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).
My observation with Google is that an astonishing high percentage of their users stopped clicking organic search results around 2010 or so. They exclusively choose from amongst the top two or three ads, which they don’t even realize are ads since the indication of “what’s an ad” has gotten more and more subtle and the position of the first organic result has gotten lower and lower on the page to the point where today you generally would have to scroll a bit to find the first organic research result. The same users who only clicked the sponsored links before now don’t click any links, usually preferring to simply read the AI generated summary of some random spam results (which notably is far worse in accuracy than what you would get if you simply asked an LLM directly).
I think as a result, Google doesn’t really care about the quality of their organic search results since on the scale Google cares about, “nobody” clicks them anyway.
FWIW, Amazon's search algorithm is actually extremely simple: rankings are based on what people buy after searching for a particular term. To use your examples, the reason why Amazon is showing power strips when you search for "surge protectors" is because people often use the terms interchangeably. So, while this is bad for you, since you correctly distinguish the terms, it's actually better for people who use the terms interchangeably and do want a power strip when they search for surge protectors. And I think it's ambiguous what the correct behavior should be. Perhaps in the future some AI system will be able to help customers manage this kind of confusion, but we're not there yet.
Since inevitably someone will mention that the search results are littered with ads: yes, they are, and due to the same factor I mentioned above, it makes sense for sellers to advertise, say, power strips against the search term "surge protector." We run into a similar thing with "outdoor" rated wire. It's a term which technically means a rating for UV exposure. However, customers often use it to refer to wire that is rated for burial in the ground. So we advertise our burial rated cable against the "outdoor" search keyword. Gotta meet the customers where they are.
I have no conceptual issue with Amazon serving ads against search terms. My big issue with Amazon search is that they intentionally made it much less useful by removing any ability to group words into one term with quotes or exclude any term with minus. These were working features of Amazon search that had long been there (and are probably still there in the code).
With the sheer number of products and the proliferation of feature or compatibility requirements buyers have to match, removing this functionality basically breaks Amazon search. Just try finding finding an LED bulb of a certain wattage that's dimmable. Every seller of non-dimmable bulbs puts the words "Not Dimmable" in their description to reduce returns. Amazon search will return all of those, with the listings I want buried somewhere in that flood - all because they've arbitrarily chosen to disable the standard, well-understood way of solving this common problem. The only solution is using an external search engine and limiting it to Amazon.com.
To me “outdoor” rated wire means has strands of tinned copper. Pure copper corrodes so much faster than jackets fail from UV damage
We use the term “solar cable” to refer to a UV resistant jacket, but we use that term half incorrectly - as solar cables have a bunch of different parameters other than just the UV
Unfortunately I think the only true solution is something like McMaster-Carr or Digikey
Maybe we’re a dog chasing its tail thinking a single universal search box is feasible, when it may simply be impossible for all users?
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.
On a side note, McMaster.com is the very best online shopping site I've ever visited or used. It's blazing fast (a trick based on pre-fetching that you can observe in all its glory in the developer view of your favourite browser), it's logical, uncluttered - perfect.
Having marketplace sellers do it could probably work if the moderation had teeth. But (for example) I've reported intentionally miscategorized listings on ebay only to have an automated system reject the report.
On a related note, https://segor.de/ doesn't have great search (and they don't remotely attempt to carry every component, and note that a whole lot of German component names look nothing like their English counterparts) but the technical design of their online catalog is interesting - it's a fast single-page app with about 3MB of data, so when you navigate the catalog it doesn't do any network round-trips except to fetch images.
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.
And YouTube isn't really interested to improve their suggestions: when I say "Not interested" to a suggestion, they ask why not with two idiotic possible answers: a) I've already seen it or b) I don't like it.
If a) would be the case, they most of the time would know it and if b) would be the case, I would have seen it too and thus a).
Examples: I use Canon and Fuji gear for taking pictures, but they offer me Nikon or Sony related videos. If they would actually have some interest to optimize suggestions, they would offer me to say "I'm not interested in Nikon/Sony/whatever" … wouldn't they?
