some product manager wants their fancy watch
| features enabled for more users so they can get a promotion, but
| their career ambitions are degrading my experience.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of these things _could_ be useful but there will probably
| be more false alarms than not to varying degrees. I know I've
| had looks like you had a hard fall alerts that ranged from
| "huh?" To I landed on my butt from the edge of a bed that I
| wouldn't have wanted an ambulance much less a helicopter for.
| wincy wrote:
| My grandpa used to say every few years they'd vote on allowing
| casinos.
|
| And every few years the people of Missouri would vote NO
| casinos. But one time, they voted to allow the casinos. Then
| the votes stopped. Hugely manipulative and it feels like this
| sort of thing is everywhere now.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| From a memorable villain monologue:
|
| > all we need... is for one of us, just one, sooner or later
| to have the thing we're all hoping for. One good day.
| bena wrote:
| To be fair, when you don't have casinos, you don't have
| casino taxes, casino employment, casino tourism, etc.
|
| Also, you don't just "have" casinos, building any building of
| that size is at the very least a multi-month affair and
| likely multiple years.
|
| So once you say "yes", you've set something in motion that is
| way harder to unwind than it was to kick off.
|
| Also, I can see it being the casinos themselves asking
| permission to enter the state. Once they're allowed in, why
| would they ask to leave? That would be the job of someone
| else.
| xg15 wrote:
| Would be interesting to know who petitioned for the votes.
| tartoran wrote:
| There are also negatives that come with casinos. The taxes
| are nice but the crime isn't.
| trollbridge wrote:
| In other words, we should let powerful corporations control
| the agenda of democracy, not the _demos_ (that is, the
| people)?
| daedrdev wrote:
| There is a similar case in California where every year a
| ballot initiative is proposed to repeal a law banning
| local rent control. Despite it failing every election it
| continues to get proposed. So its not just corporations
| who can do this, the demos do it too.
| namaria wrote:
| There should be an exponential backoff rule for failing
| propositions.
| daedrdev wrote:
| I don't like the idea because if you notice public
| opinion are slowly shifting on an policy you could
| purposefully propose it each backoff date to entrench it
| for like 8 or 16 years when public perception does swap.
| namaria wrote:
| I was joking, but my serious opinion on this is that
| direct democracy doesn't scale. For a country like
| Switzerland that is basically a small patchwork of
| villages up in the mountains it is probably fine, but for
| a polity of 39 million people and one of the biggest
| economies on Earth I should say it's a bad fit. Maybe for
| some local propositions.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _The Logic of Collective Action_ , Mancur Olson, 1965:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Acti
| on>
|
| <https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=63B1D140FD13A03F15BF8
| 42...>
|
| Very strongly recommended. I'd stumbled across this in my
| uni days, and its power and insight were obvious even to
| naive me then. It's since emerged as a classic of
| economics.
|
| PaulHoule is also a fan:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775531>
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| It's like p-hacking but with voting. Try enough
| tests/samples/whatever and eventually you'll get something
| that's "statisitically significant". Like the old xkcd comic:
| https://xkcd.com/882/
| mhb wrote:
| It's not just casinos. It's also the Constitution. And
| they've had over 200 years.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well yea. That why modifying the constitution is a
| monumental effort. They don't want things to sway as the
| congress and president shifts. It was easier for Texas to
| try and secede than to try and change the constitution in
| their favor.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| They did this with a giant new jail and its financing via
| sales tax in my hometown.
|
| First they bundled it in the regular November election. It
| failed. So then they bundled it in a run-off or primary
| election. It still failed. Finally they ran it on a solo
| ballot and it finally passed.
|
| I was like 19 or so. Voted against it every time but that was
| sort of an eye-opening moment for young me.
| cortesoft wrote:
| This is the classic result of the problem with democracy and
| "concentrated benefits and disperse costs". Legal gambling is
| a HUGE money making opportunity for casinos, and for most
| voters it is just a minor negative. Of course, utility wise,
| the minor cost times the number of voters is much higher than
| the concentrated benefit, but the concentration makes it
| worth it for casinos to keep fighting for legalization. The
| cost of fighting for it is less than the benefit when it is
| legalized.
|
| Now that it is legalized, though, there is no one who has a
| concentrated enough cost to fight for its reversal. It is
| more rational to just suffer the small cost of gambling
| instead of fighting hard for its repeal.
