The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet

LLMs as Personal Shoppers and Future Ad Channels

• Several commenters already use ChatGPT to shop and expect it will soon be tuned to push brands, affiliates, and specific merchants.
• Concern that RLHF and opaque “reasoning” make it easy to hide paid preferences behind plausible-sounding explanations.
• Some see LLM shopping as a coping mechanism for terrible modern e‑commerce UX, not a pure upgrade.
• Widespread expectation that “pure” LLMs will be followed by an ad/affiliate‑infused phase, echoing early web nostalgia.

Amazon, E‑commerce, and Deliberate Confusion

• Many describe Amazon search as intentionally bad: mixing in near‑matches, miscategorized products, and interleaved ads that look like results.
• People report buying the wrong items (e.g., power strips vs surge protectors, wrong materials) due to noisy results and keyword poisoning.
• Debate: some say this is a hard search problem with user language ambiguity; others insist it’s enshittification driven by ad and engagement incentives.
• Praise for niche sites (McMaster, Digikey, geizhals) that invest in rich, accurate filters and structured data as the opposite of the Gruen pattern.

Social Feeds and Dark Patterns

• Facebook and Instagram are cited as classic Gruen‑like environments: users open the app for a simple purpose, get sucked into feeds of memes, reels, and recommendations, and often never reach their original goal.
• Users describe strong efforts by platforms to block feed‑cleaning tools and to obscure DOM structure, reinforcing that this is intentional.
• Some note new “friends only” feeds, but complain they’re buried, reset frequently, or still cluttered with “suggested” content.

Is Wikipedia (and Similar Sites) Gruen?

• Split views:
  • One camp says Wikipedia isn’t designed to disorient; it simply links interesting content, and lingering is aligned with its educational mission.
  • Others say it still produces a Gruen‑like state (rabbit holes), even if emergent rather than profit‑driven.

Physical-World Analogies and Regulation

• Airports, IKEA, and malls are used as intuitive examples of forced paths and disorienting layouts to maximize exposure to retail.
• EU rules about symmetric ease of subscribe/unsubscribe are discussed; commenters clarify that “unfair” barriers and aggressive retention tactics are legally restricted in theory, though often flouted in practice.

Broader Critique and Coping

• Strong sense that advertising and current capitalism push products toward user‑hostile, confusing designs (“enshittification”).
• Some respond by quitting platforms, using blockers, or relying on LLM summaries instead of navigating hostile interfaces.