Share this page!

Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
Twitter logo
May 30 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
I mis-clicked on one of my 150 open tabs and it happened to be a tab that's been open since 2019 with a paper that has a solution to the exact research problem I've been puzzling over today. This is the moment I've been waiting for and I've decided to never close any tabs again
If I never tweet again it's because I'm frantically switching between tabs trying to find Twitter
Some people remember where they were when they heard they were admitted to their dream school. I remember where I was when I heard about Command + Shift + T
Come to this thread for the relatable tab experiences, stay for the replies from people who've leaned into the tab insanity and use software to manage thousands of open tabs
I didn't know about this feature! Who needs discoverable user interfaces when you can just hope for your tweets about your struggles to go viral and wait for someone to clue you in 😆
Writing this thread stirred up buried memories. My first contribution to open source about 20 years ago was to add tabbed browsing to an obscure but neat browser. The developers rejected it because they felt tabs were likely a passing fad 😂 (History is obvious with hindsight!)
I first experienced tabs in a browser called Phoenix which later became Firefox. It felt empowering to be part of a community of hobbyists helping make browsers better in the web's relatively early days. Today's landscape of tech giants was nowhere on the horizon back then.
Ha, turns out there's a paper filled with charts and tables about our tab hoarding behaviors (of course there's a paper!). Here are the top six reasons people say they never close those tabs. Check, check and check. dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.114…
The researchers detail many things that browsers could be doing to ease tab overload. I know browser makers are keenly aware that tab management is a big pain point... I wonder why they haven't done more to relieve the misery. Browser people reading this, any pointers?
A couple recurring q's in the replies:
–Tabs survive browser restarts! (Even if the browser restarts empty you can bring back your tabs with Cmd+Shift+T! Did I just change your life?)
–I do close tabs sometimes, but this one managed to hide, which made the moment extra special.
Oh, like Braess's paradox but for tabs! Strange but plausible.

"Braess's paradox is the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Arvind Narayanan

Arvind Narayanan Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @random_walker

Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
May 17
There was a Slack-like app long before Slack, called Yammer. I was avid user back in 2009. It seemed poised to be the future of workplace communication. But it didn't find critical mass because meeting culture was too strong. Many good ideas fail because the world isn't ready.
Huh, apparently Microsoft (which bought Yammer) integrated it into Teams, whose usage exploded during the pandemic. So Yammer lives after all! It just had to wait 10 years. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yammer
Incidentally, this is why hundreds of efforts to build an "email killer" have all failed. The problem with email isn't bad UX, but the fact that the UX has to cater to all kinds of uses. If you try to build a general-purpose email killer you'll replicate all the problems with it.
Read 5 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
May 12
Here's how a seemingly trivial design change can totally alter the character of a social media app.

A few years ago Twitter changed the relatively neutral ⭐ button to a positive ❤️. Ironically, this may have worsened Twitter's tendency to propagate outrage. Why is that?
The emoji shapes behavior. When you see a tweet you appreciate, if the tweet is positive, you ❤️ it.

If it's negative—outrage or bad news—a ❤️ seems inappropriate. So people are slightly more likely to retweet to express appreciation.

That makes negative content more viral.
The nature of virality is that if negative content is even, say, 10% more likely to be retweeted, the tweets that make the rounds will be overwhelmingly negative, because that 10% compounds with every retweet.
Read 9 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
May 11
A new study finds 3,000 websites on which third-party tracking companies scoop up what you type into forms in real time — even if you never hit submit. This happens on about 1,800 websites for E.U. users too, likely in violation of the GDPR. wired.com/story/leaky-fo…
Here's the paper: homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~asenol/leaky-…
by @asusenol, Gunes Acar, @MathiasOZ, @fborgesius. They say they were inspired by this investigation by @suryamattu & @kashhill: gizmodo.com/before-you-hit…
Great example of an interplay between investigative journalism and academic research!
The trackers scooping up datea include Meta and Tiktok. Some of the worst offenders were "session replay" companies that I've written about before in collaboration with @s_englehardt and Gunes Acar (one of the authors of the present study).
Read 9 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
May 10
Cryptocurrency is unusual among scams in that while it isn't a scam by itself, it's an excellent platform for scams. Even if the socially beneficial uses never materialize, the perpetual abundance of new scams alone will sustain the "value" of crypto for the foreseeable future.
Great question. I do think cryptocurrency has many features that are exceptionally attractive to scammers. There's the obvious stuff: anonymity/pseudonymity, and the fact that it's already money, not something physical that needs to be moved. But also…
There's a lot of genuine technical innovation in this space, and non-experts can't easily evaluate what's actually innovative, so scammers can plausibly pretend to have invented remarkable tech ("whitepaper capitalism").
Read 8 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
May 9
Research on the harms of social media — mental health, disinformation, radicalization, echo chambers… — has gone astray by asking the wrong question: "has social media worsened the problem?" It's a tempting but meaningless question that leads to dangerously wrong policy advice.
It is meaningless because social media is not adopted in a vacuum. It’s like asking whether car adoption made roads more dangerous. Maybe, maybe not; but cars reshaped everything about transportation (and neighborhoods and societies). There’s no way to set up a proper comparison.
It doesn’t matter if social media has made these problems worse or not. Banning social media is not a realistic option; no one is advocating for that. So the answer to this question is not useful or actionable for policy making.
Read 8 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
Mar 8
In 2019 I was part of a large-scale Princeton study of dark patterns that has since influenced both the academic literature and the regulatory debate. arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07032…
Today I want to talk about how we nearly squandered that impact because of a 2-word change.
When drafting the paper we decided that the term Dark Pattern was too buzzwordy and didn’t have a clear definition, so we would have to introduce a new term with a more precise definition. (We picked “Adversarial Design Pattern” ... rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?)
Reviewers hated it. Not having much of a choice, we grudgingly switched to the standard term. In retrospect we realized that saved us. I’m reminded of this whenever I accidentally find a relevant and insightful paper that I’d missed for years because it used a nonstandard term.
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(