|
| So as you say, they only have to win the fight once, and it
| is won forever, and society is slightly worse off.
|
| This is the exact same reason Intuit keeps winning the tax
| battle... it matters more to them than anyone else, even
| though it makes it a little bit worse for everyone.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It also doesn't help that these days the stwte/country is
| probably large enough to gather ebouygh of a petition for
| whatever you want. Just word it nicely and you can get 10k,
| 100k people to say "sure why not?"
|
| Apathy reigns as usual.
| cortesoft wrote:
| It isn't apathy, it is rationality. Why would I spend a
| ton of time fighting against a problem that is a minor
| inconvenience to me? I have a lot of important things
| going on in my life, and a limited amount of time and
| energy to do things. It isn't rational for me (or most
| people) to spend a bunch of time, money, and effort
| fighting against legalized gambling.
|
| There literally isn't enough time in the day for me to
| fight against everything, so you pick and choose where to
| spend your energy.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Agree.
|
| I like the idea of policy changes like this having an
| expiry date a few years in the future, which forces a
| periodic revote if some party wants to keep the new
| policy. Like a political office term, this should be long
| enough to give businesses a timeframe they can plan
| around, and an opportunity for voters to see how the
| policy played out.
|
| Perhaps it would lead to an ever-increasing pile of legal
| "confirmation dialog boxes" that bore the public. But I
| like that the default action (doing nothing) would lead
| to regulations being deleted, as there are few forces
| that act to _reduce_ regulation, and having too many
| regulations is another slow-burn energy sink for
| everyone.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Externalities
| keybored wrote:
| It's more of a problem with oligarchy and oligarchic
| tendencies.
|
| Don't make things into a game theory problem. It's a power
| problem.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I am not "making" anything into a game theory problem,
| game theory is simply explaining WHY it becomes a
| problem.
|
| How to solve the problem is a separate issue, but the
| problem can be described with game theory.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Same thing is how encryption backdoor laws and other erosions
| of rights work. Be vigilant because the first time the vote
| goes through, they will never hold another vote.
| daedrdev wrote:
| There is a similar case in California where every year a
| ballot initiative is proposed to repeal a law banning local
| rent control, in the last election it was prop 33. Despite it
| failing every election it continues to get proposed.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That one would unfortunately have a huge impact on some
| people. Aka, anyone who may need to house themselves one
| days but can't afford to buy. Sure hope we keep fighting
| that.
| andrepd wrote:
| Kinda how the European """parliament""" works. It's the only
| body called "parliament" in the entire world that I'm aware
| of which does _not_ have the power to propose laws.
|
| Therefore: if the commission wants a law, all they have to do
| is keep trying. If it fails, they try again. If it passes,
| well it only has to pass once. Because the parliament can't
| introduce bills which means it can't repeal existing laws.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Apple's "This video conferencing app just disabled
| reactions!!!!" notification is just the worst. Every video
| chat, every app, every time. Ugh!
|
| I even like Apple's reactions implementation, which is pretty
| good, but there's definitely some PM that wants to push it in
| my face 10 times every day and I don't know what's worse, the
| PM doing this fully understanding the cost or whatever system
| stands aside and lets them continue.
| astrange wrote:
| PMs basically don't exist at Apple and certainly don't get to
| make any decisions when they do. That's an exec making you do
| that ;)
| tobr wrote:
| Apple is hard at work enshittifying everything despite their
| main competitive advantage being a business model that
| doesn't actually require them to do that. The iPhone settings
| app in particular is filled with advertising banners that add
| red badges to the icon that cannot be disabled.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Nah. Their business model requires it, just more subtle.
| Half the Apple "ecosystem" is just crippling their own
| products to only play nice with their products so you feel
| compelled to buy it over alternatives. See things like the
| Apple Watch, MTP support, iCloud backup etc.
| permo-w wrote:
| you can see why they do. for me the only real fear of
| moving to android (I did anyway) was losing access to the
| Apple ecosystem. on the other hand, they've railroaded
| themselves into this situation by choosing it as the
| competitive advantage they want to pursue, and in doing
| so have damaged computing philosophy as a whole
| tikhonj wrote:
| YouTube keeps on pushing shorts. If you click the x button on
| the "shorts" section, it will straight up tell you that it's
| only hiding the reccomendation for 30 days. They're not even
| pretending otherwise!
