> Computational agents (...) conserve the ultimate scarce resource: our attention. Many systems seem to have computational power asymmetry as their fundamental principle: as little human contact on the system's side as possible; as much human contact on the user's side as possible.
That's the key thing nobody is telling people about the so-called "attention economy": it's whole point is to make things as inefficient as possible - because money is made on the friction. In order to make money off attention, companies need to capture it (thereby making you spend it on something else than what you wanted to). To make more money, they need that attention to last longer (thereby making you spend more time, and/or spend it more often, on things that make them money).
Seen this way, it's clear why services hate end-user automation: their whole business is causing the very friction the users would like to automate away.
Another element is that time is the ultimate zero-sum, nonfungible, rivalrous resource.
Time spent on FB is time not spent on another site. And the higher-friction FB can make activities (to the pain point of driving away users), the better for FB.
There's a similar notion in other areas, and one of the most ridiculously malevolent examples I can think of is a brick-and-mortar sales promotion gimmick: a furniture store would run a midsummer sales event on a weekend where every family visiting the store would receive a free gallon of ice cream.
Because if you've just put a gallon of ice cream in your trunk, you can't visit another furniture store, you've got to head home to put it in the freezer. And time not spent in a competitor's furniture store is time not spent assessing and purchasing their products.
(That leverages the sunk cost fallacy as well, among others.)
I tried to find an example of the promotion online, but couldn't. I'm not sure what the specific mechanics were, and it may have been an unadverised deal.
So, family appears at strore, is unexpectedly gifted a gallon of ice cream, and finds they have to head home so as not to "waste" it. (What is actually being wasted is the comparison-shopping opportunity.)
Hrm... Maybe this was on an economics podcast / programme ... possibly Freakonomics. I'll see if I can't turn it up.
One of several possible responses, yes. Better, offer to hold (and refrigerate) the ice cream until the customer is ready to pick it up, as that would entice them to the store twice.
This motivation doesn't seem to have much to do with the friction that banks introduce.
My bank is not showing me ads (or at least, not paid ads - they advertise their own services). The friction comes from the authentication process. I must produce a username, then a password, then a personal secret (a relative's middle name), then I have to cross the room and get this device, activate it, key in a PIN, and read an access code from the device's display, that I have to type into the browser.
The password and the relative's middle name amount to the same thing; it's just a longer password.
I'm OK with the device - "something you have". It's annoying, but it's the only bit of robust security in this loop.
I'm OK with the username/password ("something you know"), although I question the value of the password - it amounts to just an extension of the username. The middle-name business is just silly. And of course, the password I use is 12 characters long, and I have to look it up in a password safe, because it's not memorable.
I can't see what possible benefit there could be to this bank (a very large international bank) from increasing the friction of authentication. They are not showing me ads during the 3-minute authentication process; if they make it hard for me to authenticate, then they increase the chance that I'll just give up and phone them, -> increased call-centre costs.
Banks and other service providers are operating with a different equation-in addition to authentication mentioned in other comments, it should be noted that customer support costs money, so the higher the walls they can avoid providing customer service the less they need to spend on it. The cheapest customer to service is the one that never makes it through the phone tree.
That's actually half of your answer right there - and the answer for the question why banks don't want you to automate your finances. They want you to do every operation through their webpage, mobile app or branch office, because they want to sell more financial products to you.
> they increase the chance that I'll just give up and phone them, -> increased call-centre costs
Being on a call with them is another perfect opportunity for them to do some upselling.
That said, your description of the authentication process sounds like a pathological case. Most banks aren't like that. The banks I use have all been streamlining authentication - but they do this by requiring users to go through the mobile app, which is full of attempts to sell you credits, insurance and investment accounts.
EDIT: two more points.
1) Some of the auth flow in banks may be (bank's interpretation of) regulatory requirements. This applies especially to banks that (like the ones I use) offer identity services for interacting with my government on-line. That is, one of the ways I can authenticate myself when filing taxes, or starting a company, or checking my medical receipts, or other stuff like this on-line, is through my bank's web page.
2) Let's look at behavior of banks through a different lens. There's one thing I want that, according to my research, no bank provides. I want a bullshit-free way to programmatically fetch my account balance. Say, an API token I could use with CURL - something I can set up and forget, so I can make myself an "account balance" widget containing up-to-date balances from one or more accounts of one or more different banks. I can't do that. It's an obvious thing to offer when building a digital service, but nobody offers it. There is a reason - and I posit that the reason is, they don't want to do it, because it would reduce my visits on their webpages / in their apps, depriving them of opportunity to advertise financial product to me. I.e. the purposeful creation of inefficiencies I talked about.
I've been told that this is nowdays commonplace among UK banks. It might be to do with regulation, but I don't think so.
Wrt. the ads, no ads are presented during the authentication flow. So I don't think that flow is cackhanded because of ads. Self-promotion occurs before I begin trying to authenticate (with a non-dismissable "call to action" that takes up half the screen real-estate on my laptop).
I actually think half the problem is "mobile first" - I don't use a mobile to access websites, because I'm too clumsy to type on a mobile. I think companies create a "mobile first" website, and then don't really bother with the "laptop next" bit. Infinite scroll, multi-part forms with one field per part, and widgets that can't be operated using a keyboard, seem to have conquered the world.
Why put effort into supporting desktop users, if mobile users are now the majority of visits, and desktop users are only going to diminish? I've never tried to use my bank's site using a mobile, but I bet it works better.
That's the key thing nobody is telling people about the so-called "attention economy": it's whole point is to make things as inefficient as possible - because money is made on the friction. In order to make money off attention, companies need to capture it (thereby making you spend it on something else than what you wanted to). To make more money, they need that attention to last longer (thereby making you spend more time, and/or spend it more often, on things that make them money).
Seen this way, it's clear why services hate end-user automation: their whole business is causing the very friction the users would like to automate away.