[HN Gopher] The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet
___________________________________________________________________
The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet
Author : Incerto
Score : 320 points
Date : 2025-04-23 08:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sebs.website)
(TXT) w3m dump (sebs.website)
| cheschire wrote:
| Yes and ChatGPT has become my personal shopper.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm certainly glad the Chinese and Americans primarily
| control them.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| We will reach enlightenment in the Year of the Depend Adult
| Undergarment.
| jerf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| yapyap wrote:
| I mean, it's in the name
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| The name says nothing about the man or his achievements.
| criddell wrote:
| And the article really isn't about the man or his
| achievements. The term is named after Gruen, but I don't
| think he had all that much to do with it or wanted to be
| associated with it.
|
| I probably would have linked the first use of "Gruen" to
| his wikipedia page, but I understand why the author didn't.
| If you really care you can find it yourself and keeping the
| post focused is a good thing.
| Miraltar wrote:
| The article isn't really about what the Gruen transfer is but
| rather about how it's applied on internet. I don't think
| mentioning the guy would be useful there, if anyone's curious
| they can just google Gruen transfer
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I wonder if I would experience Gruen transfer while googling
| about Gruen. That'd be kinda meta.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| After I wrote that, I decided to kind of test this.
|
| I first searched "Gruen transfer" using Kagi. First hit was
| the Wikipedia article with enough showing to feel I didn't
| need to go there because of what I'd read here already.
| Right below that, indented for grouping, is a Wikipedia
| link to a TV show by the same name. I skimmed that article
| to see where/when it was shown. Anyone here ever watched
| it? Curious if it's any good.
|
| Then I searched the same with google. The presentation is
| more noisy. And organized less. It's hard to compare the
| two, because viewing one before the other affects the
| second (no double slit opportunity here). I did notice that
| I felt subliminally drawn/distracted to the visual
| thumbnails of the tv show, rather than the Wikipedia entry.
| skimmilk_ wrote:
| It's a good tv show! The panel is a mix of comedians and
| ad creators that break down ads (both good and bad).
| autoexec wrote:
| I watched the first three seasons and I liked the TV
| show. It highlighted some of the scummy tricks
| advertisers use and some of the impressive art that goes
| into ads.
| Philpax wrote:
| 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)
| docdeek wrote:
| 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
| partomniscient wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is precisely what Amazon try and achieve by deliberately
| making their search so crap.
|
| They should be prosecuted for it.
| Tepix wrote:
| Judge with your wallet.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Even more reason to stop supporting Amazon, how else will
| we stop physical retailers and smaller shops from going out
| of business?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This is an interesting direction, realistically I don't
| expect the government to magically care about the lived
| experience of most people
|
| Well, here in Europe, at least the EU government cares
| about the experience of the masses. That's how we got no
| roaming charges for phones, USB-C for everything, decent
| minimum standards for all possible sorts of products from
| cucumbers to cars, SEPA, (theoretically) open borders and
| a whole lot of other things...
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| It is deceptive practice - we should have actual Judges do
| the judging.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Death to the Gruen Transfer.
| phrotoma wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is the Aldi middle aisle a case of this? I always seem to get
| lost in the entire store not just that aisle.
| benterix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-
| every...
| LadyCailin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| edent wrote:
| You don't need a plugin. Facebook offers a feed which is just
| friends.
|
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
|
| On the web, you access it by pressing Menu - Feeds - Friends.
| Words on mobile and desktop browsers.
| benterix wrote:
| It would be relatively good (except all sponsored posts...)
| the problem is it gets reset after I leave the app.
| bityard wrote:
| This is not only fairly hard to find, but in my experience,
| it also only shows you posts from the last three days. So if
| you don't log into Facebook at least every other day or so,
| you'll miss things.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It is in their interest, both in terms of their mission and
| financially (people who scroll a lot become donors and
| contributors)
| andrewflnr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| frereubu wrote:
| Onethingpedia sounds like a Borges short story.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I definitely felt this guy was a little bit hyperbolic because
| the more social media gets the way he describes the more I see
| people disconnect from it
|
| I don't know anyone other than people over 50 who still check
| their facebook feeds and the kids are out enjoying the sun
| today
| hiatus wrote:
| Replace facebook with instagram (another meta property) or
| tiktok or snapchat to address the under 50 crowd.
| immibis wrote:
| Instagram is _the_ single most garbage app on my phone, and
| I also have Snapchat installed so that 's saying something.
| It's constantly starting itself up in the background and
| then using so much memory I can't also have a browser and a
| keyboard open. Whenever this happens I know I have to go
| and force-stop Instagram.
|
| Google and/or Samsung doesn't provide a setting to never
| run this app in the background because that would be bad
| for their own data collection, I'm sure. Or, you know, let
| me install my own software on the phone.
| quesera wrote:
| > _It 's constantly starting itself up in the background_
|
| I'm astonished by the idea that Android allows apps to
| start themselves.
|
| Surely I'm misunderstanding your comment.
|
| If not, then the rot runs deeper than Instagram. Which is
| also saying something.
| Lerc wrote:
| Don't sites like Wikipedia and TVTropes count as a control
| group that challenge the Gruen transfer theory itself.
|
| They do not have any intention to confuse or distract, yet the
| effect of causing people to linger and browse remains.
|
| In the comments here, Amazon and AliExpress have been pointed
| to, but again this does not seem to be confusing by intent.
| There is a degree of deception by some vendors but that exists
| purely to get people to buy _their_ product.
|
| On the other hand, I have always thought that one of the
| primary uses of A/B testing, was to abdecate the moral
| responsibility of decision making. You no longer need to intend
| to coerce, cheat, deceive, or confuse. A/B testing let's you
| only intend to make money and all of the malicious descions are
| taken out of your hands.
| timerol wrote:
| The original article does not make this clear, but the
| concept of a Gruen transfer is distinct from the idea of
| consciously including them to maximize impulse shopping and
| retention. Faced with a sea of links to interesting content,
| I often undergo a Gruen transfer. Is that the intent of
| TVTropes, or simply emergent?
| hk__2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm confused. What does the friends tab do? And what do you
| think it should do?
| wat10000 wrote:
| I'd say the real problem is trying to be all things to all
| people. Why should Facebook be a place to keep up with your
| friends' activities _and_ a place to watch short videos from
| random people _and_ a place to organize virtual clubs _and_....
