This helped me to find out that my Huawei phone had "AI Touch" enabled. That apparently is a feature to touch any image with two fingers and the super smart AI finds out what is shown in the picture and where to buy it.
Goes without saying that I immediately disabled this. /shrug
Amazing. That’s a feature you’d expect at the top of an HN brainstorm for comically bad, far fetched phone ideas.
The next version: When you touch an item in a photo you automatically buy it. There is supposedly a way to see that this is happening and cancel it, but that part of the interface isn't intuitive and attempts to cancel more often result in additional purchases.
This cannot be turned off, and the new phone can't be used in the first place until you set up credit card billing. It also seems to trigger "automatically" and "by accident" very frequently.
It's already bad enough that my toddler can order photo canvases of a picture of himself getting ketchup out of the fridge via the Google Photos app. (He even chose expedited shipping . . . to our old address!)
Fortunately we got a refund from customer service the first time. The second time, I saw the email soon enough to cancel within the 2 hour deadline. (This was after removing all our payment info from the phone, which was the only way I could see to enforce that he couldn't do it again, but then someone made a payment and ended up saving the payment method again.)
I feel like it's only a matter of time before it happens again; at least the address is correct now so we'd actually receive the item if we were unable to cancel/refund.
I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics.
They're the ones that will click on ads and "browse" a site. They interact in a much richer way than I do.
I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to.
I've been frequently flabbergasted how these obvious observations come across as novel to people I talk to, as if 2 year olds have their own email address and password.
I even heard someone say unboxing and cartoon videos "somehow" are popular among women in their 30s.
I mean come on now...
> I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics.
Holy shit, you just blew my mind. This explains so much of the mainstream internet's degeneration into a family-friendly dumbed-down version of it.
The dangers of having big corporations raising a new generation of people (instead of their parents doing it) are even more concerning. I bet that's the exact reason we are moving towards a woke authoritorian dystopia.
That's not really what I meant. I was talking user flow, CTA placement, sizing, color, presentation medium (such as video versus text), length of text content (toddlers find lots of words less attractive than colorful drawings and big letters), ad placement and design, recommendation algorithms biasing towards repetition, whimsical animal and "America's funniest home videos" style content, animations, bright colors, things like that.
All these techniques capture the attention of children who then get miscategorized as their parents.
What you're talking about is companies trying to maximize their customer base by trying not to offend or alienate people. That makes things less direct, more bland and less specialized. That's because there's been efforts to decrease localization of international marketing and expand customer bases.
Starbucks, for instance, is so boring because it's identical in every country and thus caters to the sensibilities of everyone. They avoid shapes, flavors, numbers and colors that are off-putting in other cultures and use ingredients that can be globally sourced. That's just international industrial capitalism trying to be efficient.
The real problem is suburbia has been robbed of local color and all you have left there is Starbucks. It's a soulless corporate wasteland that totally sucks. I agree. That's a city planning and urban development problem.
> That's not really what I meant.
I wasn't trying to mirror your opinions, I just gave my own thoughts.
If toddler's usage in analytics can drive UI design, I don't see why would it be implausible that it also drives content policies. I get reminded of it every time I open youtube from a fresh browser - all I get is a bunch of toddler-level videos with people doing stupid shit like spilling a barrel of hot chocolate on the table while shouting "CHOCOLATE!" in an obnoxious toddler-like manner.
There's an alternative world of frontends that don't suck. Check here