> Also, Modern civilization is making a lot of things "frictionless".
I would debate this. Everything seems to have more and more friction to me. There was a sweet spot about 10-15 years ago where things were mostly frictionless, and it's been intentionally made worse because people believe it improves their numbers (without actually understanding what the numbers mean, I suspect).
Some examples:
- I want to read a blog. 2 paragraphs in, the screen is taken over by a popover trying to trick me into giving them my email (by making the "Cancel" control not a button, in an odd place, smaller, and a different font). I do one of 3 things that does not help the person who put it there - I give a fake email address and continue reading, I do the work and find the close/cancel button, or I simply close the tab because it's not worth my time. I suspect many people either enter a fake email or enter their real email address then mark the first few "newsletters" as spam and forget about them once their spam detection recognizes it regularly.
- I order a simple product like a gallon of milk or a light bulb, or have a routine visit to the dentist or eye doctor. I get an email imploring me to write a review of this revolutionary product or service. I ignore it. They send me several more. Annoyed, I write a scathing review of their stupid hounding efforts after buying something so mundane and give them the lowest marks. Sometimes this backfires and they want to "make it up to me" and offer me some sort of small discount on more of their products or service, or they want me to give more information "so they can improve my experience". Having the ability to write a review is great for when something goes really well or poorly, but who has time to do this for every single bank transaction? Like all I did was pay a bill. It worked exactly as expected. There's nothing to say. It wasn't spectacular, it wasn't awful. But if you do write a review and give them only 3 out of 5 stars, you'll hear about it, thus wasting more of your time.
- I want to watch the next episode of my favorite show. There's a trailer for a different show from the same service. If it's related, maybe I'm interested. Just let me tell you whether I want to see these or not in a preference. Don't make me skip it every time. But most of the time it's something they're pushing that's unrelated and not interesting, or that I already saw 5 times when watching the last 5 episodes, so usually I hit the skip button. Then there's a title card about downloading their podcast about the show. No thanks. Then a title card to "stay tuned after the episode to have it mansplained to you". Then, finally, there's the opening credits. Then after the show, there's the closing credits, followed by the credits for all the people who did voiceovers in other languages that you didn't have turned on, followed by mansplaining the episode. "When Jeremy yelled at Sally, he was angry with her!" You don't say! (Yes, I usually bail out shortly after the closing credits, it's just ridiculous how much other junk they put in there. Plus, sometimes if you don't watch it all, the episode remains in your queue until you mark it as watched.)
No one of these is terrible on its own, but it's the death by 1,000 paper cuts. I just want to accomplish some task and someone or something is constantly interrupting me to try and extract more data or money from me. It's incredibly irritating.