On the low intentionality of modern technology
I feel like writing another rant, why not.
I guess it visibly started about the time Windows 10 released and probably earlier with smartphones but it is really going into overdrive lately. Especially with all the AI(it is like exponential being used to mean a lot, really. Words have meanings, being minimally precise is not waste of time) being shoved into everything.
Statistical based autocomplete being added everywhere whether it makes sense or not or whether the user wants it or not. They will get it anyway. It makes sense somewhere, in some situations when the user deliberately invokes that.
Settings that really should be standard user accessible are just not and in very lucky cases there are not too painful workarounds. Just several examples. Search bar in address bar(I could write a rant on this alone, is having to decide before using one or the other really that inconvenient?). Forced internet search in Windows start menu search. Automagically starting downloads without any user involvement. Also defaults such as hiding extensions automatically on Windows explorer.
Constant ui reshuffles, generally for the worse(at least from the point of valuing utility and good sized monitor). Less information, straight up insulting language. Uh, oops something broke. This is prevalent even in Linux on some distros. What the hell, why? What broke? Would it be that much effort to link high level overview and logs locations? Or at least start treating the user like an adult again?
Search engines straight up ignoring the actual query entered. I can get any amount of low quality and irrelevant results(not even one or the other, they have to have it both ways) I want but a relevant result on the first page is a miracle regardless if it is actually useful or not. My guess is they simply throw the text into the nearest mainstream bucket with zero regard for nuance and specificity.
Algorithmic content recommendations. That is to say black box content reshuffling made by entity concerned with ads and engagement. Hiding crowd sourced signs of content helpfulness(dislikes).
Forced internet connection, forced online accounts, forced permanent or regular internet connectivity. Forced updates, forced telemetry.
Inability or strong discouragement to take control of the user owned devices. Smartphones, consoles, smart things generally.
Zero chance of being able to read and understand all of the TOS that are thrown everywhere but a strong pressure to accept them anyway. Sometimes after the end user paid already.
It is not hard to see the benefits for one side but I don't understand end users who embrace this. Do they really think it benefits them? It does not take all that much effort to be a generation or two behind the latest user hostile trends even if opting out completely is next to impossible.
2 of these I think are defensible:
Search bar in address bar - Maybe you could explain why this is bad to you? For me it works great, if I want to type or paste a URL it works. If I want to search something I just type my search terms and it works (...or if I want to search using a specific site, I have keyword searches set up, but I get this is an "advanced" feature not many people use). Why is it better to have an unnecessary choice first?
Defaults such as hiding extensions automatically on Windows explorer - I don't know the numbers but I think it's reasonable to assume that there's a large percentage of users who simply don't need to see the extension in the overwhelming majority of cases. There's a visual indicator (icon) that tells them what type of file it is or what program is going to open it. For advanced users who do care about the extension, they can enable showing the extension.
Well, way back in Firefox 2, the URL bar would be for URLs and searching your history and bookmarks. The search bar only returned search engine results.
The clear seperation of the two made it much easier to make both better. Nowadays, it all gets gets glommed together and both are worse for it.
An absolutely staggering number of exploits were deployed courtesy of malicious programs using a name like 'nude.jpg.exe' and manually setting to the icon for jpg. The most infamous being ILOVEYOU.
Better how? Worse how?
Lets say I have 50 bookmarks tagged 'cookbook'. I could type in 'cookbook rice' into the URL bar, and only get results that I have visited, with the ones tagged cookbook at the top. The dozen or so rows would be easily visible and I could choose the exact one I wanted. That was the 'better before'.
But now? The first several lines are dedicated to search engine queries, then a nebulous "Firefox Suggested". Accessing my bookmarks is much harder now.
It's like asking why you wouldn't want to keep all of your kitchen utensils in a 5 gallon bucket and fish for them.
Can of worms: OP advocates for intentionality and division into specific tasks. You could open the bookmarks page/panel and use the dedicated search bar there, if you know you are trying to search bookmarks rather than enter a URL or search the web. There's also a built in search engine you can select for bookmarks.
I think there are tradeoffs being made and they specifically make things work worse for your workflow, but personally speaking, I don't use bookmarks that much and basically never search for them (I have a few folders I know how to dig through to get the one I want, and have not tagged any of them).
