This one caught me completely off guard when opening YouTube the first time on an iPad: Accidentally clicked on a wrong button and got stuck in a "please subscribe to premium" modal. No amount of swiping or tapping outside the popup would help, only thing left was killing the entire app.
This experience put a major dent in my perception of the "Apple has the most intuitive UI" narrative.
The YouTube app has non-standard and nonsensical UX on every platform. It's Google's fault, nothing to do with Apple.
Case in point: The YouTube app for Apple TV. Everything (pausing, playing, changing subtitles) has been done opposite to the standard player found in every other app. You cannot use the main button to pause and resume, for example. Recently they broke swiping. Normally, you swipe the remote to navigate between UI elements such as squares in a grid or in lists with a light touch. It's very fluid, like a touch screen. But the YT app has added severe "inertia" to touch gestures, and you now have to "fling" your finger on the remote trackpad to navigate. Everything feels syrupy and stuck.
YouTube and Amazon's Prime TV app are the two worst apps I've ever used on Apple TV. I believe they both use some non-native UI toolkit that doesn't respect native OS conventions and doesn't even try to. Pretty incredible given the size and budgets of these companies.
The YouTube app does the exact same thing on Android. I ran into this just yesterday on my gf's phone, as I'd just added her to my family plan, tried to verify the settings on her phone, and it trapped me on an upsell screen for YT Premium that I had to kill the app to get out of.
This is already a problem with things like Mastodon - as soon as you subscribe to some more "spammy" accounts such as news outlets, all the other content is drowned out.
So yes, having kind of re-ranking _algorithm_ can be a good thing, whether we like it or not.
What's really worrying is seeing medical professionals starting to rely on these tools.
My wife had a pretty bad cold during pregnancy and our GP proceeded to prescribe her cough syrup with high alcohol content, because that was what ChatGPT told him to prescribe. We only noticed it once she took the first dose and spit it out again...
I think Mattermost lost a lot of instance admins' trust when they recently decided to update the server to limit access to old messages without good reason. On self-hosted instances!
That's a shame, I interviewed there once, decided not to take it but it was one of the few places I could have seen myself working at, they seemed like decent folks trying to build something worthwhile.
I know of this one [1], a 1000W space heater with integrated cryptominer. Looks kike you can actually buy it now. Not sure how much the mined crypto offsets the heating costs though.
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