| trollbridge wrote:
| Which makes me feel much better about using yt-dlp,
| SponsorBlock, and Brave.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Same. With the way they have been trying to circumvent ad-
| blocking im YT-DLP'ing everythign now.
| duskwuff wrote:
| That's not even the worst of it. YouTube has a "shelf" that
| exists solely to announce that YouTube TV was rated highly in
| a JD Power consumer survey. It's _completely meaningless_ to
| users, but that doesn 't stop them from trying to show it to
| you again every few weeks.
|
| Some YouTube executive must be really proud of that award.
| DigitallyFidget wrote:
| Adblock.
|
| You can selectively block elements from sites. I've blocked
| shorts from it and honestly forgot how annoying it was until
| these comments. Just right click, block element, preview
| before applying, make sure you don't butcher out unintended
| parts of the pages.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The annoying one for me right now is Windows 11.
|
| Every few restarts, it is showing a pop up that shows the
| wallpaper that was chosen and a "learn more" button... the pop
| up can't be moved, can't be closed, and stays on top no matter
| what.
|
| It took me a few minutes before I finally gave up and clicked
| on the "learn more" button, which of course opened Edge (even
| though edge isn't my default browser), which of course prompted
| me to switch to using edge as my default browser, which I had
| to decline and close edge again.
|
| And now I have repeated this dance a number of times on
| restarts. No, I don't want to learn more about the wallpaper,
| and I don't want to use Edge!
| srfn wrote:
| This, certainly, can be disabled. I don't remember the exact
| name of the setting, BUT here is what I use:
|
| https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
|
| You should be able to find the setting responsible for
| displaying these "learn more" buttons. I always disable it
| for myself and friend's computers.
|
| Once you know your ways around disabling all annoyances in
| Windows, it's really smooth sail.
|
| Good luck!
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Every few weeks I get "Windows 10 will reach end-of-support
| soon!". Honestly, I appreciate this, because it helps me
| mentally prepare for he day I'll finally switch to Linux.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Is this maybe a work phone enrolled in MDM or something? I do
| more phone management than I'd like to at work and haven't seen
| this.
| qwerpy wrote:
| It's a personal phone enrolled in work MDM. Seems very
| surprising that it would affect the Health app in this
| specific way though.
| spollo wrote:
| My personal biggest gripe is the Gmail app on iPhone. There is
| no possible way to stop it from trying to force you to change
| your default browser to chrome every 2 weeks when you open a
| link.
| permo-w wrote:
| the Mail app has its own massive issues. for whatever reason
| it is completely unable to just background sync and notify
| you immediately when you get an email. why is every messaging
| app able to do this instantaneously but email is not?
|
| also their new default-on email classification system is a
| fucking nightmare and I was so glad when I figured out you
| can turn it off
|
| plus why do my email drafts load in oldest first?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >The population (especially the younger generation, who never
| seen a different kind of technology at all) is being conditioned
| by the tech industry to accept that software should behave like
| an unreliable, manipulative human rather than a precise,
| predictable machine. They're learning that you can't simply tell
| a computer
|
| Youtube isn't _your_ computer. It 's _their_ computer. And the
| precise, predictable mechanical command they have given it is to
| manipulate you.
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| The way out is employee- and customer-owned non-profit
| platforms not beholden to private equity or publicly-traded
| corporations driven to exploit dark patterns.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I've personally witnessed non-profits behave in bizarre and
| anti-human fashions too, though perhaps not quite to the same
| intensity as for-profits. I don't believe they're some
| magical silver-bullet. And "employee-owned" is even more
| useless in this regard.
|
| The way out is to just not engage. Do you find anything truly
| appealing about Youtube? If there was some video on it
| somewhere that was "I can't live without this" good, why
| haven't you ripped the video with youtube-dl and kept it? It
| would no longer be a Youtube video, and you'd no longer have
| to tolerate Youtube's antihuman UI.