Or Amazon, offering me Sony lenses for my Fuji. Or more of Thing-X after buying some Thing-X yesterday. But I only need exactly one new Thing-X, which their stupid "AI" Rufus should know by now if their suggestion machinery didn't know it already ;-0
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".
> but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor
Why does this confuse you? It's the same in every single industry in the US right now.
Go ahead, try and start up a competitor to Amazon. Most likely you will just fail for normal business reasons, but if you ever even come close to being a threat, Amazon will just immense weight to steal your market out from under you. They can subsidize anything they want with AWS profits and can outspend you in any direction.
Meanwhile the DOJ will look away from obvious anti-competitive behavior because Reagan was a moron who thought regulating markets was magically bad.
Even Google ran into this with Fiber. Everywhere they went, Spectrum and Comcast just dropped prices to make Google's offer not very impressive, which is easy for them to do since they've spent decades extracting unbounded profits and paying off infrastructure investments, so their costs will be lower than any market entrant. Demonstrating like this that you COULD have significantly lowered prices but just chose not to SHOULD make people angry at you, but Americans are allergic to requiring companies actually be good for consumers.
This is the clear, obvious, trivial direction that any market operating in a capitalistic system is attempting to become. People need to stop being surprised.
If you want a competitive market, that doesn't happen naturally. You must force it.
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.
I don't really care about knockoffs (hell, I would happily shop on a site that ONLY sold knockoffs for basically everything but electronics), I just want to spend as little time actually looking through products as possible. Google is good for a lot of things but finding good places to buy stuff is not one of them. The entire process of making a profile and entering payment information is sufficient to ensure I don't buy from your site at all.
Tbh, amazon should probably be run as a public service. We've long since passed the point where their profit incentives benefit anyone but shareholders. By about fifteen-twenty years by my estimate.
I think it was horrible form the start. When e-commerce was starting to be a thing it was quickly establish how a store should look, what should it have and where. Like when TVs were made everybody settled on a rectangular display pretty quickly. Amazon is sort of first of TV companies that initially made their first commercial TV a globe and ignoring that every other competitor started making rectangular TVs pretty quickly Amazon to this day manufactures globe TVs and they still sell, not because they are good or what people think TV should look like, but just because they are cheap and delivery is convenient.
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.
Because other retailers treat their customers like pieces of shit. That's it. Everybody has been burnt, shoppers want to be able to purchase safely. Price, interface, and everything else is of less importance.
Will other retailers start treating their customers like human beings? Not a chance in hell. They'd rather let Amazon bankrupt them than do that.
...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
If you look at Walmart and others most 3rd party sellers just duplicate their listing across platforms. E-commerce has fewer "competitors" and more carbon copies
The biggest problem I have with Amazon is that after I buy something, for example AA batteries, Amazon will then recommend me only batteries, like I am the ultimate battery collecting hipster of the world. “AA’s? If you’re into mainstream, I guess. But check out these CR2032s, they can power vintage calculators.”
> 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.
There's also the well known, name change that happens. Where the product used to be a different item/SKU tied to the product on Amazon. Used to poison ratings a LOT.
>> Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.
That's Amazon's recommender model. If you buy shoes you're like other people who buy shoes, including ones with different shoe sizes. So you may want shoes in different sizes.
> 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.
I kind of wonder if without this, results would be minimal.
What if your amazon search for neoprene shorts said: "there are only 3 available in your size, all only available in plaid."
What if netflix told you: "you watched all the good scifi movies"
but we could dream right?
I would love for the amazon search results to have sidebar checkboxes that had a 3-way toggle.
Like if you searched for an air purifier and one of the features was wifi. It would be great if you could leave it alone, toggle it to check it (with wifi), or toggle it again to X it (without wifi)
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. )
If I search for something in a category with "too few" results amazon redirects the search to "all products"... even when I know exactly what I want.
And lately, even more infuriatingly, they started modifying my search terms! Like, I'll search for "hoover 2100" and some javascript will, after a second, change it to "hover 2100" and then show me completely irrelevant junk. And I go and change it back, and the javascript modifies it again! Not just showing the wrong results, but gaslighting me into thinking I had actually searched for the wrong thing, that the poor results were my fault!
