Opinion

A less affectionate approach to technology

It’s almost impossible to escape WhatsApp and very difficult to get rid of Instagram. For many, it’s also undesirable. Friends, relatives, loved ones, and the entire presence of many businesses are only available on one or the other (or both).

In 2022, when I wrote about a “more affectionate approach” to technology (pt_BR), I had recently returned to using these and other commercial platforms. I lowered my defenses in an attempt to be more present, to participate more.

The problem with companies like Meta is that every concession on our part is exploited to the fullest.

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Leave our UI alone

It’s not new to me to feel uneasy when I find out some software I use has just gone through a “major update.”

Take the case of the Jellyfin app for Roku OS.

On March 26th, a major update — version 3.0.0 — was released, which the developers themselves dubbed as “😵‍💫The ‘Will Someone Please Explain To Me What Is Going On’ release 🤷”. Not a great sign. According to the changelog, it was based on a fork that’s quite different from the previous stable version it replaced.

I don’t follow the development of the Jellyfin app for Roku OS, so I got a bit of a shock when I turned on the TV and saw this update. It’s, well… different. The elements are all crammed on the screen, the exposed filters are way too distracting (and the “not played” filter is never remembered), and overall, it just looks off — subjective, I know.

By the way, I found out today that the old app was re-released on the Roku store as Jellyfin Legacy on April 1st. What a relief to go back to the old UI! The reason for keeping it available is that version 3.0.0 doesn’t work with older versions of the Jellyfin Server (10.7 and below). I couldn’t help but wonder if someone who’s been running a three years old outdated Jellyfin Server version will have the foresight to check the project’s repository when faced with an incompatible Roku OS app update, only to eventually discover that there’s a new — actually, the old — app available for download.

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Back in the day, I used to get excited about “major updates.” “Ooh, check out those Windows 7 visual effects!” “App XYZ is now easier to use!” and so on.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve changed. I tend to think that’s not really the case. There was a lot of room for improvement back then, and developers and designers, alongside us users, were all learning how to navigate new digital interfaces for a wide range of everyday activities. Today, it feels like most UI and UX changes are done for their own sake with little reasoning or obvious benefit to the end user.

Apple has been on this trend for a while now; the Settings apps debuting in macOS 13 Ventura, in 2022, was the pinnacle (so far) of this dumb, even hostile, trend. (Here’s a good analysis.) The possibility of a complete system overhaul this September, as the rumor mill suggests, already fills me with a huge sense of dread.

It’s interesting how this issue affects both proprietary software (like Apple’s) and open-sourced ones (like Jellyfin), though it feels like it happens more often with proprietary/closed software.

Is it too much to ask that they don’t mess with what isn’t broken? Or — even better — that they favor iterative improvements over abrupt changes?

Screen time and face-to-face conversation

I spent almost 11 hours last Sunday staring at screens, not counting the TV. Between my phone, tablet, and computer, I ended the so-called day of rest with tired eyes, a fried brain, and a bit of frustration.

Not all those hours—an excess even for me, who works looking at screens—were wasted. I spent a good 40 minutes, for example, talking to my parents via video call. It’s hard to think of better uses for the screens that surround us than that.

The problem was the other 10 hours, or most of them.

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US$ 30 million to reinvent the wheel

I have been thinking and reading quite a bit about Free Our Feeds, a campaign to “save social media from billionaire capture”.

Free Our Feeds consists of a group of experts willing to raise USD 30 million via donations, over a three-year period, to create a foundation and “[…] turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app.”

It’s a noble goal, but not very original. On Bluesky’s website, one of the first sentences on the cover says:

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Meta’s moderation policy dismantling will hurt, but it can be good in the long run

Meta’s announcement on Tuesday (7th) that, among other actions, it will end partnerships with fact-checking agencies in the US, replacing them with “community notes,” and relax restrictions on certain types of content, has alarmed many people.

In a somewhat convoluted way and not without causing damage, this might lead to a good outcome (for us) in the long run.

If we take X (former Twitter) as an example, the relaxation of moderation there accelerated the discarding of Elon Musk’s platform as a habitable place, leading to losses in revenue, users, and relevance in public debate.

It would be great if this were repeated with Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. Even if so, we will have to deal with three inevitable and worrying consequences:

  1. Targeted campaigns of hate, harassment, and the occurrence of crimes (as considered outside of the US, such as racism and homophobia in Brazil) are likely to increase. It will be up to the police and the judiciary to increase their attention and be quicker in their actions to mitigate the damage.
  2. Fact-checking agencies will suffer a financial blow. Meta is the largest funder of many of them; some were created solely or primarily to act in the company’s program.
  3. Mark Zuckerberg’s boot-licking Trump, combined with an explicit threat to the sovereignty of Latin American justice and European legislation by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s vice-president of global affairs, could have serious systemic effects, such as on commercial and diplomatic relations and tariff policies between those countries and the US.

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It would be naive to expect a mass exodus of users from Meta’s platforms in response to the dismantling of moderation, although searches for deleting accounts increased sharply. Less naive would be to witness a more incisive reaction from governments and companies committed to values opposed to those made explicit by Meta’s leadership.

How about abandoning their presence on Instagram and Facebook or, at the very least, stopping injecting money into Meta’s advertising engine? If Meta’s business is to dominate our attention, nothing hurts the company more than ignoring it.

On an individual level, abandoning ship is a more difficult, less obvious decision. I should keep my Instagram account — it’s where loved ones post updates — and I won’t block Threads on the fediverse, although I don’t condemn or criticize those who do/will do so. That crowd of “preventive fediblock” to Threads had some reason.

I went all in spreadsheets for personal finance

The obscure, weird app that I had been using for five years to record my financial transactions failed to import data from the old phone to the new one. I took this as sign: it was time to move onto a better solution.

Personal finance doesn’t need to be complex, yet it’s only useful with a pinch of automated calculations, consolidations, and charts. I started researching for a new app with low requirements: something simple, that allowed me to enter my transactions (expenses and income) and review them at the end of each month or specific period.

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