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.
They should be prosecuted for it.
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.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
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.
It also makes it painfully clear how little user interaction there is publicly on the site...
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
That and the cookie popup DOM node...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
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.
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 !
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.
cheschire•4h ago
HenryBemis•4h ago
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•4h ago
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•1h ago
actionfromafar•3h ago
jerf•25m ago
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.
moq4•3h ago