I deeply hate this behavior. Another example: The Health app on iOS has a closeable banner for the "Health Checklist" UI, which gives me the option to turn on things like crash detection, fall detection, etc. All of which are notifications. I hate notifications so I will never turn these on. I dutifully scanned through it the first time and verified everything was turned off, and the banner went away. But like clockwork, the banner comes back every 2 weeks and asks me to go through the checklist again. I suspect there's a "right answer" here. If I consent to turn everything on, it'll stop nagging me. But this badly needs a Never button, not a X button that actually means "nag me again in 2 weeks". I get that some product manager wants their fancy watch features enabled for more users so they can get a promotion, but their career ambitions are degrading my experience.
My grandpa used to say every few years they’d vote on allowing casinos.
And every few years the people of Missouri would vote NO casinos. But one time, they voted to allow the casinos. Then the votes stopped. Hugely manipulative and it feels like this sort of thing is everywhere now.
This is the classic result of the problem with democracy and “concentrated benefits and disperse costs”. Legal gambling is a HUGE money making opportunity for casinos, and for most voters it is just a minor negative. Of course, utility wise, the minor cost times the number of voters is much higher than the concentrated benefit, but the concentration makes it worth it for casinos to keep fighting for legalization. The cost of fighting for it is less than the benefit when it is legalized.
Now that it is legalized, though, there is no one who has a concentrated enough cost to fight for its reversal. It is more rational to just suffer the small cost of gambling instead of fighting hard for its repeal.
So as you say, they only have to win the fight once, and it is won forever, and society is slightly worse off.
This is the exact same reason Intuit keeps winning the tax battle… it matters more to them than anyone else, even though it makes it a little bit worse for everyone.
It also doesn't help that these days the stwte/country is probably large enough to gather ebouygh of a petition for whatever you want. Just word it nicely and you can get 10k, 100k people to say "sure why not?"
It isn’t apathy, it is rationality. Why would I spend a ton of time fighting against a problem that is a minor inconvenience to me? I have a lot of important things going on in my life, and a limited amount of time and energy to do things. It isn’t rational for me (or most people) to spend a bunch of time, money, and effort fighting against legalized gambling.
There literally isn’t enough time in the day for me to fight against everything, so you pick and choose where to spend your energy.
>Why would I spend a ton of time fighting against a problem that is a minor inconvenience to me
That's ideally why we elect proper representatives and have advocacy groups who can expend that energy. We don't do too much better there, spending a fee hours researching who will actually fight in our interest instead of enabling the armies of minor inconveniences to stack up.
Sad thing about the US is that it's a reactive country, not a preventative one. It really doesn't try to act on stuff until it's arguably too late.
I like the idea of policy changes like this having an expiry date a few years in the future, which forces a periodic revote if some party wants to keep the new policy. Like a political office term, this should be long enough to give businesses a timeframe they can plan around, and an opportunity for voters to see how the policy played out.
Perhaps it would lead to an ever-increasing pile of legal "confirmation dialog boxes" that bore the public. But I like that the default action (doing nothing) would lead to regulations being deleted, as there are few forces that act to reduce regulation, and having too many regulations is another slow-burn energy sink for everyone.
We have this in WA and it's arguably very dysfunctional, particularly because due to property tax caps it has kind of turned into government-by-renewed-levy, and causes all sorts of headaches when one particular levy to fund one project has a surplus and another has a deficit due to completely normal deviations in tax projections.
As someone who has done signature collection this is mostly correct but it ignores what the actual barrier is which is proof of work which is proof of money. The idea that a ballot initiative that's just a good idea someone had winding up on your voting paper will never happen because no one has money to collect signatures from millions of people and the annoying ceremony related to it. And this is working as designed because citizen ballot initiatives are despised by legislatures because the only reason to need them is because your representatives are fucking up that badly. So there's two kinds of ballot initiatives generally
* Coalition of nonprofits desperately trying to actually represent the will of the people in defiance of the legislature. Good recent example would be abortion amendments that pass without too much trouble in red states. Democrats might need to adjust their barometer on how Americans actually feel about immigration but Republicans have refused to acknowledge the Overton Window on abortion is passing them by.
* Cash grabs because some financially interested party realized the money to get legislation this way is worth the investment.
They did this with a giant new jail and its financing via sales tax in my hometown.
First they bundled it in the regular November election. It failed.
So then they bundled it in a run-off or primary election. It still failed.
Finally they ran it on a solo ballot and it finally passed.
I was like 19 or so. Voted against it every time but that was sort of an eye-opening moment for young me.
There is a similar case in California where every year a ballot initiative is proposed to repeal a law banning local rent control, in the last election it was prop 33. Despite it failing every election it continues to get proposed.
That one would unfortunately have a huge impact on some people. Aka, anyone who may need to house themselves one days but can't afford to buy. Sure hope we keep fighting that.
Rent control is beneficial to incumbent long term tenants but is pretty bad for everyone else including those who are looking for an apartment. It's one of the many "pro-renter" regulations that constrains supply and makes rent higher.
Price controls don't work for groceries or gasoline, why would they work for rent?
If you can find data in support of such a policy I'd be interested to see it.
Yes. But the thing is incumbent renters don't really have many rights in the US. The landlord is perfectly free to kick you out by not renewing the lease, and they need no reason to not renew it. So any benefits can be nullified by the very party the law is trying to protect you from.
>Price controls don't work for groceries or gasoline, why would they work for rent?
Whats the alternative? They increase rent to the point where people are kicked out anyway? Every option leads to unattainable rent except for the rich.
Same thing is how encryption backdoor laws and other erosions of rights work. Be vigilant because the first time the vote goes through, they will never hold another vote.
It's like p-hacking but with voting. Try enough tests/samples/whatever and eventually you'll get something that's "statisitically significant". Like the old xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/882/
Well yea. That why modifying the constitution is a monumental effort. They don't want things to sway as the congress and president shifts. It was easier for Texas to try and secede than to try and change the constitution in their favor.
Kinda how the European """parliament""" works. It's the only body called "parliament" in the entire world that I'm aware of which does not have the power to propose laws.
Therefore: if the commission wants a law, all they have to do is keep trying. If it fails, they try again. If it passes, well it only has to pass once. Because the parliament can't introduce bills which means it can't repeal existing laws.
To be fair, when you don't have casinos, you don't have casino taxes, casino employment, casino tourism, etc.
Also, you don't just "have" casinos, building any building of that size is at the very least a multi-month affair and likely multiple years.
So once you say "yes", you've set something in motion that is way harder to unwind than it was to kick off.
Also, I can see it being the casinos themselves asking permission to enter the state. Once they're allowed in, why would they ask to leave? That would be the job of someone else.
There is a similar case in California where every year a ballot initiative is proposed to repeal a law banning local rent control. Despite it failing every election it continues to get proposed. So its not just corporations who can do this, the demos do it too.
I don't like the idea because if you notice public opinion are slowly shifting on an policy you could purposefully propose it each backoff date to entrench it for like 8 or 16 years when public perception does swap.
I was joking, but my serious opinion on this is that direct democracy doesn't scale. For a country like Switzerland that is basically a small patchwork of villages up in the mountains it is probably fine, but for a polity of 39 million people and one of the biggest economies on Earth I should say it's a bad fit. Maybe for some local propositions.
I was implying the repeated votes to allow casinos were being put forward by the casinos themselves. They had a vested interest in the vote.
They have no vested interest in the opposite. Someone with that interest needs to lobby to get that vote to the people. Expecting the casinos to do that is weird
Very strongly recommended. I'd stumbled across this in my uni days, and its power and insight were obvious even to naive me then. It's since emerged as a classic of economics.
YouTube keeps on pushing shorts. If you click the x button on the "shorts" section, it will straight up tell you that it's only hiding the reccomendation for 30 days. They're not even pretending otherwise!
That's not even the worst of it. YouTube has a "shelf" that exists solely to announce that YouTube TV was rated highly in a JD Power consumer survey. It's completely meaningless to users, but that doesn't stop them from trying to show it to you again every few weeks.
Some YouTube executive must be really proud of that award.
You can selectively block elements from sites. I've blocked shorts from it and honestly forgot how annoying it was until these comments. Just right click, block element, preview before applying, make sure you don't butcher out unintended parts of the pages.
Every few restarts, it is showing a pop up that shows the wallpaper that was chosen and a “learn more” button… the pop up can’t be moved, can’t be closed, and stays on top no matter what.
It took me a few minutes before I finally gave up and clicked on the “learn more” button, which of course opened Edge (even though edge isn’t my default browser), which of course prompted me to switch to using edge as my default browser, which I had to decline and close edge again.
