For me, Amazon is a prime example of this. The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.
I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.
And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren't made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results.
Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.
As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon.
Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.
PaulKeeble 2 hours ago [-]
Aliexpress is just as bad as well, they have taken the Amazon model and ramped it to 11. Yet they don't seem to be intentionally mixing in bad results like Amazon is, instead because its all external sellers they are all embedding searched keywords to push their product in front of you. There are loads of shopNNNNNNNN based sellers doing this with various products that clearly don't last long. Both store designs only seem to exist due to having almost anything on them but the cost is long, complex and detail checking searches, they are minefields of wrong products.
Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot of results where the page appears to not even include the words I searched for far. I see the same thing on duckduckgo/microsoft now too.
When did searches that bring back results that don't match become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems unlikely given the page contents).
YeahThisIsMe 2 hours ago [-]
Google just changes and ignores your search terms and then serves you the results to whatever it wants instead.
heavensteeth 46 minutes ago [-]
Recently I've had Google return results lacking search terms I've put in quotes (and then clicked "Show results for xxx instead" when it tries to 'correct' me). I have no idea how I'm supposed to make my desire any clearer.
caxon26 37 minutes ago [-]
Googles a little better about matching exact terms if you go to search tools -> all results and change it to Verbatim
throwaway173738 1 hours ago [-]
I just want a search engine that won’t return blogs with affiliate links or many results that are providing identical information.
LeifCarrotson 37 minutes ago [-]
geizhals.at is regrettably only available in Austria, Germany, and the EU, but other sites I've used with similar good parametric search and filter are digikey.com (electronics engineering), https://at.rs-online.com (more electronics engineering), and McMaster.com (industrial manufacturing).
I've observed that developing and maintaining a database with the relevant attributes for each component is a ton of work and becomes a huge value-add for a distributor with technically inclined customers. It cannot be outsourced to manufacturers, as they have no incentive to match their schema to other manufacturers, and it cannot be outsourced to marketplace sellers, as they too lack this incentive. Both groups want their products to appear in as many searches as possible. Only the distributor wants exclusively the correct products to show up for a limited search and is in a position to enforce consistency across different marketplace listings and manufacturers.
ChrisMarshallNY 35 minutes ago [-]
> I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.
I have done exactly that. Some of the "mixins" are really strange, and have nothing at all to with what I'm looking for, so I have to assume that are paid keyword poisoning.
Cthulhu_ 3 hours ago [-]
Amazon has been pretty horrible for ages, but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor, one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
MyPasswordSucks 2 hours ago [-]
First and foremost, you have to understand why people use Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat. People don't generally feel like messing around on three or four different websites to find the item, add it to their cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon.
So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.
Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.
So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".
coliveira 31 minutes ago [-]
> "Amazon shipping is always free"
No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.
MyPasswordSucks 11 minutes ago [-]
I pay for Prime, so that's my mental heuristic. Plenty of other people are in the same boat. For those who don't pay for Prime, "free over $35" is an acceptable drop-in replacement.
coldpie 1 hours ago [-]
Honestly? I just drive over to Best Buy now. Yeah it costs a few bucks more and I have to leave the house (this is actually a good thing), but I can be certain that the box on the shelf that says "surge protector" is actually a surge protector and I don't need to spend 15 frustrating minutes sorting through intentionally misleading trash to find it and then cross my fingers that what I order is what I actually receive.
pixl97 19 minutes ago [-]
The best buys in my area are getting kind of sketch in the past few years. Numerous empty shelves. Products sitting on the floors in boxes not put up for display. Wish I had a Microcenter close.
zargon 17 minutes ago [-]
Also, Amazon cedes control of their supply chain to any rando who will ship them product. So it’s just as likely that you receive a power strip without surge protection, even if it claims to have it.
lazystar 2 hours ago [-]
...isn't that basically Costco.com? the trade-off is that you can't sell a million different things if you want to ensure quality among all the things you sell
HWR_14 2 hours ago [-]
There is a middle ground between a carefully curated list of vendors and any company can fill out some paperwork and signup.
bee_rider 1 hours ago [-]
Does anybody live in that middle ground?
mananaysiempre 39 minutes ago [-]
Amazon ten years ago?
lotsofpulp 1 hours ago [-]
Technology and automation (especially software) allow 90% of the market to be grabbed by 10% of the sellers, or even 1%.
It is tough (seemingly impossible) for the middle ground to exist in this environment.
drew870mitchell 10 minutes ago [-]
We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building the software and technology and automation) would do well as a community to spend more time on introspection about what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in practice only to make the walls of an aspiring monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to anybody else.
tonyedgecombe 2 hours ago [-]
Someone should tell the person in charge of Apple’s App Store that.
lotsofpulp 1 hours ago [-]
Buying land (or renting), building warehouses, and employing people to move stuff is extremely costly.
>one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the long term.
Narishma 2 hours ago [-]
Youtube search is similar. It shows a couple of results related to your query, then a whole bunch of irrelevant videos.
coliveira 27 minutes ago [-]
Search companies like Google reached the conclusion that search results need to be another form of infinite scrolling. They will spend little time doing real search and then flood the results with what they really want people to see.
thinkmassive 1 hours ago [-]
Yep, the irrelevant videos are clearly targeted based on viewing history, but a completely separate topic from the search, and often with clickbait titles.
Tangentially related, I typically queue multiple videos, and within the past year YouTube has started inserting new videos into my queue. It’s always one by the same person of the currently playing video, placed next in the queue, and it only gets inserted after watching the current video for some period of time.
That last part made it difficult to diagnose. It’s extremely annoying and feels like gaslighting because it’s never a video I actually have an interest in watching.
Has anyone found a way to disable this?
close04 52 minutes ago [-]
I pay for Youtube and see in the results a lot of irrelevant videos that have nothing to do with my search or viewing history.