I feel ddg bangs work wonderfully with most things for this type of division, but sadly they will not access saved bookmarks.
It's a meaningful choice. At my job I often visit sites with long urls and novel subdomains, like
usedhats_august25.shop.rrdev3.mamacorp.internal. I never want to enter that into a search engine. It's a URL. However, if I just paste it into the URL bar, firefox interprets it as a search query, and gives me a page of trash results. I have to typehttp://at the front and/index.htmat the end before it tries to connect to the server.I found a setting to separate the URL bar and the search bar, but it doesn't change the behavior of the URL bar --- it just gives me a redundant dedicated search field.
What I really want is for the URL bar to be for URLs, unless I start it with
?, in which case it's search. Ah well.I used to read Bruce Tognazzini’s blog on design in the early Mac OSX days and he had a lot of criticisms of the UI and just about everything he complained about has only gotten worse, and has filled up the rest of the world beyond just Mac design as well.
His chief complaint was the temptation for “showroom design” (I can’t remember the exact term he used but something like that) where the UI is designed specifically to look really cool in a demo but ends up being kind of slow or annoying after the first 5 times you do it. Everything seems like this now. Everything is designed to look pretty in a screenshot and make a sexy demo but does not actually adhere to good usability principles. It often seems like designers don’t even realize these principles exist if they even care about them at all. Nobody cares about how devices feel to use once they’ve gotten you to buy them. It’s not even like you can bank on a good UI element to make future purchasing decisions because everyone rotates everything out every 5ish years anyway.
To provide a bit of a counter to your second paragraph, there are some things that serve practical purposes even though highly tech-fluent folks tend to pull them under the same umbrella as “showroom design”. OS X up through 10.9 or so and iOS prior to version 7 for example were full of small, unintrusive animations that as much as they were there to look pretty also conveyed to the user what was happening and made certain features easier for the less technical to understand and adopt. Screens radically changing without an interstitial animation isn’t going to phase a longtime computer user, but for a lot of other people it can be confusing.
That said, things have absolutely careened too far in the direction of “showroom design”. Animation lengths, padding, and corner radii balooned, companies have stopped doing user research, and UI designers stopped holding their designs to rigorous usability standards. Everything is more based on trends on Dribbble and brand value than they are on the practical needs of the program or its users.
At some point, it's very hard to fight this. I'm knowledgeable enough about hardware and software to self-host my own VPN, my own adblocker, my own music and video servers, run my own website, and use my own domain for email. The vast majority of people have no interest in that. Most of the remaining sliver of people don't have the money, time, or knowledge.
As a result, most people wind up using Chrome, always logged into their Google account, using passkeys in Google simply because those tools are pushed EVERYWHERE and you have to constantly fight 'helpful' popups and recommendations and deal with tons of strange edge cases and breakages to do anything else.
Hell, it's happening to me too -- I can't be bothered to figure out how to use modern game consoles offline, or disable social features, so I just try not to look at them on the home screen and I just don't use online features. I can't imagine what it's like for people who have been using computers decades longer than me. Eventually you just give up!
The services that really bother me are streaming services, though. I stopped using video and music streaming because, despite paying for the product, I couldn't control basic features like disabling podcasts in Spotify or hiding certain content recommendations from my home page. Sorry Netflix, I'm never going to watch reality TV of any kind. Sorry Spotify, Joe Rogan does not deserve any space on my home screen. Death by a thousand intolerable cuts like that led me to run my own media server. I just feel bad for all of the people who don't have the ability to self-host; I suspect if it gets bad enough, more and more people will move back to physical media like vinyl.
In addition to self hosting as an option, people can also simply not use many of the services that seem to generate complaints and frustration. I know I'm probably atypical in media consumption, but I don't understand how some folks can feel such strong negative associations with a service and continue to use it. I understand folks who don't care about these things continuing to use them, but not the folks that are motivated to write about them while continuing to use them. 🤷♂️
When you have a family the choice of what to use or ditch isn’t always up to you.
Yea I got a lot farther on decoupling after my wife saw all the oligarchs standing behind Trump.
How so? I have a family and don't use the same apps as them. If I'm annoyed by an app or service nothing is forcing me to use it even if it's available.
