Meta has announced the release of its Meta AI app. This is a trend all of these LLM players are doing. I’d expect it generates more traffic since it’s easier for a user to access ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. via its companion app instead of using the web interface. Also, from a user perspective it’s easier to upload a photo from your camera roll and using your smartphone’s microphone as well feels more natural.

I think about how much more a LLM knows about me compared to a traditional¹ search engine. I provide the llm way more information compared to a search engine since I use it way more interactively. A search engine does not provide me with results based on a previous query. The queries are always isolated and not based on each other². That’s different with llms. I could ask for a list of restaurants in my area. And then follow up with filters for this list, e.g. asking for restaurants (from the initial list) that are open this evening and provide vegan dishes. Using a search engine, I’d start with the same first query, asking for a list of restaurant recommendations, but then I would look at the recommendations one by one by myself. I definitely could also ask the search engine in the first place for “a list of vegan restaurants” but as soon as I’d ask for “a list of vegan restaurants opened tonight” some - if not all - search engine won’t be able to provide me with valid results. Thus, the llm learns more from me than the search engine (in this example, it would know that I might eat a restaurant tonight). This is just a simple example but I think interacting with the llm let them learn so much more from us than we think. Probably, you can compare it to humans interacting with each other. If you have a conversation, reacting on the things the other person is saying, you learn more than just telling / listening without a reaction.

The article by Jayden Milne about YouTube’s change in videos on its frontpage and it’s current HN thread made me think about the times a good User Interface and User Experience is traded for profit. Reading the comments on HN, it looks like everyone is dissatisfied and annoyed by the way YouTube is changing over the years. Important things are shorts, bad recommendations, ads, and of course the work against ad blockers like ublock. Back in the days, YouTube was a content platform. Nowadays, YouTube’s number 1 goal is to sell advertisement spots and show them to as many people as possible. Obviously, there’s some kind of conflict of objectives. They want the user’s to stay on the site, watch their favorite YouTubers for many hours and at the same time deliver ads and recommend videos the user inwardly doesn’t want to watch. Let them watch what they want is not as lucrative as if they showed the most ad-suitable content. Showing and recommending more ad-suitable content might lose users and clicks over time. There’s the typical balancing between two worlds.

I don’t like blog posts without a date. For me, this is bad UX. There’s no reason why one would not provide a date at the top of the post.

1. As a reader, I always want to know if the webpage i’m looking at is up to date.
2. If it’s some kind of tutorial I want to know, if it is already out of date.
3. When I visit a blog, I want to know if the blog is still active by looking at the most recent article.

Nothing else.