The main benefit of putting everything in one chat box that ambiguously does a bit of everything is the opportunity for the service to creatively misinterpret the query and present tangentially related sponsored content as a result.
The clearer the design vocabulary you offer, the easier it is to unequivocally express what you want, the more obvious it becomes when you get something other than what you want.
It's sort of a shame because we end up with these tools that are designed to inhibit and take away user agency rather than extend and advance it.
> It's sort of a shame because we end up with these tools that are designed to inhibit and take away user agency rather than extend and advance it.
"Behold, we have improved the hammer by integrating an intelligent advertisement selection algorithm. Hence, to someone equipped with only this tool, the solution to all problems will seem to be money."
"consumer" is sometimes used as codespeak left leaning circles meaning: someone who implicitly agrees with capitalism and uses it without much real criticism.
So an "investor" of your type is just someone who is more of a consumer. As they consume not only food or housing for example, but they also consume investment opportunities.
I dont know who you are hanging out with but I really don't think people use "consumer" like that. You would end up removing like 90% of the most forceful critique of capitalism in general if "consumer" was something voluntary rather than coerced. It really wouldn't make any sense! That line of thinking sounds much more neoliberal than anything else, with the emphasis on the individual and their right/wrong behavior in the market.
As someone born poor, who was lucky enough to have a brain that made computer jobs a solid option:
It's great. Going from 20 years of constant stress and scarcity mindset to knowing I could lose my job tomorrow and still sign a new lease without using up all my savings is wonderful. Financial security truly puts perspective on nearly all problems. Minor argument? Who the fuck cares I have a roof over my head. Someone's a jerk? So what, I can get services from someone else, I can afford it. My apartment explodes tomorrow? Oh well, I can put my family up in a hotel until we figure something out. Long term disability? Sucks but we have sufficient runway to figure out how to handle it.
Like, I'm so sick and tired of privileged people pandering, just acting like people suffering needlessly should just be more satisfied with the scraps we leave them.
The vast majority of humans experience all kinds of problems that would literally NOT EXIST with a little more money.
>It's sort of a shame because we end up with these tools that are designed to inhibit and take away user agency rather than extend and advance it.
People have asked for this. Let me explain.
Incentives are important. They are what drive economic behavior. Companies tend to produce what the market incentivizes. The demand side of the market has shown an unwillingness to directly pay for much of consumer internet technology. Thus it has been produced in such a way as to monetize it in other ways. Ads, data aggregation and reselling, but mostly ads. Very few people are going to paid products that perform better and give users agency, thus incentivizing the market to continue to delivering what it is now, since that appears to be what users want.
I have a pet theory that this is connected to stagnating wages over the last 40 years or so. If consumers had more disposable income they would be more willing to pay for software.
My small home town of 9000 people could afford to support a man who did only shoe repair.
The shoes cost 50$, so paying him $30 to repair them was an acceptable purchase.
Now the shoes cost $100, but nobody can afford to spend even the original $30 to repair them because they have no money. Also the shoe repair man can't run a business anymore because the shoes are borderline unrepairable, such that even if you replace the sole or any other part, the rest of the shoe is just as worn out and useless.
Most engineering effort the past 30 years has been in making things out of materials that are just barely adequate. "It takes an engineer to put together a bridge that just barely stays up" also means it takes a department of engineers to shave one cent off the BOM of these shoes that also happens to make them last half as long.
Also, the people making money off ads don’t have a lot of interest in someone paying some money, and then never seeing anymore ads again. They are in fact incentivised to continue the “ad supported is the only way” paradigm.
"Now introducing ads to your paid service. Dont like ads? You're in luck, We just introduced ad free tiers! Just purchase produkt++ for an additional $19.99 a month"
Also because up until the mobile App Store walled gardens (and all the downsides they bring) arrived circa 2010, paying for software online was slow and awkward. And generally still is on desktop (except for games).
Also because corporate software (ie. anything popular) had a tendency to start complicating the licensing terms. Sorry, that feature is not available in the Home edition. And nowadays you can't even buy a lot of software, you have to pay a recurring subscription.