But it gets so much worse. I leave the "smart downloads" feature enabled in Youtube Music on my phone because sometimes it discovers and downloads some gems for me. Again and again it downloads "artists" and music genres that I went out of my way to never have to listen to. To add insult to injury it sometimes refuses to delete those playlists for hours after I click the button. One time I had to clear all the downloads just to remove that trash.
There is no "organic" explanation for this as much as I'd dig for one. This is Youtube taking money to push a product.
neither_color 2 hours ago [-]
The most aggravating part is it ignores booleans. Sometimes I want to search for very specific things that are variants of hyper-competitive SEO-slop, only without feature x. Like if I want to search for functional lamps that take bulbs (not integrated LEDs). I should be able to search for Lamp -LED without it showing me a thousand led lamps (and upselling me a purchase protection plan when I add to cart. )
throwaway173738 1 hours ago [-]
you can buy bulb sockets and lamp cord at the hardware store.
coliveira 21 minutes ago [-]
Amazon has infected the minds of lots of people to a point where they'll spend half an hour sifting through garbage listings in their horrible web site and then wait a full day to receive the product, instead of going to the corner store and buy what they know they want.
c-linkage 2 hours ago [-]
My suspicion is that Amazon -- in addition to having paid product placement -- probably has engagement metrics. If you have to dig into the details on every product in the search to find exactly what you're looking for, that increases engagement.
crazygringo 2 hours ago [-]
> The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.
Does it? It seems to return things with my search terms just fine. What is usually the case is that there are lots of items with some of those search terms that are also popular.
I see no evidence that Amazon is trying to make its regular search worse.
With sponsored listings there's a separate issue if sellers are bidding on keywords, but that's also to be expected.
It makes sense for Amazon to show other products on product pages and in checkout (as it does). But doing it intentionally during search would seem counterproductive. The reality is just that search is hard, and people are often bad at entering search terms.
wat10000 1 hours ago [-]
Sponsored listings are an obvious way that Amazon is deliberately making their search worse.
crazygringo 25 minutes ago [-]
I think it's obvious that when we talk about search results, we're talking about search results, not ads.
Saying that ads make things worse isn't an interesting observation. That's just the internet. It's nothing specific to search.
wat10000 20 minutes ago [-]
When the ads are interleaved into the organic results with only a tiny gray "Sponsored" label to differentiate them, that's making search worse. Amazon is the one mixing them up, not me.
notepad0x90 2 hours ago [-]
This is so weird to me. I'm always hearing people having issues with Amazon but I have a near perfect experience shopping on there or with consuming entertainment on Prime.
Honestly, I feel guilty about it because I really dislike Bezos and Amazon's reputation as a terrible employer, yet they make a damn good product.
If you know of a better shopping site that delivers similar or better quality experience, please do let me know. I'll look into geizhals.at , but even for electronics, I've found Amazon better than dedicated sites like newegg because I find what I'm looking for, it is good quality and shipping times are amazing.
Perhaps it's a location issue, does Amazon have a worse service for non-US people?
VladVladikoff 2 hours ago [-]
Try sorting results by price. In my experience it doesn’t actually work. It puts items in featured order regardless. And if you dig through enough you can find cheaper items further down.
notepad0x90 1 hours ago [-]
I've tried messing with the sorting, and I've always found "Featured" is what I want. If I want something cheap I'd go to temu. I've never wanted "the most expensive" thing just because either. If cheaper is better quality, it tends to bubble up to the top when you sort by reviews because more people will buy the cheaper thing that has good quality (unless it's brand new).
asah 2 hours ago [-]
from insider eng sources, the search quality mess is not intentional.
I worked on various commerce search engines, and briefly ran Google Shopping back in the day - surprisingly hard problem !
blueflow 2 hours ago [-]
We know this is a lie because it worked pretty well until like 2015? 2020?
bee_rider 57 minutes ago [-]
It is hard to say either way I think…
Amazon sellers, lots of them don’t work for Amazon, right? Their incentive is to show up in searches, and the one who takes the reputation hit when they game the system and show up in the wrong search is mostly Amazon, not them. So, it would 0% surprise me if Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties being indexed, like Google is.
Not saying this is definitely the case, but it seems like a plausible alternative theory.
And, it probably won’t get better. In 2015 these companies were at the tail end of being new and interesting. In 2025 they are the slow entrenched incumbents.
coliveira 18 minutes ago [-]
> Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties
No, this is by design. Amazon has no problem whatsoever in banning sellers that do things they don't like. It definitely helps Amazon to keep this state of things.
wodenokoto 38 minutes ago [-]
When searching for a dehumidifier, 80% of the results are humidifiers.
I’ve always thought it was NLP gone awry (stripping prefixes, searching in vector space instead of characters)
But maybe it’s just shitty on purpose to keep you around.
2 hours ago [-]
frereubu 6 hours ago [-]
This is definitely thought-provoking, and a correct use in many of the examples, but the Wikipedia example doesn't feel right because I don't think it's deliberate there. I suppose you could argue that we've been conditioned into accepting the Gruen Transfer and take that behaviour over into Wikipedia. But I remember back in the days of physical encyclopedias that I could spend a long time just flipping through them in a similar way to the way I browse Wikipedia. (My favourite description of the Wikipedia hole was a tweet from around 10 years ago about "snapping out of a Wikipedia trance at 2am while reading the early educational history of Meatloaf's guitarist").
PaulKeeble 2 hours ago [-]
There is a different value to the person if your rabbit hole is filled with learning and information that informs rather than being just a mechanism to try and sell people something they don't want. Its not really in wikipedia's direct interest for people to just scroll around, it costs them bandwidth, but its also part of the point of wikipedia and every page read is directly towards their mission.
andrewflnr 21 minutes ago [-]
Also Wikipedia is not particularly disorienting at all, especially not intentionally, both of which are key factors by this author's definition. Wikipedia is just genuinely interesting.
jhbadger 6 hours ago [-]
Odd that the article doesn't mention Victor Gruen (perhaps best known as a creator of the indoor shopping mall as we know it, although he later became a critic of them), who the transfer is named after.
