Beware of Trivial Inconveniences (2009)

lesswrong.com

35 pointsadamzerner3 comments

Or put another way, people prefer to take the path of least resistance.

Usabale design promotes the same idea (don't make users think). Subscriber acquisition strategies rely on a similar idea that after the first 2 months of free broadband, most users won't bother switching out. Softwares exploit this by having opt-out instead of opt-in for desirable options including bloatware.

I agree with the basic point of the article but many of the stated facts are outdated by now. Since this article has been posted it has become much harder to bypass the firewall than it was back then.

Do you think that another danger of inconveniences is that it's easier to make an inconvenient mechanism more and more inconvenient than to start restricting something that hadn't been restricted before at all? Like having a tiny inconvenience at first somehow "reserves your right" to add more restrictions in the future?

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