Yes yes, labor market, visas, etc. It's still a choice to do something evil, even if you're coerced.
I am not sure you’re making a reasonable or realistic argument when you are saying that someone should risk or give up their job, personal security, and stability of their family rather than implement a button to turn off iPhone notifications.
I don’t disagree with the principle at all, but if it’s ever going to change the conversation has to start somewhere rational. “Destroy your life because your UI offends me” isn’t it.
Nick Naylor: [out loud] "I just need to pay the mortgage."
Nick Naylor: [to self] The Yuppie Nuremberg defense.I just made sure to save the emails/documentation/etc. in case anyone tried to blame it on me when it failed or users complained. If the order came down from high enough up the org, a UX manager or director might also go on the record opposing it to cover for those under them in the org.
I think of it like hiring someone to replace all the beautiful hardwood floors in your home with thick, orange shag carpet. It's a bad idea and it will probably hurt the resale value of your home, but there's nothing unethical about the contractor accepting the work and taking your money as long as everything's done properly and to code.
And every few years the people of Missouri would vote NO casinos. But one time, they voted to allow the casinos. Then the votes stopped. Hugely manipulative and it feels like this sort of thing is everywhere now.
> all we need... is for one of us, just one, sooner or later to have the thing we're all hoping for. One good day.
Also, you don't just "have" casinos, building any building of that size is at the very least a multi-month affair and likely multiple years.
So once you say "yes", you've set something in motion that is way harder to unwind than it was to kick off.
Also, I can see it being the casinos themselves asking permission to enter the state. Once they're allowed in, why would they ask to leave? That would be the job of someone else.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action>
<https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=63B1D140FD13A03F15BF842...>
Very strongly recommended. I'd stumbled across this in my uni days, and its power and insight were obvious even to naive me then. It's since emerged as a classic of economics.
PaulHoule is also a fan: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775531>
First they bundled it in the regular November election. It failed. So then they bundled it in a run-off or primary election. It still failed. Finally they ran it on a solo ballot and it finally passed.
I was like 19 or so. Voted against it every time but that was sort of an eye-opening moment for young me.
Now that it is legalized, though, there is no one who has a concentrated enough cost to fight for its reversal. It is more rational to just suffer the small cost of gambling instead of fighting hard for its repeal.
So as you say, they only have to win the fight once, and it is won forever, and society is slightly worse off.
This is the exact same reason Intuit keeps winning the tax battle… it matters more to them than anyone else, even though it makes it a little bit worse for everyone.
Apathy reigns as usual.
There literally isn’t enough time in the day for me to fight against everything, so you pick and choose where to spend your energy.
I like the idea of policy changes like this having an expiry date a few years in the future, which forces a periodic revote if some party wants to keep the new policy. Like a political office term, this should be long enough to give businesses a timeframe they can plan around, and an opportunity for voters to see how the policy played out.
Perhaps it would lead to an ever-increasing pile of legal "confirmation dialog boxes" that bore the public. But I like that the default action (doing nothing) would lead to regulations being deleted, as there are few forces that act to reduce regulation, and having too many regulations is another slow-burn energy sink for everyone.
Don’t make things into a game theory problem. It’s a power problem.
How to solve the problem is a separate issue, but the problem can be described with game theory.
Therefore: if the commission wants a law, all they have to do is keep trying. If it fails, they try again. If it passes, well it only has to pass once. Because the parliament can't introduce bills which means it can't repeal existing laws.
I even like Apple's reactions implementation, which is pretty good, but there's definitely some PM that wants to push it in my face 10 times every day and I don't know what's worse, the PM doing this fully understanding the cost or whatever system stands aside and lets them continue.
Some YouTube executive must be really proud of that award.
You can selectively block elements from sites. I've blocked shorts from it and honestly forgot how annoying it was until these comments. Just right click, block element, preview before applying, make sure you don't butcher out unintended parts of the pages.
Every few restarts, it is showing a pop up that shows the wallpaper that was chosen and a “learn more” button… the pop up can’t be moved, can’t be closed, and stays on top no matter what.
It took me a few minutes before I finally gave up and clicked on the “learn more” button, which of course opened Edge (even though edge isn’t my default browser), which of course prompted me to switch to using edge as my default browser, which I had to decline and close edge again.
And now I have repeated this dance a number of times on restarts. No, I don’t want to learn more about the wallpaper, and I don’t want to use Edge!
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
You should be able to find the setting responsible for displaying these "learn more" buttons. I always disable it for myself and friend's computers.
Once you know your ways around disabling all annoyances in Windows, it's really smooth sail.
Good luck!
also their new default-on email classification system is a fucking nightmare and I was so glad when I figured out you can turn it off
plus why do my email drafts load in oldest first?
Youtube isn't your computer. It's their computer. And the precise, predictable mechanical command they have given it is to manipulate you.