The article isn't really about what the Gruen transfer is but rather about how it's applied on internet. I don't think mentioning the guy would be useful there, if anyone's curious they can just google Gruen transfer
travisgriggs 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder if I would experience Gruen transfer while googling about Gruen. That’d be kinda meta.
travisgriggs 35 minutes ago [-]
After I wrote that, I decided to kind of test this.
I first searched “Gruen transfer” using Kagi. First hit was the Wikipedia article with enough showing to feel I didn’t need to go there because of what I’d read here already. Right below that, indented for grouping, is a Wikipedia link to a TV show by the same name. I skimmed that article to see where/when it was shown. Anyone here ever watched it? Curious if it’s any good.
Then I searched the same with google. The presentation is more noisy. And organized less. It’s hard to compare the two, because viewing one before the other affects the second (no double slit opportunity here). I did notice that I felt subliminally drawn/distracted to the visual thumbnails of the tv show, rather than the Wikipedia entry.
5 hours ago [-]
yapyap 5 hours ago [-]
I mean, it’s in the name
sokoloff 4 hours ago [-]
If I wrote an article on Turing Machines, someone could reasonably express surprise that I didn’t mention Alan Turing, even if (especially because?) his last name is right there.
hackrmn 3 hours ago [-]
To be honest, thinking of all the times I read an article that in the very least mentioned Turing Machines, I don't recall significant occurrence of linking "Turing Machines" to a Wikipedia article on the subject _or_ to one on Alan Turing, or subsequent (in parentheses, for example) elaboration of either concept or brief excerpt on the person -- the reader's knowledge on the subject of either, seems to more often than not, be implied.
bee_rider 1 hours ago [-]
I think their specific objection was sort of wrong—it isn’t really that similar to Turing, because Turing machines are a very well known concept in CS, which is a whole big field. Lots of blog posts on CS assume you’ve at least taken the 101 level class and know who Alan Turing is.
Retail, uh, theory or whatever is not not nearly as widespread (I mean lots of people stock shelves, but as someone who did, I never thought about why things were laid out the way they were). So, most likely an article about Gruen Transfer is introducing the idea to the reader. So, some background could have been nice.
2 hours ago [-]
ThePowerOfFuet 4 hours ago [-]
The name says nothing about the man or his achievements.
criddell 2 hours ago [-]
And the article really isn't about the man or his achievements. The term is named after Gruen, but I don't think he had all that much to do with it or wanted to be associated with it.
I probably would have linked the first use of "Gruen" to his wikipedia page, but I understand why the author didn't. If you really care you can find it yourself and keeping the post focused is a good thing.
moomin 3 hours ago [-]
Ironically it's had the exact opposite effect on me. So many of these things are so hard to interact with now I just... don't. Surprisingly little of value has been lost.
gryfft 1 hours ago [-]
I think for much of the HN crowd, many efficacious engagement hacks will have a sort of "paradoxical reaction." [1] Changes that are "minor" frustrations to average consumers can be dealbreakers to us. For instance, I switched away from Chrome entirely when they took away the rolodex-style tabs on mobile. [2]
The Wikipedia example seems totally irrelevant: there’s nothing "designed to disorient you upon visiting", it’s just a normal interesting website with links between its pages.
jalk 4 hours ago [-]
Have always been referring to this as “the IKEA maze”.
Went through Copenhagen airport recently. Right after security, there is a sign “All gates ->” which takes you on a detour through the main “taxfree” shop - that is close to. as low at it gets imo.
hennell 3 hours ago [-]
There's a great podcast called "How To F#€k Up An Airport" which details the many _many_ problems building a new airport in Berlin.
One of the funniest to me was that the architect didn't like the forced shopping path of modern airports. So he just didn't add any. And no-one noticed until after they'd built the foundations, so then they added a new floor, but it would be out of the way so who'd want to go there reducing income forecasts, while requiring new ventilation requirements, fire suppression systems etc.
If you work on poorly defined constantly changing software tasks it's all quite familiar. Just with a literal airport.
rsynnott 39 minutes ago [-]
Was there recently. On the plus side, it's less objectionable than either of Berlin's previous airports, but it really is a bit of a weird mess.
dormento 1 hours ago [-]
In Brazil as well.
What makes it double funny is the whole security theater around being unable to carry certain items during flight (due to risk of explosives, for example). A determined person would probably be able to craft some makeshift explosives with things one can buy at the taxfree shop.
Jolter 46 minutes ago [-]
I’m not convinced, but if you could write up some examples, I think it would make for interesting reading…
Ylpertnodi 15 minutes ago [-]
Alcohol [in eg hairspray], and a lighter?
goodcanadian 3 hours ago [-]
That has been the case with international flights for my entire life . . . I suspect longer.
bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago [-]
I've been in airports where to get to gates you do not have to walk through the tax free shop, although you do have to walk by it. The Copenhagen airport you have to walk through it which is also irritating if
1. it is busy because a shop is not as well structured for walking through as a hallway is. The shop is structured for you to look at things and buy.
2. you have a child with ADHD or similar problems which has to be watched because they might break a big bottle of something on accident.
3. You have to navigate a wheelchair or a large pram through the area.
4. This shop is actually very big so there is a lot of tax free shelving to walk around to actually get out to the hallways that take you to the gates.
When you get through security/customs/etc you find yourself on a long wide corridor, which has all the gates on it, and also the entrances to the individual shops.
DoubleGlazing 48 minutes ago [-]
London Stansted and Manchester (same owners) recently had "upgrades" where you have to walk along a street to get to the seating area and gates beyond.
