Over the last few years, you’ll have noticed a trend across the board towards a certain … ‘authoritarianism’ isn’t the word, but you get the idea: the app developers, site/service owners know best what the users need, so what the the users want is immaterial — changes are imposed, features removed, without consultation.
If you want the perfect example, go look at the uproar over the latest release of Firefox for Android.
The technological changes were perfectly justified: the core engine was unsecure and hosted some very nasty exploits … it would’ve been unjustifiable to continue delivering something that put people’s identities, finances (even lives in some instances) at risk.
But there was no need to impose the new look and feel on people … least of all with no way to revert it.
There was no need to remove the users’ ability to tailor it to their own needs in the about:config settings — meaning all the security/privacy hardening you got from the ghacks user.js file will no longer work and you’re at the mercy of whatever errors/oversights the Mozilla developers set as the defaults.
Go back and look at the changes made to the desktop version in recent years, however, and you’ll see the trend from a completely user-orientated experience to a ‘we know best’ approach on the part of Mozilla.
It’s the way things are these days .. and it’ll get worse before it gets any better (if it ever does).
If you ask me, the rot set in in the 1980s, when manufacturers started removing separate recording volumes from tape/cassette recorders in favour of peak limiters/automated gain ‘compression’. It got even worse with the the introduction of automatic tape detection: it meant that you could not only not increase the gain on a low volume source by turning up the recording gain but you now couldn’t overdrive your recording gain any more either — previously, you’d been able to put in a ferro tape and set it as chrome, or, better yet, use a chrome tape and set it to ‘metal’, increasing the recording gain (which given the quietness of the original simply resulted in a louder recording, not distortion).
It’s the result of ‘focus group’ and ‘feedback’ research: if people are having difficulty with something, you want to remove the barrier to uptake by facilitating it for them.
But it all means that we now have a generation or two of people for whom the concept of giving users choice is alien … so, instead of providing a redesigned set of defaults that the user can tweak, they simply remove all but the new defaults, because it doesn’t cross their minds that what most people who self select for membership of a focus and/or feedback group might say in response to loaded questions isn’t the alpha and the omega of the matter — that, however, is also a matter of the group-think that has been induced by the striving for not simply popularity but quantifiable popularity (how many followers, how many likes, how much applause, how much influence) encouraged by today’s (anti) social media platrforms (the US in particular always had a problem with this anyway, but it’s just got worse since the advent of Facebook, et al).
Add to that the whole Agile/DevOps mentality, whereby people with no clue are engaged to make decisions in spheres outside their own competence (no, being a developer does not mean you understand how systems work, it just means you know how to code to order) aren’t given the time to think about things in depth, and is it any wonder that people with no idea about Ergonomics, UX/UI, or information architecting are producing poorly designed solutions to problems nobody has?
As I said, it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.
The pendulum will swing back the other way in time and what you’ll end up with is a repeat of the 1960s/1970s DIY ethic that powered the now much derided Geocities; but only derided by those for whom choice by those they consider unqualified to implement their own aesthetic is a bad thing, mind you … and for whom thinking beyond denying others the level of decision making they accord themselves is beyond their own capacity, otherwise they’d have no problem with the concept of setting tasteful defaults but allowing users to modify them … something Livejournal offered its users back in 2000 — that’s right, the Medium team is patting itself on the back for, and squealing excitedly about, having finally caught up with an idea that was already old twenty years ago!
Until it does though, we’ll all just have to put up with more of this shit by the arbiters of good taste (influencers and other popular people) … and the mindset the very existence of those people inculcates in everyone else along the way.
Hashtag ‘Not all Millennials, but …’ 😉
