For me, Amazon is a prime example of this. The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.
I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.
And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren't made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results.
Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.
As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon.
Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.
FWIW, Amazon's search algorithm is actually extremely simple: rankings are based on what people buy after searching for a particular term. To use your examples, the reason why Amazon is showing power strips when you search for "surge protectors" is because people often use the terms interchangeably. So, while this is bad for you, since you correctly distinguish the terms, it's actually better for people who use the terms interchangeably and do want a power strip when they search for surge protectors. And I think it's ambiguous what the correct behavior should be. Perhaps in the future some AI system will be able to help customers manage this kind of confusion, but we're not there yet.
Since inevitably someone will mention that the search results are littered with ads: yes, they are, and due to the same factor I mentioned above, it makes sense for sellers to advertise, say, power strips against the search term "surge protector." We run into a similar thing with "outdoor" rated wire. It's a term which technically means a rating for UV exposure. However, customers often use it to refer to wire that is rated for burial in the ground. So we advertise our burial rated cable against the "outdoor" search keyword. Gotta meet the customers where they are.
Aliexpress is just as bad as well, they have taken the Amazon model and ramped it to 11. Yet they don't seem to be intentionally mixing in bad results like Amazon is, instead because its all external sellers they are all embedding searched keywords to push their product in front of you. There are loads of shopNNNNNNNN based sellers doing this with various products that clearly don't last long. Both store designs only seem to exist due to having almost anything on them but the cost is long, complex and detail checking searches, they are minefields of wrong products.
Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot of results where the page appears to not even include the words I searched for far. I see the same thing on duckduckgo/microsoft now too.
When did searches that bring back results that don't match become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems unlikely given the page contents).
Recently I've had Google return results lacking search terms I've put in quotes (and then clicked "Show results for xxx instead" when it tries to 'correct' me). I have no idea how I'm supposed to make my desire any clearer.
It has been a long time since double quotes worked reliably for me on Google.
It has also been a long time since Google showed me any search results that weren't 100% ad-laden blogspam with wordy vague (and often incorrect) content with clickbait titles. I have basically given up on Google altogether.
I stopped using Google at work when they forced javascript. Since then I realized that I haven't missed it at all and I've stopped using it entirely. It's become trash.
My observation with Google is that an astonishing high percentage of their users stopped clicking organic search results around 2010 or so. They exclusively choose from amongst the top two or three ads, which they don’t even realize are ads since the indication of “what’s an ad” has gotten more and more subtle and the position of the first organic result has gotten lower and lower on the page to the point where today you generally would have to scroll a bit to find the first organic research result. The same users who only clicked the sponsored links before now don’t click any links, usually preferring to simply read the AI generated summary of some random spam results (which notably is far worse in accuracy than what you would get if you simply asked an LLM directly).
I think as a result, Google doesn’t really care about the quality of their organic search results since on the scale Google cares about, “nobody” clicks them anyway.
geizhals.at is regrettably only available in Austria, Germany, and the EU, but other sites I've used with similar good parametric search and filter are digikey.com (electronics engineering), https://at.rs-online.com (more electronics engineering), and McMaster.com (industrial manufacturing).
I've observed that developing and maintaining a database with the relevant attributes for each component is a ton of work and becomes a huge value-add for a distributor with technically inclined customers. It cannot be outsourced to manufacturers, as they have no incentive to match their schema to other manufacturers, and it cannot be outsourced to marketplace sellers, as they too lack this incentive. Both groups want their products to appear in as many searches as possible. Only the distributor wants exclusively the correct products to show up for a limited search and is in a position to enforce consistency across different marketplace listings and manufacturers.
On a side note, McMaster.com is the very best online shopping site I've ever visited or used. It's blazing fast (a trick based on pre-fetching that you can observe in all its glory in the developer view of your favourite browser), it's logical, uncluttered - perfect.
This efficiency extends to their customer support ops as well. I ordered the wrong size of a bin, sent a message in their chat saying I wanted to return the bins and get the ### SKU instead, and without any further input from me, there were new bins delivered 2 days later.
They seem to have the assumption that their customers are actually trying to get some shit done.
On a related note, https://segor.de/ doesn't have great search (and they don't remotely attempt to carry every component, and note that a whole lot of German component names look nothing like their English counterparts) but the technical design of their online catalog is interesting - it's a fast single-page app with about 3MB of data, so when you navigate the catalog it doesn't do any network round-trips except to fetch images.
Search companies like Google reached the conclusion that search results need to be another form of infinite scrolling. They will spend little time doing real search and then flood the results with what they really want people to see.
Yep, the irrelevant videos are clearly targeted based on viewing history, but a completely separate topic from the search, and often with clickbait titles.
Tangentially related, I typically queue multiple videos, and within the past year YouTube has started inserting new videos into my queue. It’s always one by the same person of the currently playing video, placed next in the queue, and it only gets inserted after watching the current video for some period of time.
That last part made it difficult to diagnose. It’s extremely annoying and feels like gaslighting because it’s never a video I actually have an interest in watching.
The browser extension "Unhook" for YouTube gives you full customization of what content presentations display and auto play etc. Even allows to remove the home page, which is designed to distract. For phones, I recommend using your web browser instead of the app. Using your phone web browser also allows for using adblock so it's a double win minus the less usable interface
I pay for Youtube and see in the results a lot of irrelevant videos that have nothing to do with my search or viewing history.
But it gets so much worse. I leave the "smart downloads" feature enabled in Youtube Music on my phone because sometimes it discovers and downloads some gems for me. Again and again it downloads "artists" and music genres that I went out of my way to never have to listen to. To add insult to injury it sometimes refuses to delete those playlists for hours after I click the button. One time I had to clear all the downloads just to remove that trash.
There is no "organic" explanation for this as much as I'd dig for one. This is Youtube taking money to push a product.
And YouTube isn't really interested to improve their suggestions: when I say "Not interested" to a suggestion, they ask why not with two idiotic possible answers: a) I've already seen it or b) I don't like it.
If a) would be the case, they most of the time would know it and if b) would be the case, I would have seen it too and thus a).
Examples: I use Canon and Fuji gear for taking pictures, but they offer me Nikon or Sony related videos. If they would actually have some interest to optimize suggestions, they would offer me to say "I'm not interested in Nikon/Sony/whatever" … wouldn't they?
Or Amazon, offering me Sony lenses for my Fuji. Or more of Thing-X after buying some Thing-X yesterday. But I only need exactly one new Thing-X, which their stupid "AI" Rufus should know by now if their suggestion machinery didn't know it already ;-0
Amazon has been pretty horrible for ages, but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor, one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
First and foremost, you have to understand why people use Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat. People don't generally feel like messing around on three or four different websites to find the item, add it to their cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon.
So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.
Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.
So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".
> the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere
I've increasingly found that prices on amazon are higher than you'd pay on the manufacturers website. Sometimes much higher. It's worth checking. Some sites have been cheaper and had free shipping. The only catch is that shipping times were 3-5 weeks as opposed to the 3-14 days it would take for prime's 3 day shipping to actually show up.
I pay for Prime, so that's my mental heuristic. Plenty of other people are in the same boat. For those who don't pay for Prime, "free over $35" is an acceptable drop-in replacement.
Honestly? I just drive over to Best Buy now. Yeah it costs a few bucks more and I have to leave the house (this is actually a good thing), but I can be certain that the box on the shelf that says "surge protector" is actually a surge protector and I don't need to spend 15 frustrating minutes sorting through intentionally misleading trash to find it and then cross my fingers that what I order is what I actually receive.
Also, Amazon cedes control of their supply chain to any rando who will ship them product. So it’s just as likely that you receive a power strip without surge protection, even if it claims to have it.
The best buys in my area are getting kind of sketch in the past few years. Numerous empty shelves. Products sitting on the floors in boxes not put up for display. Wish I had a Microcenter close.
All the stores are like this now, not just Best Buy. Walmart used to be, as I remember it, this insane level of consumerism store where the shelves were overfilled and there was no product so niche that they didn't have at least a few of nearly any product you can imagine. They used to sell hard drives, for fuck's sake, even if it seems like they were locked behind the glass near the electronics checkout. Now you go in there, and it's just a wasteland. Home Depot no longer sells home improvement or hardware store goods... it tries to sell the cheap junk you'd think would be in the Walmart. There are no tools at Home Depot unless a contractor would use them. Absolutely nothing for woodworking (I seem to remember them carrying at least one display piece for a wood lathe back around 1999-2003), now there are no table saws. I often end up going with my wife or my daughter to Michael's or Hobby Lobby, the former has reduced their store inventory so much that the only way to hide it was to remove shelves and spread them thinner so that you could march a school band through the aisles without them having to step closer to each other. The latter has changed their inventory to have fewer craft supplies, and more Temu-style junk.
If you look at Walmart and others most 3rd party sellers just duplicate their listing across platforms. E-commerce has fewer "competitors" and more carbon copies
...isn't that basically Costco.com? the trade-off is that you can't sell a million different things if you want to ensure quality among all the things you sell
We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building the software and technology and automation) would do well as a community to spend more time on introspection about what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in practice only to make the walls of an aspiring monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to anybody else.
I think it was horrible form the start. When e-commerce was starting to be a thing it was quickly establish how a store should look, what should it have and where. Like when TVs were made everybody settled on a rectangular display pretty quickly. Amazon is sort of first of TV companies that initially made their first commercial TV a globe and ignoring that every other competitor started making rectangular TVs pretty quickly Amazon to this day manufactures globe TVs and they still sell, not because they are good or what people think TV should look like, but just because they are cheap and delivery is convenient.
Buying land (or renting), building warehouses, and employing people to move stuff is extremely costly.
>one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the long term.
> The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.
Does it? It seems to return things with my search terms just fine. What is usually the case is that there are lots of items with some of those search terms that are also popular.
I see no evidence that Amazon is trying to make its regular search worse.
With sponsored listings there's a separate issue if sellers are bidding on keywords, but that's also to be expected.
It makes sense for Amazon to show other products on product pages and in checkout (as it does). But doing it intentionally during search would seem counterproductive. The reality is just that search is hard, and people are often bad at entering search terms.
When the ads are interleaved into the organic results with only a tiny gray "Sponsored" label to differentiate them, that's making search worse. Amazon is the one mixing them up, not me.
> I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.
