I read this blog post from Joel this morning about setting up a new phone.
I totally agree that this is a massive issue in this day and age. I found it hard myself as a total tech incumbent, let alone a parent or a younger user who has no idea what any of it means…
We’ve got one side, the phone manufacturer trying to make things simple – like Apple, Samsung or whoever – with their own set of apps, cloud locations for storage and migration tools. On the other hand, you’ve got the big platforms like Google, Meta, Microsoft trying to pull you their way. Any let alone the browser wars trying to backup your bookmarks from your browser history – Chrome, Safari, Brave, Firefox…. all competing for attention and your data.
There’s a huge gap in making it intuitive for what the user wants and needs rather than “making it easier”. This reminds me of a quote from the latest from Hank Green where he states that…
What I have seen is that every opportunity that a platform has given to people to make fewer choices people have taken that option. So it used to be that feeds were chronological and people were like no I want I want that chronological feed. when you gave them the option, they chose the algorithmic one.
Did they choose the option or did they imply a choice for the option by spending more time with algorithmic feeds?
I don’t think that’s semantic, but like they chose the algorithmic feeds when you gave them the option between having a video supplied to them or clicking or choosing and clicking on a video they want to watch. They prefer having a video supplied to them. That’s Tik Tok versus YouTube, right? People prefer decisions being taken away from them.
So if people want their decisions to be taken away from them, maybe this is the answer and we should care less about where things are stored, how fragmented our digital lives are and who has access to what.
I mean, I 100% don’t agree with any of these things, and am against the big tech data grab from our devices. So maybe you should too. Time will surely tell if any of this matters as we keep on taking up more space on servers and server farms across the globe.
