Yes I remember this, every time, as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram made it more and more difficult to keep your feed in chronological order.

It is nakedly a psychological trick to give you a mixture of things you've seen before and new content to make you feel like you should try again more often - the slot machine strategy. No one asked for it.

Of course it helps that ads are easier to integrate into a feed when you don't even know what to expect in your feed in the first place.

So now, not only do these platforms not give a feed of pages and people I subscribe to, they litter my feed with ads and 'popular content' that I never subscribed to! otherwise how could they charge money to increase your organic reach?

what a crock! It was a marketers' dream to have their latest news and coupons delivered to your inbox and have you actually look at them, but if you subscribe to businesses you want to follow, how can the ad network make money? So they turned everyone into a customer of their ad platform, and held your content hostage until you paid up. This has effected numerous friends that are small content producers that maxxed out facebook's 5,000 friend limit and all they wanted was to invite all of their fans to their next event.

/rant

Other POV: I only check FB a few minutes everyday or so and that algo, maybe ironically, is what allows me to do so.

You have 1000 friends each interacting once per day with FB in a news feed worthy way (posting, joining an event, commenting etc). Are you supposed to look at 500 daily news feed posts to get a 50% chance of knowing what that friend you really like is up to? (pushing the trait but you get the idea)

Instead having to seep through endless activities I don't care about I can scan 10-15 posts per day and they are the relevant ones from the groups and friends I want to interact with.

--

I'm fully with you on the point you make about business/content creator you volontarily subscribed to having to pay extra for you to see their stuff.

It would also be less volume of stuff if Facebook only POSTED THE THINGS WE WANT PEOPLE TO SEE. No "likes" or such. Give people a clear idea what they're actually sharing/posting.

FYI-- I have many of the same complaints and found that the browser extension https://www.fbpurity.com/ is able to clean up a lot of the cruft as well as put the timeline back in chronological order.

I just unfollow everyone on Facebook. Now, my feed is mostly me. If people want me to know something, they can message me or at least tag me.

> properly is to actually listen to your users

Its a phrase that is often used but it is usually not as simple as that. Imagine that your existing users have a very different set of needs and priorities as new users coming onto your platform, or not yet users you want to attract. This means making hard decisions that will not please everyone.

Or, as you mention, your shareholders may require you to generate revenue faster and then you are left with a lot of bad decisions to make and your only choice is to pick the least damaging one.

> your existing users have a very different set of needs and priorities as new users coming onto your platform, or not yet users you want to attract

In this case you should side with your existing users who 1) you already convinced to sign up and engage with your product 2) helped you build your product in the first place.

I’d take an established power-user any day over a potential new user that has yet to prove themselves (they might quit the platform as quickly as they joined).

Of course, some idiots don’t understand this, and “Twitter” is the result.

> In this case you should side with your existing users who 1) you already convinced to sign up and engage with your product 2) helped you build your product in the first place.

sometimes you don't have that luxury, because "you need to grow".

Maybe not - if they don't constitute an economic force. Pivoting is a revered tradition in startup world

True - Users don’t always know what they want.

Apple doesn’t listen to users either. Think headphone jack. I believe it comes down to a core set of values that guide you daily through tough decisions. Like: we believe we should not trade privacy of our customers for profits (just made this up on the fly). This will rule out a lot of stuff.

Corporations have no priority except to make money. If making money is at odds with positive user experience (which is almost always is), making money wins.

True. But users can be fooled in short term. In the long term consumers are collectively smarter then any corporation.

So in the long term being decent is really good for business but also costly in short term.

Optimizing for the short-term is what many killing companies and good products.

And then trying to placate everybody with the promise to listen to feedback when the feedback directly goes against what the company is trying to do

>> I mean one way to do it properly is to actually listen to your users. So many corporations claim to have that as a priority and when you look at real, actual feedback, they really don't. How hard is it to look at the masses of complaints about autoplay or notification spam or... any numbers of dark patterns you could name and decide that you shouldn't do that?

> Corporations have no priority except to make money. If making money is at odds with positive user experience (which is almost always is), making money wins.

That attitude has a similar problem: socialism has been gaining in popularity, and I'd say that's a direct result of corporations over-prioritizing their money-making over both customer priorities and other social priorities (like paying reasonable amount of tax).

Netflix seems like its just a dishonest company.

