The tyranny of the marginal user

[moonbat]

Great article, explains why software gets shittier over time. Best seen with Chrome from day one and Firefox since version 4.

[therube]

And yet, he "dims" his webpage as you scroll down, throwing up a "Subscribe" dialog (along with a 'Continue reading' link).
(The pot calling the kettle...)

The problem is, people accept what is thrown at them instead of fighting against it.
And once you've done that, you've lost & they've won.

So this "marginal user" is only getting what is thrown at them, will only get what they deserve.


(I don't think much of the article.)

[vannilla]

And yet, he "dims" his webpage as you scroll down, throwing up a "Subscribe" dialog (along with a 'Continue reading' link).
(The pot calling the kettle...)

In his defense, that is Substack, the platform, not something he added.

[THX-1139]

And yet, he "dims" his webpage as you scroll down, throwing up a "Subscribe" dialog (along with a 'Continue reading' link).
(The pot calling the kettle...)

You may want to check your settings and or extensions; I had none of what you described happen to me, just the full article/w zero popups nor any dimming.

[Moonchild]

I had none of what you described happen to me, just the full article/w zero popups nor any dimming.

It begged me too with a fade in of the dialog as I scrolled down to read the article in full. So it's certainly a thing -- if you don't get it you're probably just blocking the content responsible.

[THX-1139]

Yes, probably, and yet I have no clue what is being blocked, or what's doing it
There were 2 scripts blocked by eMatrix, and I allowed them to test if it was to blame, but it remained the same; no change
I do use UBO also but figured most folks here would be using that already...frankly I'm puzzled. Oh well

[moonbat]

It's a Substack thing, they will pester you to subscribe the first time you open any subdomain or third party that hosts it. There are newsletter popup filters for uBlock that prevent it from showing up.

[Night Wing]

Pestering a person like me to subscribe to websites does not get me to subscribe to them. It has the opposite effect. In other words, it irritates me and I leave those websites and never visit those sites again.

[suzyne]

I don't know if I would categorise a pop-up as pestering?

Besides, if the writer is aiming to generate income from their pages, they are under no obligation to provide free content for one and all. They are giving away free content (whether it is good content is another issue) and yet people expect to be able to read it without being bothered by a single click.

I think an entitlement to the fruits of another person's effort for no cost is probably as big a problem, as the so-called "marginal user" parodied in the substack article.

[moonbat]

I don't know if I would categorise a pop-up as pestering?

Yes, we would. It is perfectly possible to design a webpage with a discreet textbox in a corner to enter one's email address to subscribe without jumping up in the user's face. UI design 101 but it's all been junked of late ever since mobile internet usage overtook desktop's.
And as pointed out before, it is the Substack platform that does this, not the author. Paywalled posts on Substack are indicated as such after a short preview.

[suzyne]

UI design 101

I suspect what you call  "UI design 101" is from a textbook before the monetisation of the web, and when it was all about user experience?

I think it is fair to say that sites like substack are not built for the users' experience, but are for the creators of the content and the substack business itself. And that is about measuring views, clicks and so on, with both parties hoping to cover costs in time and effort and maybe make money at some point.

It's like when I visit a news website that I respect and value, I don't hold it against them if they ask me to turn off my adblocker because I understand that it takes effort to make content. And if I need to do a couple of extra clicks, I am not going to complain and bring up UI principles.

So, over on substack you got a free story to read (hosted on a site that is a business) that you liked, and need to do one extra click. Honestly, that's not a big deal and is a misunderstanding of whom those sites are actually made to benefit. (Hint, it's not us.)

[moonbat]

before the monetisation of the web, and when it was all about user experience?

Not even that far back, this is all after the smartphone era. This is a very basic UX principle - don't annoy the user with unnecessary prompts - but it's like the next generation of developers who started making mobile websites using frameworks have all forgotten or never learned these. Like I said, it's perfectly possible to add a simple 'enter your email here to sign up for newsletter' textbox on the same page without interrupting the user, and was in fact the norm before mobile interfaces. (And it is still possible to do so on mobile, at least place it at the bottom of the article so people can read through it). As it is online advertising has always ignored these principles without websites doing it themselves.

