Posted by lizhang 4 hours ago
It's like when a Youtuber's audience complains about how they're constantly asking you to subscribe. The reason it happens is because the statistics say it works.
At work we’ve been discussing whether to migrate off our home grown component library to Material UI. I shudder at the thought, personally. However, a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product.
Like many of us I was born into a deeply customizable Internet, all of my websites were green or red on black. They were a glorious amalgam of fixed width fonts and <blink> tags. With occasional wingdings characters for fun and games and complex <table>/<tr>/<td> tags for really epic layouts. They were l33t, honestly ^_^
But, as time goes on and more and more people use this thing, converging on the one-true-UX feels like a net good thing assuming the fundamentals are right. To some degree the LLM-ization of the Internet is essentially the end game of squashing the personality out of the Internet which bootstrap started.
We’re on the cusp of spoken word being the core UX of computers with a fall back to reading the LLM transcript, neither of which benefits from <blink>
Not that I disagree with you, but I'll also offer a tradeoff.
When people expect to pick up your app intuitively, it can also just mean them using the app absent-mindedly, which can mean them skipping the manual and jumping straight to trying to tie up the support lines. Whereas if your ui asks for a user's full focus up front, yes there are downsides to that but they're also more engaged.
Note I'm not arguing that this is a good strategy. But given that so many people follow it I imagine it's not as bad as it appears on the surface.
As for this website, the best component is the ASCII animation in the hero and you can’t even copy that component. In fact, that nice ASCII hero is what gave me a good first impression to go thru all the components.
Two agents with two different utility functions fighting each other, it's an adversarial relationship/game.
The fight is for your limited attention span.
Clickbaity titles or least informative ones, 20min of rambling for what could've been a 2min video or article, spreading the meat of the info in the later half of the video for better retention instead of the beginning, highly misleading previews at the beggining, etc ... are good for the content producer but not so much for the content viewer that has to sift through it only to reliaze that didn't care about that particular thing.
Not limited to videos, but also things to buy the specs and meat of the technical/practical description of the product get worse and worse each year and the other proxy signals for them too.
Seems like marketing is a lot like military conflict drown the enemy in lot of noise to drop the SNR.
what's that you want to buy a 4k video projector? here it is for cheaper. Oh, you wanted the actual dots on the wall resolution to be 4k instead of max supported input, oops.
You're used to higher price meaning better quality? guess we'll flood that price point with shitier quality progressively until we find your limit
It isn't that we have a "preference" for these things, it is far more likely that a user just doesn't have their guard up 100% of the time, and these psychological manipulations are designed to cut through that.
Sure, these strategies probably net clicks, but they aren't from people who "chose" your product, they are clicks from people who were manipulated into clicking.
I suppose whether you think that is okay depends on your industry and ethics.
A stated preference isn't necessarily current or situational (I will choose to run instead of watching another 45 minutes of Youtube videos).
A situational preference is often inertia, and behavioral marketing will directly hinder the meta cognitive processes that usually give us the agency to override our default mode choices (John has been on YouTube for the last 20 minutes, what next suggestion is not likely to keep him there?)
Youtube is a perfectly "unbiased" "democratic" repository, where crazy people shouting conspiracies and prize-winning documentaries have the same thumbnail and half-line of text for you to discover if they are any good.
And I'm gonna be honest, I kind of want to use a few of these components for real (the ASCII art is fantastic).
Claude: “In react, make a full screen component that renders pixel squares that fade in and accumulate over a page component, taken as a target prop.”
Stupid crap like that. What’s cool is for those fullscreen tutorials or app walkthroughs, this works REALLY well to highlight the box on screen.
Joking about something tends to require an interconnected understanding of it
IMO this is like judging landscaping companies for all using similar looking shovels.
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828"></head>
<body link="#800080" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000080" vlink="#ff0000"><b><font size="6">
<p align="center">B</font><font size="4">ERKSHIRE </font>
They can configure it to use all lowercase letters, skip em-dashes, make grammar mistakes, stop saying "it's not X, it's Y", or whatever, yet the content itself just has a fake quality to it that makes it stand out, which is why those comments still get flagged IMO.
It's really strange... I see some text with obvious tropes and sometimes I read something and there's no obvious AI trope... but it's just not human?
you're literate smart... poetic; because
you read e.e.cummings
and william carlos
williams
...
fin.
Some people just like to feel superior by shaming others' work. You can easily tweak the visual output if you want to, but it's good enough for most use cases and better than what developers used to produce.
So, it's progress.