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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
...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
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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. )
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").
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
Google just changes and ignores your search terms and then serves you the results to whatever it wants instead.
I just want a search engine that won’t return blogs with affiliate links or many results that are providing identical information.
Youtube search is similar. It shows a couple of results related to your query, then a whole bunch of irrelevant videos.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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 occupy.
...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
There is a middle ground between a carefully curated list of vendors and any company can fill out some paperwork and signup.
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.
Someone should tell the person in charge of Apple’s App Store that.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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. )
you can buy bulb sockets and lamp cord at the hardware store.
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 !
We know this is a lie because it worked pretty well until like 2015? 2020?
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").
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen
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
I wonder if I would experience Gruen transfer while googling about Gruen. That’d be kinda meta.
I mean, it’s in the name
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.
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.
The name says nothing about the man or his achievements.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Nothing in Wikipedia’s design resembles the Gruen Transfer.
If you don't turn off the "Explore feed" or "Year in Review" in the mobile app it finds you.
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?
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.
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.
That has been the case with international flights for my entire life . . . I suspect longer.
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.
Yes, I was in Haneda terminal 3 yesterday and it doesn't force you through a shop: https://tokyo-haneda.com/en/floor/terminal3/3rd_floor.html
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.
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.
Advertising is ruining everything.
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.
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.
Hmm, this probably explains why my interaction with the internet is mostly through ChatGPT summaries these days.
I am certain the same thing will happen there, unfortunately.
> 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.
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
Similar experience for me. Abysmal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I pulled up the mobile app. Every post that didn’t say “sponsored” was from someone I knew and am following.
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.
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.
When somebody built a tool to clean up your feed, Facebook sent them a cease and desist then banned them for life:
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
You don't need a plugin. Facebook offers a feed which is just friends.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Yes and ChatGPT has become my personal shopper.
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.
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)
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
I’m certainly glad the Chinese and Americans primarily control them.
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.
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.
Death to the Gruen Transfer.
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!!
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.
Is the Aldi middle aisle a case of this? I always seem to get lost in the entire store not just that aisle.
This is precisely what Amazon try and achieve by deliberately making their search so crap.
They should be prosecuted for it.
Judge with your wallet.
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.
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.
Don't store the money in the bank, store it in bonds and etfs that are cash equivalent.
(This is not financial advice)
Thought this was about the Australian TV show, but I'd completely forgotten that was named after an actual concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_(TV_series)
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]
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xUYbI64QHI
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.