Category: Products and Design

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Audience as Capital Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

An example of why Reclaiming Attention is important to me

We just read about anxiety-inducing tactics by social media and games like FarmVille.

Growth hacking infects our attention

Today we look at a related but distinct issue: the use of “dark patterns” used by marketers on the internet.

Dark patterns are ways of designing emails, websites and other messages that confuse or manipulate people into taking an action other than what they intended.

The New York Times reported the use of such patterns by the 2020 Trump re-election campaign:

The Trump team repeatedly used phantom donation matches and faux deadlines to loosen donor wallets (“1000% offer: ACTIVATED…For the NEXT HOUR”). Eventually it ratcheted up the volume of emails it sent until it was barraging supporters with an average of 15 per day for all of October and November 2020.

Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out…It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.

By October there were sometimes nine lines of boldface text — with ALL-CAPS words sprinkled in — before the disclosure that there would be weekly withdrawals. As many as eight more lines of boldface text came before the second additional donation disclaimer.

This was what it looked like:

The article does not do a good enough job writing about the cost to people’s financial and mental well being, the most important aspect of this story. The one that they do explore in some detail is this horrifying story of a person dealing with late-stage cancer:

Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help. What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

I often write about attention on this website. Stories such as this should indicate why this issue is important to me. A life that is spent navigating interfaces like this and dealing with the severe consequences of one false move is not a life of any great quality. We deserve better of the Internet.

Categories
Making Money Online Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Growth hacking infects our attention

In my mind, Farmville was the first game to really annoy people. It was also the first game I saw that sucked in for days people I knew – people who otherwise had little interest in even casual games.

In other words, Farmville was the first large-scale success of online gamification. These are techniques that are designed – deliberately – to promote anxiety, fear of missing out, hijacking attention, guilting players and their online ‘friends’, among others.

This New York Times article from December last year takes an unsparing look at the game. Even though it shut down that month,

FarmVille lives on in the behaviors it instilled in everyday internet users and the growth-hacking techniques it perfected, now baked into virtually every site, service and app vying for your attention.

The article cites examples of the techniques I listed above:

drawing players into loops that were hard to pull themselves from. If you didn’t check in every day, your crops would wither and die; some players would set alarms so they wouldn’t forget. If you needed help, you could spend real money or send requests to your Facebook friends — a source of annoyance for nonplayers who were besieged with notifications and updates in their news feeds.

It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon

I see a recurring pattern of blaming people – the ‘consumer’ – for their supposed weakness in getting sucked in by products like Farmville, and social media in general. This has happened before with tobacco, with packaged snacks, even with recycling.

This article makes clear that companies like Zynga deliberately design games and social media to prey upon our emotions and attention in ways that TV and outdoor advertising couldn’t.

They use phone and email notifications, unread counts, access to your phone contact list and facebook friend list, your location and individual pattern of use, design techniques like pull to refresh, arbitrary countdown timers – all to systematically weaken your resolve and act according to how the game or app wants you to, including spending real money to buy in-game baubles.

Unfortunately, Farmville’s techniques now pervade the tech industry. Fortunately, enough of us have been burnt by such games and are aware of our addiction to social media that – should we want to – we can in fact start of wean ourselves off it.

Unlike with viruses, there is no vaccine that immunises you from distraction. But you can build a natural resistance to it. It’s harder, but it’s also equally effective. And we will each be the wiser for it.

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Data Custody Investing Products and Design Real-World Crypto

Virtual real estate NFTs

(Also posted earlier this week on my crypto/DeFi Whatsapp channel).

We have discussed NFTs or non-fungible tokens before, mostly in the form of digital art and collectibles. Not only do some of them sell for millions of dollars, they can also be re-sold on secondary marketplaces for gains.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that we’re now seeing pieces of virtual land inside games being sold as NFTs.

In some games, players can buy digital deeds for real estate in the form of an NFT, which proves the authenticity of a certain plot in a specific game.

The real estate will appreciate as more players join the game and scarce land is sold to other players who require the plots for certain tasks and missions.

