Hello, and good day for you who reads what I write here. I have found writing as a good and casual way to remain creative, even with diminishing free time for more elaborate works. I have talked about this before, and I still want to draw something soon, but right now, words will have to suffice.
Probably, if you're reading this leaflet, you are tech-savvy enough to know how internet works. At the very least, you know how to protect yourself from scams, phishing and other unwholesome sites. These skills were probably obtained with years, perhaps decades of internet usage, so much so that it became second nature.
So, what makes me dedicate a couple minutes of my life writing this text? It's when you create a new account in any site.
You probably have a Bluesky account. Also, you probably have a Google account. And many other accounts in mainstream platforms and services. Probably you have them for so long, that they have been configured to suit your taste. But it just takes creating a brand new account on those same services to see how terrible the "welcome party" is.
I had to create a secondary Google account, separate from my main, to deal with work-related stuff. I don't really have a choice, since I require access to Google Docs to contribute to the workflow. And it was so miserable.
All the AI toggles were on. All the configurations were optimized to introduce AI as the tireless helper that you so desperately need. All the opt-out toggles were on by default, obviously - stuff that are very well hidden under several layers of configuration, and all pertaining to stuff like AI and telemetry.
Of course, Google is not the only culprit here. If you create any new account on any new site, you're almost immediately served all flavors of AI and amenities, or with extremely joyless algorithm pulls - defaults set by the site developers who think they know what the average person likes - that you have no choice other than find and mirror all your configurations from account A to account B, a task that may take more than 15 minutes if you're configuring several Google Docs preferences like I did.
Most accounts I've created are older than 8 years, and all the added features in this period felt gradual, with plenty of time to check them and toggle them off if you didn't like them. Creating a brand new account basically ignores this gradual introduction, throws the new user into this new default and hopes they understand everything.
In other words, while games have self-contained and contextualized tutorial areas and limited maps that can be explored slowly as the player comprehends the systems behind it, the same cannot be said from sites and social media platforms, which are designed to maximize retention and give everything to the user from the very start.
Now, I am fully aware that games and service sites are two different beasts, with very different purposes, goals and intention. But this analogy simply serves to show how daunting it can be to join, for the first time, a site that everyone is using, and why a full migration from one platform to another is never possible - even partial migrations generate attrition that may hinder adoption.
I say, it's not easy to learn the intricacies of every site and every system out there, so this is particularly difficult to me. And more and more people see themselves having to juggle more than one account in the same site or service, due to the advantages of separating what you do (organization, curation, increased anonymity etc.)
I don't like this paradigm of humans needing to accommodate for machines, and I believe it should be the other way around. But as long as those systems are crafted by people who think about the machines first and humans second, I don't see this happening anytime soon.