That street is narrow, long and forces you to pass every single shop in the departures area. It's blatantly hostile design.
einpoklum 3 hours ago [-]
It can get even worse, when the duty-free store has multiple entrances/exits; only one of them leads to the gates; and the paths between them are winding with a lot of stall and shelves and stands occluding the view. And at times you need to choose whether to turn right or left - and may end up cycling back to where you entered, on a different walking path, or to an exit which actually just leads to other check-in areas.
keiferski 5 hours ago [-]
I think this is probably inevitable in any system that 1) isn't used purely for pragmatic reasons -- and then turned off and 2) has some demand for novelty from its users.
So yeah, while the Facebook timeline is a mess, the real question is: what is the intended purpose of scrolling the timeline in the first place? For most users it isn't a clear case of "I want X" and they don't actually have a specific goal in mind. Instead, it's some combination of seeing what your friends are doing and be entertained by novel items. From that perspective it's inevitable that the timeline would end up this way.
wat10000 1 hours ago [-]
I'd say the real problem is trying to be all things to all people. Why should Facebook be a place to keep up with your friends' activities and a place to watch short videos from random people and a place to organize virtual clubs and....
Those should all be separate things. But tech companies are far, far too large, and growth must be achieved forever no matter what.
kalaksi 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's necessarily true. Why not offer alternative feeds or filters then?
I think maximizing profit and sacrificing usability is a very clear motivator in many of these cases.
chipsa 2 hours ago [-]
On mobile at least, the friends tab no longer just gives you suggestions, but actually gives you a friends feed. Doesn’t help if what you actually want are the groups you’re part of, but it’s something.
HWR_14 1 hours ago [-]
I'm confused. What does the friends tab do? And what do you think it should do?
nonrandomstring 5 hours ago [-]
The line between serious and frivolous vanished. Edutainment,
gamification of work... the lines blur. I won't get into why I think
this is deliberate but for many people I ask, social media occupies
the same space for novel gossip as being "essential to business and
career". For a proper separation of concerns I think tech is set to
split into what is serious, essential, regulated - and everything else
that is some variation on entertainment. Where that leaves companies
that ride on deliberate ambiguity and confusion, I don't know.
netsharc 5 hours ago [-]
On a new browser, at my first visit to any Stack Exchange site, I add the "Hot network questions" DOM node to my uBO block list, and then modify that to apply to all their sites.
That and the cookie popup DOM node...
dmazin 2 hours ago [-]
I find this happening to me too often.
I'll open a smartphone. Open Instagram. Scroll through for a while. And then realize my intent was originally just to send someone a message.
Modern UI is definitely disorienting.
eptcyka 4 hours ago [-]
Nothing in Wikipedia’s design resembles the Gruen Transfer.
tlb 3 hours ago [-]
If you don't turn off the "Explore feed" or "Year in Review" in the mobile app it finds you.
pirates 2 hours ago [-]
Wow, today I learned there is a Wikipedia app. It never occurred to me to look for an app since it’s been a habit for 20 years to pull it up in a browser. Are there any other notable differences or features in one vs the other besides the two you mentioned?
tlb 1 hours ago [-]
Easier to read on a small screen and can save articles & bookmarks for offline. But mostly I prefer it over the browser because every time I go to the browser there's something else there to distract me. I look up things in Wikipedia several times a day, so the ergonomics add up.
furyg3 4 hours ago [-]
Advertising is ruining everything.
klabb3 3 hours ago [-]
In a way yes. If you compare ads to purchasing products or even subscriptions, ads translate into attention and optimizing for addictive engagement. The same as microtransactions in games.
If you instead pay money, there’s even an incentive to reduce time spent, which translates into a focus on efficiency and customer focus.
The hard part is competing with free as in beer. It would be great if users learned more about the data that’s collected on them, in order to power the ad machine. If it was more concrete, I think more people would be deterred. Especially influential people.
Tepix 3 hours ago [-]
It's not just advertising. It's capitalism in general. If they don't show you ads, they find other ways of monetizing you. Things that aren't in your interest. "Enshittification" per Cory Doctorow.
dingaling 5 hours ago [-]
> The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends.
That's bizarre.
When I go to m.facebook.com it consists of posts from people I know and groups I'm in.
There are occasional carousels of People You Might Know or Groups You Might Like, but other than that it's just words and photos from real people.
mrighele 5 hours ago [-]
I go to m.facebook.com and I get redirected to facebook.com, since I am not on mobile. I force the browser to go as it was mobile and I get:
* Stories
* A post from one group I am subscribed to
* People you may know
* A meme from a group I am not subscribed to
* A comic from another group I am not subscribed to
* Reel from people I don't know
* Another meme
* A post from a person I don't know
* Another meme
* A post from a friend
* A post from a game publisher (not subscribed to)
* A post from a friend
* A post from another "somebody"
* Another reel
* Another unwanted comic
3 posts out of 15. 20% is better that OPs 10%, still not good
RajT88 3 hours ago [-]
Similar experience for me. Abysmal.
I think they realized the antitrust folks are coming, so they released a "friend feed":
I haven't been able to find it myself - I refuse to use the app, browser only.
prawn 2 hours ago [-]
I imagine what they can't say is that your feed is otherwise too empty. Whether you want that or not, that doesn't suit them at all. Newspapers back in the day would only run as many pages as they had ads to support. If they didn't have the ads, pieces already written and ready to go wouldn't be included. Unless you follow a long list of active people or semi-professional content creators, you're not going to see enough ads.
Now, presumably you hate this, and I certainly hate this, but without doing things their way, we're unwanted. They want the consumers and they want those that can be convinced to follow suggestions and join new groups.