Why would you pay redundant subscription fees?
I think you are sort of making my original point, but it's hard to tell with the laconic nature of the exchange.
You don't like service A that you have easy access to because of family subscriptions and you aren't willing to forgo using the service despite disliking how it behaves or presents itself. I.e., not wanting to walk away from the media/service.
Like I said in my original comment, I don't understand why people do things they find frustrating enough to vent about and the laconic nature of this exchange has not educated me. That something is free to you doesn't change aggravation from using it.
While that can apply, most families can't afford to suscribe to dozens of redundant services. It also can become a game of "shit which app is this in" which is awful too.
Spouse uses ToDoist. I don't want to. Spouse wants me to use the shared todo. Guess I'm using Todoist.
I don't want to use Facebook. Several local community groups I want to be a part of use Facebook. Do I completely avoid participation in my community?
I want to boycott Amazon. Spouse wants to order stuff on Amazon. Do I badger my spouse into joining my boycott or do I let it be?
I don't want Apple or Windows in my home. Spouse doesn't want to deal with migrating to Linux. Guess Windows stays in my home for awhile longer.
I don't want my kids to play Roblox. All their friends play Roblox. All of my attempts to convince other parents to shift away fails. Do I let my kid play or do I ostricize them from their friends after-school time? In this case, I chose to ostracize.
There is a million of these things,and all relationships require compromise. I have to perpetually decide whether things are worth the fight, and sadly, often they are not.
Also this would functionally require you to just not use the internet at all.
Yea. Harm reduction and all that. Less better than more.
I think I get the gist. For me, I've opted out of all centralized social media, while the rest of my family uses Facebook; I use both windows and Linux, while my wife uses Windows. We don't really subscribe to things like to do lists, so I haven't navigated that one.
But I suppose my question back (not necessarily to you), is that while I get using the app for reasons beyond the quality of the app, I don't get using it if you dislike it so much you are driven to write posts about how much you dislike it (not saying that is you). And I'd differentiate between initiating posts versus the odd grousing in casual conversation. Some folks seem to really hate some apps, and then keep using them, almost like they need to keep something around to complain about, which is what I don't get.
By not using Facebook do I miss some messages from people? Probably. But for me I dislike Facebook enough that I just opt out of things that require it.
And if I felt strongly enough about separating windows/Apple from my Linux stuff I'd simply put them in separate vlans.
Appreciate the response!
For me at least, it's Facebook in particular. I don't really care much about messaging, but rather the numerous communities that are tethered to it. In my case it's primarily about the local BuyNothing community.
It's probably the largest, most successful bootstrapping of gift economy communities across the USA, slowly eating away at the idea of trying to re-sell your used stuff and instead give it away to whomever wants it. And it's largely tethered to one of the worst tech giants there is.
There are many other communities, like my kid's school PTO, that do most of their communications, planning, and announcements on Facebook.
With the further enshittifying of Discord, it'll soon be in ths same boat. Except now therr are like 3 IRL clubs that use it, family chats, and countless open source and gaming communities.
Yeah, that sucks. I've always been lucky to have drop off sites for donated goods that accept all sorts of things. But for local communities it is tough. I've always just shrugged my shoulders when folks say they use Facebook and told them I can read whatever is publicly visible, and sort of worked things out from there. I figure if folks want my volunteer efforts they can be flexible.
I've hosted teamspeak for many years after moving from IRC, and I remember a couple friends asking about moving to discord when it first came out. I told them I'll consider discord after they either go public or have multiple profitable years and see if they still have a product I want to be a part of. So I feel like a dodged a bullet there.
Maybe I'm just really insular? I actually have an active social group and life, but it's all analog or basic sms/RCS coordinated. I like spending time with groups and activities, but am also just as happy alone hiking or swimming outdoors or reading. So it's easy for me to say, well, this group requires Facebook so no thanks, I've got this dozen other things I enjoy just as much that doesn't. But I know most folks don't have that. When it comes to things like coordinating files or activity pictures, I send file upload interfaces to groups and collect pictures into group albums that I share using a combination of my nextcloud and OneDrive.
Anyway, thanks for the additional information! Good luck navigating the fall of discord!