It’s not just buy-and-hold. Those ‘assets’ are being put to ‘productive use’:

Players can then rent out their land to other gamers, charge others for using it or even sell it—either within the game or on a third-party exchange such as OpenSea.

that real estate, too, can be sold for large sums:

A group of people last month paid $1.6 million for Citadel of the Stars, a large kingdom in the unreleased fantasy role-playing game Mirandus

virtual world The Sandbox sold about $2.8 million worth of land in a pair of well-received sales that now have the company valuing its digital properties at about $37 million.

The sale of properties in games that are not even released reminds me of Bollywood/other Indian movies, which start making money through sale of music weeks before the movie’s release.

that real estate, too, can be sold for large sums:

A group of people last month paid $1.6 million for Citadel of the Stars, a large kingdom in the unreleased fantasy role-playing game Mirandus

virtual world The Sandbox sold about $2.8 million worth of land in a pair of well-received sales that now have the company valuing its digital properties at about $37 million.

The sale of properties in games that are not even released reminds me of Bollywood/other Indian movies, which start making money through sale of music weeks before the movie’s release.

We’ve heard news for years from governments who have wanted to tokenise parcels of land, even apartments. The current Indian government’s think tank also recognises real estate as a major area for the adoption of blockchain (Blockchain: the India Strategy, January 2020).

Innovation in virtual worlds made from scratch will always be faster because they have fewer messy problems. That said, there’s a lot for governments to learn from them about distribution and market mechanisms – if they choose to. For instance, governments could require new real estate projects to list on their real estate blockchain, just like the unreleased games that sold plots of ‘land’ as NFTs.

The smart contract could abstract the chain of ownership from the actual chain of transactions on the blockchain. That is, as the government understands the ownership history of the plot of land on which the new project is being built, the on-chain record history can grow ‘backwards’.

At the same time, the chain of ownership of that plot could also grow ‘forward’ as it is sold repeatedly.

Both the backwards and forwards additions to ownership are immutably recorded on the real estate blockchain. The abstraction means you don’t need to wait for the definitive ownership history of each plot of land to be determined before you list them on-chain.

Categories
Product Management Products and Design Startups The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Failure to empathise

On a new feature in Slack via which anyone on Slack can message any other Slack user, across companies:

When Slack introduced the feature today, it hadn’t implemented any features that can help someone who gets harassed. There is no block button or built in mechanism to report the message to Slack or your company’s Slack administrator.

https://twitter.com/44/status/1374737695444901891

Slack reacted:

… “we received valuable feedback from our users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages. We are taking immediate steps to prevent this kind of abuse”

– Slack Says Letting Anyone Message Anyone With Few Limits Was ‘a Mistake’

This is a failure to empathise, a rather basic failure when designing products. Gmail took off in its early days in large part because it decimated spam. That is a fifteen year old lesson. Twitter’s issues with harassment and spam are an ongoing lesson.

At Slack’s scale, one should expect product managers to consider the potential for harassment. For information overload. For ambiguity. For bias.

If Slack – or any other company – consciously builds and promotes its products to be used by organisations of all sizes, across all industries, globally, they cannot also dismiss or discount these as incovenient or unnecessary.

These considerations will slow down design and development, they will make the product somewhat less agile and they will increase monetary costs.

That’s the price of making a product that widely available.

You expect that with the increase revenue from this scale, you hire the best product, design and engineering talent to build efficiently while also considering everything above.

(ends)

Categories
Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design

Firefox’s assertive privacy intervention

We saw how Firefox implemented measures to block so-called supercookies that misuse how browsers cache images. These caching is to improve performance, but supercookies encode tracking information in images to track people across websites even when cookies themselves are blocked.

It’s a war all right

Today, I learnt that Firefox is taking another, more assertive step to blocking tracking through removing specific parts of the information that sites add to the link when pointing visitors to other websites:

referrer URLs can expose an extensive array of other sensitive info, including but not limited to Internal hostnames for government and enterprise entities that most likely should not be public.

Malicious actors could then pull sensitive info like internal names from their web servers’ access logs or their analytics software if they can trick a target into visiting a site hosted on servers under their control.

– Mozilla Firefox adopts new privacy-enhancing Referrer Policy

Now,

Mozilla has announced that it will introduce a more privacy-focused default Referrer Policy to protect Firefox users’ privacy, starting with the web browser’s next version.

The new user privacy protection feature against accidental leaking of sensitive user data will be introduced in Firefox 87.

