• Dæmon S.@calckey.world
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    5 hours ago

    @[email protected] @[email protected]

    If it’s opt-in it may as well not exist

    Just because if it were opt-in, people wouldn’t have chosen to activate it, and fewer people would use it and the graph line wouldn’t go up for the shareholders to appreciate? Then, maybe, just maybe, it would be quite a strong evidence that this isn’t really something that the users want, don’t ya think?

    For whatever reason, they have decided it’s important.

    There’s the reason, right above this paragraph: one can only achieve what people would certainly refuse, if they pushed it onto people by use of force (not necessarily physical force, but, for example, dark pattern is a technical means of “force”).

    A fox can’t convince the roosters to become her food, if the roosters were to have a stake on deciding in this regard, less roosters would become a tasty dinner for the cute fox, because becoming a tasty dinner isn’t exactly a demand from roosters. Hence why the fox must grab the roosters, but in this case the fox gives them an option to escape from her paws.

    Ah, notice your own phrasing: “They have decided”. Who have decided? Not the user, not the party interested in their own UX/UI, but the very archontic architects of a kind of digital apparatus we’ve been compelled to use for participating in this digital realm of society (risking social ostracism if we don’t), the World Wide Web.

    And when a decision is made upon someone, without regard for the very someone upon which the decision is being made, even when there’s some kind of “opting out” from the object of decision, we had a name for that: it was called “non-consensual relationship”.

    • Ulrich@feddit.org
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      5 hours ago

      Just because if it were opt-in, people wouldn’t have chosen to activate it

      Because people overwhelmingly do not change any defaults whatsoever, regardless of what they like or want.

      If you put a button in the settings that did nothing but automatically generate a $5 bill, no one would click that either.

      • Dæmon S.@calckey.world
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        5 hours ago

        @[email protected] @[email protected]

        Because people overwhelmingly do not change any defaults whatsoever

        Most roosters wouldn’t normally seek the paws of the fox to be hugged by, what an astonishing news!

        You see, that’s exactly what plays favorably for things pushed with “opt-out” mechanisms, anything. If people are less likely to change the settings to better enhance their UX (be it due to a lack of knowledge, a lack of proactive pursuit or because they deem their current settings “good enough”), this means people would be more likely to have the clankers shoved down their throats if said clankers were to be part of default settings.

        In fact, if settings would very likely go unchanged, then Mozilla could push anything, absolutely anything under they will, “shall be the whole of the Law” with the legally-required “opt-out” mechanisms in place.

        In the foreseeable future, we’d have Firefox as a new “Agentic Browser” where a clanker does all the tiring and utterly boring effort of “browsing the web” as the user watches their credit card being depleted by prompt injections carefully placed amidst Unicode exploits across the web by scammers. But, hey, let us not worry, there’s always a button to turn it off! 😄

        • Ulrich@feddit.org
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          3 hours ago

          Most roosters wouldn’t normally seek the paws of the fox to be hugged by, what an astonishing news!

          Whoosh. The point is “the roosters” don’t seek anything at all. It could be 50 lbs. of delicious cow shit, but if you don’t put it down in front of them, they’re not going to go looking for it.

          Please read my comments in their entirety before replying.