This isn't dumb stuff like bad categorization, or missing search facets, or all the other low effort issues... It's like they're actively trying to prevent me from buying things!
That this effect and related 'enshittification' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is now prevalent everywhere is really depressing to me. Here's why. I recently retired somewhat early from a career spent entirely in high tech creating new kinds of products and services. Often, products that made life better for users by empowering them to do things they couldn't do before and sometimes solving old problems better, faster and cheaper.
That whole time, I had an underlying belief that those of us in "the industry" (high tech entrepreneurial startups) were generally making the world better, whether in large ways like personal empowerment or small ways like making daily life easier, more efficient or, sometimes, even more delightful. In some sense, I felt like I was a small part of a larger march toward the kind of better future which so inspired me in the sci-fi books I read as a kid.
Over the last five years I've increasingly seen mainstream tech products and services adopting dark patterns or abusing customer's time or trust in other ways. Of course, there were always a few companies that sucked, either due to incompetence or just being unethical but most everyone agreed they were bad. But now using dark patterns, or just taking steps to actively make the product experience worse for users, is no longer an aberration or regression - it's apparently accepted as normal. High tech leaders from FAANG on down are ALL knowingly doing this shit. It's on KPIs. Teams of competent professional technologists are collecting bonuses for intentionally making their product or service worse for millions of users.
Right before I retired I actually saw this starting to happen in the company I was at. I was in meetings where some of my coworkers seriously proposed doing obviously wrong things, arguing it would boost "the metrics". Being a senior exec, I was mostly able to correct this by pointing out customer satisfaction, loyalty and confidence in our brand were the most important metrics, but it did feel 'off'. At first I dismissed it as a handful of employees with mis-calibrated values but it kept happening. Eventually, the CEO overruled me on one of these "values"-based product decisions. It really bothered me because, even though it was dressed up in polite language, it was clearly just about burning customer goodwill to boost a short-term metric. At the time, I assumed the company was just slowly losing its way. Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a time. Frankly, this change in ethos factored into my decision to retire. It's not like I expected every product decision to go my way but these weren't subjective judgements. And over the years I'd certainly made my share of product mistakes which negatively impacted customer's (oops!) but I fixed them and learned to do better. But it just felt weird (and really bad) to be doing the wrong thing on purpose. Sure, some of these things would boost metrics and revenue, at least in the short-term, but I found I couldn't get myself to stop believing the best way to increase revenue was to keep making our product experiences even better.
When I was in my late 20s and flying off to yet another trade show like Comdex, I sat next to a guy who worked for Marlboro cigarettes. It was fascinating talking with him and hearing the careful rationalizations about creating a product which obviously was bad for their customers and addictive to boot. I remember telling my coworkers at dinner that night about how weird it was to meet someone like that - and how lucky we were to be in high tech, where we got paid to build products that just kept getting better and generally helped make the world better - at least in some small way. Sure, I knew that progress would sometimes be two steps forward, one step back, but I guess I was naive to have never even imagined this future.
>Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a time.
This is one of the largest roots of atrophy in the industry, currently. "Customers" are taken as a given, and there's no connection to them any longer.
"High-Tech" is effectively now like Sears.
Tech leaned so heavy into enshitification it has become it, to the point an entire word was coined to explain what tech was turning the world around us into. Tech still thinks 'but I'm a good person/we're doing good so.... XYZ is OK' and isn't willing to even see how they actually chose to present themselves.
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").
Don't sites like Wikipedia and TVTropes count as a control group that challenge the Gruen transfer theory itself.
They do not have any intention to confuse or distract, yet the effect of causing people to linger and browse remains.
In the comments here, Amazon and AliExpress have been pointed to, but again this does not seem to be confusing by intent. There is a degree of deception by some vendors but that exists purely to get people to buy their product.
On the other hand, I have always thought that one of the primary uses of A/B testing, was to abdecate the moral responsibility of decision making. You no longer need to intend to coerce, cheat, deceive, or confuse. A/B testing let's you only intend to make money and all of the malicious descions are taken out of your hands.
