My imaginary children aren't using your streaming service

&gt; make sure it has a &quot;never ask me again&quot; option<p>Ha tell that to product managers who shove very useful reminders to enable notifications, sync contacts, auto upgrade, etc.<p>They offer all sorts of choices like remind me later, not now, i will do this later, don&#x27;t remind me for one week, not now, tell me more etc ...<p>But never the option to &quot;no, and never ask me again&quot;.<p>They play dumb in so many creative ways it is jarring.

I can sympathise with the author, would be nice to get a more streamlined experience for those without kids, but:<p>&gt; The world doesn&#x27;t revolve around children.<p>Well, that’s the thing. It kind of does. And these days there’s an argument to be made that the world doesn’t value children enough. As long as fertility is below 2.1 that’s objectively true. It means we’re dying out.<p>If the author wants to be able to retire, there needs to be kids, and the industrialised world has made that too undesirable.<p>Honestly this feels like a trifle compared to the many UX atrocities out there. Sometimes you have to make the UI more inconvenient for some to make it more convenient for others

I’m not convinced that a call to emotional trauma is really a factor here (I know a <i>lot</i> of folks that have lost kids, and the streaming profiles don’t even move the trauma needle).<p>Rather, it’s a basic usability issue, with extra clicks&#x2F;taps&#x2F;whatever required, or an overly-complex presentation, requiring extra attention. Also, as noted in another comment, every UI element increases the opportunity for misfires.<p>In The Days of Yore, we used to “score” our UI, by how many taps&#x2F;clicks it took, to accomplish tasks, or how long it took, to understand a screen. The lower, the better. I’m a bit of an anachronism, as I still do that.<p>My experience, is that implementing intuitive, low-interaction UI is <i>really hard</i>. I’m in the middle of designing a screen with drag-and-drop support for a matrix of icons. I’ve been working on it for a couple of days, already, and probably have at least a couple more to go. Lot of work, for just one screen. It’s all about removing unnecessary interactions, and implementing subtle, intuitive affordances. Also, symbolic debugging of UICollectionView is a real bitch. The debugger borks the drag and drop, so I have to use a bunch of print() statements.<p>I think most software is done by folks that aren’t willing to “go the extra mile,” to design and implement truly intuitive UI.

I don&#x27;t quite understand the problem here. On every device I use Netflix, it defaults to highlighting the last used profile. So essentially, it takes two &#x27;OK&#x27;s to login - once to launch the app, once to select the profile.<p>I don&#x27;t see how the existence of a children&#x27;s profile bothers anyone so much. It&#x27;s not extra work. You don&#x27;t have to scroll past it or anything. It&#x27;s just a nonoffensive thing that sits there if you ever need it on the initial profile page.

I have a very nice television (C series LG), with apps built in to the TV. It has a feature where it shows your “currently watched” for various apps - iPlayer, prime, 4OD, etc. but each app implements their own account select choice prompt that block those features from working. Prime very regularly shows me 5 seconds of content, then the account switch, then an ad.<p>It’s a horrible, horrible UX and is a perfect example of PM’s going wild and not being pushed back on by other disciplines. It’s such a shame.

We all know how easy it would be to add an option to hide a profile, set one as default or add a «Yes, I do actually agree to watch R-rated stuff and stop asking me about it!».<p>Feature creep and scope creep are real, but if you want to add a feature for a kids profile then put «disable kids profile» as part of the scope for that task.<p>As someone with kids I find it really useful to have kids profiles. Netflix one is particularly good, I can configure a general age group and block individual shows.<p>Our national TV app comes in two flavours, a general app and a specific one for kids. Makes it easier to deploy features for kids without adding any nagging popups for adults.

And by the way, my very real children have grown up and don&#x27;t need a child account either.

This is an odd thing to be annoyed about. Maybe it brings back bad memories for parents who’ve lost a child, but you know else does? Going outside and seeing a primary school, childcare, playgrounds, children on the street. It’s unavoidable, it’s not worth building your design around. Presumably it’s a common enough option that people choose that, otherwise they’d get rid of it.

I think it&#x27;s because kids are #1 stickiest reason not to cancel netflix. If there&#x27;s content your kids love you&#x27;re going to keep the subscription going. It&#x27;s a less risky option than youtube which will start feeding your children raw sewage if they are left unsupervised for more than 5 minutes.<p>Most adults I know could take it or leave netflix and think about cancelling it now and then.<p>I reckon the dirty secret of netflix is that the two primary use cases are actually sleep aid and child minding service.