And now I have repeated this dance a number of times on restarts. No, I don’t want to learn more about the wallpaper, and I don’t want to use Edge!
Every few weeks I get "Windows 10 will reach end-of-support soon!". Honestly, I appreciate this, because it helps me mentally prepare for he day I'll finally switch to Linux.
Apple's "This video conferencing app just disabled reactions!!!!" notification is just the worst. Every video chat, every app, every time. Ugh!
I even like Apple's reactions implementation, which is pretty good, but there's definitely some PM that wants to push it in my face 10 times every day and I don't know what's worse, the PM doing this fully understanding the cost or whatever system stands aside and lets them continue.
Apple is hard at work enshittifying everything despite their main competitive advantage being a business model that doesn’t actually require them to do that. The iPhone settings app in particular is filled with advertising banners that add red badges to the icon that cannot be disabled.
Nah. Their business model requires it, just more subtle. Half the Apple "ecosystem" is just crippling their own products to only play nice with their products so you feel compelled to buy it over alternatives. See things like the Apple Watch, MTP support, iCloud backup etc.
you can see why they do. for me the only real fear of moving to android (I did anyway) was losing access to the Apple ecosystem. on the other hand, they've railroaded themselves into this situation by choosing it as the competitive advantage they want to pursue, and in doing so have damaged computing philosophy as a whole
My personal biggest gripe is the Gmail app on iPhone. There is no possible way to stop it from trying to force you to change your default browser to chrome every 2 weeks when you open a link.
the Mail app has its own massive issues. for whatever reason it is completely unable to just background sync and notify you immediately when you get an email. why is every messaging app able to do this instantaneously but email is not?
also their new default-on email classification system is a fucking nightmare and I was so glad when I figured out you can turn it off
A lot of these things could be useful but there will probably be more false alarms than not to varying degrees. I know I’ve had looks like you had a hard fall alerts that ranged from “huh?” To I landed on my butt from the edge of a bed that I wouldn’t have wanted an ambulance much less a helicopter for.
I have a UX rule that I try to implement: if I'm in a workflow and the app interrupts with something that is not immediately related to that workflow, I uninstall the app and never use it again. No, I don't care about that new feature. I care about the feature I'm currently using. No, I don't want to allow notifications. You don't choose when we interact, I do. You're the machine and I'm the human. No, I don't want to join your discord, or follow you on social media. I assure you that if you prompt me to give you a rating in the app store that you do not want my rating. Let me do the thing I installed you to do and otherwise fuck entirely off.
Amen. I just uninstall applications that do anti-user crap. There are very few applications that I need. Almost all are replaceable or truly unnecessary.
The most recent example that sticks in my mind is I uninstalled Duolingo because they kept changing the app icon, but what finally did it for me is when they changed to some disgusting version of it with snot dripping from the creature's (is it an owl? some kind of bird? I forget) nostrils. WTF Duolingo? Uninstalled, I'm done with it.
This is what software freedom means in concrete terms. I wonder if it will be easier to explain the principles of the FLOSS purists to the average person now that multiple facets of their lives are being meddled with by aggressively hostile software, and not just being stung now and then with dropped support, format lock-in, or forced obsolescence.
CoC destroyed all of that. There has been nothing more effective at alienating the general public from open source than CoC. It worked exactly as the corporations behind it intended. CoC is so corrosive that instead of using BC and AD, there should be BCoc and ACoc when discussing the world of open source. There will be no "Normie Revolution" into the open source world until CoC is under control, which is exactly why it never will be under control. It serves its corporate masters extremely well and to the cheers of those who once upon a time were against corporate power.
PMs don't like it when their funnel gets shut off. They hate true rejection and always think the user is just some finagling away from falling down the funnel.
Respecting the users does not have value FOR THEM. That's how the job works - they're measured on how much people they trick into falling into their feature so they can put together a slide deck with nice DAU numbers.
Same for engineers - user respect doesn't have value for them either, you'll get the laziest, easiest implementation of a given ticket. Or the most complex and one if they're up for promotion or want to learn a new tech.
Afterwards, both groups will happily run towards greener pastures by the time any of this "respect value" materializes.
It's going to take a cultural shift in awareness of how abusing peoples freedom harms society before this really changes. Probably 95% of people on hackernews works for corporations that do this. Do what you can to shift the awareness.
The more general problem is that software companies started having their own goals that are at odds with just serving the damn users that pay them money.
I said this last year here: it's not a choice nor consent but a plain harassment. And it won't stop until you give up and let the software/company do what they want.
I doubt anything can be done nowadays without some law enforcement. We're long gone from times when companies offered actual options and features for the user and not for themselves.
I have begun calling this practice "rapey software" in casual conversation. People usually object when they first hear the term, but when I ask them why they would defend such practices they usually fold.
They didn’t “fold”, they wanted a very uncomfortable conversation to change direction. I’d advise finding a less objectionable term, because many people probably stop listening after your opening salvo.
Objecting to calling a practice rape is not defending the practice. Consider you persuaded most of those people only how little they wanted the discussion to continue.
We? If "we" want this ability, we first have to stop using software by Google, et al. and instead use FOSS. Google isn't going to add this into YT for us. They aren't driven by our satisfaction...
The legislation required is allowing reverse engineering for interoperability. If there was a legal, alternative Youtube frontend that everyone used and didn't do this crap - YouTube's UI would be forced to compete. As it is, writing such a client/frontend (even if you preserve the ads) will probably land you in legal hot water.
See also: how reddit shut down superior competing UIs by changing their API terms.
One can publish their client/frontend pseudonymously, using Tor if necessary. Not like one is gonna profit off it anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
That massively limits your audience. And without something like the EU's Digital Markets Act locked down platforms like iOS would be a non-starter as well.
I don't think YouTube is going to feel compelled to change their UI if 1% of users are using some alternative UI off of Tor.
No, I mean the developer publishes under a pseudonym, and said developer can use Tor if needed to hide their tracks so they can't be served legally, as no one knows who they are in real life. Joe Public isn't risking going to prison or being sued to bankruptcy because they downloaded some random YouTube client, so they don't have to use Tor.
The problem with that is that this is often not a real choice. You don't get to pick individual properties, you get to pick from a (usually pretty small) selection of products which bundle a lot of properties together, and these annoyances are usually not deal-breaking enough to cancel the other reasons why you are using that product.
Often, there simply is no respectful alternative because everyone is doing it, or the respectful alternative is utterly useless due to other issues, or the disrespectful platform is the exclusive distributor for some content that you really want to access.
The platforms/apps know this and generally get more abusive the less alternatives you have.
- Most users just use what is preinstalled on their device. That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
- As the blogpost points out, many people don't even realise there's an option.
- Which sometimes there is not: either literally or in practice. E.g. I'm forced to maintain at the very least a whatsapp and a facebook account to perform basic everyday tasks.
- Finally, what I think is the most important point: these behaviours give a competitive advantage, therefore there needs to be a floor enforced by law. It's much like environmental protections, it's not enough to say "the customers should pick the greener choice", because dumping waste into a river is cheaper than processing it or recycling. You need to enforce a level playing field via laws, to ensure this does not happen.
Don't forget two sided markets. Now that your mother in law is on Facebook and is never going to jump platforms, you are stuck on Facebook.
I find it shocking how many community organizations are completely dependent on Meta. I saw a poster for a club that gets together to play board games that simply had a heading that said "Board Game Club" and a QR code but no meeting times or places, no contact phone, email or web site url. The QR code points to... a Facebook page. If you want to engage with this organization you have no choice but to use Facebook and be subject to their system of pernicious personalization.
Many student organizations at Cornell use Instagram as their primary or only communications tool. There are so many problem with that, not least that you can't engage with that platform without giving a mobile phone number with a real cellular carrier and that doesn't have metadata about events so you get notifications on your phone about events that happened a month ago. It's absurd, but you'd make yourself a hermit if you eschewed these platforms.
I'm kind of a hermit I guess.. but I haven't had any of that stuff since like 2009 and it's been just splendid. Email and sms/signal does the job well enough.
> That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
That seems counterfactual when talking about Chrome. Microsoft has tried every trick in the book - short of simply blocking Chrome - to get people using Edge on Windows. It's been somewhat effective, but Chrome still retains a dominant lead. This is entirely due people going out of their way to install Chrome.
That's not inherently the case. Scummy dark patterns like these might show short-term advantages in numbers, but doing that burns user trust.
It's a pretty stark difference between classes of companies. Consider how people feel about Comcast and Facebook, versus how people feel about Stripe and Vanguard. (Random examples of companies with wildly different reputations.)