Though, your "except for games" addition there also points to the fact that the efficient way to get people to pay for software before mobile app stores was games as well, on walled gardens from Nintendo or Atari.
It's the old Gabe Newell line about piracy being a service problem. If you make paying for something so much harder than not paying for it people will either pirate it or just not use it at all.
I'm not sure that people are asking for ads. You explain how they actually are asking for free stuff, while some website owners who want more money, decide to use ads to make more money.
If your goal is to give users what they want, beware of confusing their actual wants with your preferred monetization method. Wanting the former isn't the same as wanting the latter.
How do you find out what people want? A good rule of thumb is to prefer asking them over trying to logic it out. Would most people answer "ads"? No, because they do not want ads.
Nobody wants to pay for anything. If you ask them how they want to pay, they’ll say “I don’t want to.”
But given a choice of paywalls or ads, most people opt for ads most of the time. Doesn’t mean they want ads, just that they apparently dislike ads less than actually paying.
You are correct: if someone is presented with a false dichotomy of "ads vs. paying", and they choose ads, that doesn't mean they want ads, it means ads was the least bad option in the false dichotomy.
I also don't think it's constructive to conflate providing a service with making a profit. Plenty of people are happy doing just the former. If someone want to make more money, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it's not a foregone conclusion that they do, or must, or that the service is contingent on it. Those are all decisions made by each individual provider.
> I also don't think it's constructive to conflate providing a service with making a profit. Plenty of people are happy doing just the former.
Can confirm. I spent years in the late 2000's running a phpBB board to enable discussion on a niche hobby. I spent probably a few thousand dollars on it over several years, we eventually waned in traffic and gave it up as everyone was moving to reddit. I never saw a penny of profit from that, nor expected it: some of our older members were happy to kick some cash my way to offset server costs. As a result, we had a community that was robust, friendly, open to everyone and 100% free to use. No scummy ads, no tracking, no surveillance, no "sponsored posts," none of it. It was glorious and I miss it every day.
I would've happily taken donations to offset the costs, but I never saw it as a money-making operation. Nowadays it feels basically unheard of to do anything online without the expectation of making money.
Sure. I was making a general observation about ads vs. subscriptions out on the open internet where sites generally cost money to run, and sometimes the owners attempt to make a salary from their time, or even make a profit. Lots of ways to change that need for revenue, but once you are hitting 100k+ daily visitors, it’s hard to avoid.
I run multiple small sites for free, and do a number of other activities for free that someone might get paid for. But I know that I’m doing it because I want to and can stop anytime. Revenue also creates continuity by creating a financial obligation…even while it reduces the passion element of motivation.
Maybe then we shouldn't be putting technologies like the internet in the hands of profit-driven companies. Most of the internet driven technology is inherently un-monetizeable, but also very useful, and ads are actively detrimental to the quality of the product. I doubt the users have much say in this to be fair.
The good news is that given how cheap hardware has gotten, there's really no moat anymore. It's fairly feasible to run large scale internet discovery tools out of your own pocket.
In the case of Meta's properties, consumers do not have agency. They are locked in (through a friend-graph that they cannot export to a competitor) and monopoly abuse keeps killing viable alternatives (like the old stale Facebook purchasing the young fresh Instagram).
People have not asked for this. They have been enticed into a garden "for free" and then locked up inside.
> But I don’t want to ask Meta AI about the best history podcasts or ask about k-pop, I want to find the video of the trained raven I saw a couple weeks ago. I want to perform social keyword search. And on Whatsapp, I want to talk to people on Whatsapp directly, without a chatbot in the middle.
It's getting increasingly evident that tech companies have stopped caring about what their users actually want to do, and instead are nudging/funneling them into doing what they want their users to do. For a while it was voice assistants. "Use Siri!!" "Use Assistant!" "Use Alexa!" "Use Cortana!" "No, really, please use it!" "We're begging you." "OK, we're making it more prominent so you accidentally use it." "We're now removing the other options so you have to use it!"
I expect the same cycle with AI. "PLEASE, USERS, you have to use this AI product! It is the current fashion, after all. We pay $billions for GPUs and the salaries of hundreds of engineers, and it's expensive. You simply must use it for everything!"
