Apps have become too good at their jobs
meteamedia.org
meteamedia.org
If a person really has a choice, it should be possible to use the internet in general such that it does not generate profit for the parent company. Another way to phrase it: if content a person sees is being steered and controlled so much that a particular company always profits, then the model of providing a service to the user has conceptually been abandoned.
The era of the open internet where people could freely visit different pages with a single browser is slowly coming to a close. Even trivial things like viewing tweets and other plaintext are incrementally being locked down behind apps that surveil users. For example the Reddit website has been borderline unusable for many years, especially on mobile, and that fact is well known to the relevant developers. The reason it isn't improved is obvious as the pop-ups nag: "reddit is better in the app!"
Where are the investors? Where's the board? Do they use the product? Reddit used to be in a dominating position for everything between 4chan and Facebook, why are they trashing everything to squeeze a bit of data? If that's benefitting the company (and I'm really in doubt of that) it's just in the shortest term... You'll see a small boost in sign ups maybe, app downloads, but the company's reputation is lost forever.
Given that and the fact that the majority of their users are probably on mobile now not desktop, I'm sure their investors and board are cheering them on to convert mobile users to App users, they're likely much more valuable.
When Reddit chose to cater to "normies", I was fine with it. But when they started to become hostile to techies (the insulting mobile and new web experience, and the decay of the old UI), I just visited less.
I also stopped visiting Facebook since they didn't let me paste links in IceCat. The message field would break in strange ways.
So long, and thanks for all the dysfunctional JavaScript.
I don't have Twitter installed on my phone as I don't want to be bothered by notifications and I don't want to see my personalized feed. But sometimes I want to catch up on some breaking news or hear a commentator's thoughts on a recent event, and Twitter is either a good place or the only place for that.
Unfortunately, the Twitter web app shuts me down when I scroll too far into a page.
https://twitter.com/brave/status/1552063664920100864?t=JTcyu...
The twitter mobile experience is awful, but I found that if you tap signin in the infamous undismissable modal and then you go back with the browser it will not nag you for a while.
Then there's Nitter if you are after an alternative frontend.
I prefer to think it's just taking a short nap.
There's stacks of really good information and internet that's not just rent seeking. It's just sadly places like Reddit (which i use) and Facebook have been so hostile to users that only the oblivious remain devotees.
I've heard this many times, but I've always had exactly the opposite experience -- the infinite scroll and poor resource management makes the performance of Reddit on desktop essentially unusable, while mobile is still paginated. As long as you switch from the awful Card view to the Compact, which should have been the default in the first place, mobile seems like a far superior experience to me. I refuse to use the app, so I can't compare there. Why do people cite the mobile web experience as being worse than desktop?
- It does full browser reloads to expand "3 More Comments" instead of asynchronously loading them, and it does this multiple times to let you see a full conversation
- When you do click to read more comments the page loads are jarring and don't take you to the comment content, making you scroll to find where you were
- It inserts irrelevant content (things like other posts) between the comments in a way that makes it unclear there's more to read.
- Of course they also pop up at you multiple times nagging you to use their app instead.
Reddit's main draw is the comment section for me. Of course in the default subs and r/popular you mostly want to avoid them, but in smaller subs they're still the heart of the community.
The quality of the content in most Shorts is extremely low, yet it’s very addictive. There’s basically no psycologic break for users. You have to be a pretty cold person to think that stealing hours of people life every day as a business opportunity.
This isn't some slyly-boastful "what's the big deal, _I_ don't have any issue with it", comment. I assume that this particular hook just missed my brain, and there are others that grab me more (I'm def not thrilled with the amt that I use Twitter). I'm just genuinely curious about the details of what makes the format so hyper-addictive, and can't really explore it by experimenting with my own brain.
Just had a thought... is there a psychology to "idle browsing" that I just don't have? I never browse the Google Play store for apps but more than 50% of users discover my apps this way. I never browse Netflix for recommendations. I almost never browse Youtube's recommendations unless I'm listening to a playlist and want to discover similar music (while doing something else).
In almost all of these contexts I discover content through word of mouth or browsing discussion forums and search for exactly what I'm looking for.
The TikTok algorithm, to put it another way, is really good at delivering relatable content within an hour or two of app engagement (liking, commenting, subscribing).
The work to reward ratio favors the user heavily. Most videos on tiktok are within 20 and 30 seconds so the user invests very little and can consume a lot with little time.
The very things I try to avoid.
Intermixed with the two categories are a few videos, which in my case are two military analysts, which I do enjoy. The thing is, you get a video that makes you think: "This is pretty good", then you're hit with either something that actually pisses you off or go "why the hell am I seeing this?". I believe that in my case it's a question of the going back and forth between: Hey this is interesting and then "why are you showing me this crap" and trying to make it learn to not show me junk content. And Shorts is MOSTLY junk, the majority of the videos are absolute garbage. So for me, it's 50% emotional rollercoaster and 50% technically curiosity.
Liking and disliking videos does NOTHING for the recommended videos. It seems like the recommendation engine only understand genres or categories when doing recommendations, but not when you hit dislike on a bunch of videos of the same type. It works create for normal YouTube videos, but not on Shorts.