You think a few niche individuals refusing to use Microsoft os is going to make a noticeable difference in their stats in the slightest? Even apple is a fairly small fraction of that market share and the next smaller option is a rounding error.
I'm not suggesting that a few people doing this is enough, or that individual choice is going to be successful. But I do think it's one of many reasons for people to systematically use Open Source wherever possible, and it's a case study in what you get by doing so.
I think we’re seeing the effects of Microsoft’s treatment of their users. Windows 11 has been out for years now and we’re a few months away from Windows 10 being unsupported, but 10 is still the most popular version of Windows. I expect that hundreds of millions of users will choose to run 10 unsupported rather than upgrade to 11. Since 11 came out, desktop Linux market share has increased from 1.5% to 4% and Mac OS has seen significant gains as well. I think the more relevant factor is that Microsoft simply doesn’t care. We reached “peak desktop” in the mid-2010s and now Microsoft is simply following the MBA playbook of what to do when you have a widely used product in a market that’s stopped growing (spend the bare minimum on maintenance, redirect revenue to developing products in markets that are growing like cloud and AI services, use your market position to push existing Windows customers to use your new products in growth markets).
Unfortunately the government seems to have taken on the idea that its primary responsibility is legislation forbidding the government from passing legislation on given topics. This is because it's wholly owned by the people it's supposed to regulate.
I'm not sure anyone who finds it difficult to write values to file and read from them later should be working on commercial software. I genuinely struggle to think of any single feature that could be more trivial than this is.
i hate it when engineers do this song and dance "well actually it's really hard to do that" in order to justify the position that they already had before the conversation started. no it isn't, it literally isn't, it's just smoke and mirrors to justify your position.
I was working at Google in the mid 2010s when Larry Page was at the helm and company leadership still listened to employee voices. There were enough internal memes calling for an end to the "not now" pattern that leadership mandated from the top down to remove all instances of it throughout Google products, and indeed for a while, it was mostly gone.
Evidently, it is now back as strong as ever. Either the metrics tanked enough to reverse this policy, the new generation simply forgot, or they never intended it to be permanent policy and only temporarily implemented it to appease the original outcry.
Can we also talk about the practice of mass sending push notifications in mobile apps, and usually nonsensical cringely cute ones at that?
The whole notion is absurd to me. A notification is supposed to notify you that something happened. But in these cases nothing has actually happened. All these notifications are, are thinly veiled attempts to manipulate you into opening the app to then try to shove more things into you for the benefit of the company that made the app.
I'm generally very stingy with notification permissions, so on the rare occasion that one of these does slip through, it makes me furious. It feels like an insult to my dignity as a human being.
Amen. What really pisses me off is that there are certain apps where I really have to enable notifications like Uber so I don’t miss my ride, but then they abuse that privilege and start pushing “special offers” etc to me with no way to selectively turn these off.
Or else, if there IS a subcategory to turn off then they just invent a new subcategory a few months after I’ve opted out, and auto opt me into that instead. eg I opt out of “marketing notifications” and then “relevant suggestions” is created. I’m looking at you, Google Maps.
Android has notification categories ("channels" as they're called in the API) that can be individually disabled. But it's on the app developers to assign the right one to their notifications. Many apps do honestly do it and do have separate categories for their marketing spam, but some make just one channel called something like "Miscellaneous" that includes everything all at once.
> The population (especially the younger generation, who never seen a different kind of technology at all) is being conditioned by the tech industry to accept that software should behave like an unreliable, manipulative human rather than a precise, predictable machine. They're learning that you can't simply tell a computer "I'm not interested" and expect it to respect that choice. Instead, you must engage in a perpetual dance of "not now, please" - only to face the same prompts again and again.
Part of the population is learning that -- but I think another part is learning that application providers are not incentivized to design around the users' best interest, and that if you want your software to behave in a predictable, user friendly way, you need to seek out third party tools (like uBlock Origin, UnTrap for Youtube, ReVanced, Invidious etc) to enforce that behavior.
And yeah, it's not got better. I fight back (uBlock origin element remover, custom stylesheets, entire rewrites of news sites (<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122>, working on a further revision now), and almost entirely abandoning the mobile comms device space (no smartphone, a largely de-Googled and anonymised e-ink tablet with no no subscription-based apps installed).
I'm surprised no one mentioned the obvious solution here:
Open-source software respects my will. It's a great feeling that many forgot existed. It's not trying to trick me all the time. When it's not perfect, I patch it.
I also love to write my own programs to solve my own problems. Like everyone used to do in the 70s. I'm having a great time and am productive than ever.
Definitely agree. I notice this a lot with search. So many apps and various things have an understanding of search that is not "find me exactly the text I entered". Sometimes I remember that something I want to find was in a sentence with a phrase like "in for all the". I want to be able to search for "in for all the" and get every message/file/whatever that has the text "in for all the" in it, instead of getting zero results because the search tries to be "smart" and filter out stopwords. It's fine to be able to do those things, but I always want the behavior to be: a) fully specified (e.g., full list of stopwords that will be ignored); and b) controllable (e.g., can disable or enable at will).
I tend to see this as one form of a widening gap between software users and software creators. I don't subscribe to the hardcore open-source philosophy that everyone should be contributing to the software they use. But I do think it's getting problematic when a small minority of people who understand the complexities of what's actually going on are crafting elaborate systems of smoke and mirrors to present a seemingly simple interface to users. I would rather that today's interfaces be ten times "worse" but ten times more predictable.
I once compared the onboarding experience of a previous product I worked on to walking the timeshare gauntlet in the arrivals area of Mexican airports.
While I 100% agree with this, I also think this isn't some sort of failing or "oops didn't think of that!" type mistake -- this behavior is fully on purpose.
They want the user to be worn down until they just accept the notifications or whatever else or even just accidentally click YES on one of the recurrent pop ups.
It is beyond infuriating the number of times a google search misclick on my phone leads me to the app store opening the page for the google app. Same with a reddit page. They know what they're doing and they don't care. And even then you have to manually close that giant banner that covers half your screen to dismiss the nag to download the app-- when the web version works perfectly fine!
Alright time to stop ranting and get back to work :)
PM has a product strategy for sure, but it’s still downstream of the main business strategy and will be based off that. So your ultimate accountability here rests with some greedy CEO or investor.
The PM usually has autonomy to hit their goal in the method they see fit. The CEO/investor, while greedy, doesn't usually dictate execution (unless they are Steve Jobs).
There's a difference though between "unethical" and just "shitty experience". A shitty experience is not inherently unethical. As a UX designer, I never did anything I believed to be unethical, but I did design many things that I thought were a shitty experience. I voiced my concerns, suggested some alternatives, and was told do design it to work the shitty way. If they want to pay me to design a shitty experience, then OK, the money's the same either way.
I just made sure to save the emails/documentation/etc. in case anyone tried to blame it on me when it failed or users complained. If the order came down from high enough up the org, a UX manager or director might also go on the record opposing it to cover for those under them in the org.
I think of it like hiring someone to replace all the beautiful hardwood floors in your home with thick, orange shag carpet. It's a bad idea and it will probably hurt the resale value of your home, but there's nothing unethical about the contractor accepting the work and taking your money as long as everything's done properly and to code.
I am not sure you’re making a reasonable or realistic argument when you are saying that someone should risk or give up their job, personal security, and stability of their family rather than implement a button to turn off iPhone notifications.
I don’t disagree with the principle at all, but if it’s ever going to change the conversation has to start somewhere rational. “Destroy your life because your UI offends me” isn’t it.
Agreed. And it's bad enough within apps... it's even worse the way they use push notifications for this kind of thing. I installed your app so I'd know when my prescriptions are ready, or when my ride is here. Abusing that privilege to upsell me on a credit card by making my phone buzz is infuriating.
I've had to uninstall so many apps because of this bad behavior.
I usually read these opinion pieces and roll my eyes because the OP is just being pedantic.
But, this really cuts to the core of everything wrong with modern software.
Open your bank app. Immediately get blocked by a popup asking you to complete a survey or try some new feature.
Sign up for a new account with some SaaS. Immediately get blocked with a tutorial flow to sell you on how great it is, regardless if you even came there for those features in the first place.
Even the way OS updates are installed has turned into a pushy salesman that tricks you into agreeing to something you didn't originally want.
Given that, say, a garbage collector can "always be closing" abandoned file objects, salesman behavior is easily within reach of a computer. It's just a persistent polling loop combined with a breadth-first search type thing.