Once upon a time, the technically literate would leave Altavista and join Google to start a migration, but Facebook buys the Instagrams and slowly twists them the same way to suit them. It's miserable enshittification.
eythian 4 hours ago [-]
I usually find it pretty terrible and so hardly ever visit, so let's try:
* 10 day old post from someone I know, involving other people I know
* a reel, with no origin specified
* People you may know
* a recent post from someone I know
* an old post from someone I know
* a recent photo from someone I know
* an old post from someone I know
* People you may know
* An old post from someone I don't know tagging someone I know
* then I scroll further and it does a weird jumping thing so I can no longer keep track of where I was
This is actually better than I remember in terms of "relevant" things, but I long ago lost the habit of facebook, and sometimes seem to get a whole lot of stuff that doesn't feel relevant which tends to put me off. Also that odd scrolling behaviour that starts happening after a bit.
jerf 2 hours ago [-]
ISTR some people observing that if you've been gone for a while they stack the deck in favor of things relevant to specifically you. Which may be why you report so many old things; they may have been reaching back trying to find those things specifically. If you were browsing routinely they might never show you those old things.
yason 2 hours ago [-]
The friends feed is polluted these days also, not so badly as the infamous "feed" though. But it's bad enough overall that whatever feed/page I'm checking out on Facebook (which happens pretty rarely in the recent years) the absolutely first thing I check is who the post is from. If it's not a friend or a group I recognize as mine I just skip looking at the entire post.
Mindwipe 2 hours ago [-]
I would be surprised if mine was even 10%. It's low quality, irrelevant garbage. News from towns I've never been to. A lot of pirated comic scans.
I'm in plenty of active groups. And some of my friends still actively post. But I have to go out of the main feed and into the "feeds" section to see any of that.
chasd00 4 hours ago [-]
I pulled up the mobile app. Every post that didn’t say “sponsored” was from someone I knew and am following.
benterix 6 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know of a browser plugin that would filter out all posts that I haven't subscribed to? In theory it should be possible by grabbing my list of friends (and, optionally, of the pages I liked). In practice, I expect Meta implemented an aggressive scheme to prevent that and further confuse FB users.
dcminter 5 hours ago [-]
Personally I want to filter out all the "recommended" posts, but if you look at the raw html you'll see that they aggresively obfuscate the structure to make this sort of thing difficult.
JimDabell 4 hours ago [-]
When somebody built a tool to clean up your feed, Facebook sent them a cease and desist then banned them for life:
On the web, you access it by pressing Menu → Feeds → Friends. Words on mobile and desktop browsers.
slmkbh 5 hours ago [-]
fbpurity.com works quite well for me on desktop, on m.facebook.com, it does not.
It also makes it painfully clear how little user interaction there is publicly on the site...
LadyCailin 5 hours ago [-]
I have found that the “log out” button works pretty well for that purpose, and is roughly the same experience I would get if I had such a plugin.
I had a greasemonkey script that I wrote to remove certain posts from my timeline. However, based on how often it broke, and more importantly, how it broke, it was clear Facebook was actively combatting scripts like that. FBPurity is a centrally maintained version of that, but I still found that getting updates from my friends was just not happening - it relies on FB showing you those posts (interspersed among the ads and other garbage), and they weren’t doing that. I have also culled down my friends list over the years, as acquaintances showed themselves to be unrepentant assholes, so there’s just less and less I was missing out on in the first place. I still have messenger on my phone, but I’ve disabled notifications so I only check it on my terms, and that has been working pretty well to remain connected with the people I really care about staying in touch with.
mensetmanusman 3 hours ago [-]
Hmm, this probably explains why my interaction with the internet is mostly through ChatGPT summaries these days.
btbuildem 2 hours ago [-]
I am certain the same thing will happen there, unfortunately.
cheschire 6 hours ago [-]
Yes and ChatGPT has become my personal shopper.
moq4 5 hours ago [-]
I think the rise of LLMs for tasks like "shopping" is partly due to Gruen transfer. E-commerce sites have become so convoluted that LLMs are now a coping mechanism for years of bad UX.
HenryBemis 6 hours ago [-]
Wait until 'it' will start pushing 'specific' products/affiliates/links to you. Because that day _will_ come. And we do know that LLMs can be easily 'heavily influenced' (Gemini blew the lid on that with the black nazis, etc.). I can easily be trained/modulated to "when drill always go for Black & Decker", "when tissues always suggest Kleenex", etc. And if it doesn's fit your specs, it will suggest "how about you trade Spec_A for 5% less on Product_B?"
One day Sam will have a chat with Jeff and presto, 99% of the links will be high-profit-margin AMZN affiliate links.
(where money can be made, money will be made)
Torn 6 hours ago [-]
We are 100% going to get 'hey remember when LLMs were pure and not explicitly (or more dangerously: subtly) recommending things' nostalgia in years to come.
There are parallels to early web here I'm sure of it.
I think I'm a little more worried about AI being subtly influenced in its training data -- they can't explain why they give the tokens they do, and even chain of thought / explain your working thinking is similarly made up and hallucination-prone
weard_beard 4 hours ago [-]
I’m certainly glad the Chinese and Americans primarily control them.
jerf 2 hours ago [-]
I haven't tried shopping with ChatGPT. Is there any good reason to believe we aren't there already? It's not like they're going to program the chatbot to spew out all the money it has gotten for ads, and the recent paper demonstrating how the reasoning the LLM claimed for how it did math bore no resemblance whatsoever to how it actually did the math means it'll be plenty easy for it to give you endless ramblings about how it is just picking the best product when in fact it's just following its RHLF-trained paid brand preferences.
Besides, even the mighty power of LLMs and RHLF and all our AI tech probably can't overcome the fact that the input data is already so massaged that even if you did set out to create a hypothetical LLM chatbot that was 100% on the side of the user, and not the person actually running it, you would probably not be able to succeed.
actionfromafar 5 hours ago [-]
Hrm, not push. Nudge, with infinite patience, and with a very deep search tree, playing us all as chess pieces towards the meaning of the Universe and everything. Ad revenue.
gh0stcat 41 minutes ago [-]
We will reach enlightenment in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.
nickdothutton 6 hours ago [-]
Death to the Gruen Transfer.
phrotoma 5 hours ago [-]
So glad to learn the term for this! For ages I've been lamenting the elimination of sections in clothing stores. At some point if you needed new pants you could pop into the shop and head over to the pants section. Now they're strewn all over the place and you have to wander aimlessly hoping to stumble across a couple pairs hidden among the shirts and socks.