|
| Those should all be separate things. But tech companies are
| far, far too large, and growth must be achieved forever no
| matter what.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > 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?
| jobigoud wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| District5524 wrote:
| 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%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.
| rix0r wrote:
| Do you fundamentally disagree with the intent of the
| regulation, or are you just putting on your software engineer's
| hat and using your decades-long honed skill of trying to find
| edge case problems in a set of rules?
| dingaling wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-...
|
| I haven't been able to find it myself - I refuse to use the
| app, browser only.
| prawn wrote:
| 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.
| eythian wrote:
| I usually find it pretty terrible and so hardly ever visit, so
| let's try:
|
| * 10 day old post from someone I know, involving other people I
| know
|
| * a reel, with no origin specified
|
| * People you may know
|
| * a recent post from someone I know
|
| * an old post from someone I know
|
| * a recent photo from someone I know
|
| * an old post from someone I know
|
| * People you may know
|
| * An old post from someone I don't know tagging someone I know
|
| * then I scroll further and it does a weird jumping thing so I
| can no longer keep track of where I was
|
| This is actually better than I remember in terms of "relevant"
| things, but I long ago lost the habit of facebook, and
| sometimes seem to get a whole lot of stuff that doesn't feel
| relevant which tends to put me off. Also that odd scrolling
| behaviour that starts happening after a bit.
| jerf wrote:
| ISTR some people observing that if you've been gone for a
| while they stack the deck in favor of things relevant to
| _specifically_ you. Which may be why you report so many old
| things; they may have been reaching back trying to find those
| things specifically. If you were browsing routinely they
| might never show you those old things.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I pulled up the mobile app. Every post that didn't say
| "sponsored" was from someone I knew and am following.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| I would be surprised if mine was even 10%. It's low quality,
| irrelevant garbage. News from towns I've never been to. A lot
| of pirated comic scans.
|
| I'm in plenty of active groups. And some of my friends still
| actively post. But I have to go out of the main feed and into
| the "feeds" section to see any of that.
| yason wrote:
| The friends feed is polluted these days also, not so badly as
| the infamous "feed" though. But it's bad enough overall that
| whatever feed/page I'm checking out on Facebook (which happens
| pretty rarely in the recent years) the absolutely first thing I
| check is who the post is from. If it's not a friend or a group
| I recognize as mine I just skip looking at the entire post.
| bityard wrote:
| Somehow, your feed is different from everyone else's. I don't
| even go on Facebook all that often (maybe once a week to post a
| pic or two) and my feed is basically:
|
| 1. 2-3 posts from actual friends
|
| 2. "Reels" of young women jumping on trampolines in bikinis
|
| (Note: I do not and have never watched Reels on Facebook.)
| netsharc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Advertising is ruining everything.
| klabb3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| MyPasswordSucks wrote:
| The implication of the conversation is "if only no-
| capitalism, then this wouldn't be an issue". The fact
| that this exact same behavior can (and does) readily
| occur under a command economy - an economic system very
| antipodal to capitalism, if possibly not quite
| literally-100%-diametrically-opposed-in-all-possible-
| regards - casts doubt on the fact that it is directly
| linked to capitalism in any meaningful way.
|
| It's also a bit strange to say " _we_ are talking about
| capitalism " when this is your first post in the sub-
| thread.
| immibis wrote:
| They pretty much explicitly said "capitalism is bad" and
| did not say "the polar opposite of capitalism is good"
|
| But it's not the polar opposite, anyway. Capitalism is a
| command economy with a particular way of determining who
| gets to issue the commands.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Markets are great.
|
| Capitalist systems heavily influenced by
| Objectivist/libertarian/Mises/Chicago "regulating markets
| more than hyper-minimally is immoral, oh and I
| conveniently have also proven from first principles that
| regulating them makes everything worse in all cases"
| horse-shit are bad.
| int_19h wrote:
| Free (as in competitive) markets are indeed great, but
| capitalism is not free markets. It is, in fact,
| antithetical to them, since what capitalism really is
| about is a property rights system that allows for
| unlimited accumulation of capital (hence the name!),
| which inevitably leads to its aggregation in the hands of
| a few monopolists who then strangle said free market.
|
| Free markets themselves, though, are a concept far older
| than capitalism, and are compatible with a broad variety
| of economic systems, including many forms of socialism
| and left-wing anarchism - e.g. Proudhon, the granddaddy
| of modern anarchist thought, was very much anti-
| capitalist and pro-free-market.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism#Free-
| marke...
| eptcyka wrote:
| Nothing in Wikipedia's design resembles the Gruen Transfer.
| tlb wrote:
| If you don't turn off the "Explore feed" or "Year in Review" in
| the mobile app it finds you.
| pirates wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I have installed and deleted it many times since the web UI
| is good enough for me.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Don't store the money in the bank, store it in bonds and etfs
| that are cash equivalent.
|
| (This is not financial advice)
| jalk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That has been the case with international flights for my entire
| life . . . I suspect longer.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hennell wrote:
| There's a great podcast called "How To F#EURk Up An Airport"
| which details the many _many_ problems building a new airport
| in Berlin.
|
| One of the funniest to me was that the architect didn't like
| the forced shopping path of modern airports. So he just didn't
| add any. And no-one noticed until after they'd built the
| foundations, so then they added a new floor, but it would be
| out of the way so who'd want to go there reducing income
| forecasts, while requiring new ventilation requirements, fire
| suppression systems etc.
|
| If you work on poorly defined constantly changing software
| tasks it's all quite familiar. Just with a literal airport.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Was there recently. On the plus side, it's less objectionable
| than either of Berlin's previous airports, but it really is a
| bit of a weird mess.
| dormento wrote:
| In Brazil as well.
|
| What makes it double funny is the whole security theater around
| being unable to carry certain items during flight (due to risk
| of explosives, for example). A determined person would probably
| be able to craft some makeshift explosives with things one can
| buy at the taxfree shop.
| Jolter wrote:
| I'm not convinced, but if you could write up some examples, I
| think it would make for interesting reading...