>The population (especially the younger generation, who never seen a different kind of technology at all) is being conditioned by the tech industry to accept that software should behave like an unreliable, manipulative human rather than a precise, predictable machine. They're learning that you can't simply tell a computer
Youtube isn't your computer. It's their computer. And the precise, predictable mechanical command they have given it is to manipulate you.
The way out is employee- and customer-owned non-profit platforms not beholden to private equity or publicly-traded corporations driven to exploit dark patterns.
Forcing everyone to work at an employee-owned corporation is bad for their personal finances. Companies can fail, and regular employees shouldn't be invested in the same place that pays their salary. That's why you should usually sell stock as soon as it vests.
I've personally witnessed non-profits behave in bizarre and anti-human fashions too, though perhaps not quite to the same intensity as for-profits. I don't believe they're some magical silver-bullet. And "employee-owned" is even more useless in this regard.
The way out is to just not engage. Do you find anything truly appealing about Youtube? If there was some video on it somewhere that was "I can't live without this" good, why haven't you ripped the video with youtube-dl and kept it? It would no longer be a Youtube video, and you'd no longer have to tolerate Youtube's antihuman UI.
The index case is public television on the US which has endless cloying and annoying fundraisers but you know in the end of the day they care what big sponsors like the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation and the The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation think but not "viewers like you" because of these problems
Or look at the case of Mozilla which seems to be at least treading water when it comes to browser engineering but in terms of marketing and legitimacy they seem to be doing as little as possible to threaten Chrome but keep plugging along because if Firefox went down then Google might get pulled into antitrust court. (Think how Microsoft funded Apple during the dark years of the 1990s to keep competition alive or how the existence of Android must have a huge value to Apple today in that Apple can claim it has competition -- competition like the heel in pro wrestling)
“Funded by a private corporation funded by the American people” is just a euphemism for state funding; the oddness of the euphemism is explained by the fact that it’s a euphemism in the first place.
I was directly replying to the comment above me about the oddness of the CPB interstitial by providing an explanation. That might have been tangential but it wasn't off-topic. You're the one having a failure of understanding here, even though I've been patient with you and tried to explain the relevance of my reply.
Non-profits often aren't looking to avoid making as much money as possible, but that's not actually written into their mandate. What's written into their mandate is that they can't pay out money beyond expenses as profits to owners. They can still have a surplus after cost, they can still re-invest that surplus (often in the form of c-suite salaries "to attract the best and brightest talent at that level"), they just can't pay it out in profits to owners. There's also the fact that non-profits are often rather strapped overall and when they see a dark pattern they're motivated by fear of failure to exploit it.
When I was young, I voraciously consumed media just like today. I watched TV, listened to radio, purchased vinyl and CDs like there was no tomorrow.
Over a few decades starting in 2000, I stopped purchasing music entirely. I also stopped listening to the radio, and in 2015 I got rid of my last TV. (Sometimes when you're in public, you can't avoid these.) And things seemed alright.
But I have come full circle and developed a complete addiction to YouTube that satiates all these desires in one service. Why own music when I can stream anything on demand? Why own a TV or disc player when all movies I want to see are likewise available?
So I pay for Premium. I could live without YouTube, but I would flounder in abject boredom. My music entertainment would be severely limited, like what was available in PD or Creative Commons, and that's rather grim. If YouTube were completely unavailable to me, in terms of any music or video, I would indeed struggle to fill those gaps, because it really fills out my days.
Thankfully, with Premium I am not nagged by ads and the UI generally cooperates. The ads were really wearing me down, because the more you use it, the more you're subjected to. Unfortunately, YouTube as a platform is not oriented to "watching what I want when I want it" but to discovering new content and suggesting "stuff I might like", so I still do fight to stay on the rails of what I truly enjoy.
Android, on the other hand, has become a holy terror. Every time I try to do something with my life, whether it's banking or finance or health care or shopping, Android is getting in my way and hindering my sanity. I cannot accomplish a simple thing without Android distracting me, frustrating me, and making me forget what I was trying to do. How many times have I unlocked my phone, fiddled, and then locked it again, only to discover that I didn't get anything done? That typically didn't happen with Microsoft or Windows, because indeed MS... was... primarily a B2B provider, and home users enjoyed similar deference to let us be productive without getting in our face. Unfortunately, that is all converging on Consumerist Advertising Hell.
AI agent idea: Detect notifications and dialog boxes that (a) lack a "Don't bother me again" button and (b) which you have responded "Maybe later" to, and forever afterwards automatically "click" "Maybe later" on your behalf the moment they appear.
Yes, this is using an H100 to crack a walnut, we shouldn't have to, etc. But still.
Yup. Corporate non-ownership, non-control in consumer products and services is becoming far too normalized. Louis Rossmann regularly points out these absurd, customer-hostile practices.
Companies no longer view their customers as their customers, and I'm not sure I've settled on an explanation that makes sense to me. I only have examples. The biggest one though was Bug Light and the Dylan Mulvaney thing from several years ago. I no longer have a link, but there was a paraphrased quote from the marketing director at the time directly expressing contempt for those who drank Bud Light. But a frustrated expletive, rather a full-on rant about how they were all moronic frat boys and gauche rednecks.
What does it mean when a company has no respect for its own customers, no gratitude, and even measurable levels of what can only be called hatred? I don't know the answer to that question, but that's the world we all live in this year of 2025. And I can't imagine it could possibly turn out well for any of us.
Companies aren't people and so lack volition. It's under-regulated greed and sense of entitlement by decision-makers, owners and/or managers, that is the problem. The root cause is the political corruption that systematically promotes and endorses this kind of behavior.
I deeply hate this behavior. Another example: The Health app on iOS has a closeable banner for the "Health Checklist" UI, which gives me the option to turn on things like crash detection, fall detection, etc. All of which are notifications. I hate notifications so I will never turn these on. I dutifully scanned through it the first time and verified everything was turned off, and the banner went away. But like clockwork, the banner comes back every 2 weeks and asks me to go through the checklist again. I suspect there's a "right answer" here. If I consent to turn everything on, it'll stop nagging me. But this badly needs a Never button, not a X button that actually means "nag me again in 2 weeks". I get that some product manager wants their fancy watch features enabled for more users so they can get a promotion, but their career ambitions are degrading my experience.
My grandpa used to say every few years they’d vote on allowing casinos.
And every few years the people of Missouri would vote NO casinos. But one time, they voted to allow the casinos. Then the votes stopped. Hugely manipulative and it feels like this sort of thing is everywhere now.
This is the classic result of the problem with democracy and “concentrated benefits and disperse costs”. Legal gambling is a HUGE money making opportunity for casinos, and for most voters it is just a minor negative. Of course, utility wise, the minor cost times the number of voters is much higher than the concentrated benefit, but the concentration makes it worth it for casinos to keep fighting for legalization. The cost of fighting for it is less than the benefit when it is legalized.
Now that it is legalized, though, there is no one who has a concentrated enough cost to fight for its reversal. It is more rational to just suffer the small cost of gambling instead of fighting hard for its repeal.
So as you say, they only have to win the fight once, and it is won forever, and society is slightly worse off.
This is the exact same reason Intuit keeps winning the tax battle… it matters more to them than anyone else, even though it makes it a little bit worse for everyone.
It also doesn't help that these days the stwte/country is probably large enough to gather ebouygh of a petition for whatever you want. Just word it nicely and you can get 10k, 100k people to say "sure why not?"
Apathy reigns as usual.
It isn’t apathy, it is rationality. Why would I spend a ton of time fighting against a problem that is a minor inconvenience to me? I have a lot of important things going on in my life, and a limited amount of time and energy to do things. It isn’t rational for me (or most people) to spend a bunch of time, money, and effort fighting against legalized gambling.
There literally isn’t enough time in the day for me to fight against everything, so you pick and choose where to spend your energy.
>Why would I spend a ton of time fighting against a problem that is a minor inconvenience to me
That's ideally why we elect proper representatives and have advocacy groups who can expend that energy. We don't do too much better there, spending a fee hours researching who will actually fight in our interest instead of enabling the armies of minor inconveniences to stack up.
Sad thing about the US is that it's a reactive country, not a preventative one. It really doesn't try to act on stuff until it's arguably too late.
Agree.
I like the idea of policy changes like this having an expiry date a few years in the future, which forces a periodic revote if some party wants to keep the new policy. Like a political office term, this should be long enough to give businesses a timeframe they can plan around, and an opportunity for voters to see how the policy played out.
Perhaps it would lead to an ever-increasing pile of legal "confirmation dialog boxes" that bore the public. But I like that the default action (doing nothing) would lead to regulations being deleted, as there are few forces that act to reduce regulation, and having too many regulations is another slow-burn energy sink for everyone.