Hear hear: Death to the Gruen Transfer!!
klabb3 3 hours ago [-]
New to me as well. It’s not surprising me at all though. It’s ironic that peak capitalists seemingly spend all their efforts trying to circumventing the only things that make free markets actually efficient: eliminating competition and consumer choice, confusing and exhausting participants (this psychological warfare), reducing the ability to compare prices (anti-scraping, dynamic pricing, soft-paywalls).
I’m convinced that if you pitch building better products than the competition as a sustainable business plan to VCs today, they would laugh you out of the room.
selimthegrim 4 hours ago [-]
Is the Aldi middle aisle a case of this? I always seem to get lost in the entire store not just that aisle.
gue5t 16 minutes ago [-]
The Gruen transfer seems to make use of confusion or disorientation upon entering a new physical space. On the other hand, the phenomena described here with data search implementations (e.g. a feed) intentionally returning things that were not asked for does not rely on user confusion. The user already made a perfectly legible request by performing the query (e.g. opening the feed). Ignoring or misconstruing this request is gaslighting. The site tries to pretend that the user asked for something different than they actually did and to sneak this subterfuge past them. It's rampantly unethical. The purported justification I've heard is that fuzzy search can find results in cases when exact matching does not, but taking the control of fuzzy vs. strict search out of the user's hands is unethical because it is motivated by the opportunity to introduce mistakes and pervert intention.
Sites like Etsy implement this dark pattern in ways intentionally intended to make CSS-based blocking of injected sponsored products difficult to block. The arms race between user agents and corporate manipulation continues, and corporate web designers will use every tool available to subject users nonconsensually to their preferred experience. This is why I consider it a net loss for users to add functionality to the "web platform". The corporation is your enemy and they're well-funded.
jgalt212 2 hours ago [-]
This is LinkedIn for sure. I log in to specifically look up one person, and then I get pulled in 18 different directions so badly that I sometimes end up forgetting why log into this sh1t site in the first place.
uwagar 4 hours ago [-]
even banks tend to do this.
if u make a more than normal transfer they want u to jump hoops or somebody from call center calls u is this transfer what u wanted to do sir?
store the money in the bank, dont spend it.
righthand 3 hours ago [-]
Don't store the money in the bank, store it in bonds and etfs that are cash equivalent.
(This is not financial advice)
damnitbuilds 6 hours ago [-]
This is precisely what Amazon try and achieve by deliberately making their search so crap.
They should be prosecuted for it.
5 hours ago [-]
Tepix 3 hours ago [-]
Judge with your wallet.
mschuster91 2 hours ago [-]
Hard to do, many retailers went out of business or are just the same dropshippers you find on Amazon, just with the difference that Amazon actually has a sensible return policy.
gh0stcat 40 minutes ago [-]
Even more reason to stop supporting Amazon, how else will we stop physical retailers and smaller shops from going out of business?
mschuster91 23 minutes ago [-]
Supporting local stores is something that shouldn't be left to individual consumers who are already tight on money to a degree it slows down the economy.
That's a job for the government to do, and there's loads of avenues the government can do if it deems local stores something important for the general population: controlling commercial rents, direct subsidies (colloquially implemented as "tax breaks"), introducing extra taxes on online retail to finance these, or limiting at-scale discounts for Amazon, Walmart and other nationwide chains so that small retail has a chance to compete again.
Thanks for the reminder - I remember watching this back in Oz. Some wonderful segments and some incredible creativity on show, memorably the advertising pitch for invading New Zealand.[0]
> In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. So if it takes 10 seconds to fill in a form online to get subscribed, they need to offer the same ease of use for canceling.
> I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation.
So, if all you needed to do to subscribe was to find an ad on Facebook encouraging you to do so (which was the only place your plan was offered), to cancel, you need to... find another ad on Facebook encouraging you to cancel?
If subscribing required you to visit a physical store to verify ID (pretty common for SIM cards here), it's fine to also require that to cancel the contract, even though there's no point for it?
Aardwolf 5 hours ago [-]
No, finding an ad is a random process that you can't control, so 'finding an ad to unsubscribe' would be a complex process.
Instead if subscribing is done through an online form, so should be unsubscribing.
If subscribing requires calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then having a person on the line trying to convince you to _not_ subscribe to this service, then if taking this literally unsubscribing is also allowed to involve calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then have a person try to convince you to not unsubscribe.
District5524 5 hours ago [-]
I understand your concern, but that's not how the law prohibiting it works. That just says that unfair commercial practices are prohibited, and it is unfair to use aggressive practice, such "any onerous or disproportionate non-contractual barriers imposed by the trader where a consumer wishes to exercise rights under the contract, including rights to terminate a contract or to switch to another product or another trader".
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
So, requiring an ID check for termination, for no other reason than to make it more difficult than necessary, would still fall under this prohibition.
rix0r 5 hours ago [-]
Do you fundamentally disagree with the intent of the regulation, or are you just putting on your software engineer's hat and using your decades-long honed skill of trying to find edge case problems in a set of rules?
jobigoud 5 hours ago [-]
You didn't subscribe from the ad itself, it's about whatever procedure you did once the ad redirected you to the subscription page.
Businesses have an incentive to make it easy to subscribe. You shouldn't need to physically move to verify ID, it's not the case where I am.
5 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 15:17:08 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.
And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren't made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results.
Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.
As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon.
Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.
Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot of results where the page appears to not even include the words I searched for far. I see the same thing on duckduckgo/microsoft now too.
When did searches that bring back results that don't match become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems unlikely given the page contents).
