[PebblesRox]

It's already bad enough that my toddler can order photo canvases of a picture of himself getting ketchup out of the fridge via the Google Photos app. (He even chose expedited shipping . . . to our old address!)

Fortunately we got a refund from customer service the first time. The second time, I saw the email soon enough to cancel within the 2 hour deadline. (This was after removing all our payment info from the phone, which was the only way I could see to enforce that he couldn't do it again, but then someone made a payment and ended up saving the payment method again.)

I feel like it's only a matter of time before it happens again; at least the address is correct now so we'd actually receive the item if we were unable to cancel/refund.

[kristopolous]

I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics.

They're the ones that will click on ads and "browse" a site. They interact in a much richer way than I do.

I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to.

I've been frequently flabbergasted how these obvious observations come across as novel to people I talk to, as if 2 year olds have their own email address and password.

I even heard someone say unboxing and cartoon videos "somehow" are popular among women in their 30s.

I mean come on now...

[TeMPOraL]

Oh my god. As a father of two small kids (4 y.o. and ~1.75 y.o), I've been watching this happen in front of me every day for years, yet somehow the implications never registered. Thank you for writing this - and yes, I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree.

Even though we're way below what seems to be average in terms of exposing kids to digital content, at this point my wife's digital activity on Spotify, YouTube, Netflix and Storytel is actually between ~30% (YouTube) to 95% (Spotify) the activity of our kids. Spotify only plays music they like to sing or dance to. Storytel is pretty much only ever playing kids' stories (to the point that even with kids asleep, we sometimes let those stories play as background noise). YouTube much less, plus I tend to yt-dlp any music/show we intend to play to kids often (which probably generates its own interesting telemetry stream, as we play those files from my wife's previous phone). Netflix... Netflix has Paw Patrol.

I bet that her advertising profile is in half really an advertising profile of our kids. And I imagine the effect is much, much stronger with moms that hand their phones to their toddlers (we don't).

On that note, I remember "learning" more than a decade ago that apparently casual games are a huge market, very popular with adult women. I kind of accepted it as fact, even though it went entirely against my life experience ("they must be right and I must be wrong, after all they've measured it, they're doing Data Science!" - thought the naive me, not yet aware just how much bullshit this "data science" is). But now I'm reconsidering - it would make much, much more sense if those results were actually coming from kids (up to teenage years) playing those games on their parents' computers / phones, logged in to their accounts.

EDIT: interesting corollary - IIRC, the thing about causal games and adult women came up around the time Zynga became a big deal, and was quoted to explain and justify investing in/developing these kinds of games. But if it's really just a misclassification - i.e. the market is real, but it's not the women after 30 that play those games, but their kids, then Zynga and all the follow-up companies were effectively targeting kids, while thinking (or pretending) they're targeting adults.

[kristopolous]

Right, the vast invisible army of 30-something suburban female gamers playing Roblox and Minecraft on weekdays between 3-5pm.

It's worth noting adult advertising fetches a higher rate than child advertising and ad networks will fill at a much greater rate, especially in RTB systems.

So even if they do realize it, it's um, better to stay quiet and pretend.

[TeMPOraL]

> Right, the vast invisible army of 30-something suburban female gamers playing Roblox and Minecraft on weekdays between 3-5pm.

Yeah, when you put it that way... I really feel ashamed now, because as I said, I actually believed that, back when it was not Minecraft and Roblox, but a some random mind-dumbingly stupid casual games. I explained it to myself as those women using those games to relax or wind down after a hard day of work (at home, at dayjob, or most likely both). It was almost believable with simple causal games - ones that you can pick up at any moment and play 5 or 15 minutes at a time.

Good point about advertising rates. This seems like a good explanation why this isn't talked about more.

[kristopolous]

> Yeah, when you put it that way... I really feel ashamed now, because as I said, I actually believed that,

Companies with millions in funding and probably hundreds of people were based on this assumption.

Irrational exuberance is complicated. Don't be hard on yourself

[bheadmaster]

> I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics.

Holy shit, you just blew my mind. This explains so much of the mainstream internet's degeneration into a family-friendly dumbed-down version of it.

The dangers of having big corporations raising a new generation of people (instead of their parents doing it) are even more concerning. I bet that's the exact reason we are moving towards a woke authoritorian dystopia.

[kristopolous]

That's not really what I meant. I was talking user flow, CTA placement, sizing, color, presentation medium (such as video versus text), length of text content (toddlers find lots of words less attractive than colorful drawings and big letters), ad placement and design, recommendation algorithms biasing towards repetition, whimsical animal and "America's funniest home videos" style content, animations, bright colors, things like that.

All these techniques capture the attention of children who then get miscategorized as their parents.

What you're talking about is companies trying to maximize their customer base by trying not to offend or alienate people. That makes things less direct, more bland and less specialized. That's because there's been efforts to decrease localization of international marketing and expand customer bases.

Starbucks, for instance, is so boring because it's identical in every country and thus caters to the sensibilities of everyone. They avoid shapes, flavors, numbers and colors that are off-putting in other cultures and use ingredients that can be globally sourced. That's just international industrial capitalism trying to be efficient.