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Alcohol [in eg hairspray], and a lighter?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| A fireball would certainly be problematic, and fires are
| very bad for planes, but only when they are less
| controlled than in the passenger cabin.
|
| You would be very unlikely to be able to create an
| _explosive_ , since there's not a lot of chemistry
| supplies for sale, but it's trivial to build/buy a
| _weapon_ to attempt to take over the plane, and the
| threat has been demonstrated at least once that I know
| of.
|
| Like almost all airport security since 9/11, preventing
| people from bringing weapons onto a plane is almost
| meaningless. Sure, you could hurt and kill passengers and
| flight attendants, but you could do that kind of
| terrorism anywhere. It won't bring down the plane, and as
| long as the cockpit door stays closed you will never
| hijack the plane.
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| London Stansted and Manchester (same owners) recently had
| "upgrades" where you have to walk along a street to get to the
| seating area and gates beyond.
|
| That street is narrow, long and forces you to pass every single
| shop in the departures area. It's blatantly hostile design.
| IIsi50MHz wrote:
| Kansas City airport (KCI) was replaced a few years ago. The
| previous design was three c-shaped terminals, each of which
| had a curb-to-plane distance that, before 9/11, meant coming
| or going was very fast. Arriving 15 minutes before takeoff
| was overkill. Time from deplaning to leaving the airport curb
| could be 2 minutes. People didn't pass more than one or two
| shops or restaurants, typically (sometimes none). Even after
| 9/11, despite public advice to arrive 2 hours in advance, it
| seemed that 1.5 hours or more was wasted just sitting next to
| the gate.
|
| But for airlines, I seem to recall servicing KCI was
| expensive. I think more than once, various airlines left or
| threatened to leave due to the high fees, which affected
| ticket prices. Fees which could not be offset by charging
| vendors the typical enormous rental prices. The new security
| barriers prevented much of the already limited foot traffic.
|
| DHS also didn't like the proximity to the curb, and
| threatened to close the airport. A new design was sought (and
| ended up being partly designed by a friend of mine), and so
| now the new one follows the typical pattern: funnel everybody
| into far-too-few security check points (always leaving some
| unmanned), then into a large concourse with lots of expensive
| ways to spend money.
|
| Seems that people are more willing to pay airport markup
| while waiting, than to pay higher ticket prices.
| jofla_net wrote:
| Just saw a picture. What a marvel of efficiency, which of
| course means we cant have it since its a nice thing.
| Looking forward to my future missed flights.
| barbazoo wrote:
| IKEA are actually the opposite of mazes. There's one main path
| that when you follow it brings you to the end and the
| occasional shortcut, literally impossible to get lost.
| jalk wrote:
| You are right, but few people get it when I say "The Swedish
| Lombard Street"
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's not a maze but it is a long path. Think of a traditional
| furniture shop or warehouse type store. You'll usually be
| able to see all 4 outer walls and the store is arranged in a
| kind of grid where you can walk almost directly to what you
| want.
|
| I don't have any problem with the IKEA layout, the experience
| is almost part of what you are going for. But it is obviously
| designed to make you take longer paths to things.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Hmm, this probably explains why my interaction with the internet
| is mostly through ChatGPT summaries these days.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I am certain the same thing will happen there, unfortunately.
| bityard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I may or may not make a living brokering exactly this.
| moomin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Navigating one of those inconveniences gives the user more
| power, while the other disempowers the user.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ...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 wrote:
| There is a middle ground between a carefully curated list
| of vendors and any company can fill out some paperwork and
| signup.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| drew870mitchell wrote:
| We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building
| the software and technology and automation) would do well
| as a community to spend more time on introspection about
| what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes
| promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in
| practice only to make the walls of an aspiring
| monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to
| anybody else.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Unironically
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04
|
| We as an industry are seen as defined by
| crap/enshitification now. The world gave us good faith,
| cheered us on, mostly excitedly hyped us. And we picked,
| by small choice after small choice, this.
| int_19h wrote:
| Technological advancement by itself merely creates the
| _potential_ for equalization. Whether that potential is
| actually realized depends on the culture of society,
| though. You can use the same basic tech to build Star
| Trek communism or a cyberpunk dystopia.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Does anybody live in that middle ground?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Amazon ten years ago?
| lazystar wrote:
| id argue that amazon is the middle ground; temu has lower
| quality
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Someone should tell the person in charge of Apple's App
| Store that.
| MyPasswordSucks wrote:
| First and foremost, you have to understand why people use
| Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm
| looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd
| expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the
| US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat.
| People don't generally feel like messing around on three or
| four different websites to find the item, add it to their
| cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long
| the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental
| heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the
| sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-
| day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon.
|
| So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products
| people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really
| need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's
| a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs
| have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the
| U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a
| money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and
| not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it
| because they have their own shipping network, so if you want
| parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.
|
| Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just
| selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much
| cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost,
| because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and
| DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing
| heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly
| incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-
| store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor
| won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely
| path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on
| just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a
| single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as
| cashflow allowed.
|
| So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer
| answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and
| patience".
| coliveira wrote:
| > "Amazon shipping is always free"
|
| No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you
| pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.
| MyPasswordSucks wrote:
| I pay for Prime, so that's my mental heuristic. Plenty of
| other people are in the same boat. For those who don't
| pay for Prime, "free over $35" is an acceptable drop-in
| replacement.
| autoexec wrote:
| Even if you pay for prime not everything sold on amazon
| is "prime eligible"
| autoexec wrote:
| > the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to
| pay elsewhere
|
| I've increasingly found that prices on amazon are higher
| than you'd pay on the manufacturers website. Sometimes much
| higher. It's worth checking. Some sites have been cheaper
| and had free shipping. The only catch is that shipping
| times were 3-5 weeks as opposed to the 3-14 days it would
| take for prime's 3 day shipping to actually show up.
| mindslight wrote:
| So many terrible trends are driven purely by people's over
| reliance on mobile phones. When you're at a personal
| computer, it's not terribly hard to search for the same
| product on multiple web stores and see which one makes the
| most sense, or build up a cart over a few days to hit a
| shipping minimum. "Fast" shipping is overstated for Amazon
| and overrated for most purchases - on average, with the
| Sunk Cost Fallacy membership, it's maybe a day or two
| quicker than other web stores. If you really do need
| something urgently then it's worth it to spend a little
| effort comparing who can actually get it to you the
| quickest. And over time you build up a regular intuition of
| where to shop for various types of things, and for many
| things independent stores have much better curation.
| Weighing competitive options is only hard when you've
| disempowered yourself by using a tiny touch screen with an
| attacker-owned operating system.