I find this to be true in many areas of life, esp. in recent years. My perfect trail running shoe was made in 2006. My perfect car was made in 2008. Those products are no longer made, and the new ones are not "better", just "different". (Often worse tbh)
We get to buy the product someone is willing to make, not the product we want to buy. The product is often not "better" for the user, but for the company making it. And as a user you can just FEEL it dripping from every new thing. It's not appealing at all to me.
There must be an economics term that describes this. I've taken to calling it "supply side rules everything around me"
A thousand times this. I distinctly recall going to a Columbia store to get a new basic fleece jacket years ago and all they had were jackets with that stupid breast zipper pocket which I didn't want. It clearly seemed like the new style as anything without it was nowhere to be found on the floor.
I begged the sales person who dug one up in a box in the back room without the pocket.
My guess is slapping an extra pocket on there let them justify increasing the cost and margins because "you're getting more!"
I'm holding on to my iPhone 12 mini and BOSE QC 35 II for dear life. It is rare these days to find a product that just works for you, and you always know that it's gonna be replaced by a crappier, more expensive model as soon as it breaks.
Good article. It's really obnoxious that so many websites now offer you probablistic results when you're actually searching for some well defined thing you asked for in precise terms. Getting some ML suggestion should be an optional fallback if I can't articulate what I want, not a first choice.
Youtube isn't mentioned in the piece but it's also one of the worst offenders of this. They shove so much "do you want to see this again?" or "for you" in the middle of your results it's crazy. Luckily using a search operator like ` after:[date]` still gets rid of it. I've noticed having to use operators on more and more sites to basically force them to not hand me random content back.
> And on Whatsapp, I want to talk to people on Whatsapp directly, without a chatbot in the middle.
They're doing this with Skype too. It annoys me. I have a list of business contacts, and that's all I use it for. My friends are elsewhere. I don't want to talk about the weather or politics. I have specific people to talk or chat with for specific topics.
Microsoft, you are already trying to be my friend via Bing and whatever that is built right into Windows 11 already.
Rant finished. I guess I understand why they do that. If I only used Skype, and no other Microsoft products, how else would I discover all the wonderful experiences I could have with an LLM?
And change is inevitable, and how much money do I give Microsoft for this particular service to stay the same, etc., etc., etc..
I'm dealing with the issues discussed in the article as I roll out project management software for attorneys that has deep LLM integration. I have four different types of LLM integration, but three of them use that same "familiar" chat request interface as their UI, and the fact that they are different interfaces for different purposes is very difficult for the end-users to reliably understand.
There's the familiar "chat" interface that they are used to, and understand readily, which is used for legal R&D and new client on-boarding. But there are also traditional word processing and spreadsheet document authoring and editing, which also use that same "chat UI" - but that is not a conversational interface; requests to that interface cause modifications to the document, rewriting portions of the word processing or spreadsheet document. A third type of LLM integration is available that is a RAG type of interface for authored and uploaded documents, where the end-user is able to ask questions about the document with a generated subject matter expert in the document's topic (a word processor or spreadsheet). My fourth LLM integration has no interface, it makes an assessment of the end-user's familiarity with their goal, and adjusts the amount of help offered to the end-user.
I am currently in the process of adding textual dressing around these three LLM request interfaces, but users are too used to operating interfaces on instinct, and the second and third type of LLM integrations where the LLM is co-authoring a document with the end-user is getting scant use, they simply don't realize it can co-author with them, and try to use it like a Q&A interface and not an assistant who will change the document for them.
You might be trying to solve problems that they don't really have (but think they have), or you're solving them in the wrong way.
For example, is a RAG chatbot the right way to get the information they need from documents, or do they want executive summaries of the document from different points of view that they almost always need to consider it from?
Is a chat assistant that you have to talk to to make modifications to a document the right choice? Or would it be better to have the user highlight the text they want changed which then gives them the option to direct how to change it with natural language?
>Or would it be better to have the user highlight the text they want changed which then gives them the option to direct how to change it with natural language?
