The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet

For me, Amazon is a prime example of this. The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.<p>I&#x27;ve bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn&#x27;t notice it.<p>And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren&#x27;t made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results.<p>Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It&#x27;s hilariously bad.<p>As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon.<p>Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.

This is definitely thought-provoking, and a correct use in many of the examples, but the Wikipedia example doesn&#x27;t feel right because I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s deliberate there. I suppose you could argue that we&#x27;ve been conditioned into accepting the Gruen Transfer and take that behaviour over into Wikipedia. But I remember back in the days of physical encyclopedias that I could spend a long time just flipping through them in a similar way to the way I browse Wikipedia. (My favourite description of the Wikipedia hole was a tweet from around 10 years ago about &quot;snapping out of a Wikipedia trance at 2am while reading the early educational history of Meatloaf&#x27;s guitarist&quot;).

Odd that the article doesn&#x27;t mention Victor Gruen (perhaps best known as a creator of the indoor shopping mall as we know it, although he later became a critic of them), who the transfer is named after.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Victor_Gruen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Victor_Gruen</a>

Ironically it&#x27;s had the exact opposite effect on me. So many of these things are so hard to interact with now I just... don&#x27;t. Surprisingly little of value has been lost.

The Wikipedia example seems totally irrelevant: there’s nothing &quot;designed to disorient you upon visiting&quot;, it’s just a normal interesting website with links between its pages.

Have always been referring to this as “the IKEA maze”.<p>Went through Copenhagen airport recently. Right after security, there is a sign “All gates -&gt;” which takes you on a detour through the main “taxfree” shop - that is close to. as low at it gets imo.

On a new browser, at my first visit to any Stack Exchange site, I add the &quot;Hot network questions&quot; DOM node to my uBO block list, and then modify that to apply to all their sites.<p>That and the cookie popup DOM node...

I think this is probably inevitable in any system that 1) isn&#x27;t used purely for pragmatic reasons -- and then turned off and 2) has some demand for novelty from its users.<p>So yeah, while the Facebook timeline is a mess, the real question is: what is the intended purpose of scrolling the timeline in the first place? For most users it <i>isn&#x27;t</i> a clear case of &quot;I want X&quot; and they don&#x27;t actually have a specific goal in mind. Instead, it&#x27;s some combination of seeing what your friends are doing and be entertained by novel items. From that perspective it&#x27;s inevitable that the timeline would end up this way.

Nothing in Wikipedia’s design resembles the Gruen Transfer.

I find this happening to me too often.<p>I&#x27;ll open a smartphone. Open Instagram. Scroll through for a while. And then realize my intent was originally just to send someone a message.<p>Modern UI is <i>definitely</i> disorienting.

Advertising is ruining everything.

I would strongly disagree with classifying the feed as a Gruen Transfer mechanism.<p>The feed as a basic concept is great. It&#x27;s basically an inbox, and no more of a Gruen Transfer enabler than an email inbox. Hell, it&#x27;s no more inherently an enabler than an aisle in the store. It&#x27;s not the existence of the feed, it&#x27;s what&#x27;s in it.<p>Facebook&#x27;s feed is what allowed me to see what my friends were up to without clicking on every single profile. That made Facebook hugely more useful to me than MySpace.<p>But there are eyeballs on the feed, and money to be made by showing ads to those eyeballs and capturing more minutes of attention to in turn show more ads. That&#x27;s the incentive.<p>I doubt that feeds are case of you can&#x27;t find what you were looking for. I don&#x27;t think most users are looking for anything in particular when they browse a feed. Now jamming more things in the search page may count. And Twitter&#x27;s nasty habit of shifting around what you&#x27;re looking at so you can&#x27;t find a post surely counts.

Hmm, this probably explains why my interaction with the internet is mostly through ChatGPT summaries these days.

The Gruen Transfer is even consuming state government websites - there is one I have to use regularly for work and about ~15 seconds after your first page load it pops up an overlay warning aboriginal and torrest strait islanders that the website contains images&#x2F;voices&#x2F;names of deceased persons (which is a cultural sensitivity of some in that group).<p>It feels petty to complain about but it just _throws_ me off my intention almost every time.

&gt; In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing.<p>Is it true? Is it a new thing? Could someone tell the telco industry, surely they are unaware of that, because as recently as last month, I had to threaten legal action again a european telco who refused to not automatically renew my &quot;pre-paid, subscription free&quot; plan... Any reference to that regulation would be appreciated.

Death to the Gruen Transfer.

So much THIS. And people wonder why their kids go bonkers after using screens on smart devices. Imagine how much faster they get disoriented because they have zero experience dealing with user interfaces, and get presented with this glowing object that rewards them for interacting with it in a disorienting way.

Does anyone know of a browser plugin that would filter out all posts that I haven&#x27;t subscribed to? In theory it should be possible by grabbing my list of friends (and, optionally, of the pages I liked). In practice, I expect Meta implemented an aggressive scheme to prevent that and further confuse FB users.

&gt; The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends.<p>That&#x27;s bizarre.<p>When I go to m.facebook.com it consists of posts from people I know and groups I&#x27;m in.<p>There are occasional carousels of People You Might Know or Groups You Might Like, but other than that it&#x27;s just words and photos from real people.

The Gruen transfer seems to make use of confusion or disorientation upon entering a new physical space. On the other hand, the phenomena described here with data search implementations (e.g. a feed) intentionally returning things that were not asked for does not rely on user confusion. The user already made a perfectly legible request by performing the query (e.g. opening the feed). Ignoring or misconstruing this request is gaslighting. The site tries to pretend that the user asked for something different than they actually did and to sneak this subterfuge past them. It&#x27;s rampantly unethical. The purported justification I&#x27;ve heard is that fuzzy search can find results in cases when exact matching does not, but taking the control of fuzzy vs. strict search out of the user&#x27;s hands is unethical because it is motivated by the opportunity to introduce mistakes and pervert intention.<p>Sites like Etsy implement this dark pattern in ways intentionally intended to make CSS-based blocking of injected sponsored products difficult to block. The arms race between user agents and corporate manipulation continues, and corporate web designers will use every tool available to subject users nonconsensually to their preferred experience. This is why I consider it a net loss for users to add functionality to the &quot;web platform&quot;. The corporation is your enemy and they&#x27;re well-funded.

This is LinkedIn for sure. I log in to specifically look up one person, and then I get pulled in 18 different directions so badly that I sometimes end up forgetting why log into this sh1t site in the first place.

Yes and ChatGPT has become my personal shopper.

even banks tend to do this.<p>if u make a more than normal transfer they want u to jump hoops or somebody from call center calls u is this transfer what u wanted to do sir?<p>store the money in the bank, dont spend it.

This is precisely what Amazon try and achieve by deliberately making their search so crap.<p>They should be prosecuted for it.

Just realized I got Gruen Transfered into a wikipedia article where I learned about Myrtle The Parachick who technically died in combat fighting Nazi&#x27;s. RIP Myrtle.

Thought this was about the Australian TV show, but I&#x27;d completely forgotten that was named after an actual concept: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gruen_(TV_series)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gruen_(TV_series)</a>

&gt; In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. So if it takes 10 seconds to fill in a form online to get subscribed, they need to offer the same ease of use for canceling.<p>&gt; I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation.<p>So, if all you needed to do to subscribe was to find an ad on Facebook encouraging you to do so (which was the only place your plan was offered), to cancel, you need to... find another ad on Facebook encouraging you to cancel?<p>If subscribing required you to visit a physical store to verify ID (pretty common for SIM cards here), it&#x27;s fine to also require that to cancel the contract, even though there&#x27;s no point for it?