I had been a customer of theirs for years, starting with the DVD rental. After a while they started adding the streaming content which was cool, but then they eventually separated the two services and switched my plan from DVD rentals to exclusively streaming content. All without any action on my part or any consent from me.

Eventually, I quit Netflix because between Prime Video and Hulu, I was covered for my streaming needs and with the exception of a few shows, was unimpressed with Netflix's original content so it was a waste of money for me.

Fast forward to a week ago, I decided to give Netflix another shot. What amazed me is the dark patterns you speak of. Like downloading content for offline viewing.

I was without access to my normal ISP and had to use cellular data so I opted to download a show. 1 episode was 100 MB and I'm on Google Fi so it was basically $1 of data usage which I understood. But then when the episode was over, I stepped away from my phone to go to the bathroom and when I came back, I found that the episode had been deleted from my phone, and that the next episode had automatically downloaded without any action on my part incurring another $0.90 of data (not to mention deleting the episode I had intentionally downloaded making the first $1 a waste)

I saw at the top of the download section that there was something called "Smart Download" enabled that claims to do exactly that - delete the last episode and download the next, but it's only supposed to happen on wi-fi which wasn't the case for me. I turned off the feature as it was obviously broken and tried contacting customer service.

The CSR I talked to then told me that the app cannot delete or download material without me clicking a button - which contradicted their description of "Smart Download" that I had just read, and he explained there was no way for them to process a refund or credit to my account because they don't have any way to do that.

This seems like a pretty major problem.

Even when confronted with a direct customer complaint, their response was just to deny, deny, deny rather than taking even minor steps to rectify the issue. This seems mind boggling from a customer service perspective when companies like Amazon will bend over backwards to keep their customers happy. Even Hulu will credit you a free month of service when they goof - they even do it if you try to cancel the service because you can't find anything good to watch. Netflix's service isn't good enough to justify this type of behavior and general apathy. Customer-last seems like a crummy business model.

I can feel your frustration with the service but I'm unconvinced that "download the next ep" is a dark pattern and more that you're a niche that their UX currently isn't catering towards.

I do a lot of cellular/tethering and know some of the pain points but can recognize that the needs are quite different to the regular user who may consume stuff at home then want to take stuff with them on the go.

Normally I see that UX often caters to the lowest common denominator which leaves power users and niche users sidelined.

My personal bug bear on this subject is that YouTube no longer buffers entire videos and holds them there - presumably this saves them lots in traffic costs and additionally allows them to up sell YouTube premium

Sorry I didn't see this immediately, I don't think that downloading the next episode is a dark pattern in and of itself. But I do think downloading the next app over mobile when the description explicitly says it wouldn't is questionable. And I think deleting downloads automatically without any good reason is so far removed from assumed functionality of a download to be a borderline dark pattern.

Without the "Smart Download" enabled the episodes persist until I delete them or cancel my service, that's the assumption with a download. Smart download immediately deletes whatever you downloaded as soon as it sees fit - which in my case was erroneously assuming I was on wi-fi. And this was my first download, it's not like it had some storage space restriction to deal with. I had ~16 GB free and it was 100 MB.

The next episode feature aside, it seems weird to say, "Okay, download this one" and then it saying, "Okay, so you meant download it and then delete it".

And to your Youtube point, I think it depends on the use-case. I fully agree with holding the buffer there, but if I'm on mobile data, I might not necessary want it to just load as much as it can as soon as it can because I pay per MB.

I actually love the smart download option, it allows me to always have the next episode downloaded when I leave the house.

This seems more like a CS fault than anything. Netflix is a huge company and CS agents are outsourced/so far from the actual product team that they operate on guidelines/info that might actually not be true/outdated. I'd say it's just a problem with a huge organization.

You don’t ask the cattle if it wants to be slaughtered.

I'd assume #num_customer_complaints is not part of the A/B metrics. If people complain but don't follow through with actions A/B probably should ignore it.

I'm not an MBA, but I imagine there's something where if you wait until you know for a fact that customers are leaving for specific and known reasons, you're waiting too long to fix it.

Yeah but the thing is A/B testing shouldn't be "rely exclusively on it and then completely ignore feedback after it's been rolled out"

What if they follow through with it 6 months or a year later? Your a/b metrics won't catch long term effects. Maybe a change gets people more engaged short term, but drives them away long term.