That's exactly what I have: the user selects what they want modified, uses the "chat text area" to request the change, the entire document is sent in (for prose consistency) with the selection identified and the change is performed. If no selection is, the change request is applied to the entire document in context-output-size aware chunks.
The RAG interface is not the only document query interface, but is the one preferred for finding information inside documents and discussing that information in large documents. My RAG implementation is a bit more than "just RAG", I use the document to generate a subject matter expert in the subject matter of the document, and that generated agent is who the end-user converses, along with the retrieved document information. So, in a way, my RAG is with the document, and an agent generated from the document, along with a context sensitive "professional communicator agent" whose job is to fill in the context breaks between the different RAG snippets, which reduces the fractured nature of the RAG snippets, lending towards better, deeper, more nunaced answers.
> Or would it be better to have the user highlight the text they want changed which then gives them the option to direct how to change it with natural language?
Users could also highlight the text they want changed, then skip the middleman by typing in the new text themselves. Not sure how to monetize this.
> the second and third type of LLM integrations where the LLM is co-authoring a document with the end-user is getting scant use, they simply don't realize it can co-author with them
This is a very new and unfamiliar paradigm, and you're going to have to "train" people in how it works.
LLM interfaces look the same, the are a multi-line text area the end-user can resize, very much like the comment fields here on HackerNews. I'm considering changing their background color and adding other visual distinctions to make clear their different purposes.
At first, I placed a simple text field on the toolbars of the word processor and the spreadsheet interfaces, but my initial testers thought they were a duplicated find/replace function and not an open ended LLM request field, despite a label and popup tool text saying otherwise.
So I moved them to be separate, independent resizable text areas. The end-users I have testing the interfaces realize they are LLM interfaces now, but are not yet realizing that the word processor and spreadsheet interfaces can co-author with them. They ask the LLMs how to use questions, rather than "would you make this change" requests. To address that, I'm adding a drawer of example videos next to the LLM text area, so they have use examples showing them how to use the interface. No amount of text seems to help, people just don't read it.
I was using Miro to make some diagrams for work recently and it popped up with a notice about their new AI assistant. I asked if it could write me a poem about gorrillas in French and it happily obliged. It was a good vibe. I have no idea what that has to do with software architecture though.
We could have the AI search added as a click able option or distinctly separated from the normal search. That would be the best of both worlds, low friction AI search, but not only AI search.
Not discussed in the article, but I think relevant, is the breakdown of search as a useful tool even on such venerated platforms as eBay, which has become similar to Facebook Marketplace in its vibes-based algorithm. Laser-focused search precision is a losing business model, apparently, and not the way of the future.
The clearer the design vocabulary you offer, the easier it is to unequivocally express what you want, the more obvious it becomes when you get something other than what you want.
It's sort of a shame because we end up with these tools that are designed to inhibit and take away user agency rather than extend and advance it.
"Behold, we have improved the hammer by integrating an intelligent advertisement selection algorithm. Hence, to someone equipped with only this tool, the solution to all problems will seem to be money."
If all you're able to express with clarity is purchase intent, how can you be anything other than a consumer?
You can purchase future income streams or a share of the revenue of an enterprise. Then you'd be an investor.
So an "investor" of your type is just someone who is more of a consumer. As they consume not only food or housing for example, but they also consume investment opportunities.
It's great. Going from 20 years of constant stress and scarcity mindset to knowing I could lose my job tomorrow and still sign a new lease without using up all my savings is wonderful. Financial security truly puts perspective on nearly all problems. Minor argument? Who the fuck cares I have a roof over my head. Someone's a jerk? So what, I can get services from someone else, I can afford it. My apartment explodes tomorrow? Oh well, I can put my family up in a hotel until we figure something out. Long term disability? Sucks but we have sufficient runway to figure out how to handle it.
Like, I'm so sick and tired of privileged people pandering, just acting like people suffering needlessly should just be more satisfied with the scraps we leave them.
The vast majority of humans experience all kinds of problems that would literally NOT EXIST with a little more money.
People have asked for this. Let me explain.