Sorry I just figured the idea would be pretty self evident from the comment. Vord more or less gets at my point in his next reply. If the knife in my kitchen sucks but I need to cut something my options are to buy a second knife or put up with the sucky one. It doesn’t make sense to buy 2 or more of everything that perfectly aligns with my preferences.
I don't know that the knife analogy works here, but I get the gist. I suppose for me I just choose to opt out if something is so aggravating I'm driven to initiating posts about it (not to be confused with grousing in casual conversation). Like I mentioned to vord, my whole family uses Facebook and I just decided not to.
Thanks for the response!
A big part of it is that good technical implementation and good design are personal interests for a lot of people. So it’s not just that it being done badly is personally frustrating, it’s morally frustrating to know this shit exists and people have to live with it who don’t know any better.
I definitely agree that the existence of intentionally worse functionality is frustrating! That's probably part of why I just don't use a lot of these things or only on specific ways.
Have a good night!
I think once I’m out of the parenting bunker this is going to be my big personal project. I really need to unspool myself from all these parasitic service vendors and either find privacy/agency respecting ones or roll my own.
I’ll be mostly teaching myself as well so I may use the exercise as an opportunity to write some detailed step-by-step guides on data liberation for dummies where I go into explaining things like Docker and how to set up containers to do various jobs and best practices for backing up things like photos.
TBH I've been doing the best I can to keep the kids from falling into the dark patterns. Figure it's easier to help them compartmentalize from the beginning rather than extract the way we have to.
Teaching the to use different tools so they don't call all tablets Ipads, or become beholden to any one OS.
It sounds very difficult these days to decide between exposing your kids to dark patterns (with guidance) and reducing their exposure (knowing that as soon as they graduate, they might feel it in full force with no 'antibodies'. How do you decide where to draw the line, if you don't mind my asking?
With absolutely no idea to the overall effectiveness, kids still elementary or younger.
They get cable TV on vacation. Turns out they tire rapidly of interruptions and not getting to pick what to watch. Random exposure to other stuff at friend's houses.
Most of us were slow boiled into the enshittified web. I think a grown adult who grew up with a well curated web experience of mostly services that are respectful of their time and attention would probably experience shock, revulsion, and disgust upon encountering the sloppified web we have today. What’s worth reading that I’m going to hunt for an x to close multiple modal dialogs for? What’s the appeal of a funnel of AI slop?
The main thing will be to cultivate a sense of understanding how their focus and energy is being directed and not succumb to attention hijacking tricks like sexy butts or curiosity gaps.
"Slow boiled" is a good way to think about things, I think, but honestly I consider it to be closer to indoctrination.
Often times when I am teaching my students, their computers will have popups from whatever antivirus and other OEM bloatware was in it. They don't understand the concept of URLs and so when they want to go to a website they google search it and get spammed ads on the way to it, followed by them clicking on something that sounds simelar but isn't what they need, which spams them with more ads, before they click back, get the right thing, and then get spammed by whatever ads are on the webpage they actually need to be on.
When I think of the term "iPad kids", I am disappointed. To be clear, I'm not disappointed at the parents, who are just trying to make the best life they can for them and their children. I am disappointed because those screens are constantly sending the message that screens are not made for us as a tool to use as we choose to serve our needs, but as a simple means of cheap dopamine production. All of the negative parts of it - the ads, the dark patterns, the efforts to indoctrinate and manipulate you - are just the way the world is, simply by merit of those things being the default.
Nobody has told them that their antivirus popup annoyance machine can be removed, or that there are magic incantations to put in that browser text box to go directly where you need to go, or that there is software you can add to the browser that will remove ads from the internet almost entirely. But the worst thing is that they will almost certainly learn about it eventually and simply not care about it because this is just how the world works and they're used to being shat on every day by people who want to exploit them.
But the thing I find most disappointing about those kids who think that this is the state of the world is that they are completely correct. We who opt out of these "annoyances" are in the minority, and the people who run things are actively combatting us. Everyone around us has bought into these predatory systems. I've mostly opted out of social media because I don't like the predatory nature of them, and as a result I'm relatively socially isolated compared to those who haven't made that choice. In the meanwhile, online services are constantly combating my adblocker, and in many cases they are winning. And as unchecked capitalism causes these predatory practices to expand, how much more of society will I be left out of if I don't decide to capitulate?