| dayvigo wrote:
| That works great for the one you already have, how would
| you discover future "I can't live without this" good videos
| if you stop using YouTube?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The index case is public television on the US which has
| endless cloying and annoying fundraisers but you know in
| the end of the day they care what big sponsors like the
| Archer Daniels Midland Corporation and the The John D. and
| Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation think but not "viewers
| like you" because of these problems
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Actio
| n
|
| Or look at the case of Mozilla which seems to be at least
| treading water when it comes to browser engineering but in
| terms of marketing and legitimacy they seem to be doing as
| little as possible to threaten Chrome but keep plugging
| along because if Firefox went down then Google might get
| pulled into antitrust court. (Think how Microsoft funded
| Apple during the dark years of the 1990s to keep
| competition alive or how the existence of Android must have
| a huge value to Apple today in that Apple can claim it has
| competition -- competition like the heel in pro wrestling)
| trollbridge wrote:
| "Funded by the CPB, a private corporation funded by the
| American people."
|
| Of all the interstitials PBS had, this one was by far the
| oddest.
| philwelch wrote:
| Public broadcasting in the US is in deep denial about
| being state media.
| otterley wrote:
| This comment is way off topic.
| philwelch wrote:
| "Funded by a private corporation funded by the American
| people" is just a euphemism for state funding; the
| oddness of the euphemism is explained by the fact that
| it's a euphemism in the first place.
| otterley wrote:
| What part of "this is off topic" do you not understand?
| philwelch wrote:
| I was directly replying to the comment above me about the
| oddness of the CPB interstitial by providing an
| explanation. That might have been tangential but it
| wasn't off-topic. You're the one having a failure of
| understanding here, even though I've been patient with
| you and tried to explain the relevance of my reply.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| When I was young, I voraciously consumed media just like
| today. I watched TV, listened to radio, purchased vinyl and
| CDs like there was no tomorrow.
|
| Over a few decades starting in 2000, I stopped purchasing
| music entirely. I also stopped listening to the radio, and
| in 2015 I got rid of my last TV. (Sometimes when you're in
| public, you can't avoid these.) And things seemed alright.
|
| But I have come full circle and developed a complete
| addiction to YouTube that satiates all these desires in one
| service. Why own music when I can stream anything on
| demand? Why own a TV or disc player when all movies I want
| to see are likewise available?
|
| So I pay for Premium. I could live without YouTube, but I
| would flounder in abject boredom. My music entertainment
| would be severely limited, like what was available in PD or
| Creative Commons, and that's rather grim. If YouTube were
| completely unavailable to me, in terms of any music or
| video, I would indeed struggle to fill those gaps, because
| it really fills out my days.
|
| Thankfully, with Premium I am not nagged by ads and the UI
| generally cooperates. The ads were really wearing me down,
| because the more you use it, the more you're subjected to.
| Unfortunately, YouTube as a platform is not oriented to
| "watching what I want when I want it" but to discovering
| new content and suggesting "stuff I might like", so I still
| do fight to stay on the rails of what I truly enjoy.
|
| Android, on the other hand, has become a holy terror. Every
| time I try to do something with my life, whether it's
| banking or finance or health care or shopping, Android is
| getting in my way and hindering my sanity. I cannot
| accomplish a simple thing without Android distracting me,
| frustrating me, and making me forget what I was trying to
| do. How many times have I unlocked my phone, fiddled, and
| then locked it again, only to discover that I didn't get
| anything done? That typically didn't happen with Microsoft
| or Windows, because indeed MS... was... primarily a B2B
| provider, and home users enjoyed similar deference to let
| us be productive without getting in our face.
| Unfortunately, that is all converging on Consumerist
| Advertising Hell.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Non-profits often aren't looking to avoid making as much
| money as possible, but that's not actually written into
| their mandate. What's written into their mandate is that
| they can't pay out money beyond expenses as profits to
| owners. They can still have a surplus after cost, they can
| still re-invest that surplus (often in the form of c-suite
| salaries "to attract the best and brightest talent at that
| level"), they just can't pay it out in profits to owners.
| There's also the fact that non-profits are often rather
| strapped overall and when they see a dark pattern they're
| motivated by fear of failure to exploit it.
| astrange wrote:
| Forcing everyone to work at an employee-owned corporation is
| bad for their personal finances. Companies can fail, and
| regular employees shouldn't be invested in the same place
| that pays their salary. That's why you should usually sell
| stock as soon as it vests.
| larvaetron wrote:
| Got it!
