Anti-Consumer Design

Or Enshiittification as Cory Doctrow has termed it.

I am a tech wizard and I grew up with it’s evolution. I was fascinated with how this little machine (PC) could do so many things. Learning Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) in school was fascinating as it was making sense of the physical world that we were constantly experiencing. It was tying concepts and words to actual experiences I had. It made explicit things that I understood intuitively just by existing, by playing.

I loved the pc that came and they games we could play on it. This was the one thing I couldn’t understand how it worked, and none of my schooling covered it, and thus I decided to pursue this in college and understand it from the bottom up. It was a good learning experience and really made me understand how we as humanity have collaborated together using language to acheive such great results. Much later I realized how much of this intrinsinc knowledge we have lost through the ages as well, as it’s not possible to codify all of human experience into digestible text for others to consume. It takes a lot of deliberate focused effort to produce well written words (unlike this stream of conscious thought which flows effortlessly as your thoughts chain from one to another, but is not condensed to convey meaning efficiently)

Sidenote: I always thought how fascinating it was the links our brains made and how each thought lead to another, just like following a link on a wiki, and then another and then another, and before you know it, you’ve ended up somewhere new. Anyway later in life realized I have ADHD.

Back to the topic at hand.

Early on feelings-> technology Great!

Later (a few decades) -> technology Worse!

What has changed?

Early on, technology was about sharing and exchanging ideas and information.

Now it’s about controlling attention.

Now it’s the commercial interests that drive how users use your application, rather than the user’s needs.

Examples of Anti-Consumer Designs

Google — Search for something specify, say a company name, “nuphy” , you will find the sponsored link first, and the actual link to the site second. The first link will cost the company money and make it appear as if their spending campaign was effective, when it was actually unnecessary. I always click the second link. The incentives are there for the company to do this, even though it doesn’t help anybody, it’s like an invisible tax. And google cannot make their results less relevant, as that will affect it’s usefulness.

Whatsapp — Status & Channels. Whatsapp is now forcing channel down users’ throats, even if you have no interest in channels, they put it right in status, and you can accidentally click follow for the channels they promote, those randomly increasing their subscriber without the intentions. The “dark patterns” in apps are getting more and more common and acceptable. Kids don’t know better, and that’s how these become commonplace. Big tech is all about taking away your ability to do things, in the name of security & control.

Google drive. How often have you felt like saying f*u to an app on mobile ? and how often wow? All reactions get normalized over time and that’s what people rely on to make you accept things that don’t benefit you but only the company. Example: in Android on gmail download a pdf from email, sign it and try to attach it to an email. it will force you to upload it to Google drive first. the first and easiest (least interactions) and default option will be to force you to use their ecosystem, so that it can spread to other users. Even when sharing the link, it will first ask for the recipient to have a Google account. You have to click once more and choose anyone with a link to make it possible. However, if you see from a technical perspective, the signed pdf is locally available, you would just attach it to the email and send , but no you have to jump through so many hoops to do that. The idea is to make only actions within their ecosystem seamless and other actions time consuming. Users cannot even save preferences for which action should be default, you have no control over it and that’s a very simple local setting to make.

Useful links

https://tonsky.me/blog/needy-programs/ — Talks about simliar concepts but from user needs vs app needs perspectives.

I would love to hear from people about their perspectives and frustrations with the modern created software.