I have done exactly that. Some of the "mixins" are really strange, and have nothing at all to with what I'm looking for, so I have to assume that are paid keyword poisoning.
This is so weird to me. I'm always hearing people having issues with Amazon but I have a near perfect experience shopping on there or with consuming entertainment on Prime.
Honestly, I feel guilty about it because I really dislike Bezos and Amazon's reputation as a terrible employer, yet they make a damn good product.
If you know of a better shopping site that delivers similar or better quality experience, please do let me know. I'll look into geizhals.at , but even for electronics, I've found Amazon better than dedicated sites like newegg because I find what I'm looking for, it is good quality and shipping times are amazing.
Perhaps it's a location issue, does Amazon have a worse service for non-US people?
Try sorting results by price. In my experience it doesn’t actually work. It puts items in featured order regardless. And if you dig through enough you can find cheaper items further down.
I've tried messing with the sorting, and I've always found "Featured" is what I want. If I want something cheap I'd go to temu. I've never wanted "the most expensive" thing just because either. If cheaper is better quality, it tends to bubble up to the top when you sort by reviews because more people will buy the cheaper thing that has good quality (unless it's brand new).
My suspicion is that Amazon -- in addition to having paid product placement -- probably has engagement metrics. If you have to dig into the details on every product in the search to find exactly what you're looking for, that increases engagement.
The most aggravating part is it ignores booleans. Sometimes I want to search for very specific things that are variants of hyper-competitive SEO-slop, only without feature x. Like if I want to search for functional lamps that take bulbs (not integrated LEDs). I should be able to search for Lamp -LED without it showing me a thousand led lamps (and upselling me a purchase protection plan when I add to cart. )
Amazon has infected the minds of lots of people to a point where they'll spend half an hour sifting through garbage listings in their horrible web site and then wait a full day to receive the product, instead of going to the corner store and buy what they know they want.
Amazon sellers, lots of them don’t work for Amazon, right? Their incentive is to show up in searches, and the one who takes the reputation hit when they game the system and show up in the wrong search is mostly Amazon, not them. So, it would 0% surprise me if Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties being indexed, like Google is.
Not saying this is definitely the case, but it seems like a plausible alternative theory.
And, it probably won’t get better. In 2015 these companies were at the tail end of being new and interesting. In 2025 they are the slow entrenched incumbents.
> Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties
No, this is by design. Amazon has no problem whatsoever in banning sellers that do things they don't like. It definitely helps Amazon to keep this state of things.
I wonder if somebody will come along to defend that position that your edited version of my post is proposing. It would be interesting to see somebody defend it (I’m not interested in doing so, though).
The biggest problem I have with Amazon is that after I buy something, for example AA batteries, Amazon will then recommend me only batteries, like I am the ultimate battery collecting hipster of the world. “AA’s? If you’re into mainstream, I guess. But check out these CR2032s, they can power vintage calculators.”
That this effect and related 'enshittification' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is now prevalent everywhere is really depressing to me. Here's why. I recently retired somewhat early from a career spent entirely in high tech creating new kinds of products and services. Often, products that made life better for users by empowering them to do things they couldn't do before and sometimes solving old problems better, faster and cheaper.
That whole time, I had an underlying belief that those of us in "the industry" (high tech entrepreneurial startups) were generally making the world better, whether in large ways like personal empowerment or small ways like making daily life easier, more efficient or, sometimes, even more delightful. In some sense, I felt like I was a small part of a larger march toward the kind of better future which so inspired me in the sci-fi books I read as a kid.
Over the last five years I've increasingly seen mainstream tech products and services adopting dark patterns or abusing customer's time or trust in other ways. Of course, there were always a few companies that sucked, either due to incompetence or just being unethical but most everyone agreed they were bad. But now using dark patterns, or just taking steps to actively make the product experience worse for users, is no longer an aberration or regression - it's apparently accepted as normal. High tech leaders from FAANG on down are ALL knowingly doing this shit. It's on KPIs. Teams of competent professional technologists are collecting bonuses for intentionally making their product or service worse for nice people they don't know.
Right before I retired I actually saw this starting at the company I was at. I was in meetings where some of my coworkers seriously proposed doing obviously wrong things, arguing it would boost "the metrics". Being a senior exec, I was mostly able to correct this by pointing out customer satisfaction, loyalty and confidence in our brand were the most important metrics, but it did feel 'off'. At first I dismissed it as a handful of employees with mis-calibrated values but it kept happening. Eventually, the CEO overruled me on one of these "values"-based product decisions. It really bothered me because, even though it was dressed up in polite language, it was clearly just about burning customer goodwill to boost a short-term metric. At the time, I assumed the company was just slowly losing its way. Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a time. Frankly, this change in ethos factored into my decision to retire. It's not like I expected every product decision to go my way but these weren't subjective judgements. And over the years I'd certainly made my share of product mistakes (oops!) but it just felt weird (and really bad) to be doing the wrong thing on purpose. Sure, some of these things would boost metrics and revenue, at least in the short-term, but I found I couldn't get myself to NOT believe the best way to increase metrics and revenue was to just make our product experiences even better.
When I was in my late 20s and flying off to some trade show like Comdex, I sat next to a guy who worked for Marlboro cigarettes. It was interesting talking with him and hearing the careful rationalizations about creating a product which obviously was bad for customers and addictive to boot. I remember telling my coworkers at dinner that night about how weird it was to meet someone like that - and how lucky we were to be in high tech, where we got paid to build products that just kept getting better and helped make the world better - at least in some small way. Sure, I knew that progress would sometimes be two steps forward, one step back, but I guess I was naive to have never even imagined this future.
This is definitely thought-provoking, and a correct use in many of the examples, but the Wikipedia example doesn't feel right because I don't think it's deliberate there. I suppose you could argue that we've been conditioned into accepting the Gruen Transfer and take that behaviour over into Wikipedia. But I remember back in the days of physical encyclopedias that I could spend a long time just flipping through them in a similar way to the way I browse Wikipedia. (My favourite description of the Wikipedia hole was a tweet from around 10 years ago about "snapping out of a Wikipedia trance at 2am while reading the early educational history of Meatloaf's guitarist").
There is a different value to the person if your rabbit hole is filled with learning and information that informs rather than being just a mechanism to try and sell people something they don't want. Its not really in wikipedia's direct interest for people to just scroll around, it costs them bandwidth, but its also part of the point of wikipedia and every page read is directly towards their mission.
Wikipedia is designed to help you find exactly what you want, quickly, and then offer infinitely _more_. So a different thing than the Gruen Transfer, but related.
It's not intentional, but it is evolutionary, in the sense that we've never had this discussion about onethingpedia, the website that had a design optimal at making you leave after you found what you were looking for, because nobody ever heard of it.
I definitely felt this guy was a little bit hyperbolic because the more social media gets the way he describes the more I see people disconnect from it
I don't know anyone other than people over 50 who still check their facebook feeds and the kids are out enjoying the sun today
Also Wikipedia is not particularly disorienting at all, especially not intentionally, both of which are key factors by this author's definition. Wikipedia is just genuinely interesting.
Odd that the article doesn't mention Victor Gruen (perhaps best known as a creator of the indoor shopping mall as we know it, although he later became a critic of them), who the transfer is named after.
The article isn't really about what the Gruen transfer is but rather about how it's applied on internet. I don't think mentioning the guy would be useful there, if anyone's curious they can just google Gruen transfer
After I wrote that, I decided to kind of test this.
I first searched “Gruen transfer” using Kagi. First hit was the Wikipedia article with enough showing to feel I didn’t need to go there because of what I’d read here already. Right below that, indented for grouping, is a Wikipedia link to a TV show by the same name. I skimmed that article to see where/when it was shown. Anyone here ever watched it? Curious if it’s any good.
Then I searched the same with google. The presentation is more noisy. And organized less. It’s hard to compare the two, because viewing one before the other affects the second (no double slit opportunity here). I did notice that I felt subliminally drawn/distracted to the visual thumbnails of the tv show, rather than the Wikipedia entry.
I watched the first three seasons and I liked the TV show. It highlighted some of the scummy tricks advertisers use and some of the impressive art that goes into ads.
If I wrote an article on Turing Machines, someone could reasonably express surprise that I didn’t mention Alan Turing, even if (especially because?) his last name is right there.
To be honest, thinking of all the times I read an article that in the very least mentioned Turing Machines, I don't recall significant occurrence of linking "Turing Machines" to a Wikipedia article on the subject _or_ to one on Alan Turing, or subsequent (in parentheses, for example) elaboration of either concept or brief excerpt on the person -- the reader's knowledge on the subject of either, seems to more often than not, be implied.
I think their specific objection was sort of wrong—it isn’t really that similar to Turing, because Turing machines are a very well known concept in CS, which is a whole big field. Lots of blog posts on CS assume you’ve at least taken the 101 level class and know who Alan Turing is.
Retail, uh, theory or whatever is not not nearly as widespread (I mean lots of people stock shelves, but as someone who did, I never thought about why things were laid out the way they were). So, most likely an article about Gruen Transfer is introducing the idea to the reader. So, some background could have been nice.
And the article really isn't about the man or his achievements. The term is named after Gruen, but I don't think he had all that much to do with it or wanted to be associated with it.
I probably would have linked the first use of "Gruen" to his wikipedia page, but I understand why the author didn't. If you really care you can find it yourself and keeping the post focused is a good thing.
Ironically it's had the exact opposite effect on me. So many of these things are so hard to interact with now I just... don't. Surprisingly little of value has been lost.
I think for much of the HN crowd, many efficacious engagement hacks will have a sort of "paradoxical reaction." [1] Changes that are "minor" frustrations to average consumers can be dealbreakers to us. For instance, I switched away from Chrome entirely when they took away the rolodex-style tabs on mobile. [2]
> In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing.
Is it true? Is it a new thing?
Could someone tell the telco industry, surely they are unaware of that, because as recently as last month, I had to threaten legal action again a european telco who refused to not automatically renew my "pre-paid, subscription free" plan...
Any reference to that regulation would be appreciated.
The Wikipedia example seems totally irrelevant: there’s nothing "designed to disorient you upon visiting", it’s just a normal interesting website with links between its pages.
Have always been referring to this as “the IKEA maze”.
Went through Copenhagen airport recently. Right after security, there is a sign “All gates ->” which takes you on a detour through the main “taxfree” shop - that is close to. as low at it gets imo.