| abracadaniel wrote:
| A few years ago I noticed that my shipments all took a week
| or more regardless, but other retailers would have it here
| in a day or two, sometimes same day. Cancelled prime and
| haven't regretted it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Buying land (or renting), building warehouses, and employing
| people to move stuff is extremely costly.
|
| >one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't
| allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low
| quality knockoffs, etc.
|
| This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best
| Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it
| tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money
| off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the
| long term.
| coldpie wrote:
| Honestly? I just drive over to Best Buy now. Yeah it costs a
| few bucks more and I have to leave the house (this is
| actually a good thing), but I can be certain that the box on
| the shelf that says "surge protector" is actually a surge
| protector and I don't need to spend 15 frustrating minutes
| sorting through intentionally misleading trash to find it and
| then cross my fingers that what I order is what I actually
| receive.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The best buys in my area are getting kind of sketch in the
| past few years. Numerous empty shelves. Products sitting on
| the floors in boxes not put up for display. Wish I had a
| Microcenter close.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| All the stores are like this now, not just Best Buy.
| Walmart used to be, as I remember it, this insane level
| of consumerism store where the shelves were overfilled
| and there was no product so niche that they didn't have
| at least a few of nearly any product you can imagine.
| They used to sell hard drives, for fuck's sake, even if
| it seems like they were locked behind the glass near the
| electronics checkout. Now you go in there, and it's just
| a wasteland. Home Depot no longer sells home improvement
| or hardware store goods... it tries to sell the cheap
| junk you'd think would be in the Walmart. There are no
| tools at Home Depot unless a contractor would use them.
| Absolutely nothing for woodworking (I seem to remember
| them carrying at least one display piece for a wood lathe
| back around 1999-2003), now there are no table saws. I
| often end up going with my wife or my daughter to
| Michael's or Hobby Lobby, the former has reduced their
| store inventory so much that the only way to hide it was
| to remove shelves and spread them thinner so that you
| could march a school band through the aisles without them
| having to step closer to each other. The latter has
| changed their inventory to have fewer craft supplies, and
| more Temu-style junk.
|
| Big box stores are all dying or dead.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| HD revenue is 250% ish vs what it was 15 years ago.
| Currently at ATH. Hard to say they're dying.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Adjusted for inflation? With how many new stores in that
| timeframe?
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Caveat - I haven't gone to primary sources, but all
| indications are that they're doing pretty well. Increase
| of 1.8~% in number of store locations in the last 5
| years.
|
| Inflation adjusted, revenue is up 38% since late 2009.
|
| Wal-Mart is similarly doing very well.
|
| If you thought HD and WMT were dying, this may be a
| moment to reevaluate the heuristics you're using to gauge
| the health of retail businesses.
|
| https://ycharts.com/indicators/home_depot_inc_hd_total_st
| ore... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HD/home-
| depot/reve...
| oyashirochama wrote:
| They are dying as what their namesakes suggest and
| instead become slop factories.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Their investors don't care so long as line go up
| everforward wrote:
| Microcenter's commission scheme has made their sales
| people intolerable. Last time I was in there I had to
| tell no less than 6 employees I was perfectly comfortable
| choosing a router and DisplayPort cable without them.
|
| I am also capable of reading the back of the box. It's
| actually much easier without having employees interrupt
| and hover around me.
| zargon wrote:
| Also, Amazon cedes control of their supply chain to any
| rando who will ship them product. So it's just as likely
| that you receive a power strip without surge protection,
| even if it claims to have it.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| If you look at Walmart and others most 3rd party sellers just
| duplicate their listing across platforms. E-commerce has
| fewer "competitors" and more carbon copies
| scotty79 wrote:
| I think it was horrible form the start. When e-commerce was
| starting to be a thing it was quickly establish how a store
| should look, what should it have and where. Like when TVs
| were made everybody settled on a rectangular display pretty
| quickly. Amazon is sort of first of TV companies that
| initially made their first commercial TV a globe and ignoring
| that every other competitor started making rectangular TVs
| pretty quickly Amazon to this day manufactures globe TVs and
| they still sell, not because they are good or what people
| think TV should look like, but just because they are cheap
| and delivery is convenient.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| > but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem
| to be a serious competitor
|
| Why does this confuse you? It's the same in every single
| industry in the US right now.
|
| Go ahead, try and start up a competitor to Amazon. Most
| likely you will just fail for normal business reasons, but if
| you ever even come close to being a threat, Amazon will just
| immense weight to steal your market out from under you. They
| can subsidize anything they want with AWS profits and can
| outspend you in any direction.
|
| Meanwhile the DOJ will look away from obvious anti-
| competitive behavior because Reagan was a moron who thought
| regulating markets was magically bad.
|
| Even Google ran into this with Fiber. Everywhere they went,
| Spectrum and Comcast just dropped prices to make Google's
| offer not very impressive, which is easy for them to do since
| they've spent decades extracting unbounded profits and paying
| off infrastructure investments, so their costs will be lower
| than any market entrant. Demonstrating like this that you
| COULD have significantly lowered prices but just chose not to
| SHOULD make people angry at you, but Americans are allergic
| to requiring companies actually be good for consumers.
|
| This is the clear, obvious, trivial direction that any market
| operating in a capitalistic system is attempting to become.
| People need to stop being surprised.
|
| If you want a competitive market, that doesn't happen
| naturally. You must force it.
| oofManBang wrote:
| I don't really care about knockoffs (hell, I would happily
| shop on a site that ONLY sold knockoffs for basically
| everything but electronics), I just want to spend as little
| time actually looking through products as possible. Google is
| good for a lot of things but finding good places to buy stuff
| is not one of them. The entire process of making a profile
| and entering payment information is sufficient to ensure I
| don't buy from your site at all.
|
| Tbh, amazon should probably be run as a public service. We've
| long since passed the point where their profit incentives
| benefit anyone but shareholders. By about fifteen-twenty
| years by my estimate.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Because other retailers treat their customers like pieces of
| shit. That's it. Everybody has been burnt, shoppers want to
| be able to purchase safely. Price, interface, and everything
| else is of less importance.
|
| Will other retailers start treating their customers like
| human beings? Not a chance in hell. They'd rather let Amazon
| bankrupt them than do that.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Aliexpress is just as bad as well, they have taken the Amazon
| model and ramped it to 11. Yet they don't seem to be
| intentionally mixing in bad results like Amazon is, instead
| because its all external sellers they are all embedding
| searched keywords to push their product in front of you. There
| are loads of shopNNNNNNNN based sellers doing this with various
| products that clearly don't last long. Both store designs only
| seem to exist due to having almost anything on them but the
| cost is long, complex and detail checking searches, they are
| minefields of wrong products.
