Nicely said. This really summarizes how I feel when I use a lot of modern websites. I often feel manipulated. Instead of me driving the interaction the website tries to impose its opinion on what I need or want.
If you feel manipulated, it means that you did not want to do something, but the UI expressed its opinion in a way that was strong enough for you to notice it.
If the UI expresses its opinion in a way that aligns with your intentions, it gets called easy-to-use, unobtrussive, frictionless, and other nice-to-hear words.
a) tools for professionals/experts where the assumption is the user knows best what it wants, and will spend time figuring out how to reach it
b) the instagram/autotune etc kind of tools that make everyone feel like an expert without doing the work, by providing very nice results for very little effort, but as a user you will very quickly run into the limititions when you form your own opinion.
Many tools that used to be a) now are becoming b) which is nice because it can increase power and productivity for everyone, but the experts and pro's are left behind... What's even worse for them is these simplified tools are often not created by domain experts...
That concerns me about the progress in AI. It won't be used to help us but mainly to manipulate us.
It's not nice overall, because as those b) tools push out a) tools, it creates an artificial ceiling. Sure, it may be nice to enable a random person to do a new thing for the first time in their lives, but it's not nice if your software prevents those who want to do that thing more than once from being able to do it faster and better. Toys are more approachable than tools, but good works happens with tools; when almost all software tools become toy-like, we have a problem.
-- Alan Kay
Long time ago, the default was often whatever was easiest to program or took up the fewest compute resources: the variable is zero initialized by the OS, so therefore the setting will default to off.
Then, the rule became: the default should be the way most users will want to use the software.
Now, it’s: the default should be whatever causes the user to take the action that the developer wants them to take.
We are also seeing software with fewer and fewer settings. Developers are simply taking away the option and forcing users to do it the way the developer wants. This trend is aided and abetted by the current crop of ‘minimalist’ UI designers who insist that settings are bad and nothing should be user configurable.
With a lot of modern software (FB is the big example) has an agenda. A list of stuff labeled KPI on a whiteboard.. stuff FB would like people to do.
A software that don't want you to use it? Very stupid