Incentives are important. They are what drive economic behavior. Companies tend to produce what the market incentivizes. The demand side of the market has shown an unwillingness to directly pay for much of consumer internet technology. Thus it has been produced in such a way as to monetize it in other ways. Ads, data aggregation and reselling, but mostly ads. Very few people are going to paid products that perform better and give users agency, thus incentivizing the market to continue to delivering what it is now, since that appears to be what users want.
The shoes cost 50$, so paying him $30 to repair them was an acceptable purchase.
Now the shoes cost $100, but nobody can afford to spend even the original $30 to repair them because they have no money. Also the shoe repair man can't run a business anymore because the shoes are borderline unrepairable, such that even if you replace the sole or any other part, the rest of the shoe is just as worn out and useless.
Most engineering effort the past 30 years has been in making things out of materials that are just barely adequate. "It takes an engineer to put together a bridge that just barely stays up" also means it takes a department of engineers to shave one cent off the BOM of these shoes that also happens to make them last half as long.
Which again is a "feature" of the design from the company's perspective.
"Now introducing ads to your paid service. Dont like ads? You're in luck, We just introduced ad free tiers! Just purchase produkt++ for an additional $19.99 a month"
Also because corporate software (ie. anything popular) had a tendency to start complicating the licensing terms. Sorry, that feature is not available in the Home edition. And nowadays you can't even buy a lot of software, you have to pay a recurring subscription.
It's the old Gabe Newell line about piracy being a service problem. If you make paying for something so much harder than not paying for it people will either pirate it or just not use it at all.
If your goal is to give users what they want, beware of confusing their actual wants with your preferred monetization method. Wanting the former isn't the same as wanting the latter.
How do you find out what people want? A good rule of thumb is to prefer asking them over trying to logic it out. Would most people answer "ads"? No, because they do not want ads.
But given a choice of paywalls or ads, most people opt for ads most of the time. Doesn’t mean they want ads, just that they apparently dislike ads less than actually paying.
I also don't think it's constructive to conflate providing a service with making a profit. Plenty of people are happy doing just the former. If someone want to make more money, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it's not a foregone conclusion that they do, or must, or that the service is contingent on it. Those are all decisions made by each individual provider.
Can confirm. I spent years in the late 2000's running a phpBB board to enable discussion on a niche hobby. I spent probably a few thousand dollars on it over several years, we eventually waned in traffic and gave it up as everyone was moving to reddit. I never saw a penny of profit from that, nor expected it: some of our older members were happy to kick some cash my way to offset server costs. As a result, we had a community that was robust, friendly, open to everyone and 100% free to use. No scummy ads, no tracking, no surveillance, no "sponsored posts," none of it. It was glorious and I miss it every day.
I would've happily taken donations to offset the costs, but I never saw it as a money-making operation. Nowadays it feels basically unheard of to do anything online without the expectation of making money.
I run multiple small sites for free, and do a number of other activities for free that someone might get paid for. But I know that I’m doing it because I want to and can stop anytime. Revenue also creates continuity by creating a financial obligation…even while it reduces the passion element of motivation.
In the case of Meta's properties, consumers do not have agency. They are locked in (through a friend-graph that they cannot export to a competitor) and monopoly abuse keeps killing viable alternatives (like the old stale Facebook purchasing the young fresh Instagram).
People have not asked for this. They have been enticed into a garden "for free" and then locked up inside.
It's getting increasingly evident that tech companies have stopped caring about what their users actually want to do, and instead are nudging/funneling them into doing what they want their users to do. For a while it was voice assistants. "Use Siri!!" "Use Assistant!" "Use Alexa!" "Use Cortana!" "No, really, please use it!" "We're begging you." "OK, we're making it more prominent so you accidentally use it." "We're now removing the other options so you have to use it!"
I expect the same cycle with AI. "PLEASE, USERS, you have to use this AI product! It is the current fashion, after all. We pay $billions for GPUs and the salaries of hundreds of engineers, and it's expensive. You simply must use it for everything!"
We get to buy the product someone is willing to make, not the product we want to buy. The product is often not "better" for the user, but for the company making it. And as a user you can just FEEL it dripping from every new thing. It's not appealing at all to me.