There's a great podcast called "How To F#€k Up An Airport" which details the many _many_ problems building a new airport in Berlin.
One of the funniest to me was that the architect didn't like the forced shopping path of modern airports. So he just didn't add any. And no-one noticed until after they'd built the foundations, so then they added a new floor, but it would be out of the way so who'd want to go there reducing income forecasts, while requiring new ventilation requirements, fire suppression systems etc.
If you work on poorly defined constantly changing software tasks it's all quite familiar. Just with a literal airport.
What makes it double funny is the whole security theater around being unable to carry certain items during flight (due to risk of explosives, for example). A determined person would probably be able to craft some makeshift explosives with things one can buy at the taxfree shop.
I've been in airports where to get to gates you do not have to walk through the tax free shop, although you do have to walk by it. The Copenhagen airport you have to walk through it which is also irritating if
1. it is busy because a shop is not as well structured for walking through as a hallway is. The shop is structured for you to look at things and buy.
2. you have a child with ADHD or similar problems which has to be watched because they might break a big bottle of something on accident.
3. You have to navigate a wheelchair or a large pram through the area.
4. This shop is actually very big so there is a lot of tax free shelving to walk around to actually get out to the hallways that take you to the gates.
When you get through security/customs/etc you find yourself on a long wide corridor, which has all the gates on it, and also the entrances to the individual shops.
IKEA are actually the opposite of mazes. There’s one main path that when you follow it brings you to the end and the occasional shortcut, literally impossible to get lost.
London Stansted and Manchester (same owners) recently had "upgrades" where you have to walk along a street to get to the seating area and gates beyond.
That street is narrow, long and forces you to pass every single shop in the departures area. It's blatantly hostile design.
It can get even worse, when the duty-free store has multiple entrances/exits; only one of them leads to the gates; and the paths between them are winding with a lot of stall and shelves and stands occluding the view. And at times you need to choose whether to turn right or left - and may end up cycling back to where you entered, on a different walking path, or to an exit which actually just leads to other check-in areas.
I think this is probably inevitable in any system that 1) isn't used purely for pragmatic reasons -- and then turned off and 2) has some demand for novelty from its users.
So yeah, while the Facebook timeline is a mess, the real question is: what is the intended purpose of scrolling the timeline in the first place? For most users it isn't a clear case of "I want X" and they don't actually have a specific goal in mind. Instead, it's some combination of seeing what your friends are doing and be entertained by novel items. From that perspective it's inevitable that the timeline would end up this way.
I'd say the real problem is trying to be all things to all people. Why should Facebook be a place to keep up with your friends' activities and a place to watch short videos from random people and a place to organize virtual clubs and....
Those should all be separate things. But tech companies are far, far too large, and growth must be achieved forever no matter what.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Why not offer alternative feeds or filters then?
I think maximizing profit and sacrificing usability is a very clear motivator in many of these cases.
On mobile at least, the friends tab no longer just gives you suggestions, but actually gives you a friends feed. Doesn’t help if what you actually want are the groups you’re part of, but it’s something.
The line between serious and frivolous vanished. Edutainment,
gamification of work... the lines blur. I won't get into why I think
this is deliberate but for many people I ask, social media occupies
the same space for novel gossip as being "essential to business and
career". For a proper separation of concerns I think tech is set to
split into what is serious, essential, regulated - and everything else
that is some variation on entertainment. Where that leaves companies
that ride on deliberate ambiguity and confusion, I don't know.
On a new browser, at my first visit to any Stack Exchange site, I add the "Hot network questions" DOM node to my uBO block list, and then modify that to apply to all their sites.
Same here. I also block elements with links to my profile because I always get distracted by the green dot whenever one of my old answers gets an upvote.
I would strongly disagree with classifying the feed as a Gruen Transfer mechanism.
The feed as a basic concept is great. It's basically an inbox, and no more of a Gruen Transfer enabler than an email inbox. Hell, it's no more inherently an enabler than an aisle in the store. It's not the existence of the feed, it's what's in it.
Facebook's feed is what allowed me to see what my friends were up to without clicking on every single profile. That made Facebook hugely more useful to me than MySpace.
But there are eyeballs on the feed, and money to be made by showing ads to those eyeballs and capturing more minutes of attention to in turn show more ads. That's the incentive.
I doubt that feeds are case of you can't find what you were looking for. I don't think most users are looking for anything in particular when they browse a feed. Now jamming more things in the search page may count. And Twitter's nasty habit of shifting around what you're looking at so you can't find a post surely counts.
Yeah, if look at the definition of Gruen Transfer, it's the design of the mall itself that causes the discombobulation. The fact that there are screaming, attention-grabbing things all over the mall isn't the transfer itself. The fact that it's hard for you to find what you were originally going to do, and then you get distracted by the attention-grabbing things, is.
So Instagram, etc's overall design might have Gruen Transfer, the feed itself is merely the place your attention goes when you struggle to figure out what to do.
Right in the article, the author states that their feed (and mine too) only ever contains a handful of updates from friends, the rest of it is infinite doomscrolling garbage. If yours is not the same, then you haven't been on facebook in the last 6-7 years.
Yes, I stopped using Facebook in 2016, but regardless it's not the feed but what's in it.
The feed wasn't created to disorient, it was a great organization feature actually. It helped you see the most recent updates from friends and actually saved time at first compared to manually clicking around and getting lost on other parts of profiles.
Twitter and Facebook both used to have feeds with an obvious collection basin and an obvious sort order. The moment the obvious tool was replaced with "the algorithm", the feed became a Gruen Transfer.
I mean, originally supermarkets weren't laid out in a confusing way, right? But they are now.
Wow, today I learned there is a Wikipedia app. It never occurred to me to look for an app since it’s been a habit for 20 years to pull it up in a browser. Are there any other notable differences or features in one vs the other besides the two you mentioned?
Easier to read on a small screen and can save articles & bookmarks for offline. But mostly I prefer it over the browser because every time I go to the browser there's something else there to distract me. I look up things in Wikipedia several times a day, so the ergonomics add up.
In a way yes. If you compare ads to purchasing products or even subscriptions, ads translate into attention and optimizing for addictive engagement. The same as microtransactions in games.
If you instead pay money, there’s even an incentive to reduce time spent, which translates into a focus on efficiency and customer focus.
The hard part is competing with free as in beer. It would be great if users learned more about the data that’s collected on them, in order to power the ad machine. If it was more concrete, I think more people would be deterred. Especially influential people.
It's not just advertising. It's capitalism in general. If they don't show you ads, they find other ways of monetizing you. Things that aren't in your interest. "Enshittification" per Cory Doctorow.
It's not confined to capitalism, and it's more than a bit fruitless to frame it as such. A strict command economy would still be trying to advance its own interests through identical methods. Instead of "friend post, friend post, click here to buy product, friend post", you get "friend post, friend post, the Rungra People's Pleasure Ground is proud to announce that Supreme Leader has facilitated the construction of a brand-new dolphinarium, friend post".
Agreed. It's not a matter of _if_ product placement and affiliate links will happen in LLM output, it's a matter of when. The business incentives are too strong for this not to happen.
I imagine what they can't say is that your feed is otherwise too empty. Whether you want that or not, that doesn't suit them at all. Newspapers back in the day would only run as many pages as they had ads to support. If they didn't have the ads, pieces already written and ready to go wouldn't be included. Unless you follow a long list of active people or semi-professional content creators, you're not going to see enough ads.
Now, presumably you hate this, and I certainly hate this, but without doing things their way, we're unwanted. They want the consumers and they want those that can be convinced to follow suggestions and join new groups.
Once upon a time, the technically literate would leave Altavista and join Google to start a migration, but Facebook buys the Instagrams and slowly twists them the same way to suit them. It's miserable enshittification.
Somehow, your feed is different from everyone else's. I don't even go on Facebook all that often (maybe once a week to post a pic or two) and my feed is basically:
1. 2-3 posts from actual friends
2. "Reels" of young women jumping on trampolines in bikinis
(Note: I do not and have never watched Reels on Facebook.)
I usually find it pretty terrible and so hardly ever visit, so let's try:
* 10 day old post from someone I know, involving other people I know
* a reel, with no origin specified
* People you may know
* a recent post from someone I know
* an old post from someone I know
* a recent photo from someone I know
* an old post from someone I know
* People you may know
* An old post from someone I don't know tagging someone I know
* then I scroll further and it does a weird jumping thing so I can no longer keep track of where I was
This is actually better than I remember in terms of "relevant" things, but I long ago lost the habit of facebook, and sometimes seem to get a whole lot of stuff that doesn't feel relevant which tends to put me off. Also that odd scrolling behaviour that starts happening after a bit.
ISTR some people observing that if you've been gone for a while they stack the deck in favor of things relevant to specifically you. Which may be why you report so many old things; they may have been reaching back trying to find those things specifically. If you were browsing routinely they might never show you those old things.
The friends feed is polluted these days also, not so badly as the infamous "feed" though. But it's bad enough overall that whatever feed/page I'm checking out on Facebook (which happens pretty rarely in the recent years) the absolutely first thing I check is who the post is from. If it's not a friend or a group I recognize as mine I just skip looking at the entire post.
I would be surprised if mine was even 10%. It's low quality, irrelevant garbage. News from towns I've never been to. A lot of pirated comic scans.
I'm in plenty of active groups. And some of my friends still actively post. But I have to go out of the main feed and into the "feeds" section to see any of that.
Does anyone know of a browser plugin that would filter out all posts that I haven't subscribed to? In theory it should be possible by grabbing my list of friends (and, optionally, of the pages I liked). In practice, I expect Meta implemented an aggressive scheme to prevent that and further confuse FB users.
Personally I want to filter out all the "recommended" posts, but if you look at the raw html you'll see that they aggresively obfuscate the structure to make this sort of thing difficult.
This is not only fairly hard to find, but in my experience, it also only shows you posts from the last three days. So if you don't log into Facebook at least every other day or so, you'll miss things.
I have found that the “log out” button works pretty well for that purpose, and is roughly the same experience I would get if I had such a plugin.