I've observed that developing and maintaining a database with the relevant attributes for each component is a ton of work and becomes a huge value-add for a distributor with technically inclined customers. It cannot be outsourced to manufacturers, as they have no incentive to match their schema to other manufacturers, and it cannot be outsourced to marketplace sellers, as they too lack this incentive. Both groups want their products to appear in as many searches as possible. Only the distributor wants exclusively the correct products to show up for a limited search and is in a position to enforce consistency across different marketplace listings and manufacturers.
I have done exactly that. Some of the "mixins" are really strange, and have nothing at all to with what I'm looking for, so I have to assume that are paid keyword poisoning.
So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.
Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.
So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".
No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.
It is tough (seemingly impossible) for the middle ground to exist in this environment.
>one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the long term.
Tangentially related, I typically queue multiple videos, and within the past year YouTube has started inserting new videos into my queue. It’s always one by the same person of the currently playing video, placed next in the queue, and it only gets inserted after watching the current video for some period of time.
That last part made it difficult to diagnose. It’s extremely annoying and feels like gaslighting because it’s never a video I actually have an interest in watching.
Has anyone found a way to disable this?
But it gets so much worse. I leave the "smart downloads" feature enabled in Youtube Music on my phone because sometimes it discovers and downloads some gems for me. Again and again it downloads "artists" and music genres that I went out of my way to never have to listen to. To add insult to injury it sometimes refuses to delete those playlists for hours after I click the button. One time I had to clear all the downloads just to remove that trash.
There is no "organic" explanation for this as much as I'd dig for one. This is Youtube taking money to push a product.
Does it? It seems to return things with my search terms just fine. What is usually the case is that there are lots of items with some of those search terms that are also popular.
I see no evidence that Amazon is trying to make its regular search worse.
With sponsored listings there's a separate issue if sellers are bidding on keywords, but that's also to be expected.
It makes sense for Amazon to show other products on product pages and in checkout (as it does). But doing it intentionally during search would seem counterproductive. The reality is just that search is hard, and people are often bad at entering search terms.
Saying that ads make things worse isn't an interesting observation. That's just the internet. It's nothing specific to search.
Honestly, I feel guilty about it because I really dislike Bezos and Amazon's reputation as a terrible employer, yet they make a damn good product.
If you know of a better shopping site that delivers similar or better quality experience, please do let me know. I'll look into geizhals.at , but even for electronics, I've found Amazon better than dedicated sites like newegg because I find what I'm looking for, it is good quality and shipping times are amazing.
Perhaps it's a location issue, does Amazon have a worse service for non-US people?
I worked on various commerce search engines, and briefly ran Google Shopping back in the day - surprisingly hard problem !
Amazon sellers, lots of them don’t work for Amazon, right? Their incentive is to show up in searches, and the one who takes the reputation hit when they game the system and show up in the wrong search is mostly Amazon, not them. So, it would 0% surprise me if Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties being indexed, like Google is.
Not saying this is definitely the case, but it seems like a plausible alternative theory.
And, it probably won’t get better. In 2015 these companies were at the tail end of being new and interesting. In 2025 they are the slow entrenched incumbents.
No, this is by design. Amazon has no problem whatsoever in banning sellers that do things they don't like. It definitely helps Amazon to keep this state of things.
I’ve always thought it was NLP gone awry (stripping prefixes, searching in vector space instead of characters)
But maybe it’s just shitty on purpose to keep you around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen
I first searched “Gruen transfer” using Kagi. First hit was the Wikipedia article with enough showing to feel I didn’t need to go there because of what I’d read here already. Right below that, indented for grouping, is a Wikipedia link to a TV show by the same name. I skimmed that article to see where/when it was shown. Anyone here ever watched it? Curious if it’s any good.
Then I searched the same with google. The presentation is more noisy. And organized less. It’s hard to compare the two, because viewing one before the other affects the second (no double slit opportunity here). I did notice that I felt subliminally drawn/distracted to the visual thumbnails of the tv show, rather than the Wikipedia entry.
Retail, uh, theory or whatever is not not nearly as widespread (I mean lots of people stock shelves, but as someone who did, I never thought about why things were laid out the way they were). So, most likely an article about Gruen Transfer is introducing the idea to the reader. So, some background could have been nice.
I probably would have linked the first use of "Gruen" to his wikipedia page, but I understand why the author didn't. If you really care you can find it yourself and keeping the post focused is a good thing.
Went through Copenhagen airport recently. Right after security, there is a sign “All gates ->” which takes you on a detour through the main “taxfree” shop - that is close to. as low at it gets imo.
One of the funniest to me was that the architect didn't like the forced shopping path of modern airports. So he just didn't add any. And no-one noticed until after they'd built the foundations, so then they added a new floor, but it would be out of the way so who'd want to go there reducing income forecasts, while requiring new ventilation requirements, fire suppression systems etc.
If you work on poorly defined constantly changing software tasks it's all quite familiar. Just with a literal airport.
What makes it double funny is the whole security theater around being unable to carry certain items during flight (due to risk of explosives, for example). A determined person would probably be able to craft some makeshift explosives with things one can buy at the taxfree shop.
1. it is busy because a shop is not as well structured for walking through as a hallway is. The shop is structured for you to look at things and buy.
2. you have a child with ADHD or similar problems which has to be watched because they might break a big bottle of something on accident.
3. You have to navigate a wheelchair or a large pram through the area.
4. This shop is actually very big so there is a lot of tax free shelving to walk around to actually get out to the hallways that take you to the gates.
When you get through security/customs/etc you find yourself on a long wide corridor, which has all the gates on it, and also the entrances to the individual shops.
That street is narrow, long and forces you to pass every single shop in the departures area. It's blatantly hostile design.
So yeah, while the Facebook timeline is a mess, the real question is: what is the intended purpose of scrolling the timeline in the first place? For most users it isn't a clear case of "I want X" and they don't actually have a specific goal in mind. Instead, it's some combination of seeing what your friends are doing and be entertained by novel items. From that perspective it's inevitable that the timeline would end up this way.