There must be an economics term that describes this. I've taken to calling it "supply side rules everything around me"
I begged the sales person who dug one up in a box in the back room without the pocket.
My guess is slapping an extra pocket on there let them justify increasing the cost and margins because "you're getting more!"
Youtube isn't mentioned in the piece but it's also one of the worst offenders of this. They shove so much "do you want to see this again?" or "for you" in the middle of your results it's crazy. Luckily using a search operator like ` after:[date]` still gets rid of it. I've noticed having to use operators on more and more sites to basically force them to not hand me random content back.
They're doing this with Skype too. It annoys me. I have a list of business contacts, and that's all I use it for. My friends are elsewhere. I don't want to talk about the weather or politics. I have specific people to talk or chat with for specific topics.
Microsoft, you are already trying to be my friend via Bing and whatever that is built right into Windows 11 already.
Rant finished. I guess I understand why they do that. If I only used Skype, and no other Microsoft products, how else would I discover all the wonderful experiences I could have with an LLM?
And change is inevitable, and how much money do I give Microsoft for this particular service to stay the same, etc., etc., etc..
There's the familiar "chat" interface that they are used to, and understand readily, which is used for legal R&D and new client on-boarding. But there are also traditional word processing and spreadsheet document authoring and editing, which also use that same "chat UI" - but that is not a conversational interface; requests to that interface cause modifications to the document, rewriting portions of the word processing or spreadsheet document. A third type of LLM integration is available that is a RAG type of interface for authored and uploaded documents, where the end-user is able to ask questions about the document with a generated subject matter expert in the document's topic (a word processor or spreadsheet). My fourth LLM integration has no interface, it makes an assessment of the end-user's familiarity with their goal, and adjusts the amount of help offered to the end-user.
I am currently in the process of adding textual dressing around these three LLM request interfaces, but users are too used to operating interfaces on instinct, and the second and third type of LLM integrations where the LLM is co-authoring a document with the end-user is getting scant use, they simply don't realize it can co-author with them, and try to use it like a Q&A interface and not an assistant who will change the document for them.
For example, is a RAG chatbot the right way to get the information they need from documents, or do they want executive summaries of the document from different points of view that they almost always need to consider it from?
Is a chat assistant that you have to talk to to make modifications to a document the right choice? Or would it be better to have the user highlight the text they want changed which then gives them the option to direct how to change it with natural language?
That's exactly what I have: the user selects what they want modified, uses the "chat text area" to request the change, the entire document is sent in (for prose consistency) with the selection identified and the change is performed. If no selection is, the change request is applied to the entire document in context-output-size aware chunks.
The RAG interface is not the only document query interface, but is the one preferred for finding information inside documents and discussing that information in large documents. My RAG implementation is a bit more than "just RAG", I use the document to generate a subject matter expert in the subject matter of the document, and that generated agent is who the end-user converses, along with the retrieved document information. So, in a way, my RAG is with the document, and an agent generated from the document, along with a context sensitive "professional communicator agent" whose job is to fill in the context breaks between the different RAG snippets, which reduces the fractured nature of the RAG snippets, lending towards better, deeper, more nunaced answers.
Users could also highlight the text they want changed, then skip the middleman by typing in the new text themselves. Not sure how to monetize this.
This is a very new and unfamiliar paradigm, and you're going to have to "train" people in how it works.
At first, I placed a simple text field on the toolbars of the word processor and the spreadsheet interfaces, but my initial testers thought they were a duplicated find/replace function and not an open ended LLM request field, despite a label and popup tool text saying otherwise.
So I moved them to be separate, independent resizable text areas. The end-users I have testing the interfaces realize they are LLM interfaces now, but are not yet realizing that the word processor and spreadsheet interfaces can co-author with them. They ask the LLMs how to use questions, rather than "would you make this change" requests. To address that, I'm adding a drawer of example videos next to the LLM text area, so they have use examples showing them how to use the interface. No amount of text seems to help, people just don't read it.
They give an option to disable it completely! Once again, my affection for Kagi is rewarded.
Toast, anyone?