The original article does not make this clear, but the concept of a Gruen transfer is distinct from the idea of consciously including them to maximize impulse shopping and retention. Faced with a sea of links to interesting content, I often undergo a Gruen transfer. Is that the intent of TVTropes, or simply emergent?
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.
Wikipedia is designed to help you find exactly what you want, quickly, and then offer infinitely _more_. So a different thing than the Gruen Transfer, but related.
It's not intentional, but it is evolutionary, in the sense that we've never had this discussion about onethingpedia, the website that had a design optimal at making you leave after you found what you were looking for, because nobody ever heard of it.
I definitely felt this guy was a little bit hyperbolic because the more social media gets the way he describes the more I see people disconnect from it
I don't know anyone other than people over 50 who still check their facebook feeds and the kids are out enjoying the sun today
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.
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.
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.
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]
I’ve always felt it was the opposite. HN users put up with some pretty major inconveniences and will host their own FTP server and write scripts to interact with it rather than paying for Dropbox.
We always have to remember these things are built for the masses. All the people I know using Facebook still are enjoying the changes. They watch hundreds of hours of conspiracy AI slop videos about giant ice walls that surround the flat Earth, etc. It's just a TV replacement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
IKEA are actually the opposite of mazes. There’s one main path that when you follow it brings you to the end and the occasional shortcut, literally impossible to get lost.
It’s not a maze but it is a long path. Think of a traditional furniture shop or warehouse type store. You’ll usually be able to see all 4 outer walls and the store is arranged in a kind of grid where you can walk almost directly to what you want.
I don’t have any problem with the IKEA layout, the experience is almost part of what you are going for. But it is obviously designed to make you take longer paths to things.
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.
Kansas City airport (KCI) was replaced a few years ago. The previous design was three c-shaped terminals, each of which had a curb-to-plane distance that, before 9/11, meant coming or going was very fast. Arriving 15 minutes before takeoff was overkill. Time from deplaning to leaving the airport curb could be 2 minutes. People didn't pass more than one or two shops or restaurants, typically (sometimes none). Even after 9/11, despite public advice to arrive 2 hours in advance, it seemed that 1.5 hours or more was wasted just sitting next to the gate.
But for airlines, I seem to recall servicing KCI was expensive. I think more than once, various airlines left or threatened to leave due to the high fees, which affected ticket prices. Fees which could not be offset by charging vendors the typical enormous rental prices. The new security barriers prevented much of the already limited foot traffic.
DHS also didn't like the proximity to the curb, and threatened to close the airport. A new design was sought (and ended up being partly designed by a friend of mine), and so now the new one follows the typical pattern: funnel everybody into far-too-few security check points (always leaving some unmanned), then into a large concourse with lots of expensive ways to spend money.
Seems that people are more willing to pay airport markup while waiting, than to pay higher ticket prices.
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.
Same here. I also block elements with links to my profile because I always get distracted by the green dot whenever one of my old answers gets an upvote.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 think as a result, Google doesn’t really care about the quality of their organic search results since on the scale Google cares about, “nobody” clicks them anyway.
Since inevitably someone will mention that the search results are littered with ads: yes, they are, and due to the same factor I mentioned above, it makes sense for sellers to advertise, say, power strips against the search term "surge protector." We run into a similar thing with "outdoor" rated wire. It's a term which technically means a rating for UV exposure. However, customers often use it to refer to wire that is rated for burial in the ground. So we advertise our burial rated cable against the "outdoor" search keyword. Gotta meet the customers where they are.
With the sheer number of products and the proliferation of feature or compatibility requirements buyers have to match, removing this functionality basically breaks Amazon search. Just try finding finding an LED bulb of a certain wattage that's dimmable. Every seller of non-dimmable bulbs puts the words "Not Dimmable" in their description to reduce returns. Amazon search will return all of those, with the listings I want buried somewhere in that flood - all because they've arbitrarily chosen to disable the standard, well-understood way of solving this common problem. The only solution is using an external search engine and limiting it to Amazon.com.
