Tell HN: I hate contemporary "predictive tile" UI design so much

I open Spotify. One day many moons ago, Spotify was a tool for listening to music. Now I'm not sure what it is. It presents me with eight tiles, all unlabeled, all with an identical sleek black appearance. One of the tiles is an auto-generated playlist Spotify made "for me". Two of the tiles are playlists I made myself. One of the tiles is an artist I often listen to. Every time I open the application the tiles are arranged in a different order. It is difficult to find where Spotify has stored my playlists, or to sort my library by artist, because every single screen and command button is presented as a series of auto-generated tiles.

I open Google Search. One day many moons ago, it was a tool for searching for online content. Now I'm not sure what it is. It presents me with five advertisements, and then above the advertisements it presents me with a random number of tiles running off of my phone screen. A link to "Images" used to be right above the search results, and pressing it always did the same thing. Now some of the tiles appear to be different queries I could search for instead of my query. Some of the tiles are auto-harvesting information out of a random website, which I did not ask for. Every time I make a Google search the tiles are arranged in a different order.

I open YouTube. One day many moons ago, it was a tool for locating videos. Now I'm not sure what it is. It presents me with six tiles, all unlabeled...

Every new software design trend in my lifetime has been met with a wave of resistance. People like what they're used to, and I understand that contemporary tastes won't always match up with my preferred software design methodology. (My preferences happen to line up with the UI conventions used right around the time I became proficient with computers. No doubt I have objectively perfect taste.)

But this is something new. Software isn't "designed" any more, it re-renders itself to try and predict how I want to use it. It's like if my car automatically rearranged the dashboard based on my driving behavior. "Well, you didn't use the windshield wipers for a while, so I put the wiper button button in the space where the radio usually goes." Yes, but now it's raining. Where is the wiper button?

Apparently widescale software proficiency peaked in early Gen Y. Reports now say that Gen Z and Gen A children are worse with computers than their predecessors. Many apparently have little understanding of what "files" are or what it means to download software. I'm not surprised. Software tools are no longer tools, they're lifestyle platforms that try to redesign themselves to meet the predicted behavior of the user. Every button click is reported back to HQ to help set up a promotion for some godless product manager.

Can anything be done about this garbage?