|
| Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot
| of results where the page appears to not even include the words
| I searched for far. I see the same thing on
| duckduckgo/microsoft now too.
|
| When did searches that bring back results that don't match
| become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with
| ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them
| now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems
| unlikely given the page contents).
| YeahThisIsMe wrote:
| Google just changes and ignores your search terms and then
| serves you the results to whatever it wants instead.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I just want a search engine that won't return blogs with
| affiliate links or many results that are providing
| identical information.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| When I click a result and see Amazon links, it's instant
| back button.
|
| Why can't Google's algorithm determine that any page with
| a list of Amazon affiliate links is 99.999% low quality,
| low effort blogspam?
| bityard wrote:
| Because those pages also make Google a lot of money via
| ads. "Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome."
| eitland wrote:
| Try Marginalia :-)
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| Kagi.com
|
| Allows you to customize results more than any I've used.
| heavensteeth wrote:
| Recently I've had Google return results lacking search
| terms I've put in quotes (and then clicked "Show results
| for xxx instead" when it tries to 'correct' me). I have no
| idea how I'm supposed to make my desire any clearer.
| caxon26 wrote:
| Googles a little better about matching exact terms if you
| go to search tools -> all results and change it to
| Verbatim
| prepend wrote:
| Every single search. It's funny to me that Google doesn't
| let you default this setting and a sign they they are
| quite anti-user.
|
| I wonder what employees of Google actually use. Is there
| a non-crappy version of Google that actually meets their
| needs and returns what they need?
| bityard wrote:
| It has been a long time since double quotes worked
| reliably for me on Google.
|
| It has also been a long time since Google showed me any
| search results that weren't 100% ad-laden blogspam with
| wordy vague (and often incorrect) content with clickbait
| titles. I have basically given up on Google altogether.
| autoexec wrote:
| I stopped using Google at work when they forced
| javascript. Since then I realized that I haven't missed
| it at all and I've stopped using it entirely. It's become
| trash.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| What do you use instead?
| eitland wrote:
| Not GP but I have used Marginalia + DDG until 3 years ago
| and Kagi since then.
| int_19h wrote:
| +1 for Kagi. If you want a search engine that works with
| you rather than against you, this is it right now.
| eitland wrote:
| This has been going on for over a decade for me now (I
| know because I blogged about it at the time).
|
| For years I used DDG, not because it was better, but it
| wasn't worse and I wanted to support competition.
|
| Then I started using Marginalia and shortly after I found
| Kagi.
|
| Kagi works like Google used to do (and has a range of
| nice extra features) and in the _very_ unusual situations
| were it doesn 't work, when I posted it to the forums it
| was quickly acknowledged and dealt with.
|
| Extremely refreshing to be on the customer side of a
| search engine the last three years instead of being some
| kind of livestock for Googles ad sales machine.
| xp84 wrote:
| My observation with Google is that an astonishing high
| percentage of their users stopped clicking organic search
| results around 2010 or so. They exclusively choose from
| amongst the top two or three ads, which they don't even
| realize are ads since the indication of "what's an ad" has
| gotten more and more subtle and the position of the first
| organic result has gotten lower and lower on the page to the
| point where today you generally would have to scroll a bit to
| find the first organic research result. The same users who
| only clicked the sponsored links before now don't click any
| links, usually preferring to simply read the AI generated
| summary of some random spam results (which notably is _far_
| worse in accuracy than what you would get if you simply asked
| an LLM directly).
|
| I think as a result, Google doesn't really care about the
| quality of their organic search results since on the scale
| Google cares about, "nobody" clicks them anyway.
| c-linkage wrote:
| My suspicion is that Amazon -- in addition to having paid
| product placement -- probably has engagement metrics. If you
| have to dig into the details on every product in the search to
| find exactly what you're looking for, that increases
| engagement.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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._
|
| Does it? It seems to return things with my search terms just
| fine. What is usually the case is that there are lots of items
| with some of those search terms that are also popular.
|
| I see no evidence that Amazon is trying to make its regular
| search _worse_.
|
| With sponsored listings there's a separate issue if sellers are
| bidding on keywords, but that's also to be expected.
|
| It makes sense for Amazon to show other products on product
| pages and in checkout (as it does). But doing it intentionally
| during search would seem counterproductive. The reality is just
| that search is hard, and people are often bad at entering
| search terms.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Sponsored listings are an obvious way that Amazon is
| deliberately making their search worse.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I think it's obvious that when we talk about search
| results, we're talking about search results, not ads.
|
| Saying that ads make things worse isn't an interesting
| observation. That's just the internet. It's nothing
| specific to search.
| wat10000 wrote:
| When the ads are interleaved into the organic results
| with only a tiny gray "Sponsored" label to differentiate
| them, that's making search worse. Amazon is the one
| mixing them up, not me.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The point is, we can measure the quality of organic
| search results, that's the topic here, and I don't see
| any evidence of Amazon engaging in this "Gruen transfer"
| for organic search results.
|
| _Obviously_ putting ads in search is going to worsen the
| overall quality of search+ads. But that 's not an
| interesting observation to make because we all know that
| already. It's by definition. And it's clear Amazon is
| doing that to make money from the ads, again not as a
| "Gruen transfer" effect.
| schiffern wrote:
| >[It isn't "Gruen transfer" because it's an ad to make
| money.]
|
| Why would that particular carve-out be considered part of
| the definition of "Gruen transfer?"
|
| Seems more like clicking on ads is the _end_ and Gruen
| transfer (via intentionally confusing ads with search
| results) is the _means_.
|
| FTA: "The 'Transfer' part is the moment that you, as a
| consumer surrounded by a deliberately confusing layout,
| lose track of your original intentions." This still seems
| perfectly applicable to me?
|
| FTA: "The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my
| feed was updates from friends. The rest was a combination
| of ads, memes, and influencer marketing videos..." So
| putting ads in lists where they don't belong is
| explicitly _included_ in the definition, despite your
| attempt to exclude it.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think you're being too charitable. The user doesn't
| just experience the organic search results but the whole
| thing, ads and all. It's entirely Amazon's choice which
| ads to run when and where so you can't rule out
| intentional "Gruen transfer" in the overall results by
| placing ads for maximum confusion.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| This is so weird to me. I'm always hearing people having issues
| with Amazon but I have a near perfect experience shopping on
| there or with consuming entertainment on Prime.
|
| Honestly, I feel guilty about it because I really dislike Bezos
| and Amazon's reputation as a terrible employer, yet they make a
| damn good product.
|
| If you know of a better shopping site that delivers similar or
| better quality experience, please do let me know. I'll look
| into geizhals.at , but even for electronics, I've found Amazon
| better than dedicated sites like newegg because I find what I'm
| looking for, it is good quality and shipping times are amazing.
|
| Perhaps it's a location issue, does Amazon have a worse service
| for non-US people?
