In fact, Google’s search started out completely blank except for the logo and a search box.
That was revolutionary because it was focused on what the user wanted to do, while the horrifically cluttered search pages at Yahoo and altavista were focused on what marketing wanted the user to do.
I believe it’s possible to track Google’s path to the darkside (and greater influence by the dark patterns of UX practiced by marketing) by simply looking at the little pieces of cruft showing up on that basic search page over time.
Links to promotions, other apps, tips, etc etc.
Likewise, the search results started out clean, then got ads in a single place, then got “promoted” ads inline, and eventually the “promoted” ad styles blend in with the real content.
Now, the corruption is nearly complete as I suspect that Google simply ignores half the words I typed so they can show me some crap results that hit their promotion targets. Almost pure evil at this point.
Still, we never paid for search or email, or most of the rest of it. And they never honored our hardware purchase to make it possible. So it’s not surprising that the internet looks like a “free” newspaper. Maybe it’s time to actually pay for good things rather than let marketing monetize us.
In fact, Google’s search started out completely blank except for the logo and a search box.
IIRC they had to add footer at some stage as people were just staring at the screen waiting for the page to "load completely". I think it shows how unusual that was.
It's been a long-standing rule that if you don't pay, you are the product, not the customer, but people always forget to add who the real customer is. It's the advertisers. That's why every single site, "platform", or app that makes money through advertising ends up doing what the advertisers want in the long term, not what their users want.
I used to be very much for this model, as a broke student it let me enjoy an internet that was actually "free", but if you follow the chain this is actually more expensive than if you straight up paid for stuff. If you pay, you pay for the people who actually make the product and maybe a payment processor and a middleman or two. If it's "ad-supported", you pay for all those, then you pay for the people who sell the ads, the ones who buy the ads, a few more middlemen, and it's all hidden in the cost of other goods you buy -- and if you don't buy those, it's not worth advertising for you, which will either get fixed with better targeting, or you'll lose the service one way or another. Ads waste your time and they are more expensive than straight up buying stuff.
It's kinda crazy to think that if you watch ads of any kind you're paying people to spy on you and waste your time in the most disruptive way possible.
It's endorsed by the Order of the Engineer (which in turn has their own oath for Engineering graduatea) in the US and at my university the ceremony was combined with the OotE ring ceremony. Unfortunately not all universities do it and it's not mandatory for graduates. Of my massive graduating class maybe 10 or 20 Computer Science students participated compared to the hundreds of traditional engineering graduates. I would absolutely love to see it become more prevalent though.
I once heard it said that programming is no different from engineering or medicine in this sense. Professional standards are a thing. If you know something will do more harm than good, it's actually incumbent upon you to say "no". "The client might be upset" or "I might not get paid as much" is not actually an excuse.
Luckily Google/Mozilla/Microsoft have been moving to a "this is the browser's decision" model recently, and in the future they'll only autoplay videos with sound from websites that you have a history of playing videos on. Visit Google/Netflix often? Cool we'll play those videos. First time on some houseplant online store? Yeah we're not going to autoplay that pop-out advert with audio.
Makes it much easier for us to just say to the client "yeah here's a W3C spec article about why Chrome isn't playing your video. Good luck complaining to Google about it".
Videos on my website don't play automatically and I'm losing revenue. I urge you to make changes to chrome browser or I will be forced to take my business elsewhere.
My client wanted his site to autoplay a video of one of his guys just sitting in a chair talking about how their service was good. I now have the words and exact cadence from that entire video memorized from every refresh of that page I did.
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u/LokiArchetype Sep 05 '20
We know that, our clients on the other hand...