I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.
you gotta indoctrinate them while they’re young & impressionable so that they will more easily accept your biases as reality;
Lol and social media companies are just such complete white knights too and would never engage in such tactics.
Not really, it’s just phrased differently to the usual signup pitch, they’re putting in a middle ground between full “premium” subscribers (whatever that is) and public access with tracking and ad metrics.
Companies need revenue to operate. They get that revenue from advertising data and selling ad slots, or subscriptions. Whether they actually cease all tracking and ad metrics when you subscribe is something I’d doubt though, and that could be a case for the legal system if they didn’t do what they claim.
Personally, this behaviour is the point where I would not consider the site to be valuable enough to bother with.
There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.
They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to them. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they amplify their tiny innate magical abilities up to become a Pretty Good Magician™. So while all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, they’re making magical subroutines and utility functions and spawning recursive spells without halting checks and generally causing havoc.
It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work
Interfaces can be needlessly complex regardless of being flat or skeuomorphic.
But flat interfaces still require mental effort to parse. Especially when the interface is complex and/or crowded and you’re trying to pick out active UI elements amongst decorations like group boxes/panels.
Essentially, flat interfaces are currently popular because of touchscreen devices. Touchscreen devices have limited space and thus need simplistic UI elements that can be prodded by a fat finger on a small screen.
But I don’t need a flat touchscreen-friendly interface on my non-touch dual 24" monitors with acres of screen real estate. I need an interface that nicely separates usable UI elements from the rest of the application window. That means 3D hints on a 2D screen, which allows my monkey-brain with five million years of evolved 3D vision the opportunity to run my “click the button” mental command as a background process.