Would be an easy thing to add. We always have to reach for the remote and look at what the parental control password is for amazon. My kids are old enough that most things are fine. The sentence &quot;I am that guy&quot; means something. They can handle it. We&#x27;ve watched BillyElliot, so swearing isn&#x27;t a concern.<p>Totally agree, let us turn it off, full stop.

Don&#x27;t you dare to remind me that children exist! Children are their parents&#x27; business, normal people are entitled to a world for normal people only.<p>That&#x27;s how I read it at least

The solution is avoiding crappy UIs designed to &quot;help those who do not know how to use a computer&quot; keeping them in their ignorance to exploit them and damn teaching IT. The MIT Missing Semester of Your CS Education <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;missing.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;missing.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;</a> should be mandatory for high schools in 2025. People than will choose not to buy services but contents, and instead of watching Netflix with multiple accounts in a family they&#x27;ll simply milk a public catalog passing through their own recommendation engine&#x2F;scoring system, downloading what they want and keeping it locally on their own storage having bought the bits, not the service. With the side effect of much reducing the enormous consumption of bandwidth and energy we have today to keep internet up for the old new mainframe model named &quot;the cloud&quot;.<p>The push toward {fog,edge}-computing, new distributed LLM proposals like BrianknowsAI&#x27;s DCI Network clearly show this trend. We need moldable systems not cages.

Never used these parental control thing, but recently visited a friend with kids, and saw how she uses it to &#x27;mange&#x27; her children, and these parental control system feels totally like corporate ACL management software. I mean at some point why don&#x27;t you just put a GUI in front of AWS ACL system and just call it a day.

I unsubscribed from every streaming service and switched to Jellyfin+Tailscale. Since then I&#x27;ve had a better experience in nearly every way. For example, Jellyfin has optional parental controls, and also allows the administrator to fine-tune the content ratings.

What a weird article. Feels distasteful to utilise a group’s trauma to reinforce your point despite being decidedly anti-child.

I somehow sympathise with the author, in how struggling his life must be if he gets annoyed by such a detail in the grand scheme of things.<p>If anything, I tend to witness more and more &quot;anti-child&quot; behaviours: hotels without children, restaurants without children, weddings without children. I don&#x27;t have children and feel rather uncomfortable around them, but this trend just makes me sad.

Either we accept universal user interfaces like these or we accept a lot more complexity in the many possible configurations of the systems. The economic incentives seem to lean in one direction here.

Maybe the solution would be, to stop watching stupid game shows and inane sitcoms?<p>Maybe you&#x27;re own mental health would improve (since this is repeatedly referenced as the reason for viewing nonsense media), along with that of your imaginary children?

We added an account for our dog that doesn&#x27;t get used but it&#x27;s funny to see.

Yeah, totally.<p>Has anyone else noticed how every streaming service has an &quot;Audio Description&quot; mode?<p>My imaginary deaf people aren&#x27;t using your streaming service! I don&#x27;t want to be reminded of deafness!

Is this mandated by law in certain countries? I’ve never seen this.

For Netflix I deleted mine by clicking the pencil and then remove.

this is a case of “well if it isn&#x27;t the consequences of my own actions coming back to haunt me”. People like the article&#x27;s author (and probably the article&#x27;s author) have been petitioning the government and big tech companies for years asking for more censorship to protect them from big mean hurty words and now they wonder why the internet is a nanny state.

&gt; What&#x27;s the solution?<p>rutracker.org<p>Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Set up Stremio with Torrentio.<p>You&#x27;ll have a UX that&#x27;s nicer than most commercial services, you&#x27;ll have all the content you&#x27;ve ever wanted and you won&#x27;t be feeding predatory capitalist services with your hard-earned cash.

it&#x27;s like everyone who can afford something needs to have kids as the next logical step.

&gt; The world doesn&#x27;t revolve around children.<p>I mean, it kind of does. There is no (human) world without kids.<p>Every adult who can’t stand children was once a child and will be cared for by the annoying children of today when they’re old and infirm. Not by their own kids, of course, because they don’t have any, but by other people’s kids. So, you’re welcome, I guess. Sorry you had to see things for kids.

What if you have friends visiting with children?<p>No need to set up a special account, it’s already there.

I find this a strange thing to be annoyed by, strange to the point of novelty.<p>Perhaps the kids mode needs to be easily accessible and prominent, because it might need to be used by kids? Maybe it’s good design to have it available on the very first screen.<p>It’s also distasteful to borrow trauma from others to justify personal preferences. Don’t speak for people who have experienced extreme tragedy as a way of reinforcing an argument. It’s weird.