The way out is to just not engage. Do you find anything truly appealing about Youtube? If there was some video on it somewhere that was "I can't live without this" good, why haven't you ripped the video with youtube-dl and kept it? It would no longer be a Youtube video, and you'd no longer have to tolerate Youtube's antihuman UI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Or look at the case of Mozilla which seems to be at least treading water when it comes to browser engineering but in terms of marketing and legitimacy they seem to be doing as little as possible to threaten Chrome but keep plugging along because if Firefox went down then Google might get pulled into antitrust court. (Think how Microsoft funded Apple during the dark years of the 1990s to keep competition alive or how the existence of Android must have a huge value to Apple today in that Apple can claim it has competition -- competition like the heel in pro wrestling)
Of all the interstitials PBS had, this one was by far the oddest.
Over a few decades starting in 2000, I stopped purchasing music entirely. I also stopped listening to the radio, and in 2015 I got rid of my last TV. (Sometimes when you're in public, you can't avoid these.) And things seemed alright.
But I have come full circle and developed a complete addiction to YouTube that satiates all these desires in one service. Why own music when I can stream anything on demand? Why own a TV or disc player when all movies I want to see are likewise available?
So I pay for Premium. I could live without YouTube, but I would flounder in abject boredom. My music entertainment would be severely limited, like what was available in PD or Creative Commons, and that's rather grim. If YouTube were completely unavailable to me, in terms of any music or video, I would indeed struggle to fill those gaps, because it really fills out my days.
Thankfully, with Premium I am not nagged by ads and the UI generally cooperates. The ads were really wearing me down, because the more you use it, the more you're subjected to. Unfortunately, YouTube as a platform is not oriented to "watching what I want when I want it" but to discovering new content and suggesting "stuff I might like", so I still do fight to stay on the rails of what I truly enjoy.
Android, on the other hand, has become a holy terror. Every time I try to do something with my life, whether it's banking or finance or health care or shopping, Android is getting in my way and hindering my sanity. I cannot accomplish a simple thing without Android distracting me, frustrating me, and making me forget what I was trying to do. How many times have I unlocked my phone, fiddled, and then locked it again, only to discover that I didn't get anything done? That typically didn't happen with Microsoft or Windows, because indeed MS... was... primarily a B2B provider, and home users enjoyed similar deference to let us be productive without getting in our face. Unfortunately, that is all converging on Consumerist Advertising Hell.
Companies no longer view their customers as their customers, and I'm not sure I've settled on an explanation that makes sense to me. I only have examples. The biggest one though was Bug Light and the Dylan Mulvaney thing from several years ago. I no longer have a link, but there was a paraphrased quote from the marketing director at the time directly expressing contempt for those who drank Bud Light. But a frustrated expletive, rather a full-on rant about how they were all moronic frat boys and gauche rednecks.
What does it mean when a company has no respect for its own customers, no gratitude, and even measurable levels of what can only be called hatred? I don't know the answer to that question, but that's the world we all live in this year of 2025. And I can't imagine it could possibly turn out well for any of us.
I've had to uninstall so many apps because of this bad behavior.
They want the user to be worn down until they just accept the notifications or whatever else or even just accidentally click YES on one of the recurrent pop ups.
It is beyond infuriating the number of times a google search misclick on my phone leads me to the app store opening the page for the google app. Same with a reddit page. They know what they're doing and they don't care. And even then you have to manually close that giant banner that covers half your screen to dismiss the nag to download the app-- when the web version works perfectly fine!
Alright time to stop ranting and get back to work :)
The most recent example that sticks in my mind is I uninstalled Duolingo because they kept changing the app icon, but what finally did it for me is when they changed to some disgusting version of it with snot dripping from the creature's (is it an owl? some kind of bird? I forget) nostrils. WTF Duolingo? Uninstalled, I'm done with it.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20190115034109/https://plus.goog...>
(And yes, I archived all my G+ content, though it's one hell of a bastard to search through it.)
That posted to HN on a day where for a moment three of HN's front-page stories were my own content (direct submissions or links to).
HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745525>
The following day saw a slew of Google-critical stories:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-11-17>
And yeah, it's not got better. I fight back (uBlock origin element remover, custom stylesheets, entire rewrites of news sites (<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122>, working on a further revision now), and almost entirely abandoning the mobile comms device space (no smartphone, a largely de-Googled and anonymised e-ink tablet with no no subscription-based apps installed).
I still strongly believe that this ends poorly.
The whole notion is absurd to me. A notification is supposed to notify you that something happened. But in these cases nothing has actually happened. All these notifications are, are thinly veiled attempts to manipulate you into opening the app to then try to shove more things into you for the benefit of the company that made the app.
I'm generally very stingy with notification permissions, so on the rare occasion that one of these does slip through, it makes me furious. It feels like an insult to my dignity as a human being.