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| Try sorting results by price. In my experience it doesn't
| actually work. It puts items in featured order regardless.
| And if you dig through enough you can find cheaper items
| further down.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I've tried messing with the sorting, and I've always found
| "Featured" is what I want. If I want something cheap I'd go
| to temu. I've never wanted "the most expensive" thing just
| because either. If cheaper is better quality, it tends to
| bubble up to the top when you sort by reviews because more
| people will buy the cheaper thing that has good quality
| (unless it's brand new).
| scotty79 wrote:
| Apparently you are an ideal Amazon customer. I knew there
| has to be one somewhere.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| As someone who used Amazon, stopped, then comes back from
| time to time, it's crap. You've been trained to it, it
| hasn't been optimized for you.
|
| From my life, if you feel like you shouldn't but still
| do, you should stop/check yourself. Applies to the hard
| things in life, but also the easy ones like not using a
| store.
| Narishma wrote:
| Youtube search is similar. It shows a couple of results related
| to your query, then a whole bunch of irrelevant videos.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Yep, the irrelevant videos are clearly targeted based on
| viewing history, but a completely separate topic from the
| search, and often with clickbait titles.
|
| Tangentially related, I typically queue multiple videos, and
| within the past year YouTube has started inserting new videos
| into my queue. It's always one by the same person of the
| currently playing video, placed next in the queue, and it
| only gets inserted after watching the current video for some
| period of time.
|
| That last part made it difficult to diagnose. It's extremely
| annoying and feels like gaslighting because it's never a
| video I actually have an interest in watching.
|
| Has anyone found a way to disable this?
| close04 wrote:
| I pay for Youtube and see in the results a lot of
| irrelevant videos that have nothing to do with my search or
| viewing history.
|
| But it gets so much worse. I leave the "smart downloads"
| feature enabled in Youtube Music on my phone because
| sometimes it discovers and downloads some gems for me.
| Again and again it downloads "artists" and music genres
| that I went out of my way to never have to listen to. To
| add insult to injury it sometimes refuses to delete those
| playlists for hours after I click the button. One time I
| had to clear all the downloads just to remove that trash.
|
| There is no "organic" explanation for this as much as I'd
| dig for one. This is Youtube taking money to push a
| product.
| teabee wrote:
| The browser extension "Unhook" for YouTube gives you full
| customization of what content presentations display and
| auto play etc. Even allows to remove the home page, which
| is designed to distract. For phones, I recommend using your
| web browser instead of the app. Using your phone web
| browser also allows for using adblock so it's a double win
| minus the less usable interface
| coliveira wrote:
| Search companies like Google reached the conclusion that
| search results need to be another form of infinite scrolling.
| They will spend little time doing real search and then flood
| the results with what they really want people to see.
| jcynix wrote:
| And YouTube isn't really interested to improve their
| suggestions: when I say "Not interested" to a suggestion,
| they ask why not with two idiotic possible answers: a) I've
| already seen it or b) I don't like it.
|
| If a) would be the case, they most of the time would know it
| and if b) would be the case, I would have seen it too and
| thus a).
|
| Examples: I use Canon and Fuji gear for taking pictures, but
| they offer me Nikon or Sony related videos. If they would
| actually have some interest to optimize suggestions, they
| would offer me to say "I'm not interested in
| Nikon/Sony/whatever" ... wouldn't they?
|
| Or Amazon, offering me Sony lenses for my Fuji. Or more of
| Thing-X after buying some Thing-X yesterday. But I only need
| exactly one new Thing-X, which their stupid "AI" Rufus should
| know by now if their suggestion machinery didn't know it
| already ;-0
| filoeleven wrote:
| I've stopped using "not interested" because it's so shitty
| and pointless. It has no effect whatsoever on the other
| videos YT decides to show me. I swear when I clicked "I've
| already watched this video" the Home Screen would show more
| previously-watched videos than before.
|
| I aggressively nuke channels instead, and use a ublock
| script to hide anything with a red bar (which means I
| previously watched it).
| asah wrote:
| from insider eng sources, the search quality mess is not
| intentional.
|
| I worked on various commerce search engines, and briefly ran
| Google Shopping back in the day - surprisingly hard problem !
| blueflow wrote:
| We know this is a lie because it worked pretty well until
| like 2015? 2020?
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is hard to say either way I think...
|
| Amazon sellers, lots of them don't work for Amazon, right?
| Their incentive is to show up in searches, and the one who
| takes the reputation hit when they game the system and show
| up in the wrong search is mostly Amazon, not them. So, it
| would 0% surprise me if Amazon was just losing to the
| malicious subset of the parties being indexed, like Google
| is.
|
| Not saying this is definitely the case, but it seems like a
| plausible alternative theory.
|
| And, it probably won't get better. In 2015 these companies
| were at the tail end of being new and interesting. In 2025
| they are the slow entrenched incumbents.
| coliveira wrote:
| > Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the
| parties
|
| No, this is by design. Amazon has no problem whatsoever
| in banning sellers that do things they don't like. It
| definitely helps Amazon to keep this state of things.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if somebody will come along to defend that
| position that your edited version of my post is
| proposing. It would be interesting to see somebody defend
| it (I'm not interested in doing so, though).
| neither_color wrote:
| The most aggravating part is it ignores booleans. Sometimes I
| want to search for very specific things that are variants of
| hyper-competitive SEO-slop, only without feature x. Like if I
| want to search for functional lamps that take bulbs (not
| integrated LEDs). I should be able to search for Lamp -LED
| without it showing me a thousand led lamps (and upselling me a
| purchase protection plan when I add to cart. )
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| you can buy bulb sockets and lamp cord at the hardware store.