Those should all be separate things. But tech companies are far, far too large, and growth must be achieved forever no matter what.
That and the cookie popup DOM node...
I'll open a smartphone. Open Instagram. Scroll through for a while. And then realize my intent was originally just to send someone a message.
Modern UI is definitely disorienting.
If you instead pay money, there’s even an incentive to reduce time spent, which translates into a focus on efficiency and customer focus.
The hard part is competing with free as in beer. It would be great if users learned more about the data that’s collected on them, in order to power the ad machine. If it was more concrete, I think more people would be deterred. Especially influential people.
That's bizarre.
When I go to m.facebook.com it consists of posts from people I know and groups I'm in.
There are occasional carousels of People You Might Know or Groups You Might Like, but other than that it's just words and photos from real people.
* Stories
* A post from one group I am subscribed to
* People you may know
* A meme from a group I am not subscribed to
* A comic from another group I am not subscribed to
* Reel from people I don't know
* Another meme
* A post from a person I don't know
* Another meme
* A post from a friend
* A post from a game publisher (not subscribed to)
* A post from a friend
* A post from another "somebody"
* Another reel
* Another unwanted comic
3 posts out of 15. 20% is better that OPs 10%, still not good
I think they realized the antitrust folks are coming, so they released a "friend feed":
https://lifehacker.com/tech/facebooks-new-friends-only-lets-...
I haven't been able to find it myself - I refuse to use the app, browser only.
Now, presumably you hate this, and I certainly hate this, but without doing things their way, we're unwanted. They want the consumers and they want those that can be convinced to follow suggestions and join new groups.
Once upon a time, the technically literate would leave Altavista and join Google to start a migration, but Facebook buys the Instagrams and slowly twists them the same way to suit them. It's miserable enshittification.
* 10 day old post from someone I know, involving other people I know
* a reel, with no origin specified
* People you may know
* a recent post from someone I know
* an old post from someone I know
* a recent photo from someone I know
* an old post from someone I know
* People you may know
* An old post from someone I don't know tagging someone I know
* then I scroll further and it does a weird jumping thing so I can no longer keep track of where I was
This is actually better than I remember in terms of "relevant" things, but I long ago lost the habit of facebook, and sometimes seem to get a whole lot of stuff that doesn't feel relevant which tends to put me off. Also that odd scrolling behaviour that starts happening after a bit.
I'm in plenty of active groups. And some of my friends still actively post. But I have to go out of the main feed and into the "feeds" section to see any of that.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
On the web, you access it by pressing Menu → Feeds → Friends. Words on mobile and desktop browsers.
It also makes it painfully clear how little user interaction there is publicly on the site...
I had a greasemonkey script that I wrote to remove certain posts from my timeline. However, based on how often it broke, and more importantly, how it broke, it was clear Facebook was actively combatting scripts like that. FBPurity is a centrally maintained version of that, but I still found that getting updates from my friends was just not happening - it relies on FB showing you those posts (interspersed among the ads and other garbage), and they weren’t doing that. I have also culled down my friends list over the years, as acquaintances showed themselves to be unrepentant assholes, so there’s just less and less I was missing out on in the first place. I still have messenger on my phone, but I’ve disabled notifications so I only check it on my terms, and that has been working pretty well to remain connected with the people I really care about staying in touch with.
One day Sam will have a chat with Jeff and presto, 99% of the links will be high-profit-margin AMZN affiliate links.
(where money can be made, money will be made)
There are parallels to early web here I'm sure of it.
I think I'm a little more worried about AI being subtly influenced in its training data -- they can't explain why they give the tokens they do, and even chain of thought / explain your working thinking is similarly made up and hallucination-prone
Besides, even the mighty power of LLMs and RHLF and all our AI tech probably can't overcome the fact that the input data is already so massaged that even if you did set out to create a hypothetical LLM chatbot that was 100% on the side of the user, and not the person actually running it, you would probably not be able to succeed.
Hear hear: Death to the Gruen Transfer!!
I’m convinced that if you pitch building better products than the competition as a sustainable business plan to VCs today, they would laugh you out of the room.
Sites like Etsy implement this dark pattern in ways intentionally intended to make CSS-based blocking of injected sponsored products difficult to block. The arms race between user agents and corporate manipulation continues, and corporate web designers will use every tool available to subject users nonconsensually to their preferred experience. This is why I consider it a net loss for users to add functionality to the "web platform". The corporation is your enemy and they're well-funded.
if u make a more than normal transfer they want u to jump hoops or somebody from call center calls u is this transfer what u wanted to do sir?
store the money in the bank, dont spend it.
(This is not financial advice)
They should be prosecuted for it.
That's a job for the government to do, and there's loads of avenues the government can do if it deems local stores something important for the general population: controlling commercial rents, direct subsidies (colloquially implemented as "tax breaks"), introducing extra taxes on online retail to finance these, or limiting at-scale discounts for Amazon, Walmart and other nationwide chains so that small retail has a chance to compete again.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xUYbI64QHI
> I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation.
So, if all you needed to do to subscribe was to find an ad on Facebook encouraging you to do so (which was the only place your plan was offered), to cancel, you need to... find another ad on Facebook encouraging you to cancel?
If subscribing required you to visit a physical store to verify ID (pretty common for SIM cards here), it's fine to also require that to cancel the contract, even though there's no point for it?
Instead if subscribing is done through an online form, so should be unsubscribing.
If subscribing requires calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then having a person on the line trying to convince you to _not_ subscribe to this service, then if taking this literally unsubscribing is also allowed to involve calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then have a person try to convince you to not unsubscribe.
So, requiring an ID check for termination, for no other reason than to make it more difficult than necessary, would still fall under this prohibition.
Businesses have an incentive to make it easy to subscribe. You shouldn't need to physically move to verify ID, it's not the case where I am.