I want to personalize things I use. I want to change the settings. I want to change the colors, the design, the functionality. It used to be more common that I could do this type of thing. But these days, it seems like companies want to use "AI" to personalize things without my consent. Instead of asking me what I want, they decide what I want.
On Netflix, I'd love to change the order of the various categories. But I can't. Netflix decides for me what the order should be. I no longer have a choice. This kind of thing seems to be happening across products and services. It's not only commercial software, but also places like Linux (edit: I mean the ecosystem, not the kernel) and Firefox (edit: I was thinking of the extensions and ui). And it's not only personalization. It used to be when I misspelled something on Google, the page would ask me "did I mean:". But these days, Google decides for me what I meant. It just goes ahead and changes the search words without asking.
One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color. But in most ways MacOS doesn't allow me to personalize things.
These companies might argue that it's for my benefit or that it's been studied or whatever, but it doesn't matter. There's a big difference between me choosing to paint my room green and a corporation coming into my house in the middle of the night and painting my room green.
Update: [2022-02-04] This post unexpectedly got on hackernews; see the comments.
This is an excellent point, and it’s what we’re trying to change with Entfer.
Entfer is a new search engine that will give you as the user much more control over your search experience, by allowing you to control the page rank, tweak the algorithms, and choose if you want the query to change from what you actually requested.
It’s still a work-in-progress, but you can already preview some of the features here: https://entfer.com/
I share your frustration! The Netflix example really hits the nail on the head for me. I've always guessed, at least in the case of Netflix, it's because they want people to stream the smallest number of titles in their catalogue possible, the economics of 1000 people streaming one title vs 1000 people streaming 1000 different titles mean that their incentivised to advertise a wide range of options to get people in the door but then to persuade people to all watch the same thing.
One maddening aspect is how hard it is to resume whatever episode/season/show you were watching, especially if you were watching on another device.
On Netflix and HBO it often takes a search. They hide the active show below the fold.
This is a bad user experience, wastes my time, makes it harder to enjoy my selected content. And it distracts me into discovery of new shows and increases my engagement, which is good for business. That is, until I decide I am fed up and quit altogether.
One reason for affluent households to download pirated content, in my anecdotal experience, is not simply to avoid paying. It is to exercise control over their own user experience.
The only alternative I see is to build some browser plugin to rearrange the content, but that is brittle and likely to suffer bit rot every time the interface changes.
How can we incentivize consensual personalization as well-behaved, paying customers ?
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