We have this in WA and it's arguably very dysfunctional, particularly because due to property tax caps it has kind of turned into government-by-renewed-levy, and causes all sorts of headaches when one particular levy to fund one project has a surplus and another has a deficit due to completely normal deviations in tax projections.
Thanks for the data point!
Like inflation messing with fines, but population growth undermining signature-gathering to be a pointless formality.
As someone who has done signature collection this is mostly correct but it ignores what the actual barrier is which is proof of work which is proof of money. The idea that a ballot initiative that's just a good idea someone had winding up on your voting paper will never happen because no one has money to collect signatures from millions of people and the annoying ceremony related to it. And this is working as designed because citizen ballot initiatives are despised by legislatures because the only reason to need them is because your representatives are fucking up that badly. So there's two kinds of ballot initiatives generally
* Coalition of nonprofits desperately trying to actually represent the will of the people in defiance of the legislature. Good recent example would be abortion amendments that pass without too much trouble in red states. Democrats might need to adjust their barometer on how Americans actually feel about immigration but Republicans have refused to acknowledge the Overton Window on abortion is passing them by.
* Cash grabs because some financially interested party realized the money to get legislation this way is worth the investment.
It’s more of a problem with oligarchy and oligarchic tendencies.
Don’t make things into a game theory problem. It’s a power problem.
I am not “making” anything into a game theory problem, game theory is simply explaining WHY it becomes a problem.
How to solve the problem is a separate issue, but the problem can be described with game theory.
Externalities
They did this with a giant new jail and its financing via sales tax in my hometown.
First they bundled it in the regular November election. It failed. So then they bundled it in a run-off or primary election. It still failed. Finally they ran it on a solo ballot and it finally passed.
I was like 19 or so. Voted against it every time but that was sort of an eye-opening moment for young me.
There is a similar case in California where every year a ballot initiative is proposed to repeal a law banning local rent control, in the last election it was prop 33. Despite it failing every election it continues to get proposed.
That one would unfortunately have a huge impact on some people. Aka, anyone who may need to house themselves one days but can't afford to buy. Sure hope we keep fighting that.
Rent control is beneficial to incumbent long term tenants but is pretty bad for everyone else including those who are looking for an apartment. It's one of the many "pro-renter" regulations that constrains supply and makes rent higher.
Price controls don't work for groceries or gasoline, why would they work for rent?
If you can find data in support of such a policy I'd be interested to see it.
Yes. But the thing is incumbent renters don't really have many rights in the US. The landlord is perfectly free to kick you out by not renewing the lease, and they need no reason to not renew it. So any benefits can be nullified by the very party the law is trying to protect you from.
>Price controls don't work for groceries or gasoline, why would they work for rent?
Whats the alternative? They increase rent to the point where people are kicked out anyway? Every option leads to unattainable rent except for the rich.
Same thing is how encryption backdoor laws and other erosions of rights work. Be vigilant because the first time the vote goes through, they will never hold another vote.
From a memorable villain monologue:
> all we need... is for one of us, just one, sooner or later to have the thing we're all hoping for. One good day.
It's like p-hacking but with voting. Try enough tests/samples/whatever and eventually you'll get something that's "statisitically significant". Like the old xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/882/
It's not just casinos. It's also the Constitution. And they've had over 200 years.
Well yea. That why modifying the constitution is a monumental effort. They don't want things to sway as the congress and president shifts. It was easier for Texas to try and secede than to try and change the constitution in their favor.
Not overtly modifying it with amendments. Nibbling away at it with, for example, insanely broad interpretations of interstate commerce.
Kinda how the European """parliament""" works. It's the only body called "parliament" in the entire world that I'm aware of which does not have the power to propose laws.
Therefore: if the commission wants a law, all they have to do is keep trying. If it fails, they try again. If it passes, well it only has to pass once. Because the parliament can't introduce bills which means it can't repeal existing laws.
To be fair, when you don't have casinos, you don't have casino taxes, casino employment, casino tourism, etc.
Also, you don't just "have" casinos, building any building of that size is at the very least a multi-month affair and likely multiple years.
So once you say "yes", you've set something in motion that is way harder to unwind than it was to kick off.
Also, I can see it being the casinos themselves asking permission to enter the state. Once they're allowed in, why would they ask to leave? That would be the job of someone else.
In other words, we should let powerful corporations control the agenda of democracy, not the demos (that is, the people)?
There is a similar case in California where every year a ballot initiative is proposed to repeal a law banning local rent control. Despite it failing every election it continues to get proposed. So its not just corporations who can do this, the demos do it too.
There should be an exponential backoff rule for failing propositions.
I don't like the idea because if you notice public opinion are slowly shifting on an policy you could purposefully propose it each backoff date to entrench it for like 8 or 16 years when public perception does swap.
I was joking, but my serious opinion on this is that direct democracy doesn't scale. For a country like Switzerland that is basically a small patchwork of villages up in the mountains it is probably fine, but for a polity of 39 million people and one of the biggest economies on Earth I should say it's a bad fit. Maybe for some local propositions.
I was not trying to say that.
I was implying the repeated votes to allow casinos were being put forward by the casinos themselves. They had a vested interest in the vote.
They have no vested interest in the opposite. Someone with that interest needs to lobby to get that vote to the people. Expecting the casinos to do that is weird
The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson, 1965:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action>
<https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=63B1D140FD13A03F15BF842...>
Very strongly recommended. I'd stumbled across this in my uni days, and its power and insight were obvious even to naive me then. It's since emerged as a classic of economics.
PaulHoule is also a fan: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775531>
There are also negatives that come with casinos. The taxes are nice but the crime isn't.
Would be interesting to know who petitioned for the votes.
The casinos. That’s the only reason it kept coming up.
If the people want them gone, they have to do the same as the casinos did.
YouTube keeps on pushing shorts. If you click the x button on the "shorts" section, it will straight up tell you that it's only hiding the reccomendation for 30 days. They're not even pretending otherwise!
That's not even the worst of it. YouTube has a "shelf" that exists solely to announce that YouTube TV was rated highly in a JD Power consumer survey. It's completely meaningless to users, but that doesn't stop them from trying to show it to you again every few weeks.
Some YouTube executive must be really proud of that award.
Adblock.
You can selectively block elements from sites. I've blocked shorts from it and honestly forgot how annoying it was until these comments. Just right click, block element, preview before applying, make sure you don't butcher out unintended parts of the pages.
Which makes me feel much better about using yt-dlp, SponsorBlock, and Brave.
Same. With the way they have been trying to circumvent ad-blocking im YT-DLP'ing everythign now.
The annoying one for me right now is Windows 11.
Every few restarts, it is showing a pop up that shows the wallpaper that was chosen and a “learn more” button… the pop up can’t be moved, can’t be closed, and stays on top no matter what.
It took me a few minutes before I finally gave up and clicked on the “learn more” button, which of course opened Edge (even though edge isn’t my default browser), which of course prompted me to switch to using edge as my default browser, which I had to decline and close edge again.
And now I have repeated this dance a number of times on restarts. No, I don’t want to learn more about the wallpaper, and I don’t want to use Edge!
This, certainly, can be disabled. I don't remember the exact name of the setting, BUT here is what I use:
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
You should be able to find the setting responsible for displaying these "learn more" buttons. I always disable it for myself and friend's computers.
Once you know your ways around disabling all annoyances in Windows, it's really smooth sail.
Good luck!
Every few weeks I get "Windows 10 will reach end-of-support soon!". Honestly, I appreciate this, because it helps me mentally prepare for he day I'll finally switch to Linux.
Apple's "This video conferencing app just disabled reactions!!!!" notification is just the worst. Every video chat, every app, every time. Ugh!
I even like Apple's reactions implementation, which is pretty good, but there's definitely some PM that wants to push it in my face 10 times every day and I don't know what's worse, the PM doing this fully understanding the cost or whatever system stands aside and lets them continue.
PMs basically don't exist at Apple and certainly don't get to make any decisions when they do. That's an exec making you do that ;)
Apple is hard at work enshittifying everything despite their main competitive advantage being a business model that doesn’t actually require them to do that. The iPhone settings app in particular is filled with advertising banners that add red badges to the icon that cannot be disabled.
Nah. Their business model requires it, just more subtle. Half the Apple "ecosystem" is just crippling their own products to only play nice with their products so you feel compelled to buy it over alternatives. See things like the Apple Watch, MTP support, iCloud backup etc.
you can see why they do. for me the only real fear of moving to android (I did anyway) was losing access to the Apple ecosystem. on the other hand, they've railroaded themselves into this situation by choosing it as the competitive advantage they want to pursue, and in doing so have damaged computing philosophy as a whole
I buy a midrange Samsung phone and I understand that they need to make some money on it.