Or else, if there IS a subcategory to turn off then they just invent a new subcategory a few months after I’ve opted out, and auto opt me into that instead. eg I opt out of “marketing notifications” and then “relevant suggestions” is created. I’m looking at you, Google Maps.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Part of the population is learning that -- but I think another part is learning that application providers are not incentivized to design around the users' best interest, and that if you want your software to behave in a predictable, user friendly way, you need to seek out third party tools (like uBlock Origin, UnTrap for Youtube, ReVanced, Invidious etc) to enforce that behavior.
I tend to see this as one form of a widening gap between software users and software creators. I don't subscribe to the hardcore open-source philosophy that everyone should be contributing to the software they use. But I do think it's getting problematic when a small minority of people who understand the complexities of what's actually going on are crafting elaborate systems of smoke and mirrors to present a seemingly simple interface to users. I would rather that today's interfaces be ten times "worse" but ten times more predictable.
JoshTriplett•4h ago
Does Microsoft understand consent? Yes / Ask me again later
In general, options like "never ask me again" seem to have disappeared, and we should bring them back.
CamperBob2•4h ago
JoshTriplett•4h ago
tgsovlerkhgsel•4h ago
Often, there simply is no respectful alternative because everyone is doing it, or the respectful alternative is utterly useless due to other issues, or the disrespectful platform is the exclusive distributor for some content that you really want to access.
The platforms/apps know this and generally get more abusive the less alternatives you have.
otterley•3h ago
ikiris•4h ago
JoshTriplett•4h ago
ndiddy•4h ago
andrepd•4h ago
- Most users just use what is preinstalled on their device. That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
- As the blogpost points out, many people don't even realise there's an option.
- Which sometimes there is not: either literally or in practice. E.g. I'm forced to maintain at the very least a whatsapp and a facebook account to perform basic everyday tasks.
- Finally, what I think is the most important point: these behaviours give a competitive advantage, therefore there needs to be a floor enforced by law. It's much like environmental protections, it's not enough to say "the customers should pick the greener choice", because dumping waste into a river is cheaper than processing it or recycling. You need to enforce a level playing field via laws, to ensure this does not happen.
JoshTriplett•4h ago
That's not inherently the case. Scummy dark patterns like these might show short-term advantages in numbers, but doing that burns user trust.
It's a pretty stark difference between classes of companies. Consider how people feel about Comcast and Facebook, versus how people feel about Stripe and Vanguard. (Random examples of companies with wildly different reputations.)
esafak•4h ago
PaulHoule•3h ago
AlexandrB•3h ago
That seems counterfactual when talking about Chrome. Microsoft has tried every trick in the book - short of simply blocking Chrome - to get people using Edge on Windows. It's been somewhat effective, but Chrome still retains a dominant lead. This is entirely due people going out of their way to install Chrome.
PaulHoule•3h ago
I find it shocking how many community organizations are completely dependent on Meta. I saw a poster for a club that gets together to play board games that simply had a heading that said "Board Game Club" and a QR code but no meeting times or places, no contact phone, email or web site url. The QR code points to... a Facebook page. If you want to engage with this organization you have no choice but to use Facebook and be subject to their system of pernicious personalization.
Many student organizations at Cornell use Instagram as their primary or only communications tool. There are so many problem with that, not least that you can't engage with that platform without giving a mobile phone number with a real cellular carrier and that doesn't have metadata about events so you get notifications on your phone about events that happened a month ago. It's absurd, but you'd make yourself a hermit if you eschewed these platforms.
AlexandrB•4h ago
See also: how reddit shut down superior competing UIs by changing their API terms.
dayvigo•3h ago
AlexandrB•3h ago
I don't think YouTube is going to feel compelled to change their UI if 1% of users are using some alternative UI off of Tor.
dayvigo•3h ago
grishka•2h ago
In the US, as far as I know, there hasn't yet been a precedent about this.
reverendsteveii•3h ago
retrac•4h ago
whateveracct•3h ago
JoshTriplett•3h ago
trinsic2•3h ago
ikiris•2h ago
izacus•2h ago
Same for engineers - user respect doesn't have value for them either, you'll get the laziest, easiest implementation of a given ticket. Or the most complex and one if they're up for promotion or want to learn a new tech.
Afterwards, both groups will happily run towards greener pastures by the time any of this "respect value" materializes.
grishka•2h ago
astrange•3h ago
rozap•1h ago
i hate it when engineers do this song and dance "well actually it's really hard to do that" in order to justify the position that they already had before the conversation started. no it isn't, it literally isn't, it's just smoke and mirrors to justify your position.
namaria•58m ago
dayvigo•1h ago
dfxm12•2h ago
tremon•2h ago
mixmastamyk•1h ago
pndy•1h ago
I doubt anything can be done nowadays without some law enforcement. We're long gone from times when companies offered actual options and features for the user and not for themselves.
lud_lite•32m ago