I've resorted to a Firefox plugin that just removes Shorts from the YouTube sidebar and then removing the panel... Though YouTube tells me it will be back in 30 days, at which point I'll have to remove it again.
I'm pretty confounded by the fact that it seemed so poor at exploring the space of possible videos
While the companies behind the videos are probably more predatory than what was there in the past, the tendency is there in everyone.
Maybe the way to get out of this is to educate people that binge watching video content is not good for you.
Problem is now they're pushing shorts which suck. If I wanted short content I'd sign up to TikTok or Instagram. Personally I think youtube should target longer content which will, I think, probably outlast short content.
Over a period of five years I’ve reported maybe three videos. Last week I reported ten Shorts. The reports range from misleading and copy right violation to encouring suicide, violence and endangerment.
YouTube simply does not care, Shorts are there to defend against TikTok, so it bypass any existing algorithmes.
Anti-competition laws find this harms competition, and courts have restricted it. This is why companies get pushed to allow independent repair services, etc. However, the analysis is a bit vague and difficult to enforce, since it's hard to distinguish from product bundling. The question is not whether the product is one or many, but whether there can be multiple markets, or whether the benefits of producer integration outweigh the competition benefits of consumer integration.
For attention-seeking apps, clearly a context-switch that breaks attention is to be avoided. I find it interesting that multiple small switches to new interesting (shiny) things not only is more sticky than longer formats, it also seems to reduce interest in making a mode shift, to something else entirely. There are different ways to model this neurologically, with no leading hypothesis AFAIK.
I would like to think that WeChat is successful in the Chinese marketplace because that marketplace isn't actually very competitive. The government puts their thumb on the scale in favor of simplifying their mechanisms of control.
There is a phrase associated with unix: "Make each program do one thing well". Mobile operating systems lack the inter-process communication needed to make an ecosystem of simple, extensible programs.
"The goal for most apps, especially social media, is to sustain user retention for as long as possible" That's it. And that's why I chose Kindle to be my go to app. No FB nor TikTok installed.
Of course video and images can be hosted externally, but it still forces companies who develop these mini programs to pay a minimum of attention to keeping their functionality relatively simple.
Tens of thousands of businesses worldwide purchase "the full Microsoft experience."
They integrate every single aspect of their digital enterprise with Microsoft's off the shelf option.
The same applies to Apps.
Many people want 1 thing that does it all.
People want an ecosystem that is easy to adapt to, and more specifically they want _the ecosystem they're familiar with_. In a past life with software support, when it came to large/enterprise customers, the biggest pushback/fights had nothing to do with features or price, but with a few stubborn IT Managers/Administrators who were used to another product and didn't want to change.
UI/UX should have a common 'language' for lack of better words between them with a spin on it that still makes it unique for the program. We already see this with desktop OSes and mobile; if I right-click on any common desktop OS, I know I get a contextual menu on an object, if I swipe or tap on mobile likely something will happen, etc. Users mostly get this except for a small subset and can use a lot of apps; the app ecosystem on mobile more or less demonstrates this.
What Meta is doing with WhatsApp isn't about the one app for all, it's just they have a huge user base that isn't bringing in money and likely they see this as a cardinal sin _not to monetize_ WhatsApp somehow. They likely look at WeChat and go "wait you can make money like that?" and are desperately trying to figure out how to get themselves there. I have not been in the US for a long time so I don't know how people there will adopt to Meta-Money or whatever Meta ends up calling it. For the EU countries I've lived in, I'm not as confident people will want to be doing that with Meta at least when Apple/Google Pay exist and work pretty alright and banking apps already handling fast direct payments without needing an SV intermediary.
I say application, you say ecosystem
To people who don't care about software, the difference can be... marginal.
They want a that is easy to use without training. Works perfectly, for their use case, the first time.
There are no other relevant details.
People don't know what an 'ecosystem' is. They just want to click twice, and have things work. They don't have neither time nor energy to take away from daily hustle and dedicate it to maintaining an open web.
I think the consensus among users is that no single component of MS's offering is best-in-class, except maybe Excel.
In WhatsApp for example, I just want to use it as a messaging app but I find myself getting drawn to statuses and wasting my time and attention there. I try to combat it by muting each individual status but it's not an effective strategy. It would be great to have the option to either disable it or only allow certain person.
I disagree with this. Things change, the world goes on, and you need to keep up with it. It’s not YouTube taking away their audience, it’s them not keeping up with the times (if they don’t make shorts)
Youtube is currently pushing shorts hard. It is incentivizing users to download clips from tiktok (legally or not) and reupload them to youtube, where they get free prioritized air time. There are many (hundreds?) of such channels with milllions of subscribers from simply copy-pasting tiktok to youtube. This is how youtube wants to grow its shorts. This is the company's immoral behavior, not the creators.
I think this part is the most remarkable of the article.
Yes, at this point, we all know about surveillance capitalism, the attention economy, amusing ourselves to death and all that jazz.
However, here is a concrete example where a platform operator actively forces its content creators to make their content more addictive. That's not the invisible hand of the market driving youtubers to do a particular thing, it's the quite visible hand of youtube.
Its all fun and games until large regulators like the Eu comes cracking down...
So in the end all hyper commercial software will turn into crap.