But with Apple you're paying 1000 eurodollars so the least they can do is respect the customer.
My personal biggest gripe is the Gmail app on iPhone. There is no possible way to stop it from trying to force you to change your default browser to chrome every 2 weeks when you open a link.
the Mail app has its own massive issues. for whatever reason it is completely unable to just background sync and notify you immediately when you get an email. why is every messaging app able to do this instantaneously but email is not?
also their new default-on email classification system is a fucking nightmare and I was so glad when I figured out you can turn it off
plus why do my email drafts load in oldest first?
A lot of these things could be useful but there will probably be more false alarms than not to varying degrees. I know I’ve had looks like you had a hard fall alerts that ranged from “huh?” To I landed on my butt from the edge of a bed that I wouldn’t have wanted an ambulance much less a helicopter for.
Is this maybe a work phone enrolled in MDM or something? I do more phone management than I'd like to at work and haven't seen this.
It’s a personal phone enrolled in work MDM. Seems very surprising that it would affect the Health app in this specific way though.
I have a UX rule that I try to implement: if I'm in a workflow and the app interrupts with something that is not immediately related to that workflow, I uninstall the app and never use it again. No, I don't care about that new feature. I care about the feature I'm currently using. No, I don't want to allow notifications. You don't choose when we interact, I do. You're the machine and I'm the human. No, I don't want to join your discord, or follow you on social media. I assure you that if you prompt me to give you a rating in the app store that you do not want my rating. Let me do the thing I installed you to do and otherwise fuck entirely off.
> I assure you that if you prompt me to give you a rating in the app store that you do not want my rating.
This recently got egregious. Android itself is now showing these prompts for the Messages (SMS) and Phone apps! Like What The Actual Fuck?!
You must have a very empty phone. I salute you.
Sounds like a way for them to Fire their too-smart customers.
Sort of how obvious typos in phishing emails leave them with "customers" who will "buy" what they're selling.
I usually take the time to send an email to whoever's email I can find over the issue before walking away.
Amen. We need a whole movement around this to take back control of software.
https://futo.org
Ahem... https://www.fsf.org/
Amen. I just uninstall applications that do anti-user crap. There are very few applications that I need. Almost all are replaceable or truly unnecessary.
The most recent example that sticks in my mind is I uninstalled Duolingo because they kept changing the app icon, but what finally did it for me is when they changed to some disgusting version of it with snot dripping from the creature's (is it an owl? some kind of bird? I forget) nostrils. WTF Duolingo? Uninstalled, I'm done with it.
Related joke going around right now:
Does Microsoft understand consent? Yes / Ask me again later
In general, options like "never ask me again" seem to have disappeared, and we should bring them back.
This is what software freedom means in concrete terms. I wonder if it will be easier to explain the principles of the FLOSS purists to the average person now that multiple facets of their lives are being meddled with by aggressively hostile software, and not just being stung now and then with dropped support, format lock-in, or forced obsolescence.
CoC destroyed all of that. There has been nothing more effective at alienating the general public from open source than CoC. It worked exactly as the corporations behind it intended. CoC is so corrosive that instead of using BC and AD, there should be BCoc and ACoc when discussing the world of open source. There will be no "Normie Revolution" into the open source world until CoC is under control, which is exactly why it never will be under control. It serves its corporate masters extremely well and to the cheers of those who once upon a time were against corporate power.
PMs don't like it when their funnel gets shut off. They hate true rejection and always think the user is just some finagling away from falling down the funnel.
And they don't understand that respecting users (and non-users) has value, and changes how people see your company.
Respecting the users does not have value FOR THEM. That's how the job works - they're measured on how much people they trick into falling into their feature so they can put together a slide deck with nice DAU numbers.
Same for engineers - user respect doesn't have value for them either, you'll get the laziest, easiest implementation of a given ticket. Or the most complex and one if they're up for promotion or want to learn a new tech.
Afterwards, both groups will happily run towards greener pastures by the time any of this "respect value" materializes.
It's going to take a cultural shift in awareness of how abusing peoples freedom harms society before this really changes. Probably 95% of people on hackernews works for corporations that do this. Do what you can to shift the awareness.
They understand it just fine. Their reward metrics only care about the impact they had, not the externalities.
The more general problem is that software companies started having their own goals that are at odds with just serving the damn users that pay them money.
I said this last year here: it's not a choice nor consent but a plain harassment. And it won't stop until you give up and let the software/company do what they want.
I doubt anything can be done nowadays without some law enforcement. We're long gone from times when companies offered actual options and features for the user and not for themselves.
I have begun calling this practice "rapey software" in casual conversation. People usually object when they first hear the term, but when I ask them why they would defend such practices they usually fold.
They didn’t “fold”, they wanted a very uncomfortable conversation to change direction. I’d advise finding a less objectionable term, because many people probably stop listening after your opening salvo.
Objecting to calling a practice rape is not defending the practice. Consider you persuaded most of those people only how little they wanted the discussion to continue.
"Enshittified rapeware" ... does have a bit of a ring to it, no? Think I'll stick with malware.
We? If "we" want this ability, we first have to stop using software by Google, et al. and instead use FOSS. Google isn't going to add this into YT for us. They aren't driven by our satisfaction...
Never ask me again is available here: https://www.debian.org/distrib/
Legislation will be necessary. Otherwise, why would they bother?
The legislation required is allowing reverse engineering for interoperability. If there was a legal, alternative Youtube frontend that everyone used and didn't do this crap - YouTube's UI would be forced to compete. As it is, writing such a client/frontend (even if you preserve the ads) will probably land you in legal hot water.
See also: how reddit shut down superior competing UIs by changing their API terms.
One can publish their client/frontend pseudonymously, using Tor if necessary. Not like one is gonna profit off it anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
That massively limits your audience. And without something like the EU's Digital Markets Act locked down platforms like iOS would be a non-starter as well.
I don't think YouTube is going to feel compelled to change their UI if 1% of users are using some alternative UI off of Tor.
No, I mean the developer publishes under a pseudonym, and said developer can use Tor if needed to hide their tracks so they can't be served legally, as no one knows who they are in real life. Joe Public isn't risking going to prison or being sued to bankruptcy because they downloaded some random YouTube client, so they don't have to use Tor.
It depends on the country. In some, reverse engineering a proprietary product for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly allowed.
In the US, as far as I know, there hasn't yet been a precedent about this.
Or refusing to use software that does this kind of thing, and using more respectful software instead.
The problem with that is that this is often not a real choice. You don't get to pick individual properties, you get to pick from a (usually pretty small) selection of products which bundle a lot of properties together, and these annoyances are usually not deal-breaking enough to cancel the other reasons why you are using that product.
Often, there simply is no respectful alternative because everyone is doing it, or the respectful alternative is utterly useless due to other issues, or the disrespectful platform is the exclusive distributor for some content that you really want to access.
The platforms/apps know this and generally get more abusive the less alternatives you have.
You might be surprised to learn just how much technology and entertainment you can live without.
Many problems with that approach.
- Most users just use what is preinstalled on their device. That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
- As the blogpost points out, many people don't even realise there's an option.
- Which sometimes there is not: either literally or in practice. E.g. I'm forced to maintain at the very least a whatsapp and a facebook account to perform basic everyday tasks.
- Finally, what I think is the most important point: these behaviours give a competitive advantage, therefore there needs to be a floor enforced by law. It's much like environmental protections, it's not enough to say "the customers should pick the greener choice", because dumping waste into a river is cheaper than processing it or recycling. You need to enforce a level playing field via laws, to ensure this does not happen.
Don't forget two sided markets. Now that your mother in law is on Facebook and is never going to jump platforms, you are stuck on Facebook.
I find it shocking how many community organizations are completely dependent on Meta. I saw a poster for a club that gets together to play board games that simply had a heading that said "Board Game Club" and a QR code but no meeting times or places, no contact phone, email or web site url. The QR code points to... a Facebook page. If you want to engage with this organization you have no choice but to use Facebook and be subject to their system of pernicious personalization.
Many student organizations at Cornell use Instagram as their primary or only communications tool. There are so many problem with that, not least that you can't engage with that platform without giving a mobile phone number with a real cellular carrier and that doesn't have metadata about events so you get notifications on your phone about events that happened a month ago. It's absurd, but you'd make yourself a hermit if you eschewed these platforms.
I'm kind of a hermit I guess.. but I haven't had any of that stuff since like 2009 and it's been just splendid. Email and sms/signal does the job well enough.