| coliveira wrote:
| Amazon has infected the minds of lots of people to a point
| where they'll spend half an hour sifting through garbage
| listings in their horrible web site and then wait a full
| day to receive the product, instead of going to the corner
| store and buy what they know they want.
| immibis wrote:
| It's incredible, right? But what causes it? And is it
| connected to all the other facets of the mass dumbing-
| down of the entire population?
| neither_color wrote:
| I'll humor this patronizing reply chain to add that online
| shopping, despite its flaws and lack of boolean search, has
| a better selection and long tail variety than local brick
| and mortar establishments that all hassle you with warranty
| protection plan upsells and customer loyalty points anyway.
| Even the rare shop that can beat Amazon on price and
| selection, like Microcenter, still tries to guilt trip you
| with extended warranties and $80 "ram installation"
| service.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| When searching for a dehumidifier, 80% of the results are
| humidifiers.
|
| I've always thought it was NLP gone awry (stripping prefixes,
| searching in vector space instead of characters)
|
| But maybe it's just shitty on purpose to keep you around.
| anthonyrstevens wrote:
| This is not my experience. I just did a search for
| "dehumidifer" and ALL of the first 50 results are for
| dehumidifiers. The 51st result is for:
|
| Vacplus Moisture Absorbers 6 Pack, 10.5 Oz Portable Humidity
| Absorber Boxes for Your Bathroom, Closet & Car, Dehumidifier
| with Fragrance
|
| ...which is related, no?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| You're right. I guess it was nlp gone awry when I looked
| for one 2 years ago but now it's fixed.
|
| Only the sponsored results are not dehumidifiers when I
| just did a search.
|
| Sorry for the noise.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| geizhals.at is regrettably only available in Austria, Germany,
| and the EU, but other sites I've used with similar good
| parametric search and filter are digikey.com (electronics
| engineering), https://at.rs-online.com (more electronics
| engineering), and McMaster.com (industrial manufacturing).
|
| I've observed that developing and maintaining a database with
| the relevant attributes for each component is a ton of work and
| becomes a huge value-add _for a distributor_ with technically
| inclined customers. It cannot be outsourced to manufacturers,
| as they have no incentive to match their schema to other
| manufacturers, and it cannot be outsourced to marketplace
| sellers, as they too lack this incentive. Both groups want
| their products to appear in as many searches as possible. Only
| the distributor wants exclusively the correct products to show
| up for a limited search and is in a position to enforce
| consistency across different marketplace listings and
| manufacturers.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| On a side note, McMaster.com is the very best online shopping
| site I've ever visited or used. It's blazing fast (a trick
| based on pre-fetching that you can observe in all its glory
| in the developer view of your favourite browser), it's
| logical, uncluttered - perfect.
| silon42 wrote:
| We need a Europe version of that.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| This efficiency extends to their customer support ops as
| well. I ordered the wrong size of a bin, sent a message in
| their chat saying I wanted to return the bins and get the
| ### SKU instead, and without any further input from me,
| there were new bins delivered 2 days later.
|
| They seem to have the assumption that their customers are
| actually trying to get some shit done.
| immibis wrote:
| On a related note, https://segor.de/ doesn't have great
| search (and they don't remotely attempt to carry every
| component, and note that a whole lot of German component
| names look nothing like their English counterparts) but the
| technical design of their online catalog is interesting -
| it's a fast single-page app with about 3MB of data, so when
| you navigate the catalog it doesn't do any network round-
| trips except to fetch images.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Having marketplace sellers do it could probably work if the
| moderation had teeth. But (for example) I've reported
| intentionally miscategorized listings on ebay only to have an
| automated system reject the report.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> 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._
|
| I have done exactly that. Some of the "mixins" are really
| strange, and have nothing at all to with what I'm looking for,
| so I have to assume that are paid keyword poisoning.
| oyashirochama wrote:
| There's also the well known, name change that happens. Where
| the product used to be a different item/SKU tied to the
| product on Amazon. Used to poison ratings a LOT.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| The biggest problem I have with Amazon is that after I buy
| something, for example AA batteries, Amazon will then recommend
| me _only batteries_ , like I am the ultimate battery collecting
| hipster of the world. "AA's? If you're into mainstream, I
| guess. But check out these CR2032s, they can power vintage
| calculators."
| toasterlovin wrote:
| FWIW, Amazon's search algorithm is actually extremely simple:
| rankings are based on what people buy after searching for a
| particular term. To use your examples, the reason why Amazon is
| showing power strips when you search for "surge protectors" is
| because people often use the terms interchangeably. So, while
| this is bad for you, since you correctly distinguish the terms,
| it's actually better for people who use the terms
| interchangeably and do want a power strip when they search for
| surge protectors. And I think it's ambiguous what the correct
| behavior should be. Perhaps in the future some AI system will
| be able to help customers manage this kind of confusion, but
| we're not there yet.
|
| Since inevitably someone will mention that the search results
| are littered with ads: yes, they are, and due to the same
| factor I mentioned above, it makes sense for sellers to
| advertise, say, power strips against the search term "surge
| protector." We run into a similar thing with "outdoor" rated
| wire. It's a term which technically means a rating for UV
| exposure. However, customers often use it to refer to wire that
| is rated for burial in the ground. So we advertise our burial
| rated cable against the "outdoor" search keyword. Gotta meet
| the customers where they are.
| mrandish wrote:
| I have no conceptual issue with Amazon serving ads against
| search terms. My big issue with Amazon search is that they
| intentionally made it _much_ less useful by removing any
| ability to group words into one term with quotes or exclude
| any term with minus. These were working features of Amazon
| search that had long been there (and are probably still there
| in the code).
|
| With the sheer number of products and the proliferation of
| feature or compatibility requirements buyers have to match,
| removing this functionality basically breaks Amazon search.
| Just try finding finding an LED bulb of a certain wattage
| that's dimmable. Every seller of non-dimmable bulbs puts the
| words "Not Dimmable" in their description to reduce returns.
| Amazon search will return all of those, with the listings I
| want buried somewhere in that flood - all because they've
| arbitrarily chosen to disable the standard, well-understood
| way of solving this common problem. The only solution is
| using an external search engine and limiting it to
| Amazon.com.
| oofManBang wrote:
| > I have no conceptual issue with Amazon serving ads
| against search terms.