The real problem is suburbia has been robbed of local color and all you have left there is Starbucks. It's a soulless corporate wasteland that totally sucks. I agree. That's a city planning and urban development problem.

[bheadmaster]

> That's not really what I meant.

I wasn't trying to mirror your opinions, I just gave my own thoughts.

If toddler's usage in analytics can drive UI design, I don't see why would it be implausible that it also drives content policies. I get reminded of it every time I open youtube from a fresh browser - all I get is a bunch of toddler-level videos with people doing stupid shit like spilling a barrel of hot chocolate on the table while shouting "CHOCOLATE!" in an obnoxious toddler-like manner.

[kristopolous]

Yeah it's freaking ridiculous.

There's an alternative world of frontends that don't suck. Check here

https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

[microtherion]

There may be a lot of truth to that, but I've absolutely seen women in that age group play games on their phones, e.g. Bejeweled, or, famously, Tetris at world record breaking skill levels: https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007...

I would not know about unboxing videos, but there are several cable channels that seem to show nothing but hours and hours of close ups of hands fondling more or less tasteful necklaces, and I'm pretty sure those do not cater to toddlers.

[kristopolous]

There's certainly women who play video games of all ages! Absolutely! That demographic bucket gets overrepresented and thus misrepresented as an artefact of how the data is collected because small children can't be easily extricated from the dataset

I'm sure there's many top female gamers. No question. (I don't play video games so excuse me ignorance on the details)

[chiggsy]

>I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to.

Christ, man, I can literally see it, seen it tons of times, and yet ... just wow.

[groestl]

This absolutely makes sense.

[nine_k]

Stop. Do you mean that the fridge has Google Photos app running? Or do you mean that your phone is not locked when given to the enterprising toddler in question?

[PebblesRox]

Sorry for the confusion, the fridge was just part of the photo he was looking at. We gave him the phone to look at photos, thinking he couldn’t make too much trouble with that app. But while looking at a photo of himself with ketchup, he managed to complete the ordering process for ordering a photo canvas - a feature of the photos app I had always ignored until I saw the email that the order had shipped.

[nine_k]

Marvel now at the streamlined ordering process, which even a toddler can complete successfully and in no time!

[joseda-hg]

I recently came across a review of a Samsung Smart fridge made by a non tech influencer, some of the things that grabbed my attention were:

- The fridge had both front and back cameras

- It had a microphone

- It could play music, which maybe was important if you considered it for a glorified kitchen tablet

- It could install regular android apps

- It could sync photos and notes

- It was compatible with the Uber app, so I have to assume you could actually have payment info in there

I have never bought a nice fridge and I will go out of my way to avoid pointless smart, so it really came as a surprise to me, but the situation seems posible and probably will happen to someone at some point

[utucuro]

The listed features are interesting, probably useful for a fridge IF by back camera, a camera that can show me the inside of the fridge is meant - I'd love being able to access that during shopping trips.

The rest are all potentially useful as well, but more important than any of these are security and longevity - a flagship phone from Samsung gets something like 5 years of updates if I recall right, and those updates are prioritized according to how premium the phone is - how far down the list are fridges? I would definitely want my fridge to last longer than 5 years and NOT be a security risk in my network.

[joseda-hg]

Yes, back camera allowed to view remotely the contents of the fridge and was able to be accessed from any smartphone connected

Apparently fridges get at a minimum 2 years of updates with Samsung, but after that no updates are guaranteed

[fennecfoxy]

I'm curious, how is your toddler using the Photos app? I won't launch into a spiel about giving devices to young children as I'm not a parent myself and never will be (rainbow month yeeeah boi)

But I do find it interesting to compare with my own upbringing. Seems kids are given relatively unfettered access to phones/tablets these days, proper ones with a regular OS. I suppose the upside is learning/becoming familiar tech stuff sooner, downside as they enter tween/teen years is probably social media :(

[PebblesRox]

We definitely relaxed our standards for kid #2 compared with kid #1 in terms of phone time.

Mainly he would watch photos and videos of himself and his big brother. We did not install any kid-specific apps and did not allow YouTube at that age.

He did enjoy Wordle - at his peak he knew how to type in around 8 different valid five letter words, which I thought was pretty impressive at age 2! His favorite was TRAIN.

[schmorptron]

I wouldve just had them change the shipping address, that sort of album / canvas is the stuff you as parents will be cackling over for decades to come :D

[PebblesRox]

Unfortunately it was too late to change the address by the time I discovered it, but we, uh, actually did order our own copy (from a much cheaper photo place) and it's currently hanging on the wall in our kitchen.

[TeMPOraL]

Assuming it doesn't completely blank out or disintegrate by then.

When it comes to durability, I have little trust in companies today, and the quality of techniques and materials they use - not in a hyper-optimized economy we have now. Especially when we're talking about prints ordered through a button in an app made by an advertising company, one that wants you to stay subscribed to their digital playground (instead of focusing on physical ownership of media, such as photo albums), one "products" (services, really) have a half-life on the same order as digital print/ad shops.

Nah, the very presence of this "feature" actually pushed me away from Google Photos. In a perfect world, it would make sense. In the real world, it's just first-party user interface spam.