> That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
That seems counterfactual when talking about Chrome. Microsoft has tried every trick in the book - short of simply blocking Chrome - to get people using Edge on Windows. It's been somewhat effective, but Chrome still retains a dominant lead. This is entirely due people going out of their way to install Chrome.
> these behaviours give a competitive advantage
That's not inherently the case. Scummy dark patterns like these might show short-term advantages in numbers, but doing that burns user trust.
It's a pretty stark difference between classes of companies. Consider how people feel about Comcast and Facebook, versus how people feel about Stripe and Vanguard. (Random examples of companies with wildly different reputations.)
Comcast and Facebook are B2C companies while Microsoft is also B2B, where this problem is most pervasive.
Facebook is B2B when it comes to advertising and also its use as a communications and promotional tool outside of advertising.
You think a few niche individuals refusing to use Microsoft os is going to make a noticeable difference in their stats in the slightest? Even apple is a fairly small fraction of that market share and the next smaller option is a rounding error.
I'm not suggesting that a few people doing this is enough, or that individual choice is going to be successful. But I do think it's one of many reasons for people to systematically use Open Source wherever possible, and it's a case study in what you get by doing so.
I think we’re seeing the effects of Microsoft’s treatment of their users. Windows 11 has been out for years now and we’re a few months away from Windows 10 being unsupported, but 10 is still the most popular version of Windows. I expect that hundreds of millions of users will choose to run 10 unsupported rather than upgrade to 11. Since 11 came out, desktop Linux market share has increased from 1.5% to 4% and Mac OS has seen significant gains as well. I think the more relevant factor is that Microsoft simply doesn’t care. We reached “peak desktop” in the mid-2010s and now Microsoft is simply following the MBA playbook of what to do when you have a widely used product in a market that’s stopped growing (spend the bare minimum on maintenance, redirect revenue to developing products in markets that are growing like cloud and AI services, use your market position to push existing Windows customers to use your new products in growth markets).
Unfortunately the government seems to have taken on the idea that its primary responsibility is legislation forbidding the government from passing legislation on given topics. This is because it's wholly owned by the people it's supposed to regulate.
It's surprisingly hard to do this. Never means never and then you have to remember the flag and decide what later things it applies to.
Later means you have to remember the flag and decide what later things it applies to.
I'm not sure anyone who finds it difficult to write values to file and read from them later should be working on commercial software. I genuinely struggle to think of any single feature that could be more trivial than this is.
....what? persistence is a solved problem.
i hate it when engineers do this song and dance "well actually it's really hard to do that" in order to justify the position that they already had before the conversation started. no it isn't, it literally isn't, it's just smoke and mirrors to justify your position.
I know a guy who made a career out of advising management about this sort of foot dragging in software engineering. He is very wealthy.
I was working at Google in the mid 2010s when Larry Page was at the helm and company leadership still listened to employee voices. There were enough internal memes calling for an end to the "not now" pattern that leadership mandated from the top down to remove all instances of it throughout Google products, and indeed for a while, it was mostly gone.
Evidently, it is now back as strong as ever. Either the metrics tanked enough to reverse this policy, the new generation simply forgot, or they never intended it to be permanent policy and only temporarily implemented it to appease the original outcry.
Can we also talk about the practice of mass sending push notifications in mobile apps, and usually nonsensical cringely cute ones at that?
The whole notion is absurd to me. A notification is supposed to notify you that something happened. But in these cases nothing has actually happened. All these notifications are, are thinly veiled attempts to manipulate you into opening the app to then try to shove more things into you for the benefit of the company that made the app.
I'm generally very stingy with notification permissions, so on the rare occasion that one of these does slip through, it makes me furious. It feels like an insult to my dignity as a human being.
Amen. What really pisses me off is that there are certain apps where I really have to enable notifications like Uber so I don’t miss my ride, but then they abuse that privilege and start pushing “special offers” etc to me with no way to selectively turn these off.
Or else, if there IS a subcategory to turn off then they just invent a new subcategory a few months after I’ve opted out, and auto opt me into that instead. eg I opt out of “marketing notifications” and then “relevant suggestions” is created. I’m looking at you, Google Maps.
Android has notification categories ("channels" as they're called in the API) that can be individually disabled. But it's on the app developers to assign the right one to their notifications. Many apps do honestly do it and do have separate categories for their marketing spam, but some make just one channel called something like "Miscellaneous" that includes everything all at once.
IIRC it's against Apple's guidelines to use push notifications for engagement/spam; not that that ever stopped anyone.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Apple use push notifications for spam.
> The population (especially the younger generation, who never seen a different kind of technology at all) is being conditioned by the tech industry to accept that software should behave like an unreliable, manipulative human rather than a precise, predictable machine. They're learning that you can't simply tell a computer "I'm not interested" and expect it to respect that choice. Instead, you must engage in a perpetual dance of "not now, please" - only to face the same prompts again and again.
Part of the population is learning that -- but I think another part is learning that application providers are not incentivized to design around the users' best interest, and that if you want your software to behave in a predictable, user friendly way, you need to seek out third party tools (like uBlock Origin, UnTrap for Youtube, ReVanced, Invidious etc) to enforce that behavior.
My own rant on this topic from 2013, twelve years ago, about Google, on Google+:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20190115034109/https://plus.goog...>
(And yes, I archived all my G+ content, though it's one hell of a bastard to search through it.)
That posted to HN on a day where for a moment three of HN's front-page stories were my own content (direct submissions or links to).
HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745525>
The following day saw a slew of Google-critical stories:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-11-17>
And yeah, it's not got better. I fight back (uBlock origin element remover, custom stylesheets, entire rewrites of news sites (<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122>, working on a further revision now), and almost entirely abandoning the mobile comms device space (no smartphone, a largely de-Googled and anonymised e-ink tablet with no no subscription-based apps installed).
I still strongly believe that this ends poorly.
I'm surprised no one mentioned the obvious solution here:
Open-source software respects my will. It's a great feeling that many forgot existed. It's not trying to trick me all the time. When it's not perfect, I patch it.
I also love to write my own programs to solve my own problems. Like everyone used to do in the 70s. I'm having a great time and am productive than ever.
Definitely agree. I notice this a lot with search. So many apps and various things have an understanding of search that is not "find me exactly the text I entered". Sometimes I remember that something I want to find was in a sentence with a phrase like "in for all the". I want to be able to search for "in for all the" and get every message/file/whatever that has the text "in for all the" in it, instead of getting zero results because the search tries to be "smart" and filter out stopwords. It's fine to be able to do those things, but I always want the behavior to be: a) fully specified (e.g., full list of stopwords that will be ignored); and b) controllable (e.g., can disable or enable at will).
I tend to see this as one form of a widening gap between software users and software creators. I don't subscribe to the hardcore open-source philosophy that everyone should be contributing to the software they use. But I do think it's getting problematic when a small minority of people who understand the complexities of what's actually going on are crafting elaborate systems of smoke and mirrors to present a seemingly simple interface to users. I would rather that today's interfaces be ten times "worse" but ten times more predictable.
I once compared the onboarding experience of a previous product I worked on to walking the timeshare gauntlet in the arrivals area of Mexican airports.
TurboTax?
could be anything nowadays.
Could be an apple device. During setup there's a Privacy screen that links to 1000 pages of privacy policy - and not one setting you can change.
From the title I assumed it was going to be about LLMs!
While I 100% agree with this, I also think this isn't some sort of failing or "oops didn't think of that!" type mistake -- this behavior is fully on purpose.
They want the user to be worn down until they just accept the notifications or whatever else or even just accidentally click YES on one of the recurrent pop ups.
It is beyond infuriating the number of times a google search misclick on my phone leads me to the app store opening the page for the google app. Same with a reddit page. They know what they're doing and they don't care. And even then you have to manually close that giant banner that covers half your screen to dismiss the nag to download the app-- when the web version works perfectly fine!
Alright time to stop ranting and get back to work :)
Why are UX designers getting the heat? The PM is the one forcing their hand.
PM has a product strategy for sure, but it’s still downstream of the main business strategy and will be based off that. So your ultimate accountability here rests with some greedy CEO or investor.
The PM usually has autonomy to hit their goal in the method they see fit. The CEO/investor, while greedy, doesn't usually dictate execution (unless they are Steve Jobs).
Programmers are pretty innocent, but UX Designers by trade should disallow dark patterns that worsen User's eXperience, right?
Programmers are the ones implementing these designs, so they at the very least share culpability.
Like everyone else, UX designers have a choice to follow unethical orders or refuse them.
Yes yes, labor market, visas, etc. It's still a choice to do something evil, even if you're coerced.