|
| I do. Ads have zero positive. They lower everyone's quality
| of life and stuff our heads full of useless crap like brand
| awareness. Truly a cancer on society in every conceivable
| way.
| mrandish wrote:
| I agree ads are annoying and I wish they weren't there
| (and for me, they're mostly not because: uBlock Origen).
| My point was that conceptually in-store advertising has
| been a thing for over a hundred years. Retailers have
| always merchandised their inventory.
|
| However, _breaking_ existing basic functionality like
| Search with the specific intention of making it harder
| and take longer for users to find what they want goes
| beyond annoying to malicious.
| mrandish wrote:
| That this effect and related 'enshittification'
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is now
| prevalent everywhere is really depressing to me. Here's why. I
| recently retired somewhat early from a career spent entirely in
| high tech creating new kinds of products and services. Often,
| products that made life better for users by empowering them to
| do things they couldn't do before and sometimes solving old
| problems better, faster _and_ cheaper.
|
| That whole time, I had an underlying belief that those of us in
| "the industry" (high tech entrepreneurial startups) were
| generally making the world better, whether in large ways like
| personal empowerment or small ways like making daily life
| easier, more efficient or, sometimes, even more delightful. In
| some sense, I felt like I was a small part of a larger march
| toward the kind of better future which so inspired me in the
| sci-fi books I read as a kid.
|
| Over the last five years I've increasingly seen mainstream tech
| products and services adopting dark patterns or abusing
| customer's time or trust in other ways. Of course, there were
| always a few companies that sucked, either due to incompetence
| or just being unethical but most everyone agreed they were
| _bad_. But now using dark patterns, or just taking steps to
| actively make the product experience worse for users, is no
| longer an aberration or regression - it 's apparently accepted
| as normal. High tech leaders from FAANG on down are ALL
| knowingly doing this shit. It's on KPIs. Teams of competent
| professional technologists are collecting bonuses for
| intentionally making their product or service worse for
| millions of users.
|
| Right before I retired I actually saw this starting to happen
| in the company I was at. I was in meetings where some of my
| coworkers seriously proposed doing obviously wrong things,
| arguing it would boost "the metrics". Being a senior exec, I
| was mostly able to correct this by pointing out customer
| satisfaction, loyalty and confidence in our brand were the most
| important metrics, but it did feel 'off'. At first I dismissed
| it as a handful of employees with mis-calibrated values but it
| kept happening. Eventually, the CEO overruled me on one of
| these "values"-based product decisions. It really bothered me
| because, even though it was dressed up in polite language, it
| was clearly just about burning customer goodwill to boost a
| short-term metric. At the time, I assumed the company was just
| slowly losing its way. Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever
| shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a
| time. Frankly, this change in ethos factored into my decision
| to retire. It's not like I expected every product decision to
| go my way but these weren't subjective judgements. And over the
| years I'd certainly made my share of product mistakes which
| negatively impacted customer's (oops!) but I fixed them and
| learned to do better. But it just felt weird (and really bad)
| to be doing the wrong thing _on purpose_. Sure, some of these
| things would boost metrics and revenue, at least in the short-
| term, but I found I couldn 't get myself to stop believing the
| best way to increase revenue was to keep making our product
| experiences even better.
|
| When I was in my late 20s and flying off to yet another trade
| show like Comdex, I sat next to a guy who worked for Marlboro
| cigarettes. It was fascinating talking with him and hearing the
| careful rationalizations about creating a product which
| obviously was bad for their customers and addictive to boot. I
| remember telling my coworkers at dinner that night about how
| weird it was to meet someone like that - and how lucky we were
| to be in high tech, where we got paid to build products that
| just kept getting better and generally helped make the world
| better - at least in some small way. Sure, I knew that progress
| would sometimes be two steps forward, one step back, but I
| guess I was naive to have never even imagined _this_ future.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I already posted this in this thread but unironically this
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04
|
| Tech leaned so heavy into enshitification it has become it,
| to the point an entire word was coined to explain what tech
| was turning the world around us into. Tech still thinks 'but
| I'm a good person/we're doing good so.... XYZ is OK' and
| isn't willing to even see how they actually chose to present
| themselves.
| mrandish wrote:
| I guess I was just lucky that my entire adult working life
| basically spanned the democratization of personal computers
| and digital communications from the 80s up to a few years
| ago. I never knowingly shipped anything that intentionally
| made things harder, less powerful or less efficient. On the
| contrary, everything I was involved with was substantially
| faster, better and more powerful than existing
| alternatives. And usually cheaper too. I guess people
| starting careers in high tech today will either have to
| make some hard ethical choices or get good at rationalizing
| doing bad things.
| jofla_net wrote:
| >Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been
| through winning over customers one at a time.
|
| This is one of the largest roots of atrophy in the industry,
| currently. "Customers" are taken as a given, and there's no
| connection to them any longer. "High-Tech" is effectively now
| like Sears.
| piotrpdev wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, it's unfortunate so many companies are
| short-sighted these days.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for
| the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.
|
| That's Amazon's recommender model. If you buy shoes you're like
| other people who buy shoes, including ones with different shoe
| sizes. So you may want shoes in different sizes.
|
| My fellow Greeks know how the algorithm works:
|
| https://scontent-lhr8-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/470673830...
| rendaw wrote:
| If I search for something in a category with "too few" results
| amazon redirects the search to "all products"... even when I
| know exactly what I want.
|
| And lately, even more infuriatingly, they started modifying my
| search terms! Like, I'll search for "hoover 2100" and some
| javascript will, after a second, change it to "hover 2100" and
| then show me completely irrelevant junk. And I go and change it
| back, and the javascript modifies it again! Not just showing
| the wrong results, but gaslighting me into thinking I had
| actually searched for the wrong thing, that the poor results
| were my fault!
|
| This isn't dumb stuff like bad categorization, or missing
| search facets, or all the other low effort issues... It's like
| they're actively trying to prevent me from buying things!
| dmazin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| spankalee wrote:
| Yes, I stopped using Facebook in 2016, but regardless it's
| not the feed but what's in it.
|
| The feed wasn't created to disorient, it was a great
| organization feature actually. It helped you see the most
| recent updates from friends and actually saved time at first
| compared to manually clicking around and getting lost on
| other parts of profiles.
| cgannett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's a fun coincidence, I just learned about Myrtle last
| Friday.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T-8E-dEbwc
| rixed wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
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