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| Yup. Corporate non-ownership, non-control in consumer products
| and services is becoming far too normalized. Louis Rossmann
| regularly points out these absurd, customer-hostile practices.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >these absurd, customer-hostile practices
|
| Companies no longer view their customers as their customers,
| and I'm not sure I've settled on an explanation that makes
| sense to me. I only have examples. The biggest one though was
| Bug Light and the Dylan Mulvaney thing from several years ago.
| I no longer have a link, but there was a paraphrased quote from
| the marketing director at the time directly expressing contempt
| for those who drank Bud Light. But a frustrated expletive,
| rather a full-on rant about how they were all moronic frat boys
| and gauche rednecks.
|
| What does it mean when a company has no respect for its own
| customers, no gratitude, and even measurable levels of what can
| only be called hatred? I don't know the answer to that
| question, but that's the world we all live in this year of
| 2025. And I can't imagine it could possibly turn out well for
| any of us.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| I once compared the onboarding experience of a previous product I
| worked on to walking the timeshare gauntlet in the arrivals area
| of Mexican airports.
| Zee2 wrote:
| TurboTax?
| lukev wrote:
| Agreed. And it's bad enough within apps... it's even worse the
| way they use push notifications for this kind of thing. I
| installed your app so I'd know when my prescriptions are ready,
| or when my ride is here. Abusing that privilege to upsell me on a
| credit card by making my phone buzz is infuriating.
|
| I've had to uninstall so many apps because of this bad behavior.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| While I 100% agree with this, I also think this isn't some sort
| of failing or "oops didn't think of that!" type mistake -- this
| behavior is fully on purpose.
|
| They want the user to be worn down until they just accept the
| notifications or whatever else or even just accidentally click
| YES on one of the recurrent pop ups.
|
| It is beyond infuriating the number of times a google search
| misclick on my phone leads me to the app store opening the page
| for the google app. Same with a reddit page. They know what
| they're doing and they don't care. And even then you have to
| manually close that giant banner that covers half your screen to
| dismiss the nag to download the app-- when the web version works
| perfectly fine!
|
| Alright time to stop ranting and get back to work :)
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| I have a UX rule that I try to implement: if I'm in a workflow
| and the app interrupts with something that is not immediately
| related to that workflow, I uninstall the app and never use it
| again. No, I don't care about that new feature. I care about the
| feature I'm currently using. No, I don't want to allow
| notifications. You don't choose when we interact, I do. You're
| the machine and I'm the human. No, I don't want to join your
| discord, or follow you on social media. I assure you that if you
| prompt me to give you a rating in the app store that you do not
| want my rating. Let me do the thing I installed you to do and
| otherwise fuck entirely off.
| airstrike wrote:
| Amen. We need a whole movement around this to take back control
| of software.
| encom wrote:
| Ahem... https://www.fsf.org/
| nkrisc wrote:
| Amen. I just uninstall applications that do anti-user crap.
| There are very few applications that I _need_. Almost all are
| replaceable or truly unnecessary.
|
| The most recent example that sticks in my mind is I uninstalled
| Duolingo because they kept changing the app icon, but what
| finally did it for me is when they changed to some disgusting
| version of it with snot dripping from the creature's (is it an
| owl? some kind of bird? I forget) nostrils. WTF Duolingo?
| Uninstalled, I'm done with it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You must have a very empty phone. I salute you.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I usually take the time to send an email to whoever's email I
| can find over the issue before walking away.
| kazinator wrote:
| Given that, say, a garbage collector can "always be closing"
| abandoned file objects, salesman behavior is easily within reach
| of a computer. It's just a persistent polling loop combined with
| a breadth-first search type thing.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| My own rant on this topic _from 2013_ , twelve years ago, about
| Google, on Google+:
|
| <https://web.archive.org/web/20190115034109/https://plus.goog...>
|
| (And yes, I archived all my G+ content, though it's one hell of a
| bastard to search through it.)
|
| That posted to HN on a day where for a moment three of HN's
| front-page stories were my own content (direct submissions or
| links to).
|
| HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745525>
|
| The following day saw a slew of Google-critical stories:
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-11-17>
|
| And yeah, it's not got better. I fight back (uBlock origin
| element remover, custom stylesheets, entire rewrites of news
| sites (<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122>,
| working on a further revision now), and almost entirely
| abandoning the mobile comms device space (no smartphone, a
| largely de-Googled and anonymised e-ink tablet with no no
| subscription-based apps installed).
|
| I still strongly believe that this ends poorly.
| grishka wrote:
| Can we also talk about the practice of mass sending push
| notifications in mobile apps, and usually nonsensical cringely
| cute ones at that?