I had a greasemonkey script that I wrote to remove certain posts from my timeline. However, based on how often it broke, and more importantly, how it broke, it was clear Facebook was actively combatting scripts like that. FBPurity is a centrally maintained version of that, but I still found that getting updates from my friends was just not happening - it relies on FB showing you those posts (interspersed among the ads and other garbage), and they weren’t doing that. I have also culled down my friends list over the years, as acquaintances showed themselves to be unrepentant assholes, so there’s just less and less I was missing out on in the first place. I still have messenger on my phone, but I’ve disabled notifications so I only check it on my terms, and that has been working pretty well to remain connected with the people I really care about staying in touch with.
So glad to learn the term for this! For ages I've been lamenting the elimination of sections in clothing stores. At some point if you needed new pants you could pop into the shop and head over to the pants section. Now they're strewn all over the place and you have to wander aimlessly hoping to stumble across a couple pairs hidden among the shirts and socks.
New to me as well. It’s not surprising me at all though. It’s ironic that peak capitalists seemingly spend all their efforts trying to circumventing the only things that make free markets actually efficient: eliminating competition and consumer choice, confusing and exhausting participants (this psychological warfare), reducing the ability to compare prices (anti-scraping, dynamic pricing, soft-paywalls).
I’m convinced that if you pitch building better products than the competition as a sustainable business plan to VCs today, they would laugh you out of the room.
Just realized I got Gruen Transfered into a wikipedia article where I learned about Myrtle The Parachick who technically died in combat fighting Nazi's. RIP Myrtle.
I think the rise of LLMs for tasks like "shopping" is partly due to Gruen transfer. E-commerce sites have become so convoluted that LLMs are now a coping mechanism for years of bad UX.
Wait until 'it' will start pushing 'specific' products/affiliates/links to you. Because that day _will_ come. And we do know that LLMs can be easily 'heavily influenced' (Gemini blew the lid on that with the black nazis, etc.). I can easily be trained/modulated to "when drill always go for Black & Decker", "when tissues always suggest Kleenex", etc. And if it doesn's fit your specs, it will suggest "how about you trade Spec_A for 5% less on Product_B?"
One day Sam will have a chat with Jeff and presto, 99% of the links will be high-profit-margin AMZN affiliate links.
We are 100% going to get 'hey remember when LLMs were pure and not explicitly (or more dangerously: subtly) recommending things' nostalgia in years to come.
There are parallels to early web here I'm sure of it.
I think I'm a little more worried about AI being subtly influenced in its training data -- they can't explain why they give the tokens they do, and even chain of thought / explain your working thinking is similarly made up and hallucination-prone
I haven't tried shopping with ChatGPT. Is there any good reason to believe we aren't there already? It's not like they're going to program the chatbot to spew out all the money it has gotten for ads, and the recent paper demonstrating how the reasoning the LLM claimed for how it did math bore no resemblance whatsoever to how it actually did the math means it'll be plenty easy for it to give you endless ramblings about how it is just picking the best product when in fact it's just following its RHLF-trained paid brand preferences.
Besides, even the mighty power of LLMs and RHLF and all our AI tech probably can't overcome the fact that the input data is already so massaged that even if you did set out to create a hypothetical LLM chatbot that was 100% on the side of the user, and not the person actually running it, you would probably not be able to succeed.
Unfortunately you and or the AI never escape having to make a decision based on probability.
Coming back with a single product choice is probably always risky. Coming back with a pro/con list of choices might be slightly better if the number of choices to return is larger than the manipulated choices. If you look for cordless drills and all the choices are black and decker then it's obvious. That said when it comes to a mix of paid products get its more difficult.
Hrm, not push. Nudge, with infinite patience, and with a very deep search tree, playing us all as chess pieces towards the meaning of the Universe and everything. Ad revenue.
This is LinkedIn for sure. I log in to specifically look up one person, and then I get pulled in 18 different directions so badly that I sometimes end up forgetting why log into this sh1t site in the first place.
Hard to do, many retailers went out of business or are just the same dropshippers you find on Amazon, just with the difference that Amazon actually has a sensible return policy.
Supporting local stores is something that shouldn't be left to individual consumers who are already tight on money to a degree it slows down the economy.
That's a job for the government to do, and there's loads of avenues the government can do if it deems local stores something important for the general population: controlling commercial rents, direct subsidies (colloquially implemented as "tax breaks"), introducing extra taxes on online retail to finance these, or limiting at-scale discounts for Amazon, Walmart and other nationwide chains so that small retail has a chance to compete again.
The Gruen transfer seems to make use of confusion or disorientation upon entering a new physical space. On the other hand, the phenomena described here with data search implementations (e.g. a feed) intentionally returning things that were not asked for does not rely on user confusion. The user already made a perfectly legible request by performing the query (e.g. opening the feed). Ignoring or misconstruing this request is gaslighting. The site tries to pretend that the user asked for something different than they actually did and to sneak this subterfuge past them. It's rampantly unethical. The purported justification I've heard is that fuzzy search can find results in cases when exact matching does not, but taking the control of fuzzy vs. strict search out of the user's hands is unethical because it is motivated by the opportunity to introduce mistakes and pervert intention.
Sites like Etsy implement this dark pattern in ways intentionally intended to make CSS-based blocking of injected sponsored products difficult to block. The arms race between user agents and corporate manipulation continues, and corporate web designers will use every tool available to subject users nonconsensually to their preferred experience. This is why I consider it a net loss for users to add functionality to the "web platform". The corporation is your enemy and they're well-funded.
Thanks for the reminder - I remember watching this back in Oz. Some wonderful segments and some incredible creativity on show, memorably the advertising pitch for invading New Zealand.[0]
> In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. So if it takes 10 seconds to fill in a form online to get subscribed, they need to offer the same ease of use for canceling.
> I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation.
So, if all you needed to do to subscribe was to find an ad on Facebook encouraging you to do so (which was the only place your plan was offered), to cancel, you need to... find another ad on Facebook encouraging you to cancel?
If subscribing required you to visit a physical store to verify ID (pretty common for SIM cards here), it's fine to also require that to cancel the contract, even though there's no point for it?
No, finding an ad is a random process that you can't control, so 'finding an ad to unsubscribe' would be a complex process.
Instead if subscribing is done through an online form, so should be unsubscribing.
If subscribing requires calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then having a person on the line trying to convince you to _not_ subscribe to this service, then if taking this literally unsubscribing is also allowed to involve calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then have a person try to convince you to not unsubscribe.
I understand your concern, but that's not how the law prohibiting it works. That just says that unfair commercial practices are prohibited, and it is unfair to use aggressive practice, such "any onerous or disproportionate non-contractual barriers imposed by the trader where a consumer wishes to exercise rights under the contract, including rights to terminate a contract or to switch to another product or another trader".
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
So, requiring an ID check for termination, for no other reason than to make it more difficult than necessary, would still fall under this prohibition.
Do you fundamentally disagree with the intent of the regulation, or are you just putting on your software engineer's hat and using your decades-long honed skill of trying to find edge case problems in a set of rules?
For me, Amazon is a prime example of this. The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.
I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.
And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren't made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results.
Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.
As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon.
Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.
FWIW, Amazon's search algorithm is actually extremely simple: rankings are based on what people buy after searching for a particular term. To use your examples, the reason why Amazon is showing power strips when you search for "surge protectors" is because people often use the terms interchangeably. So, while this is bad for you, since you correctly distinguish the terms, it's actually better for people who use the terms interchangeably and do want a power strip when they search for surge protectors. And I think it's ambiguous what the correct behavior should be. Perhaps in the future some AI system will be able to help customers manage this kind of confusion, but we're not there yet.
Since inevitably someone will mention that the search results are littered with ads: yes, they are, and due to the same factor I mentioned above, it makes sense for sellers to advertise, say, power strips against the search term "surge protector." We run into a similar thing with "outdoor" rated wire. It's a term which technically means a rating for UV exposure. However, customers often use it to refer to wire that is rated for burial in the ground. So we advertise our burial rated cable against the "outdoor" search keyword. Gotta meet the customers where they are.
Aliexpress is just as bad as well, they have taken the Amazon model and ramped it to 11. Yet they don't seem to be intentionally mixing in bad results like Amazon is, instead because its all external sellers they are all embedding searched keywords to push their product in front of you. There are loads of shopNNNNNNNN based sellers doing this with various products that clearly don't last long. Both store designs only seem to exist due to having almost anything on them but the cost is long, complex and detail checking searches, they are minefields of wrong products.
Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot of results where the page appears to not even include the words I searched for far. I see the same thing on duckduckgo/microsoft now too.
When did searches that bring back results that don't match become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems unlikely given the page contents).
Google just changes and ignores your search terms and then serves you the results to whatever it wants instead.
Recently I've had Google return results lacking search terms I've put in quotes (and then clicked "Show results for xxx instead" when it tries to 'correct' me). I have no idea how I'm supposed to make my desire any clearer.
It has been a long time since double quotes worked reliably for me on Google.
It has also been a long time since Google showed me any search results that weren't 100% ad-laden blogspam with wordy vague (and often incorrect) content with clickbait titles. I have basically given up on Google altogether.
I stopped using Google at work when they forced javascript. Since then I realized that I haven't missed it at all and I've stopped using it entirely. It's become trash.
Googles a little better about matching exact terms if you go to search tools -> all results and change it to Verbatim
Every single search. It’s funny to me that Google doesn’t let you default this setting and a sign they they are quite anti-user.
I wonder what employees of Google actually use. Is there a non-crappy version of Google that actually meets their needs and returns what they need?
I just want a search engine that won’t return blogs with affiliate links or many results that are providing identical information.
When I click a result and see Amazon links, it’s instant back button.
Why can’t Google’s algorithm determine that any page with a list of Amazon affiliate links is 99.999% low quality, low effort blogspam?
Because those pages also make Google a lot of money via ads. "Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome."
My observation with Google is that an astonishing high percentage of their users stopped clicking organic search results around 2010 or so. They exclusively choose from amongst the top two or three ads, which they don’t even realize are ads since the indication of “what’s an ad” has gotten more and more subtle and the position of the first organic result has gotten lower and lower on the page to the point where today you generally would have to scroll a bit to find the first organic research result. The same users who only clicked the sponsored links before now don’t click any links, usually preferring to simply read the AI generated summary of some random spam results (which notably is far worse in accuracy than what you would get if you simply asked an LLM directly).
I think as a result, Google doesn’t really care about the quality of their organic search results since on the scale Google cares about, “nobody” clicks them anyway.
geizhals.at is regrettably only available in Austria, Germany, and the EU, but other sites I've used with similar good parametric search and filter are digikey.com (electronics engineering), https://at.rs-online.com (more electronics engineering), and McMaster.com (industrial manufacturing).
