Comment by robinsonb5
2 months ago
That immediately made me think of the digital TV switchover. The elderly father of a friend of mine would spend much of his time in front of the TV, and could operate it without assistance, thanks to the simple 1:1 mapping between buttons and functions.
After the digital switchover, there was now a set-top box, and electronic program guide and three-figure channel numbers thrown into the mix, as well as stateful aspect such as whether the TV was set to AV or still trying to use its now-obsolete tuner.
For someone with poor eyesight, limited feeling in his fingers and limited ability (and admittedly willingness, too) to build a mental model of how the menus worked and how they can be navigated, it spelled the end of his unsupervised access to TV.
The big difference for me between database-query-driven and algorithmically-driven is that the latter makes it very hard to know when you've completed an exhaustive search. Indeed for the likes of meta and tiktok that's a feature, not a bug, since their goal is to keep you engaged and plugged into "their" content forever.
I have a "Roku TV". It has many pointless problems. But the biggest is that it takes a very long time to turn on. If you turn it on by remote control, there is no indication that anything has happened until the TV finally starts showing something. You just have to hope that the signal got through. It's fairly frequent that we fail to turn the TV on because we assume that it just isn't done getting ready to turn on yet.
You can avoid this by using the physical power button, which is conveniently located behind the TV. It will still take forever to turn on, but there's no ambiguity over whether you've started the process.
I still have trouble believing the device was allowed to reach customers in this state.