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.
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).
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").
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
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]
We always have to remember these things are built for the masses. All the people I know using Facebook still are enjoying the changes. They watch hundreds of hours of conspiracy AI slop videos about giant ice walls that surround the flat Earth, etc. It's just a TV replacement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
The Gruen Transfer is even consuming state government websites - there is one I have to use regularly for work and about ~15 seconds after your first page load it pops up an overlay warning aboriginal and torrest strait islanders that the website contains images/voices/names of deceased persons (which is a cultural sensitivity of some in that group).
It feels petty to complain about but it just _throws_ me off my intention almost every time.
> 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.
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.
So much THIS. And people wonder why their kids go bonkers after using screens on smart devices. Imagine how much faster they get disoriented because they have zero experience dealing with user interfaces, and get presented with this glowing object that rewards them for interacting with it in a disorienting way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
[+] [-] Tepix|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PaulKeeble|10 months ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] frereubu|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jhbadger|10 months ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen
[+] [-] Miraltar|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yapyap|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] moomin|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gryfft|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] qingcharles|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hk__2|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jalk|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hennell|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] einpoklum|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dormento|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] goodcanadian|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] barbazoo|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DoubleGlazing|10 months ago|reply
That street is narrow, long and forces you to pass every single shop in the departures area. It's blatantly hostile design.
[+] [-] netsharc|10 months ago|reply
That and the cookie popup DOM node...
[+] [-] arcanemachiner|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|10 months ago|reply
So yeah, while the Facebook timeline is a mess, the real question is: what is the intended purpose of scrolling the timeline in the first place? For most users it isn't a clear case of "I want X" and they don't actually have a specific goal in mind. Instead, it's some combination of seeing what your friends are doing and be entertained by novel items. From that perspective it's inevitable that the timeline would end up this way.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wat10000|10 months ago|reply
Those should all be separate things. But tech companies are far, far too large, and growth must be achieved forever no matter what.
[+] [-] kalaksi|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] chipsa|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] eptcyka|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dmazin|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] furyg3|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] spankalee|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] btbuildem|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jackvalentine|10 months ago|reply
It feels petty to complain about but it just _throws_ me off my intention almost every time.
[+] [-] rixed|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nickdothutton|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] phrotoma|10 months ago|reply
Hear hear: Death to the Gruen Transfer!!
[+] [-] selimthegrim|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] schainks|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] benterix|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dcminter|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LadyCailin|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] edent|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slmkbh|10 months ago|reply
It also makes it painfully clear how little user interaction there is publicly on the site...
[+] [-] dingaling|10 months ago|reply
That's bizarre.
When I go to m.facebook.com it consists of posts from people I know and groups I'm in.
There are occasional carousels of People You Might Know or Groups You Might Like, but other than that it's just words and photos from real people.
[+] [-] mrighele|10 months ago|reply
* 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
[+] [-] eythian|10 months ago|reply
* 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.
[+] [-] Mindwipe|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bityard|10 months ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] yason|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gue5t|10 months ago|reply
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.