[daemonspudguy]

I don't really understand why you always pin the blame on smartphone users for the enshittification of web. How does what device your website is visited on most effect how ads are delivered, how newsgroups can be signed up to, etc?

[moonbat]

After 2013, mobile internet usage overtook desktop usage and since then website devs have stopped bothering to make sites that look good on the desktop even when modern CSS can change fonts and layout based on display resolution and orientation. Forget website devs, even browsers and operating systems have dumbed themselves down and removed features in line with the limited functionality a smartphone offers. Meanwhile Pale Moon's UI gets derided as 'old fashioned' while being fully customizable

[daemonspudguy]

We live under an economic system where not putting in the work for your stuff to work good on all platforms is rewarded because that requires money, and that's money that could be spent on executives, which is the main priority in this economy. Smartphones as we know them never existing probably wouldn't change that. Also, yes, the default Pale Moon UI is rather old-fashioned. It being fully customizable doesn't make that not be true. It also isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

I don't know if I would categorise a pop-up as pestering?

Yes, we would.

A pop-up, or dimming, is more or less annoying, a little message in a corner is not. It depends also how often it appears. The same is true for ads (and more for counter-ad-blockers), and it depend whether they occur in between the main text, or on the sides, whether they are too bright, and whether they start video or even worse audio without consent. Also the "european cookie warning" can be annoying and the annoyance may depend on its style.

I have Adblock Latitude, and the IDCAC filter within ABL (not the IDCAC add-on). I allow ads on very very few sites. Some cookie warnings are not trapped by the IDCAC filter. I note they may be different in style. Some offer buttons at equal level with "accept all cookies" "reject all" "customize" (even the dreaded google does that, in a page, the few times I still use google maps). Some other have the "reject all" in smaller font and/or a different location. One of the worse is the italian newspaper Corriere della Sera (for which I allow ads) where the button is "reject and subscribe" (I will NEVER subscribe to an online newspaper even if I buy it in hardcopy ... actually usually I navigate it to quote e.g. to forum something I already read on paper.
The Swiss meteoblue site (a rather good weather forecast site) has an annoying popup suggesting subscription/no adblock overlaid on dimmed content which appears every so and often when one refreshes the page. With my NoSquint setting often the button to dismiss the popup is off screen. And one has to dismiss and reload. I managed to avoid the popup with a tentative custom filter in ABL, but still I have to reload to un-dim ...

[Moonchild]

I don't know if I would categorise a pop-up as pestering?

The main issue with pop-ups (and slide-ins, and dimming, and modals) is that its sole purpose is to interrupt what you are doing to demand attention. Anything that does that is "pestering" in this context. In this case, you can't continue reading the article until you have dealt with the overlay.

[suzyne]

I guess that unless pestering has a specific meaning in the UI design world, then whether a web interaction qualifies for that label is a personal thing? Those types of pop-ups don't annoy me.

[athenian200]

This article makes a lot of sense to me. Here is my own take on why the smartphone revolution was ultimately the death of the web as we knew it.

This principle about the marginal user has probably always been true, but what changed with the smartphone was that it resulted in a much lower standard for marginal users than had been the case with PCs. That is to say, a certain minimum level of competence was needed to use a desktop PC, and the devices simply were not appealing to people below a certain level of intelligence. Even the Fisher Price aesthetic of Windows XP Home Edition or attempts to reach out with Media Center edition weren't quite enough to make a large swath of the population want to spend a significant amount of time on a PC. It required focused attention on a screen and a device that was inherently designed for productivity and creativity.

What the smartphone did, effectively, was expand computing to the people on the other side of the bell curve. A desktop or laptop computer was good at filtering out most people with IQs below, say, 100 or so, and establishing a baseline of intelligence for the average Internet user. Smartphones completely destroyed that and made it so that the Internet is accessible to people with IQs of 85. Consequently, everything has to be designed around the limitations of those least intelligent users, because that is where the untapped market is and where businesses want to grow. They've already captured all the people smart enough to use a PC, now they want to expand to the semi-illiterate people who probably couldn't use a PC to save their lives, and only know how to finger big icons on their iPhones.

