Lately I have been increasingly frustrated with the user experience (UX) decisions being made by big tech. Etsy and Amazon both have earned my ire in the past week, so I've gotta rant about it.
I'm going to start with Etsy. A while back, late last year, they stopped allowing orders to be tracked on the mobile web. They did this to force people to use their app, but thankfully requesting the desktop site worked to get around it. At some point they reversed that decision because tracking works on mobile again, but their emails with order updates now require going to their site to actually see the details. The order receipts show that you've made a purchase with so-and-so, your shipping address, the cost breakdown, and what card you paid with. That's it though, there's no text listing of the product name nor even a thumbnail of the product image. Don't know which order that receipt's for? Gotta click the view order button to be tracked and redirected to their site. Yay!
Etsy's shipping notification email is slightly better; it does show the items, but it does not contain the carrier nor tracking number. The only option is to be tracked by clicking the track order button and being redirected to their site. I wish that independent sellers had better options than Etsy and eBay, because these sites are making searching and ordering so difficult that it's becoming untenable. Their search has gotten infinitely worse, showing results for partial word matches instead of querying the whole submission. "The Who" pulls up a hot mess of things, so then I tried "The Who Keith Moon" and it brought up an even bigger mess of things, including moon products. Matching 1 individual keyword when there's 4 is so ridiculous. Again, they've made it so difficult to search that it's untenable.
Amazon has gotten really awful in the past week as well. First, they changed all of their emails to generic product info, with zero information as to what the item is. Them: "Your lawn and garden item has shipped!" Well, what the fuck item is that? I didn't order anything for outside. The only way to find out was - you guessed it - clicking their tracking link to be taken to their site. The item in question? A fruit fly trap for indoors.
Now Amazon and AI. Ugh. They tried to push Rufus on me randomly for months, but closing the popup sidebar once when it happened made it stop. They've recently rebranded Rufus to Alexa for Shopping and the sidebar popup is no longer optional. If you load a page, it opens. You can close it, but it'll reopen on the next page, or if you refresh the current page. Not only is it unacceptable to keep shoving this ridiculous LLM bot into my face despite the fact that I have never once used an Alexa product period, it is doubly unacceptable that the damn sidebar takes up a full third of the screen, making the product columns condensed and harder to navigate. At first I tried to use uBlock Origin to block the whole element, but they have coded it in a way that they use a variable for the width of the thing, and it's not a standalone class. When I tried to do it with Stylus, I got the chat to disappear, but due to that coding, the sidebar itself was still there. After about 5 minutes of using the site with this thing continually taking over my screen, I searched DuckDuckGo to see if there was any way to disable it. There is no way to do so within your Amazon account, but thankfully there is a browser extension called Adios Alexa for Shopping available for Chromium and Firefox. Bless the person who created it because it's the only thing keeping that site usable for me.
Many of us know that tracking and ads are big tech's primary goals at this point, but the lengths that they are going to in order to juice people for their data is astounding. Is the end goal of making websites unusable to try to force people into mobile apps for the advanced data mining they enable? I don't know. It definitely could be, because unless they're having AI code everything with no sort of human testing of the changes, none of it makes any sense.
I am trying to break away from Amazon, but having a disability that makes catching covid life-threatening for me, simply going out to run errands is not really an option. As for Etsy, I'll have to continue wading through miles of shit to find the great shops buried in it.
GenAI is trash. ChatGPT is trash. Copilot is trash. Every other GenAI product is trash. You suck and you should feel bad about it and the fact that you are stealing from me. You should apologize to the world and then self-destruct for the good of humanity.