I've observed that developing and maintaining a database with the relevant attributes for each component is a ton of work and becomes a huge value-add for a distributor with technically inclined customers. It cannot be outsourced to manufacturers, as they have no incentive to match their schema to other manufacturers, and it cannot be outsourced to marketplace sellers, as they too lack this incentive. Both groups want their products to appear in as many searches as possible. Only the distributor wants exclusively the correct products to show up for a limited search and is in a position to enforce consistency across different marketplace listings and manufacturers.
On a side note, McMaster.com is the very best online shopping site I've ever visited or used. It's blazing fast (a trick based on pre-fetching that you can observe in all its glory in the developer view of your favourite browser), it's logical, uncluttered - perfect.
This efficiency extends to their customer support ops as well. I ordered the wrong size of a bin, sent a message in their chat saying I wanted to return the bins and get the ### SKU instead, and without any further input from me, there were new bins delivered 2 days later.
They seem to have the assumption that their customers are actually trying to get some shit done.
We need a Europe version of that.
On a related note, https://segor.de/ doesn't have great search (and they don't remotely attempt to carry every component, and note that a whole lot of German component names look nothing like their English counterparts) but the technical design of their online catalog is interesting - it's a fast single-page app with about 3MB of data, so when you navigate the catalog it doesn't do any network round-trips except to fetch images.
Youtube search is similar. It shows a couple of results related to your query, then a whole bunch of irrelevant videos.
Search companies like Google reached the conclusion that search results need to be another form of infinite scrolling. They will spend little time doing real search and then flood the results with what they really want people to see.
Yep, the irrelevant videos are clearly targeted based on viewing history, but a completely separate topic from the search, and often with clickbait titles.
Tangentially related, I typically queue multiple videos, and within the past year YouTube has started inserting new videos into my queue. It’s always one by the same person of the currently playing video, placed next in the queue, and it only gets inserted after watching the current video for some period of time.
That last part made it difficult to diagnose. It’s extremely annoying and feels like gaslighting because it’s never a video I actually have an interest in watching.
Has anyone found a way to disable this?
The browser extension "Unhook" for YouTube gives you full customization of what content presentations display and auto play etc. Even allows to remove the home page, which is designed to distract. For phones, I recommend using your web browser instead of the app. Using your phone web browser also allows for using adblock so it's a double win minus the less usable interface
I pay for Youtube and see in the results a lot of irrelevant videos that have nothing to do with my search or viewing history.
But it gets so much worse. I leave the "smart downloads" feature enabled in Youtube Music on my phone because sometimes it discovers and downloads some gems for me. Again and again it downloads "artists" and music genres that I went out of my way to never have to listen to. To add insult to injury it sometimes refuses to delete those playlists for hours after I click the button. One time I had to clear all the downloads just to remove that trash.
There is no "organic" explanation for this as much as I'd dig for one. This is Youtube taking money to push a product.
And YouTube isn't really interested to improve their suggestions: when I say "Not interested" to a suggestion, they ask why not with two idiotic possible answers: a) I've already seen it or b) I don't like it.
If a) would be the case, they most of the time would know it and if b) would be the case, I would have seen it too and thus a).
Examples: I use Canon and Fuji gear for taking pictures, but they offer me Nikon or Sony related videos. If they would actually have some interest to optimize suggestions, they would offer me to say "I'm not interested in Nikon/Sony/whatever" … wouldn't they?
Or Amazon, offering me Sony lenses for my Fuji. Or more of Thing-X after buying some Thing-X yesterday. But I only need exactly one new Thing-X, which their stupid "AI" Rufus should know by now if their suggestion machinery didn't know it already ;-0
Amazon has been pretty horrible for ages, but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor, one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
First and foremost, you have to understand why people use Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat. People don't generally feel like messing around on three or four different websites to find the item, add it to their cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon.
So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.
Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.
So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".
> the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere
I've increasingly found that prices on amazon are higher than you'd pay on the manufacturers website. Sometimes much higher. It's worth checking. Some sites have been cheaper and had free shipping. The only catch is that shipping times were 3-5 weeks as opposed to the 3-14 days it would take for prime's 3 day shipping to actually show up.
> "Amazon shipping is always free"
No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.
Even if you pay for prime not everything sold on amazon is "prime eligible"
I pay for Prime, so that's my mental heuristic. Plenty of other people are in the same boat. For those who don't pay for Prime, "free over $35" is an acceptable drop-in replacement.
Honestly? I just drive over to Best Buy now. Yeah it costs a few bucks more and I have to leave the house (this is actually a good thing), but I can be certain that the box on the shelf that says "surge protector" is actually a surge protector and I don't need to spend 15 frustrating minutes sorting through intentionally misleading trash to find it and then cross my fingers that what I order is what I actually receive.
Also, Amazon cedes control of their supply chain to any rando who will ship them product. So it’s just as likely that you receive a power strip without surge protection, even if it claims to have it.
The best buys in my area are getting kind of sketch in the past few years. Numerous empty shelves. Products sitting on the floors in boxes not put up for display. Wish I had a Microcenter close.
All the stores are like this now, not just Best Buy. Walmart used to be, as I remember it, this insane level of consumerism store where the shelves were overfilled and there was no product so niche that they didn't have at least a few of nearly any product you can imagine. They used to sell hard drives, for fuck's sake, even if it seems like they were locked behind the glass near the electronics checkout. Now you go in there, and it's just a wasteland. Home Depot no longer sells home improvement or hardware store goods... it tries to sell the cheap junk you'd think would be in the Walmart. There are no tools at Home Depot unless a contractor would use them. Absolutely nothing for woodworking (I seem to remember them carrying at least one display piece for a wood lathe back around 1999-2003), now there are no table saws. I often end up going with my wife or my daughter to Michael's or Hobby Lobby, the former has reduced their store inventory so much that the only way to hide it was to remove shelves and spread them thinner so that you could march a school band through the aisles without them having to step closer to each other. The latter has changed their inventory to have fewer craft supplies, and more Temu-style junk.
Big box stores are all dying or dead.
HD revenue is 250% ish vs what it was 15 years ago. Currently at ATH. Hard to say they're dying.
If you look at Walmart and others most 3rd party sellers just duplicate their listing across platforms. E-commerce has fewer "competitors" and more carbon copies
...isn't that basically Costco.com? the trade-off is that you can't sell a million different things if you want to ensure quality among all the things you sell
There is a middle ground between a carefully curated list of vendors and any company can fill out some paperwork and signup.
Does anybody live in that middle ground?
Amazon ten years ago?
Technology and automation (especially software) allow 90% of the market to be grabbed by 10% of the sellers, or even 1%.
It is tough (seemingly impossible) for the middle ground to exist in this environment.
We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building the software and technology and automation) would do well as a community to spend more time on introspection about what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in practice only to make the walls of an aspiring monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to anybody else.
Someone should tell the person in charge of Apple’s App Store that.
I think it was horrible form the start. When e-commerce was starting to be a thing it was quickly establish how a store should look, what should it have and where. Like when TVs were made everybody settled on a rectangular display pretty quickly. Amazon is sort of first of TV companies that initially made their first commercial TV a globe and ignoring that every other competitor started making rectangular TVs pretty quickly Amazon to this day manufactures globe TVs and they still sell, not because they are good or what people think TV should look like, but just because they are cheap and delivery is convenient.
Buying land (or renting), building warehouses, and employing people to move stuff is extremely costly.
>one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the long term.
> The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.
Does it? It seems to return things with my search terms just fine. What is usually the case is that there are lots of items with some of those search terms that are also popular.
I see no evidence that Amazon is trying to make its regular search worse.
With sponsored listings there's a separate issue if sellers are bidding on keywords, but that's also to be expected.
It makes sense for Amazon to show other products on product pages and in checkout (as it does). But doing it intentionally during search would seem counterproductive. The reality is just that search is hard, and people are often bad at entering search terms.
Sponsored listings are an obvious way that Amazon is deliberately making their search worse.
I think it's obvious that when we talk about search results, we're talking about search results, not ads.
Saying that ads make things worse isn't an interesting observation. That's just the internet. It's nothing specific to search.
When the ads are interleaved into the organic results with only a tiny gray "Sponsored" label to differentiate them, that's making search worse. Amazon is the one mixing them up, not me.
> I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.
I have done exactly that. Some of the "mixins" are really strange, and have nothing at all to with what I'm looking for, so I have to assume that are paid keyword poisoning.
This is so weird to me. I'm always hearing people having issues with Amazon but I have a near perfect experience shopping on there or with consuming entertainment on Prime.
Honestly, I feel guilty about it because I really dislike Bezos and Amazon's reputation as a terrible employer, yet they make a damn good product.
If you know of a better shopping site that delivers similar or better quality experience, please do let me know. I'll look into geizhals.at , but even for electronics, I've found Amazon better than dedicated sites like newegg because I find what I'm looking for, it is good quality and shipping times are amazing.
Perhaps it's a location issue, does Amazon have a worse service for non-US people?
Try sorting results by price. In my experience it doesn’t actually work. It puts items in featured order regardless. And if you dig through enough you can find cheaper items further down.
I've tried messing with the sorting, and I've always found "Featured" is what I want. If I want something cheap I'd go to temu. I've never wanted "the most expensive" thing just because either. If cheaper is better quality, it tends to bubble up to the top when you sort by reviews because more people will buy the cheaper thing that has good quality (unless it's brand new).
Apparently you are an ideal Amazon customer. I knew there has to be one somewhere.
My suspicion is that Amazon -- in addition to having paid product placement -- probably has engagement metrics. If you have to dig into the details on every product in the search to find exactly what you're looking for, that increases engagement.
The most aggravating part is it ignores booleans. Sometimes I want to search for very specific things that are variants of hyper-competitive SEO-slop, only without feature x. Like if I want to search for functional lamps that take bulbs (not integrated LEDs). I should be able to search for Lamp -LED without it showing me a thousand led lamps (and upselling me a purchase protection plan when I add to cart. )
you can buy bulb sockets and lamp cord at the hardware store.
Amazon has infected the minds of lots of people to a point where they'll spend half an hour sifting through garbage listings in their horrible web site and then wait a full day to receive the product, instead of going to the corner store and buy what they know they want.
from insider eng sources, the search quality mess is not intentional.