|
| The whole notion is absurd to me. A _notification_ is supposed to
| _notify_ you that something _happened_. But in these cases
| nothing has actually happened. All these notifications are, are
| thinly veiled attempts to manipulate you into opening the app to
| then try to shove more things into you for the benefit of the
| company that made the app.
|
| I'm generally very stingy with notification permissions, so on
| the rare occasion that one of these does slip through, it makes
| me furious. It feels like an insult to my dignity as a human
| being.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Amen. What really pisses me off is that there are certain apps
| where I really _have_ to enable notifications like Uber so I
| don't miss my ride, but then they abuse that privilege and
| start pushing "special offers" etc to me with no way to
| selectively turn these off.
|
| Or else, if there IS a subcategory to turn off then they just
| invent a new subcategory a few months after I've opted out, and
| auto opt me into that instead. eg I opt out of "marketing
| notifications" and then "relevant suggestions" is created. I'm
| looking at you, Google Maps.
| grishka wrote:
| Android has notification categories ("channels" as they're
| called in the API) that can be individually disabled. But
| it's on the app developers to assign the right one to their
| notifications. Many apps do honestly do it and do have
| separate categories for their marketing spam, but some make
| just one channel called something like "Miscellaneous" that
| includes everything all at once.
| endemic wrote:
| IIRC it's against Apple's guidelines to use push notifications
| for engagement/spam; not that that ever stopped anyone.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
| Centigonal wrote:
| > _The population (especially the younger generation, who never
| seen a different kind of technology at all) is being conditioned
| by the tech industry to accept that software should behave like
| an unreliable, manipulative human rather than a precise,
| predictable machine. They 're learning that you can't simply tell
| a computer "I'm not interested" and expect it to respect that
| choice. Instead, you must engage in a perpetual dance of "not
| now, please" - only to face the same prompts again and again._
|
| Part of the population is learning that -- but I think another
| part is learning that application providers are not incentivized
| to design around the users' best interest, and that if you want
| your software to behave in a predictable, user friendly way, you
| need to seek out third party tools (like uBlock Origin, UnTrap
| for Youtube, ReVanced, Invidious etc) to enforce that behavior.
| ValveFan6969 wrote:
| Also relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hieoUkUiFbg
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Definitely agree. I notice this a lot with search. So many apps
| and various things have an understanding of search that is not
| "find me exactly the text I entered". Sometimes I remember that
| something I want to find was in a sentence with a phrase like "in
| for all the". I want to be able to search for "in for all the"
| and get every message/file/whatever that has the text "in for all
| the" in it, instead of getting zero results because the search
| tries to be "smart" and filter out stopwords. It's fine to be
| _able_ to do those things, but I always want the behavior to be:
| a) fully specified (e.g., full list of stopwords that will be
| ignored); and b) controllable (e.g., can disable or enable at
| will).
|
| I tend to see this as one form of a widening gap between software
| users and software creators. I don't subscribe to the hardcore
| open-source philosophy that everyone should be contributing to
| the software they use. But I do think it's getting problematic
| when a small minority of people who understand the complexities
| of what's actually going on are crafting elaborate systems of
| smoke and mirrors to present a seemingly simple interface to
| users. I would rather that today's interfaces be ten times
| "worse" but ten times more predictable.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| AI agent idea: Detect notifications and dialog boxes that (a)
| lack a "Don't bother me again" button and (b) which you have
| responded "Maybe later" to, and forever afterwards automatically
| "click" "Maybe later" on your behalf the moment they appear.
|
| Yes, this is using an H100 to crack a walnut, we shouldn't have
| to, etc. But still.
| tcdent wrote:
| I usually read these opinion pieces and roll my eyes because the
| OP is just being pedantic.
|
| But, this really cuts to the core of everything wrong with modern
| software.
|
| Open your bank app. Immediately get blocked by a popup asking you
| to complete a survey or try some new feature.
|
| Sign up for a new account with some SaaS. Immediately get blocked
| with a tutorial flow to sell you on how great it is, regardless
| if you even came there for those features in the first place.
|
| Even the way OS updates are installed has turned into a pushy
| salesman that tricks you into agreeing to something you didn't
| originally want.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| the difference is you're not allowed to shoot the salesman in the
| face or hit him with a splitting maul
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