To me “outdoor” rated wire means has strands of tinned copper. Pure copper corrodes so much faster than jackets fail from UV damage
We use the term “solar cable” to refer to a UV resistant jacket, but we use that term half incorrectly - as solar cables have a bunch of different parameters other than just the UV
Unfortunately I think the only true solution is something like McMaster-Carr or Digikey
Maybe we’re a dog chasing its tail thinking a single universal search box is feasible, when it may simply be impossible for all users?
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.
If a) would be the case, they most of the time would know it and if b) would be the case, I would have seen it too and thus a).
Examples: I use Canon and Fuji gear for taking pictures, but they offer me Nikon or Sony related videos. If they would actually have some interest to optimize suggestions, they would offer me to say "I'm not interested in Nikon/Sony/whatever" … wouldn't they?
Or Amazon, offering me Sony lenses for my Fuji. Or more of Thing-X after buying some Thing-X yesterday. But I only need exactly one new Thing-X, which their stupid "AI" Rufus should know by now if their suggestion machinery didn't know it already ;-0
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?
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".
Why does this confuse you? It's the same in every single industry in the US right now.
Go ahead, try and start up a competitor to Amazon. Most likely you will just fail for normal business reasons, but if you ever even come close to being a threat, Amazon will just immense weight to steal your market out from under you. They can subsidize anything they want with AWS profits and can outspend you in any direction.
Meanwhile the DOJ will look away from obvious anti-competitive behavior because Reagan was a moron who thought regulating markets was magically bad.
Even Google ran into this with Fiber. Everywhere they went, Spectrum and Comcast just dropped prices to make Google's offer not very impressive, which is easy for them to do since they've spent decades extracting unbounded profits and paying off infrastructure investments, so their costs will be lower than any market entrant. Demonstrating like this that you COULD have significantly lowered prices but just chose not to SHOULD make people angry at you, but Americans are allergic to requiring companies actually be good for consumers.
This is the clear, obvious, trivial direction that any market operating in a capitalistic system is attempting to become. People need to stop being surprised.
If you want a competitive market, that doesn't happen naturally. You must force it.
Tbh, amazon should probably be run as a public service. We've long since passed the point where their profit incentives benefit anyone but shareholders. By about fifteen-twenty years by my estimate.
>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.
Will other retailers start treating their customers like human beings? Not a chance in hell. They'd rather let Amazon bankrupt them than do that.
I worked on various commerce search engines, and briefly ran Google Shopping back in the day - surprisingly hard problem !
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.
That's Amazon's recommender model. If you buy shoes you're like other people who buy shoes, including ones with different shoe sizes. So you may want shoes in different sizes.
My fellow Greeks know how the algorithm works:
https://scontent-lhr8-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/470673830...
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?
What if your amazon search for neoprene shorts said: "there are only 3 available in your size, all only available in plaid."
What if netflix told you: "you watched all the good scifi movies"
but we could dream right?
I would love for the amazon search results to have sidebar checkboxes that had a 3-way toggle.
Like if you searched for an air purifier and one of the features was wifi. It would be great if you could leave it alone, toggle it to check it (with wifi), or toggle it again to X it (without wifi)
would be great to search for dumb tvs
And lately, even more infuriatingly, they started modifying my search terms! Like, I'll search for "hoover 2100" and some javascript will, after a second, change it to "hover 2100" and then show me completely irrelevant junk. And I go and change it back, and the javascript modifies it again! Not just showing the wrong results, but gaslighting me into thinking I had actually searched for the wrong thing, that the poor results were my fault!
This isn't dumb stuff like bad categorization, or missing search facets, or all the other low effort issues... It's like they're actively trying to prevent me from buying things!
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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.
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...which is related, no?
That whole time, I had an underlying belief that those of us in "the industry" (high tech entrepreneurial startups) were generally making the world better, whether in large ways like personal empowerment or small ways like making daily life easier, more efficient or, sometimes, even more delightful. In some sense, I felt like I was a small part of a larger march toward the kind of better future which so inspired me in the sci-fi books I read as a kid.