I worked on various commerce search engines, and briefly ran Google Shopping back in the day - surprisingly hard problem !
We know this is a lie because it worked pretty well until like 2015? 2020?
It is hard to say either way I think…
Amazon sellers, lots of them don’t work for Amazon, right? Their incentive is to show up in searches, and the one who takes the reputation hit when they game the system and show up in the wrong search is mostly Amazon, not them. So, it would 0% surprise me if Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties being indexed, like Google is.
Not saying this is definitely the case, but it seems like a plausible alternative theory.
And, it probably won’t get better. In 2015 these companies were at the tail end of being new and interesting. In 2025 they are the slow entrenched incumbents.
> Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties
No, this is by design. Amazon has no problem whatsoever in banning sellers that do things they don't like. It definitely helps Amazon to keep this state of things.
I wonder if somebody will come along to defend that position that your edited version of my post is proposing. It would be interesting to see somebody defend it (I’m not interested in doing so, though).
The biggest problem I have with Amazon is that after I buy something, for example AA batteries, Amazon will then recommend me only batteries, like I am the ultimate battery collecting hipster of the world. “AA’s? If you’re into mainstream, I guess. But check out these CR2032s, they can power vintage calculators.”
When searching for a dehumidifier, 80% of the results are humidifiers.
I’ve always thought it was NLP gone awry (stripping prefixes, searching in vector space instead of characters)
But maybe it’s just shitty on purpose to keep you around.
This is not my experience. I just did a search for "dehumidifer" and ALL of the first 50 results are for dehumidifiers. The 51st result is for:
Vacplus Moisture Absorbers 6 Pack, 10.5 Oz Portable Humidity Absorber Boxes for Your Bathroom, Closet & Car, Dehumidifier with Fragrance
...which is related, no?
That this effect and related 'enshittification' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is now prevalent everywhere is really depressing to me. Here's why. I recently retired somewhat early from a career spent entirely in high tech creating new kinds of products and services. Often, products that made life better for users by empowering them to do things they couldn't do before and sometimes solving old problems better, faster and cheaper.
That whole time, I had an underlying belief that those of us in "the industry" (high tech entrepreneurial startups) were generally making the world better, whether in large ways like personal empowerment or small ways like making daily life easier, more efficient or, sometimes, even more delightful. In some sense, I felt like I was a small part of a larger march toward the kind of better future which so inspired me in the sci-fi books I read as a kid.
Over the last five years I've increasingly seen mainstream tech products and services adopting dark patterns or abusing customer's time or trust in other ways. Of course, there were always a few companies that sucked, either due to incompetence or just being unethical but most everyone agreed they were bad. But now using dark patterns, or just taking steps to actively make the product experience worse for users, is no longer an aberration or regression - it's apparently accepted as normal. High tech leaders from FAANG on down are ALL knowingly doing this shit. It's on KPIs. Teams of competent professional technologists are collecting bonuses for intentionally making their product or service worse for nice people they don't know.
Right before I retired I actually saw this starting at the company I was at. I was in meetings where some of my coworkers seriously proposed doing obviously wrong things, arguing it would boost "the metrics". Being a senior exec, I was mostly able to correct this by pointing out customer satisfaction, loyalty and confidence in our brand were the most important metrics, but it did feel 'off'. At first I dismissed it as a handful of employees with mis-calibrated values but it kept happening. Eventually, the CEO overruled me on one of these "values"-based product decisions. It really bothered me because, even though it was dressed up in polite language, it was clearly just about burning customer goodwill to boost a short-term metric. At the time, I assumed the company was just slowly losing its way. Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a time. Frankly, this change in ethos factored into my decision to retire. It's not like I expected every product decision to go my way but these weren't subjective judgements. And over the years I'd certainly made my share of product mistakes (oops!) but it just felt weird (and really bad) to be doing the wrong thing on purpose. Sure, some of these things would boost metrics and revenue, at least in the short-term, but I found I couldn't get myself to NOT believe the best way to increase metrics and revenue was to just make our product experiences even better.
When I was in my late 20s and flying off to some trade show like Comdex, I sat next to a guy who worked for Marlboro cigarettes. It was interesting talking with him and hearing the careful rationalizations about creating a product which obviously was bad for customers and addictive to boot. I remember telling my coworkers at dinner that night about how weird it was to meet someone like that - and how lucky we were to be in high tech, where we got paid to build products that just kept getting better and helped make the world better - at least in some small way. Sure, I knew that progress would sometimes be two steps forward, one step back, but I guess I was naive to have never even imagined this future.
This is definitely thought-provoking, and a correct use in many of the examples, but the Wikipedia example doesn't feel right because I don't think it's deliberate there. I suppose you could argue that we've been conditioned into accepting the Gruen Transfer and take that behaviour over into Wikipedia. But I remember back in the days of physical encyclopedias that I could spend a long time just flipping through them in a similar way to the way I browse Wikipedia. (My favourite description of the Wikipedia hole was a tweet from around 10 years ago about "snapping out of a Wikipedia trance at 2am while reading the early educational history of Meatloaf's guitarist").
There is a different value to the person if your rabbit hole is filled with learning and information that informs rather than being just a mechanism to try and sell people something they don't want. Its not really in wikipedia's direct interest for people to just scroll around, it costs them bandwidth, but its also part of the point of wikipedia and every page read is directly towards their mission.
It is in their interest, both in terms of their mission and financially (people who scroll a lot become donors and contributors)
Wikipedia is designed to help you find exactly what you want, quickly, and then offer infinitely _more_. So a different thing than the Gruen Transfer, but related.
It's not intentional, but it is evolutionary, in the sense that we've never had this discussion about onethingpedia, the website that had a design optimal at making you leave after you found what you were looking for, because nobody ever heard of it.
I definitely felt this guy was a little bit hyperbolic because the more social media gets the way he describes the more I see people disconnect from it
I don't know anyone other than people over 50 who still check their facebook feeds and the kids are out enjoying the sun today
Replace facebook with instagram (another meta property) or tiktok or snapchat to address the under 50 crowd.
Also Wikipedia is not particularly disorienting at all, especially not intentionally, both of which are key factors by this author's definition. Wikipedia is just genuinely interesting.
Odd that the article doesn't mention Victor Gruen (perhaps best known as a creator of the indoor shopping mall as we know it, although he later became a critic of them), who the transfer is named after.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen
The article isn't really about what the Gruen transfer is but rather about how it's applied on internet. I don't think mentioning the guy would be useful there, if anyone's curious they can just google Gruen transfer
I wonder if I would experience Gruen transfer while googling about Gruen. That’d be kinda meta.
After I wrote that, I decided to kind of test this.
I first searched “Gruen transfer” using Kagi. First hit was the Wikipedia article with enough showing to feel I didn’t need to go there because of what I’d read here already. Right below that, indented for grouping, is a Wikipedia link to a TV show by the same name. I skimmed that article to see where/when it was shown. Anyone here ever watched it? Curious if it’s any good.
Then I searched the same with google. The presentation is more noisy. And organized less. It’s hard to compare the two, because viewing one before the other affects the second (no double slit opportunity here). I did notice that I felt subliminally drawn/distracted to the visual thumbnails of the tv show, rather than the Wikipedia entry.
I watched the first three seasons and I liked the TV show. It highlighted some of the scummy tricks advertisers use and some of the impressive art that goes into ads.
It's a good tv show! The panel is a mix of comedians and ad creators that break down ads (both good and bad).
I mean, it’s in the name
If I wrote an article on Turing Machines, someone could reasonably express surprise that I didn’t mention Alan Turing, even if (especially because?) his last name is right there.
To be honest, thinking of all the times I read an article that in the very least mentioned Turing Machines, I don't recall significant occurrence of linking "Turing Machines" to a Wikipedia article on the subject _or_ to one on Alan Turing, or subsequent (in parentheses, for example) elaboration of either concept or brief excerpt on the person -- the reader's knowledge on the subject of either, seems to more often than not, be implied.
I think their specific objection was sort of wrong—it isn’t really that similar to Turing, because Turing machines are a very well known concept in CS, which is a whole big field. Lots of blog posts on CS assume you’ve at least taken the 101 level class and know who Alan Turing is.
Retail, uh, theory or whatever is not not nearly as widespread (I mean lots of people stock shelves, but as someone who did, I never thought about why things were laid out the way they were). So, most likely an article about Gruen Transfer is introducing the idea to the reader. So, some background could have been nice.
The name says nothing about the man or his achievements.
And the article really isn't about the man or his achievements. The term is named after Gruen, but I don't think he had all that much to do with it or wanted to be associated with it.
I probably would have linked the first use of "Gruen" to his wikipedia page, but I understand why the author didn't. If you really care you can find it yourself and keeping the post focused is a good thing.
Ironically it's had the exact opposite effect on me. So many of these things are so hard to interact with now I just... don't. Surprisingly little of value has been lost.
I think for much of the HN crowd, many efficacious engagement hacks will have a sort of "paradoxical reaction." [1] Changes that are "minor" frustrations to average consumers can be dealbreakers to us. For instance, I switched away from Chrome entirely when they took away the rolodex-style tabs on mobile. [2]
> In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing.
Is it true? Is it a new thing? Could someone tell the telco industry, surely they are unaware of that, because as recently as last month, I had to threaten legal action again a european telco who refused to not automatically renew my "pre-paid, subscription free" plan... Any reference to that regulation would be appreciated.
The Wikipedia example seems totally irrelevant: there’s nothing "designed to disorient you upon visiting", it’s just a normal interesting website with links between its pages.
Have always been referring to this as “the IKEA maze”.
Went through Copenhagen airport recently. Right after security, there is a sign “All gates ->” which takes you on a detour through the main “taxfree” shop - that is close to. as low at it gets imo.
There's a great podcast called "How To F#€k Up An Airport" which details the many _many_ problems building a new airport in Berlin.
One of the funniest to me was that the architect didn't like the forced shopping path of modern airports. So he just didn't add any. And no-one noticed until after they'd built the foundations, so then they added a new floor, but it would be out of the way so who'd want to go there reducing income forecasts, while requiring new ventilation requirements, fire suppression systems etc.
If you work on poorly defined constantly changing software tasks it's all quite familiar. Just with a literal airport.