With that update, Firefox will apply the new default Referrer Policy to all navigational requests, redirected requests, and subresource (image, style, script) requests, thereby providing a significantly more private browsing experience.

The new Referrer Policy simply drops specific parts of the referrer URL. This sounds simple, but this is the fist time that I’ve seen a browser actually intervene and edit a URL to remove information – not add it.

The Supercookies update was defensive in nature. This is a lot more assertive.

In my view, the time for debating whether a browser should be a neutral application or not is long past. Trackers on the web are widely used and aggressively collect browsing metadata to build visitor profiles. Websites push ads, videos, subscription popups and popunders to the point where they drain your attention. The act of simply browsing the web is an experience akin to harassment and surveillance.

Everyone needs technology that’s on their side, works to protect their privacy and attention. We should start with the web browser. That is what Firefox is doing,

(via Michael Tsai)

Update: I just came across this. The same release also includes “Smart Block”, which

takes an additional step to improve the rendering on pages that embed third-party trackers—instead of just pulling the script and leaving a “hole” where it used to be, Smart Block replaces it with what Mozilla describes as “stand-in” scripts. These stand-in scripts function just enough like the original trackers to restore the intended page-rendering sequence and results without actually leaking data to third parties.

– Firefox 87 is out today, adds Smart Block for improved private browsing
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Products and Design Real-World Crypto

“Crypto can’t contribute anything further” and the failure of imagination

This article in The Ken newsletter isn’t very hopeful about crypto’s ability to make much of a difference to India. There are a couple of strong downsides to allowing unfettered access to crypto, but the article doesn’t make those. I think I’ll write about them on this site in a future post.

This article, unfortunately, makes claims like this regarding the “tens of billions of dollars coming to the country from remittances and remote work”

the contention that crypto will serve as a catalyst is moot. India already has a robust banking system to support inward foreign remittances and crypto can’t contribute anything further.

I wish the writer had chosen a different hill to make a stand on. I really do.

Cross border remittances are infamous for few options, very high processing fees and currency markups. Here’s the World Bank lamenting the state of remittances [PDF report].

Providers of remittance services in the formal sector typically charge a fee of 10–15 percent of the principal amount to handle the small remittances typically made by poor migrants.

For every INR 100 a migrant ends back, if their family receives just INR 85, that’s INR 15 worth of that migrant’s labour wasted. Lost. In moving electronic records from a computer system to another. In 20201.

This is unconscionable.

And as regard the robust banking system, look no further than this:

I am myself, as of Monday, waiting for an overseas payment that was made to me on Thursday. I have no idea where it is in my bank’s systems. When I wanted to remit money overseas late last year, my bank had me pull records from 2014 to prove that the money I was sending was in fact mine.

There exist many startups, both Indian and otherwise – Remitl.y, Remit2India, RemitGuru, Azimo, Xoom, Transferwise – that choose to tackle the problem of remittance in India.

Remittances is broken.

To say ‘crypto can’t contribute anything further’ is to accept the current state of finance: payments, investments, even inflationary money.

This is an example of failure of imagination –the worst sort of failure.

Categories
Personal Finance Products and Design Real-World Crypto

The e-yuan cryptocurrency and privacy

China’s e-yuan – the Financial Times takes a look at how the Chinese Government is pushing adoption of the natively-digital currency, not just to advance payments and investments, but also to exert even greater control over its population: “Virtual control: the agenda behind China’s new digital currency”

(Article on Financial Times; may be paywalled; consider supporting good journalism)

China is intent on becoming the first large economy to introduce a digital currency, showcasing its position as the global leader in payments technology to the world at next year’s Winter Olympics.

Cryptocurrencies are often decentralised; they are not issued or backed by governments. The “e-yuan”, by contrast, is part of China’s top-down design… the digital currency project is tied up in the Communist party’s drive to maintain control over society and the economy. The technology is partly designed to reinforce its surveillance state.