Awesome comment. I'm one of the sliver of people who does have (most of the ) knowledge, but not the time. Instead of media server, I just use an offline player and manually copy my music to my phone, and on a USB stick in my car. I have started a vinyl collection 2 years ago haha!
I opted for Apple over Google, but I think they are both bad. Apple claims to have more privacy, if one believes them.
Funny you should mention the console. Basically, I set myself to offline or invisible and that's that.
I am pretty sure most people don't think at all about any of this. To them, tech is a magical box that shows them fun stuff. They barely know what is in the settings. They have no idea the App Store shows them a list of what personal data each app will harvest. These are thoughts most people don't even have. And those who are a little more tech savvy? Many simply do not care. I talked about privacy with my brother in law and he said it plainly: "I know all this but I just don't care. They can have my data if it means I get to use these apps for free." They do not understand that there is no "free"; we are paying with our data and privacy.
I pushed my aging parents towards Apple as its UI changed less often. This was almost 10 years ago. Now they ask me for help troubleshooting, I have to figure it out myself first. Used to be that I'd whip up the answer from memory. Not anymore.
Change for change's sake. Anything to make the buyer feel like there is "improvement" every year. That it does make sense to buy the latest
digital shackle... errr... smartphone.In my opinion, tech (or mainstream tech anyway) is manufactured with one underlying goal in mind: behavioural modification. They figured out how easy it is to get people addicted to different apps or "services", and the devices no longer need to be anything more than a screen to project that into the recipient's eyeballs.
Feeling down? Scroll Instagram, the latest version is out with twice the ads, but you still think you are keeping in touch with friends.
Feeling happy? Post on Facebook for the world to witness your momentary success, otherwise the moment may pass without anyone knowing, and then what?!
Having a thought? Oh by all means take it to Elon Musk's field of misery, where every brain fart can leave an impression on others, thus lending legitimacy to it versus it vanishing in the ether.
The goal is to deeply ingrain these platforms and devices into our daily lives until our brains automatically reach for the device. I have caught myself doing this: wondering what the weather is like, and glancing at the smart watch to find out. Why no look out the window or open the door? Another example: I see a cool sunset, instead of thinking "wow that is a cool sunset", I think "where's the phone so I can take a photo?" Sad. So sad.
I laughed hard for this line. Thank you. I'm stealing it :)
But yes, you're absolutely correct. X has become a place full of bots, low effort posters, spam, scammers (masquerading as Elon Musk himself) and straight up Big Tech AI hype propaganda. I never really used the original Twitter much before the acquisition, and I signed up for X to build a following for my tech content, but gosh that place is unbearable.
Haha glad you liked that line :D
I gave Twitter an honest shot several times over the years. It never really stuck for me. Maybe i just don't think or operate in a way that matches the platform's intention. I respected it for its functionality that enabled people to organize (against regimes, etc.). One issue was that only 2-3 friend where even on the platform, actively posting. So it felt lonely compared to Facebook (back then). I have since deleted FB, Insta, etc.
As a business, and if I were to need a following, then yeah, I'd have to bite the bullet and basically be as present on all these platforms as possible. For now I have a regular job that has no need for that. And for personal stuff, I am happy to be here on Tildes. I think I've had more meaningful exchanges here in a couple of weeks than on Reddit in several years.
I don’t really see the through line in that list. It just seems like decision in software that annoy you personally more than a “lack of intentionality”. Several of those seem to have a lot of thought and intentionality?
I'll shill for Kagi. Paying for a search engine removes the dark pattern of it being more profitable to give bad results.
Getting out of the mess is slow and painful. Every step helps.
Is DuckDuckGo still a decent option?
Anecdotally, I (not the person you were replying to, in case you were looking for their opinion specifically) tried DDG for several months and found the results kind of poor, and ended up switching back to Google. I guess it depends what your threshold for 'decent' is.