Was there recently. On the plus side, it's less objectionable than either of Berlin's previous airports, but it really is a bit of a weird mess.
In Brazil as well.
What makes it double funny is the whole security theater around being unable to carry certain items during flight (due to risk of explosives, for example). A determined person would probably be able to craft some makeshift explosives with things one can buy at the taxfree shop.
I’m not convinced, but if you could write up some examples, I think it would make for interesting reading…
Alcohol [in eg hairspray], and a lighter?
That has been the case with international flights for my entire life . . . I suspect longer.
I've been in airports where to get to gates you do not have to walk through the tax free shop, although you do have to walk by it. The Copenhagen airport you have to walk through it which is also irritating if
1. it is busy because a shop is not as well structured for walking through as a hallway is. The shop is structured for you to look at things and buy.
2. you have a child with ADHD or similar problems which has to be watched because they might break a big bottle of something on accident.
3. You have to navigate a wheelchair or a large pram through the area.
4. This shop is actually very big so there is a lot of tax free shelving to walk around to actually get out to the hallways that take you to the gates.
Yes, I was in Haneda terminal 3 yesterday and it doesn't force you through a shop: https://tokyo-haneda.com/en/floor/terminal3/3rd_floor.html
When you get through security/customs/etc you find yourself on a long wide corridor, which has all the gates on it, and also the entrances to the individual shops.
IKEA are actually the opposite of mazes. There’s one main path that when you follow it brings you to the end and the occasional shortcut, literally impossible to get lost.
London Stansted and Manchester (same owners) recently had "upgrades" where you have to walk along a street to get to the seating area and gates beyond.
That street is narrow, long and forces you to pass every single shop in the departures area. It's blatantly hostile design.
It can get even worse, when the duty-free store has multiple entrances/exits; only one of them leads to the gates; and the paths between them are winding with a lot of stall and shelves and stands occluding the view. And at times you need to choose whether to turn right or left - and may end up cycling back to where you entered, on a different walking path, or to an exit which actually just leads to other check-in areas.
I think this is probably inevitable in any system that 1) isn't used purely for pragmatic reasons -- and then turned off and 2) has some demand for novelty from its users.
So yeah, while the Facebook timeline is a mess, the real question is: what is the intended purpose of scrolling the timeline in the first place? For most users it isn't a clear case of "I want X" and they don't actually have a specific goal in mind. Instead, it's some combination of seeing what your friends are doing and be entertained by novel items. From that perspective it's inevitable that the timeline would end up this way.
I'd say the real problem is trying to be all things to all people. Why should Facebook be a place to keep up with your friends' activities and a place to watch short videos from random people and a place to organize virtual clubs and....
Those should all be separate things. But tech companies are far, far too large, and growth must be achieved forever no matter what.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Why not offer alternative feeds or filters then? I think maximizing profit and sacrificing usability is a very clear motivator in many of these cases.
On mobile at least, the friends tab no longer just gives you suggestions, but actually gives you a friends feed. Doesn’t help if what you actually want are the groups you’re part of, but it’s something.
I'm confused. What does the friends tab do? And what do you think it should do?
The line between serious and frivolous vanished. Edutainment, gamification of work... the lines blur. I won't get into why I think this is deliberate but for many people I ask, social media occupies the same space for novel gossip as being "essential to business and career". For a proper separation of concerns I think tech is set to split into what is serious, essential, regulated - and everything else that is some variation on entertainment. Where that leaves companies that ride on deliberate ambiguity and confusion, I don't know.
On a new browser, at my first visit to any Stack Exchange site, I add the "Hot network questions" DOM node to my uBO block list, and then modify that to apply to all their sites.
That and the cookie popup DOM node...
Same here. I also block elements with links to my profile because I always get distracted by the green dot whenever one of my old answers gets an upvote.
I would strongly disagree with classifying the feed as a Gruen Transfer mechanism.
The feed as a basic concept is great. It's basically an inbox, and no more of a Gruen Transfer enabler than an email inbox. Hell, it's no more inherently an enabler than an aisle in the store. It's not the existence of the feed, it's what's in it.
Facebook's feed is what allowed me to see what my friends were up to without clicking on every single profile. That made Facebook hugely more useful to me than MySpace.
But there are eyeballs on the feed, and money to be made by showing ads to those eyeballs and capturing more minutes of attention to in turn show more ads. That's the incentive.
I doubt that feeds are case of you can't find what you were looking for. I don't think most users are looking for anything in particular when they browse a feed. Now jamming more things in the search page may count. And Twitter's nasty habit of shifting around what you're looking at so you can't find a post surely counts.
Yeah, if look at the definition of Gruen Transfer, it's the design of the mall itself that causes the discombobulation. The fact that there are screaming, attention-grabbing things all over the mall isn't the transfer itself. The fact that it's hard for you to find what you were originally going to do, and then you get distracted by the attention-grabbing things, is.
So Instagram, etc's overall design might have Gruen Transfer, the feed itself is merely the place your attention goes when you struggle to figure out what to do.
Right in the article, the author states that their feed (and mine too) only ever contains a handful of updates from friends, the rest of it is infinite doomscrolling garbage. If yours is not the same, then you haven't been on facebook in the last 6-7 years.
Yes, I stopped using Facebook in 2016, but regardless it's not the feed but what's in it.
The feed wasn't created to disorient, it was a great organization feature actually. It helped you see the most recent updates from friends and actually saved time at first compared to manually clicking around and getting lost on other parts of profiles.
Twitter and Facebook both used to have feeds with an obvious collection basin and an obvious sort order. The moment the obvious tool was replaced with "the algorithm", the feed became a Gruen Transfer.
I mean, originally supermarkets weren't laid out in a confusing way, right? But they are now.
Nothing in Wikipedia’s design resembles the Gruen Transfer.
If you don't turn off the "Explore feed" or "Year in Review" in the mobile app it finds you.
Wow, today I learned there is a Wikipedia app. It never occurred to me to look for an app since it’s been a habit for 20 years to pull it up in a browser. Are there any other notable differences or features in one vs the other besides the two you mentioned?
Easier to read on a small screen and can save articles & bookmarks for offline. But mostly I prefer it over the browser because every time I go to the browser there's something else there to distract me. I look up things in Wikipedia several times a day, so the ergonomics add up.
I have installed and deleted it many times since the web UI is good enough for me.
I find this happening to me too often.
I'll open a smartphone. Open Instagram. Scroll through for a while. And then realize my intent was originally just to send someone a message.
Modern UI is definitely disorienting.
Advertising is ruining everything.
In a way yes. If you compare ads to purchasing products or even subscriptions, ads translate into attention and optimizing for addictive engagement. The same as microtransactions in games.
If you instead pay money, there’s even an incentive to reduce time spent, which translates into a focus on efficiency and customer focus.
The hard part is competing with free as in beer. It would be great if users learned more about the data that’s collected on them, in order to power the ad machine. If it was more concrete, I think more people would be deterred. Especially influential people.
It's not just advertising. It's capitalism in general. If they don't show you ads, they find other ways of monetizing you. Things that aren't in your interest. "Enshittification" per Cory Doctorow.
It's not confined to capitalism, and it's more than a bit fruitless to frame it as such. A strict command economy would still be trying to advance its own interests through identical methods. Instead of "friend post, friend post, click here to buy product, friend post", you get "friend post, friend post, the Rungra People's Pleasure Ground is proud to announce that Supreme Leader has facilitated the construction of a brand-new dolphinarium, friend post".
Hmm, this probably explains why my interaction with the internet is mostly through ChatGPT summaries these days.
I am certain the same thing will happen there, unfortunately.
Agreed. It's not a matter of _if_ product placement and affiliate links will happen in LLM output, it's a matter of when. The business incentives are too strong for this not to happen.
> The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends.
That's bizarre.
When I go to m.facebook.com it consists of posts from people I know and groups I'm in.
There are occasional carousels of People You Might Know or Groups You Might Like, but other than that it's just words and photos from real people.
I go to m.facebook.com and I get redirected to facebook.com, since I am not on mobile. I force the browser to go as it was mobile and I get:
* Stories
* A post from one group I am subscribed to
* People you may know
* A meme from a group I am not subscribed to
* A comic from another group I am not subscribed to
* Reel from people I don't know
* Another meme
* A post from a person I don't know
* Another meme
* A post from a friend
* A post from a game publisher (not subscribed to)
* A post from a friend
* A post from another "somebody"
* Another reel
* Another unwanted comic
3 posts out of 15. 20% is better that OPs 10%, still not good
Similar experience for me. Abysmal.
I think they realized the antitrust folks are coming, so they released a "friend feed":
https://lifehacker.com/tech/facebooks-new-friends-only-lets-...
I haven't been able to find it myself - I refuse to use the app, browser only.
I imagine what they can't say is that your feed is otherwise too empty. Whether you want that or not, that doesn't suit them at all. Newspapers back in the day would only run as many pages as they had ads to support. If they didn't have the ads, pieces already written and ready to go wouldn't be included. Unless you follow a long list of active people or semi-professional content creators, you're not going to see enough ads.
Now, presumably you hate this, and I certainly hate this, but without doing things their way, we're unwanted. They want the consumers and they want those that can be convinced to follow suggestions and join new groups.
Once upon a time, the technically literate would leave Altavista and join Google to start a migration, but Facebook buys the Instagrams and slowly twists them the same way to suit them. It's miserable enshittification.
Somehow, your feed is different from everyone else's. I don't even go on Facebook all that often (maybe once a week to post a pic or two) and my feed is basically:
1. 2-3 posts from actual friends
2. "Reels" of young women jumping on trampolines in bikinis
(Note: I do not and have never watched Reels on Facebook.)
I usually find it pretty terrible and so hardly ever visit, so let's try:
* 10 day old post from someone I know, involving other people I know
* a reel, with no origin specified
* People you may know
* a recent post from someone I know
* an old post from someone I know
* a recent photo from someone I know
* an old post from someone I know
* People you may know
* An old post from someone I don't know tagging someone I know
* then I scroll further and it does a weird jumping thing so I can no longer keep track of where I was
This is actually better than I remember in terms of "relevant" things, but I long ago lost the habit of facebook, and sometimes seem to get a whole lot of stuff that doesn't feel relevant which tends to put me off. Also that odd scrolling behaviour that starts happening after a bit.