Over the last five years I've increasingly seen mainstream tech products and services adopting dark patterns or abusing customer's time or trust in other ways. Of course, there were always a few companies that sucked, either due to incompetence or just being unethical but most everyone agreed they were bad. But now using dark patterns, or just taking steps to actively make the product experience worse for users, is no longer an aberration or regression - it's apparently accepted as normal. High tech leaders from FAANG on down are ALL knowingly doing this shit. It's on KPIs. Teams of competent professional technologists are collecting bonuses for intentionally making their product or service worse for millions of users.
Right before I retired I actually saw this starting to happen in the company I was at. I was in meetings where some of my coworkers seriously proposed doing obviously wrong things, arguing it would boost "the metrics". Being a senior exec, I was mostly able to correct this by pointing out customer satisfaction, loyalty and confidence in our brand were the most important metrics, but it did feel 'off'. At first I dismissed it as a handful of employees with mis-calibrated values but it kept happening. Eventually, the CEO overruled me on one of these "values"-based product decisions. It really bothered me because, even though it was dressed up in polite language, it was clearly just about burning customer goodwill to boost a short-term metric. At the time, I assumed the company was just slowly losing its way. Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a time. Frankly, this change in ethos factored into my decision to retire. It's not like I expected every product decision to go my way but these weren't subjective judgements. And over the years I'd certainly made my share of product mistakes which negatively impacted customer's (oops!) but I fixed them and learned to do better. But it just felt weird (and really bad) to be doing the wrong thing on purpose. Sure, some of these things would boost metrics and revenue, at least in the short-term, but I found I couldn't get myself to stop believing the best way to increase revenue was to keep making our product experiences even better.
When I was in my late 20s and flying off to yet another trade show like Comdex, I sat next to a guy who worked for Marlboro cigarettes. It was fascinating talking with him and hearing the careful rationalizations about creating a product which obviously was bad for their customers and addictive to boot. I remember telling my coworkers at dinner that night about how weird it was to meet someone like that - and how lucky we were to be in high tech, where we got paid to build products that just kept getting better and generally helped make the world better - at least in some small way. Sure, I knew that progress would sometimes be two steps forward, one step back, but I guess I was naive to have never even imagined this future.
This is one of the largest roots of atrophy in the industry, currently. "Customers" are taken as a given, and there's no connection to them any longer. "High-Tech" is effectively now like Sears.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04
Tech leaned so heavy into enshitification it has become it, to the point an entire word was coined to explain what tech was turning the world around us into. Tech still thinks 'but I'm a good person/we're doing good so.... XYZ is OK' and isn't willing to even see how they actually chose to present themselves.
They do not have any intention to confuse or distract, yet the effect of causing people to linger and browse remains.
In the comments here, Amazon and AliExpress have been pointed to, but again this does not seem to be confusing by intent. There is a degree of deception by some vendors but that exists purely to get people to buy their product.
On the other hand, I have always thought that one of the primary uses of A/B testing, was to abdecate the moral responsibility of decision making. You no longer need to intend to coerce, cheat, deceive, or confuse. A/B testing let's you only intend to make money and all of the malicious descions are taken out of your hands.
It's not intentional, but it is evolutionary, in the sense that we've never had this discussion about onethingpedia, the website that had a design optimal at making you leave after you found what you were looking for, because nobody ever heard of it.
I don't know anyone other than people over 50 who still check their facebook feeds and the kids are out enjoying the sun today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen
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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.
I don’t have any problem with the IKEA layout, the experience is almost part of what you are going for. But it is obviously designed to make you take longer paths to things.
That street is narrow, long and forces you to pass every single shop in the departures area. It's blatantly hostile design.
But for airlines, I seem to recall servicing KCI was expensive. I think more than once, various airlines left or threatened to leave due to the high fees, which affected ticket prices. Fees which could not be offset by charging vendors the typical enormous rental prices. The new security barriers prevented much of the already limited foot traffic.
DHS also didn't like the proximity to the curb, and threatened to close the airport. A new design was sought (and ended up being partly designed by a friend of mine), and so now the new one follows the typical pattern: funnel everybody into far-too-few security check points (always leaving some unmanned), then into a large concourse with lots of expensive ways to spend money.
Seems that people are more willing to pay airport markup while waiting, than to pay higher ticket prices.
That and the cookie popup DOM node...
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.