I love Instagram as much as everyone else. I carefully curate and check the feeds of the people I follow every day, and try hard not to waste the day.
My favorite follower is an adorable corgi puppy named Parsnip. My friend’s dog, Parsnip, has little adventures every day that are described in haiku. And to view that haiku every day, I have to click the dreaded “Read More…” link.
Instagram always hides the last 10 syllables behind the link. The reason is a mystery. But I never once “didn’t want to see more.” I always want to see everything.
This seems to be a common social media symptom. Facebook and Twitter routinely create ‘See More’ buttons. I’ve seen Facebook use the “See more…” link to hide a single word. When it comes to Twitter, under what circumstances would you not want to read the entire tweet? A tweet is only 280 characters long. Is there a need to reduce it further here?
very simple request
If you search for “MLB rankings,” a single division appears. You have to click “More…” to see what I asked for: the rankings.
Social media seems determined to show users what they don’t want to see, and not show them what they want to see. For example, I want to read all comments on a post at once. I don’t want to read only ‘relevant’ comments. I always want to read all the comments.
This morning, I posted a video of my son playing t-ball on Facebook, and I received a notification that a friend had replied to the comment I left. After receiving the notification, I had to click five times to see the comment.
Some posts may have thousands of comments, requiring a lot of scrolling. In such cases, it would be good to have a “View more comments…” link at the bottom. Or how about always showing all comments only on friends’ posts and not in group discussions? It’s strange that a site is the one that decides that it doesn’t want to see someone’s comments, or that it only reads a third of all the comments that appear.
Most feeds show ‘recommended posts’ from people who haven’t even subscribed. Sometimes I come across an account I want to follow, but most of the time I only want to see posts from people I actually follow.
Of course, it’s nice to see videos in the feed, but I want the videos to disappear when I close the feed or scroll past it. I don’t want it to shrink to a small window at the bottom of the screen and continue playing. Closing does not mean ‘reduce the window size and continue playing the video’, but actually closes.
I wish this feature was somehow an option for users to disable. Even after looking through the settings, I can’t find a way. What if we could make it easy to turn on or off whether recommended posts are displayed? Instead of forcing ‘Relevant Comments’ to be the default, why not make ‘View All Comments’ a permanent setting? Who determines ‘relevance’? Obviously not the user.
Not to mention web pages that automatically play videos with sound.
Annoying design
The most frustrating thing of all is social media deciding whose posts you see and whose posts you see. It’s not uncommon to go to George’s feed and think, “Hmm, I haven’t seen any of George’s posts lately” and then find a bunch of old posts. For some unknown and incomprehensible reason, George’s posts are no longer “relevant” to you. ‘It was determined that there was no such thing.
I would pay to see every post from everyone I follow, if only in chronological order. With all the comments.
Advertisements are okay too. In fact, it’s not a bad idea that most social networks try to show you ads based on your interests and browsing history. Ads are often intrusive and obnoxious, but the new way the site displays them isn’t a bad thing. Most social media platforms display clearly marked ads as a normal part of the feed. This method works well. The same goes for ads that stick in your browser as you scroll through articles. This is thanks to the hard work of many web designers.
However, all of this stimulation is, of course, a result of the characteristics of the web. The not-so-subtle superpower of web pages is that they can basically do anything you ask them to do. When you click on a link, you are at the mercy of the page designer. Browsers can support a lot of things, especially blocking horrible pop-up windows, but it’s not in their power to force sites to disable user interface ‘features’ that make the browsing experience unpleasant.
There may be reasons why social sites think shorthand features like “Read More…” links are a good idea. It’s hard to understand, but someone clearly seems to think it’s worth it. But ultimately, it is the user who thinks and makes the choice. What users want to see is not experts or Silicon Valley user interface designers. The choice must be made by the user.
We know that all of these are real problems. However, individuals should at least be able to choose how their personal feeds are displayed so that they can see cute puppy photos every day.
editor@itworld.co.kr
Source: www.itworld.co.kr