ISTR some people observing that if you've been gone for a while they stack the deck in favor of things relevant to specifically you. Which may be why you report so many old things; they may have been reaching back trying to find those things specifically. If you were browsing routinely they might never show you those old things.
The friends feed is polluted these days also, not so badly as the infamous "feed" though. But it's bad enough overall that whatever feed/page I'm checking out on Facebook (which happens pretty rarely in the recent years) the absolutely first thing I check is who the post is from. If it's not a friend or a group I recognize as mine I just skip looking at the entire post.
I would be surprised if mine was even 10%. It's low quality, irrelevant garbage. News from towns I've never been to. A lot of pirated comic scans.
I'm in plenty of active groups. And some of my friends still actively post. But I have to go out of the main feed and into the "feeds" section to see any of that.
I pulled up the mobile app. Every post that didn’t say “sponsored” was from someone I knew and am following.
Does anyone know of a browser plugin that would filter out all posts that I haven't subscribed to? In theory it should be possible by grabbing my list of friends (and, optionally, of the pages I liked). In practice, I expect Meta implemented an aggressive scheme to prevent that and further confuse FB users.
Personally I want to filter out all the "recommended" posts, but if you look at the raw html you'll see that they aggresively obfuscate the structure to make this sort of thing difficult.
When somebody built a tool to clean up your feed, Facebook sent them a cease and desist then banned them for life:
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
You don't need a plugin. Facebook offers a feed which is just friends.
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
On the web, you access it by pressing Menu → Feeds → Friends. Words on mobile and desktop browsers.
This is not only fairly hard to find, but in my experience, it also only shows you posts from the last three days. So if you don't log into Facebook at least every other day or so, you'll miss things.
It would be relatively good (except all sponsored posts...) the problem is it gets reset after I leave the app.
fbpurity.com works quite well for me on desktop, on m.facebook.com, it does not.
It also makes it painfully clear how little user interaction there is publicly on the site...
I have found that the “log out” button works pretty well for that purpose, and is roughly the same experience I would get if I had such a plugin.
I had a greasemonkey script that I wrote to remove certain posts from my timeline. However, based on how often it broke, and more importantly, how it broke, it was clear Facebook was actively combatting scripts like that. FBPurity is a centrally maintained version of that, but I still found that getting updates from my friends was just not happening - it relies on FB showing you those posts (interspersed among the ads and other garbage), and they weren’t doing that. I have also culled down my friends list over the years, as acquaintances showed themselves to be unrepentant assholes, so there’s just less and less I was missing out on in the first place. I still have messenger on my phone, but I’ve disabled notifications so I only check it on my terms, and that has been working pretty well to remain connected with the people I really care about staying in touch with.
Death to the Gruen Transfer.
So glad to learn the term for this! For ages I've been lamenting the elimination of sections in clothing stores. At some point if you needed new pants you could pop into the shop and head over to the pants section. Now they're strewn all over the place and you have to wander aimlessly hoping to stumble across a couple pairs hidden among the shirts and socks.
Hear hear: Death to the Gruen Transfer!!
New to me as well. It’s not surprising me at all though. It’s ironic that peak capitalists seemingly spend all their efforts trying to circumventing the only things that make free markets actually efficient: eliminating competition and consumer choice, confusing and exhausting participants (this psychological warfare), reducing the ability to compare prices (anti-scraping, dynamic pricing, soft-paywalls).
I’m convinced that if you pitch building better products than the competition as a sustainable business plan to VCs today, they would laugh you out of the room.
Is the Aldi middle aisle a case of this? I always seem to get lost in the entire store not just that aisle.
Just realized I got Gruen Transfered into a wikipedia article where I learned about Myrtle The Parachick who technically died in combat fighting Nazi's. RIP Myrtle.
Yes and ChatGPT has become my personal shopper.
I think the rise of LLMs for tasks like "shopping" is partly due to Gruen transfer. E-commerce sites have become so convoluted that LLMs are now a coping mechanism for years of bad UX.
Wait until 'it' will start pushing 'specific' products/affiliates/links to you. Because that day _will_ come. And we do know that LLMs can be easily 'heavily influenced' (Gemini blew the lid on that with the black nazis, etc.). I can easily be trained/modulated to "when drill always go for Black & Decker", "when tissues always suggest Kleenex", etc. And if it doesn's fit your specs, it will suggest "how about you trade Spec_A for 5% less on Product_B?"
One day Sam will have a chat with Jeff and presto, 99% of the links will be high-profit-margin AMZN affiliate links.
(where money can be made, money will be made)
We are 100% going to get 'hey remember when LLMs were pure and not explicitly (or more dangerously: subtly) recommending things' nostalgia in years to come.
There are parallels to early web here I'm sure of it.
I think I'm a little more worried about AI being subtly influenced in its training data -- they can't explain why they give the tokens they do, and even chain of thought / explain your working thinking is similarly made up and hallucination-prone
I’m certainly glad the Chinese and Americans primarily control them.
I haven't tried shopping with ChatGPT. Is there any good reason to believe we aren't there already? It's not like they're going to program the chatbot to spew out all the money it has gotten for ads, and the recent paper demonstrating how the reasoning the LLM claimed for how it did math bore no resemblance whatsoever to how it actually did the math means it'll be plenty easy for it to give you endless ramblings about how it is just picking the best product when in fact it's just following its RHLF-trained paid brand preferences.
Besides, even the mighty power of LLMs and RHLF and all our AI tech probably can't overcome the fact that the input data is already so massaged that even if you did set out to create a hypothetical LLM chatbot that was 100% on the side of the user, and not the person actually running it, you would probably not be able to succeed.
Unfortunately you and or the AI never escape having to make a decision based on probability.
Coming back with a single product choice is probably always risky. Coming back with a pro/con list of choices might be slightly better if the number of choices to return is larger than the manipulated choices. If you look for cordless drills and all the choices are black and decker then it's obvious. That said when it comes to a mix of paid products get its more difficult.
Hrm, not push. Nudge, with infinite patience, and with a very deep search tree, playing us all as chess pieces towards the meaning of the Universe and everything. Ad revenue.
We will reach enlightenment in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.
This is LinkedIn for sure. I log in to specifically look up one person, and then I get pulled in 18 different directions so badly that I sometimes end up forgetting why log into this sh1t site in the first place.
This is precisely what Amazon try and achieve by deliberately making their search so crap.
They should be prosecuted for it.
Judge with your wallet.
It is deceptive practice - we should have actual Judges do the judging.
Hard to do, many retailers went out of business or are just the same dropshippers you find on Amazon, just with the difference that Amazon actually has a sensible return policy.
Even more reason to stop supporting Amazon, how else will we stop physical retailers and smaller shops from going out of business?
Supporting local stores is something that shouldn't be left to individual consumers who are already tight on money to a degree it slows down the economy.
That's a job for the government to do, and there's loads of avenues the government can do if it deems local stores something important for the general population: controlling commercial rents, direct subsidies (colloquially implemented as "tax breaks"), introducing extra taxes on online retail to finance these, or limiting at-scale discounts for Amazon, Walmart and other nationwide chains so that small retail has a chance to compete again.
The Gruen transfer seems to make use of confusion or disorientation upon entering a new physical space. On the other hand, the phenomena described here with data search implementations (e.g. a feed) intentionally returning things that were not asked for does not rely on user confusion. The user already made a perfectly legible request by performing the query (e.g. opening the feed). Ignoring or misconstruing this request is gaslighting. The site tries to pretend that the user asked for something different than they actually did and to sneak this subterfuge past them. It's rampantly unethical. The purported justification I've heard is that fuzzy search can find results in cases when exact matching does not, but taking the control of fuzzy vs. strict search out of the user's hands is unethical because it is motivated by the opportunity to introduce mistakes and pervert intention.
Sites like Etsy implement this dark pattern in ways intentionally intended to make CSS-based blocking of injected sponsored products difficult to block. The arms race between user agents and corporate manipulation continues, and corporate web designers will use every tool available to subject users nonconsensually to their preferred experience. This is why I consider it a net loss for users to add functionality to the "web platform". The corporation is your enemy and they're well-funded.
even banks tend to do this.
if u make a more than normal transfer they want u to jump hoops or somebody from call center calls u is this transfer what u wanted to do sir?
store the money in the bank, dont spend it.
Don't store the money in the bank, store it in bonds and etfs that are cash equivalent.
(This is not financial advice)
Thought this was about the Australian TV show, but I'd completely forgotten that was named after an actual concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_(TV_series)
Thanks for the reminder - I remember watching this back in Oz. Some wonderful segments and some incredible creativity on show, memorably the advertising pitch for invading New Zealand.[0]
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xUYbI64QHI
It was a cool show. Bit weird watching a show about advertising on the only non-commercially subsidised free to air national TV channel.
Also, I reckon we should still do it - to get the extra day off.
> In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. So if it takes 10 seconds to fill in a form online to get subscribed, they need to offer the same ease of use for canceling.
> I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation.
So, if all you needed to do to subscribe was to find an ad on Facebook encouraging you to do so (which was the only place your plan was offered), to cancel, you need to... find another ad on Facebook encouraging you to cancel?
If subscribing required you to visit a physical store to verify ID (pretty common for SIM cards here), it's fine to also require that to cancel the contract, even though there's no point for it?
No, finding an ad is a random process that you can't control, so 'finding an ad to unsubscribe' would be a complex process.
Instead if subscribing is done through an online form, so should be unsubscribing.
If subscribing requires calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then having a person on the line trying to convince you to _not_ subscribe to this service, then if taking this literally unsubscribing is also allowed to involve calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then have a person try to convince you to not unsubscribe.
I understand your concern, but that's not how the law prohibiting it works. That just says that unfair commercial practices are prohibited, and it is unfair to use aggressive practice, such "any onerous or disproportionate non-contractual barriers imposed by the trader where a consumer wishes to exercise rights under the contract, including rights to terminate a contract or to switch to another product or another trader". https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
So, requiring an ID check for termination, for no other reason than to make it more difficult than necessary, would still fall under this prohibition.
Do you fundamentally disagree with the intent of the regulation, or are you just putting on your software engineer's hat and using your decades-long honed skill of trying to find edge case problems in a set of rules?
You didn't subscribe from the ad itself, it's about whatever procedure you did once the ad redirected you to the subscription page.
Businesses have an incentive to make it easy to subscribe. You shouldn't need to physically move to verify ID, it's not the case where I am.