Its digital format enables the central bank to track all transactions at the individual level in real time. “we will give those people who demand it [paper money and coins] anonymity in their transactions… but at the same time, we will keep the balance between the ‘controllable anonymity’ and anti-money laundering, CTF [counter-terrorist financing], and also tax issues, online gambling and any electronic criminal activities”

If current statements by the government are any measure, it’s a pretty big blow to privacy. The e-yuan is also seen

as a means to reassert state control over its fintech industry and a vast e-payments market that is dominated by two huge private companies, Ant Group and Tencent… the digital renminbi is distributed directly to the e-wallets of users by state-owned banks, thus setting up payments channels that circumvent Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Categories
Data Custody Products and Design Writing

Because of Notion, the web is no longer read-only

I learnt today that a friend of mine had set up his own personal website. He built it on Notion and linked a domain name to it. That set of Notion pages has a surprising amount of information on it, including what appears to be the beginnings of a knowledge base of the areas he’s built a career in.

His Notion pages have collapsible sections, text, images, embeds, multiple columns – the works. This is by a person who, from what I know, has not had previous experience with WordPress or Weblow or the like.

What Notion has done is simple and yet profound. It has made it super simple to put high quality, information-dense web pages online.

If you are technically adept, you can buy a domain, hosting, install WordPress, a theme or two, a few plugins like Elementor and build your web pages. If you have enough money, you can hire an agency to build a site for you – and train you to add/edit information on it. If you’re the leadership of a company in charge of public-facing properties, you can get a team to build it for you (well, for the company).

But if you’re outside of a fairly narrow set of people, the web is read-only for you.

That’s why social media became such a big deal. It gave everyone an input box and a send button that published to everyone on the Internet. You could fill that box with text, pictures, sounds, whatever you wanted.

But social media is linear, post-oriented and reverse-chronological. As are WordPress.com, Medium, Substack, Revue – all of which are holdovers from the blog era.

For true self-expression, you want to be able to create free-form information. Notion makes that possible. And makes it look pretty, so you aren’t distracted by themeing and customising looks-and-feels. You just focus on how you want to present what is important for you to say.

It does look like the future of publishing.

End note: we’ve spoken time and again about owning your data. Notion is not that. Whatever its data export capabilities may be, it’s still a proprietary format hosted on a third party service. Yet for most people, the benefit of self-expression and one’s own unique online presence is a powerful motivator. And you know what – that might be a good enough trade off for now.

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Data Custody Products and Design

Notion as read-it-later app

I’ve recently begun using Notion as my read later app.

I’ve created a page with a basic database, and Notion’s excellent Share Sheet extension sends web pages from Safari to this database perfectly. Same for the Notion extension for Firefox on the Mac. I just wish both extensions had the ability to edit properties inline so I could add tags right there. This is what my reading list page looks like (the earlier articles have better tagging):

I’m impressed with Notion’s ability to extract text from a web page – it seems to work as well as Instapaper and Pocket, my main read-later services so far. It’s also a pretty good reading experience:

And just like with Instapaper and Pocket, I can export my database to a CSV so I have my URLs in an open format on my hard drive, and not locked away in a closed service. This limitation was what kept me from using Evernote for this:

Categories
Products and Design Real-World Crypto The Next Computer

Nvidia limiting its graphics cards’ ability to mine Ethereum cryptocurrency

This is rather interesting.

Graphics card-maker Nvidia says it will deliberately reduce the efficiency of its latest card by 50% when it is used to mine the crypto-currency Ethereum.

Crypto-currency enthusiasts have contributed to a shortage of graphics cards by snapping up supplies to use for non-gaming purposes… Nvidia said it had intervened to make sure its products “end up in the hands of gamers”.

But it will also sell a bespoke crypto-currency mining processor.

– Nvidia limits crypto-mining on new graphics card

Nvidia’s stock has had a great run in the past year. It’s not only produced extremely popular gaming cards, but its hardware has also found use in the artificial intelligence/deep learning and cryptocurrency spaces:

I’m still reading about this, and I may update this post or add a new one about my thoughts. I thought the act of deliberately modifying one’s hardware to cripple a specific function was interesting enough to document. No value judgements yet.

A part of my reading queue:

NVIDIA’s own announcement

Nvidia is nerfing its RTX 3060 GPU to stop crypto miners from buying them all – Polygon

Nvidia May Restart Production of Crypto Mining GPUs if Demand Sufficient – Coindesk

I’m also looking forward to this being discussed on Nvidia’s earnings call for last quarter, scheduled for 24th Feb 2021.