There's a difference though between "unethical" and just "shitty experience". A shitty experience is not inherently unethical. As a UX designer, I never did anything I believed to be unethical, but I did design many things that I thought were a shitty experience. I voiced my concerns, suggested some alternatives, and was told do design it to work the shitty way. If they want to pay me to design a shitty experience, then OK, the money's the same either way.
I just made sure to save the emails/documentation/etc. in case anyone tried to blame it on me when it failed or users complained. If the order came down from high enough up the org, a UX manager or director might also go on the record opposing it to cover for those under them in the org.
I think of it like hiring someone to replace all the beautiful hardwood floors in your home with thick, orange shag carpet. It's a bad idea and it will probably hurt the resale value of your home, but there's nothing unethical about the contractor accepting the work and taking your money as long as everything's done properly and to code.
There are degrees of evil though, surely?
I am not sure you’re making a reasonable or realistic argument when you are saying that someone should risk or give up their job, personal security, and stability of their family rather than implement a button to turn off iPhone notifications.
I don’t disagree with the principle at all, but if it’s ever going to change the conversation has to start somewhere rational. “Destroy your life because your UI offends me” isn’t it.
I'd be out of work entirely if I quit every job when I saw something disgusting. There are levels though.
Just following orders amirite
Agreed. And it's bad enough within apps... it's even worse the way they use push notifications for this kind of thing. I installed your app so I'd know when my prescriptions are ready, or when my ride is here. Abusing that privilege to upsell me on a credit card by making my phone buzz is infuriating.
I've had to uninstall so many apps because of this bad behavior.
Also relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hieoUkUiFbg
Software doesn't write itself. It's the salesmen behind the software.
I usually read these opinion pieces and roll my eyes because the OP is just being pedantic.
But, this really cuts to the core of everything wrong with modern software.
Open your bank app. Immediately get blocked by a popup asking you to complete a survey or try some new feature.
Sign up for a new account with some SaaS. Immediately get blocked with a tutorial flow to sell you on how great it is, regardless if you even came there for those features in the first place.
Even the way OS updates are installed has turned into a pushy salesman that tricks you into agreeing to something you didn't originally want.
Given that, say, a garbage collector can "always be closing" abandoned file objects, salesman behavior is easily within reach of a computer. It's just a persistent polling loop combined with a breadth-first search type thing.
>The population (especially the younger generation, who never seen a different kind of technology at all) is being conditioned by the tech industry to accept that software should behave like an unreliable, manipulative human rather than a precise, predictable machine. They're learning that you can't simply tell a computer
Youtube isn't your computer. It's their computer. And the precise, predictable mechanical command they have given it is to manipulate you.
The way out is employee- and customer-owned non-profit platforms not beholden to private equity or publicly-traded corporations driven to exploit dark patterns.
Forcing everyone to work at an employee-owned corporation is bad for their personal finances. Companies can fail, and regular employees shouldn't be invested in the same place that pays their salary. That's why you should usually sell stock as soon as it vests.
Forcing? No. You're injecting illiberal FUD.
I've personally witnessed non-profits behave in bizarre and anti-human fashions too, though perhaps not quite to the same intensity as for-profits. I don't believe they're some magical silver-bullet. And "employee-owned" is even more useless in this regard.
The way out is to just not engage. Do you find anything truly appealing about Youtube? If there was some video on it somewhere that was "I can't live without this" good, why haven't you ripped the video with youtube-dl and kept it? It would no longer be a Youtube video, and you'd no longer have to tolerate Youtube's antihuman UI.
The index case is public television on the US which has endless cloying and annoying fundraisers but you know in the end of the day they care what big sponsors like the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation and the The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation think but not "viewers like you" because of these problems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Or look at the case of Mozilla which seems to be at least treading water when it comes to browser engineering but in terms of marketing and legitimacy they seem to be doing as little as possible to threaten Chrome but keep plugging along because if Firefox went down then Google might get pulled into antitrust court. (Think how Microsoft funded Apple during the dark years of the 1990s to keep competition alive or how the existence of Android must have a huge value to Apple today in that Apple can claim it has competition -- competition like the heel in pro wrestling)
“Funded by the CPB, a private corporation funded by the American people.”
Of all the interstitials PBS had, this one was by far the oddest.
Public broadcasting in the US is in deep denial about being state media.
This comment is way off topic.
“Funded by a private corporation funded by the American people” is just a euphemism for state funding; the oddness of the euphemism is explained by the fact that it’s a euphemism in the first place.
What part of "this is off topic" do you not understand?
I was directly replying to the comment above me about the oddness of the CPB interstitial by providing an explanation. That might have been tangential but it wasn't off-topic. You're the one having a failure of understanding here, even though I've been patient with you and tried to explain the relevance of my reply.
Non-profits often aren't looking to avoid making as much money as possible, but that's not actually written into their mandate. What's written into their mandate is that they can't pay out money beyond expenses as profits to owners. They can still have a surplus after cost, they can still re-invest that surplus (often in the form of c-suite salaries "to attract the best and brightest talent at that level"), they just can't pay it out in profits to owners. There's also the fact that non-profits are often rather strapped overall and when they see a dark pattern they're motivated by fear of failure to exploit it.
That works great for the one you already have, how would you discover future "I can't live without this" good videos if you stop using YouTube?
Ever heard of SAIC or the Navy Federal Credit Union?
When I was young, I voraciously consumed media just like today. I watched TV, listened to radio, purchased vinyl and CDs like there was no tomorrow.
Over a few decades starting in 2000, I stopped purchasing music entirely. I also stopped listening to the radio, and in 2015 I got rid of my last TV. (Sometimes when you're in public, you can't avoid these.) And things seemed alright.
But I have come full circle and developed a complete addiction to YouTube that satiates all these desires in one service. Why own music when I can stream anything on demand? Why own a TV or disc player when all movies I want to see are likewise available?
So I pay for Premium. I could live without YouTube, but I would flounder in abject boredom. My music entertainment would be severely limited, like what was available in PD or Creative Commons, and that's rather grim. If YouTube were completely unavailable to me, in terms of any music or video, I would indeed struggle to fill those gaps, because it really fills out my days.
Thankfully, with Premium I am not nagged by ads and the UI generally cooperates. The ads were really wearing me down, because the more you use it, the more you're subjected to. Unfortunately, YouTube as a platform is not oriented to "watching what I want when I want it" but to discovering new content and suggesting "stuff I might like", so I still do fight to stay on the rails of what I truly enjoy.
Android, on the other hand, has become a holy terror. Every time I try to do something with my life, whether it's banking or finance or health care or shopping, Android is getting in my way and hindering my sanity. I cannot accomplish a simple thing without Android distracting me, frustrating me, and making me forget what I was trying to do. How many times have I unlocked my phone, fiddled, and then locked it again, only to discover that I didn't get anything done? That typically didn't happen with Microsoft or Windows, because indeed MS... was... primarily a B2B provider, and home users enjoyed similar deference to let us be productive without getting in our face. Unfortunately, that is all converging on Consumerist Advertising Hell.
You're a consumer entirely dependent on a corporation. Broaden your horizons a little, maybe get a library card and read a book.
AI agent idea: Detect notifications and dialog boxes that (a) lack a "Don't bother me again" button and (b) which you have responded "Maybe later" to, and forever afterwards automatically "click" "Maybe later" on your behalf the moment they appear.
Yes, this is using an H100 to crack a walnut, we shouldn't have to, etc. But still.
the difference is you're not allowed to shoot the salesman in the face or hit him with a splitting maul
Yup. Corporate non-ownership, non-control in consumer products and services is becoming far too normalized. Louis Rossmann regularly points out these absurd, customer-hostile practices.
>these absurd, customer-hostile practices
Companies no longer view their customers as their customers, and I'm not sure I've settled on an explanation that makes sense to me. I only have examples. The biggest one though was Bug Light and the Dylan Mulvaney thing from several years ago. I no longer have a link, but there was a paraphrased quote from the marketing director at the time directly expressing contempt for those who drank Bud Light. But a frustrated expletive, rather a full-on rant about how they were all moronic frat boys and gauche rednecks.
What does it mean when a company has no respect for its own customers, no gratitude, and even measurable levels of what can only be called hatred? I don't know the answer to that question, but that's the world we all live in this year of 2025. And I can't imagine it could possibly turn out well for any of us.
Companies aren't people and so lack volition. It's under-regulated greed and sense of entitlement by decision-makers, owners and/or managers, that is the problem. The root cause is the political corruption that systematically promotes and endorses this kind of behavior.
Got it!