I mean, why do you think everything is so visual and oversimplified on smartphones/tablets? Clever babies can figure out how to use tablets around age 2, before they are capable of picking up a book. What this means, is that people who either have difficulties with language (common once you get below an IQ of about 90 or so), people who are very young, or second language learners who barely understand whatever language the smartphone's interface is in... are all now potential customers for the product. One could even go so far as to argue that these companies are secretly trying to get people hooked on their services as babies, and also practically exploiting people who are on the borderline of having an intellectual disability by making their products so appealing and easy to use for low-IQ individuals, who will have poorer impulse control and less ability to understand any EULA they agree to.

In fairness, though, I would have to admit the smartphone was not the first instance of this. GUI interfaces in general, like Mac and Windows, along with services like AOL, were perceived by the earliest Internet users in a very similar way to how smartphone users are seen by us. The shift from things like text-based DOS/Unix to Mac/Windows was probably when the IQ requirement fell from above average (maybe 110/115 or so), to something closer to 95 or 100.

So it's not so much that tech companies weren't always appealing to the most marginal users, but rather that the smartphone made it so that the most marginal user was now someone with an IQ of 80 or so rather than 95, and we can all feel the difference in what is required to make a product or service appealing to someone as limited as that.

What are those with higher IQs left to do? Work around the increasingly busted system and create their own solutions... because they can, and they are basically expected to do so. The irony is that the very fact that we can accommodate ourselves and work around the limitations of their newer products and services is precisely why we are not appealing customers. If we were in the position of demanding old features back and didn't know how to work around the new limitations, they might try to profit off it... but in reality, you can find an amazing number of YouTube videos showing how to work around almost anything you can think of.

The reality is, someone from the PC community always inevitably takes the time to fix the broken mess to the point that it is usable, without the developer of the software having to pay or even thank them for it. This has even happened with some games like Nier: Automata. The developer left the game in a broken state for years, and the only way to play it on PC was essentially with a community patch. That is to say, the software companies have figured out that they only have to make sure their software is usable for people who are too dumb to change any configuration settings.

For the rest of the community, the genius-level types will take the broken mess the company generates with each new major version as a challenge, and the average users who want a fix for all the problems it introduces will use their social connections and keep begging the creative types to share their solutions. Therefore, we wind up in a constant cycle where software companies break things, and hackers fix them back, before the companies break them again. Sort of like the cycle with DRM constantly being broken, but in this case just with basic features and functionality.

That is, they've figured out that they can give up and save a lot of development time by targeting the bottom and leaving the rest of us to "pirate/hack" our way back to something usable because they know some rebellious show-off with programming skills will "do something about it" and be unable to resist sharing their solution. They really have accounted for everything, even the community's response, and used it as a pressure-release valve to keep the system intact so that people don't reach the point of revolting against them en masse. They have found a way to rely on hackers and nominal alternatives to their stuff that work well enough, to keep pressure from building to the point that everyone stands up and demands change. Sort of like why Google keeps Firefox around, and why Microsoft no longer sees Linux as a threat.

[moonbat]

Also, yes, the default Pale Moon UI is rather old-fashioned.

In what way? Not removing UI customization out of a mania for 'simplicity', not replacing regular dialog boxes and the sidebar with tabs and not stuffing everything into a hamburger menu as is the Chrome inspired fashion?

A pop-up, or dimming, is more or less annoying, a little message in a corner is not.

Yes, sliding desktop alerts as were introduced in the old Firefox aren't a problem since they are small, will go away on their own and don't force you to deal with them first.

A desktop or laptop computer was good at filtering out most people with IQs below, say, 100 or so, and establishing a baseline of intelligence for the average Internet user.

Sadly as time passes, the generation that grew up using only PCs to access the net gets replaced by the younger ones that have grown up using smartphones and Chrome and have little exposure or interest in the OS, let alone being aware of the desktop vs mobile UI differences. Younger web developers today will happily use only Chrome or will have no concept even of other non Blink browsers existing.