IME it was very poor for non-English searches and when "local" (but not US) results were desirable. DDG was exceptionally poor for the latter in fact. Searches for "[name name] restaurant [city/town name]" in French, for example, would not return the page of the restaurant with that name in that town. This was true a good year or so ago, now, but it was useless enough that I switched to Qwant (which is also worse than Google, but better than DDG, for how I use them).
I have used it for years as my default. I'm in Canada. It's good, but I know Google can be better (if I were willing to look past the many sponsored links and ads). Any other options, or is Kagi the best option these days?
I know that others say that it has worse results than Google, but I personally find that they are roughly on par. I'd actually say they're miles ahead simply because they don't give me unprompted AI answers.
Good point... The automated AI answers are annoying and wasteful.
I liked it well enough, but still ended up having to fall back to Google for results periodically, and their business model still relies on ads.
I have never needed to fall back to Google for regular searches with Kagi. Google Maps is still the best at what it does, so I forsee having to use that for quite some time for the "find a place in the area quickly" need.
Yeah, DuckDuckGo does have some ads. Not as bad as Google. They do keep pushing their own browser on me. I'll have a look at Kagi tho I don't know how I feel about paying for a search engine. I guess the crappier and more ad-ridden the free ones get, the more willing I will be to pay. I do hate ads with a passion.
Maps is very annoying. Like you said, Google Maps is the best. I have been using Apple Maps in the iPhone and it is a bit of a struggle at times, but fine as GPS / navigation. Not sure if any independent alternatives are good. Wyze was bought by Google. Is MapQuest still a thing?
Yea and for directions most things are fine. It's really just the location-browsing that everything else probably has no chance of catching up on short of the government emminent-domaining Google's map data.
I think mostly you are talking about enshittification. The reasons for that have been discussed at length by Corey Doctorow. But in the broadest terms, what you are noticing is that your goals are different than the companies who are providing software that you use. It’s probably rare now for anyone to make something as good and usuable as possible. That would be YOUR goal. But Microsoft or google don’t care about that. They care about maximizing profit. That may cause bad search results, because ad revenue is more important than whatever some rando user typed. Or it may result in some odd design choices because of partnerships or tie-ins or cost savings that aren’t evident to us.
We see this stuff everywhere now. For example, Marvel movies. Maybe a few of them, like the original Ironman were just trying to be a good movie. But soon, they all had to tie into a whole chain of movies and shows because it isn’t interesting to Disney if you watch ONE movie, you have to watch 7 this year plus subscribe and watch the tv shows too and buy a fantastic four backpack or something.
This is one reason why indie games are getting more popular I think. A game made by a small team is way more likely to have the same goals as the player.
I won't comment on the majority of the post. Others have covered a lot of the ground, and I wouldn't be adding much.
But this particular gripe may have a reason behind it:
OWASP recommends obfuscated error messages as a protection from attack, so I think this may be why they seem a lot more common.
Edit:grammar
I can understand it on a website since that argument makes sense but on software and the operating system I've got on my own pc it makes far less sense and makes troubleshooting a fair bit harder.
I agree that it makes troubleshooting harder. Just trying to explain the trend. As more things get web enabled (and more devs are trained on web standards) I really only see this trend continuing.
I think this started much further back, with the web. A website can be redesigned at any time and as a user, you don't get a say in it. Hopefully they tested it enough before the launch and can react if something broken?
Though of course, with commercial software installed from a CD you don't get a say either, but everyone gets the same version and it doesn't change after it was shipped. (That's both good and bad; you're stuck with the bugs, too.)
There's something to be said for shipping things as static files you can download. PDF's don't fit screens well, but at least they don't change on you.
My absolute worst pet peeve:
Sites that are mainly about looking at a certain user's profile at a time and seeing their posts automatically, or even worse, ONLY sorting those posts via some opaque, poorly or undefined algorithm instead of, you know, the sane thing; chronologically.
If I click on someone's twitter, there is absolutely NO, ZERO, NILCH universes where I, or any other fucking person on the entire face of the earth would want to see posts in ANY order except seeing the most recent ones on top. What other POSSIBLE order could you be sorting them in? By retweets? Alphabetically? By word count? By number of Es in the post? WHY??????
This absolute fucking cancer has spread to way too many websites and it legitimately makes actually furious when I see it. It's the worst anti pattern I've ever seen in social media and it needs to die immediately.