I went into my Amazon wishlist earlier today, as I know it’s the first port of call for several family members when trying to determine what to get me for Christmas, and I was a little perturbed to discover that it is seemingly not possible to change the order of the things on your wishlist any more. Or, to be more accurate, you can rearrange the order of the items in the first three rows in Grid view, but everything else doesn’t respond to clicking and dragging like it used to.
I did a little research online and, indeed, it seems that Amazon deliberately removed this a while back. It’s a “deprecated feature”, apparently.
I always find the idea of “deprecated features” bizarre, because inevitably the features that get “deprecated” are ones that are actually useful, and in many cases they don’t actually get replaced by something with similar functionality. In the case of Amazon wishlists, aside from the Grid view exception I note above (which I suspect is a bug) you can now only sort them in various automated ways, or you can push something to the top of the wishlist by going to its product page and “re-adding” it. You can also move it to another list and then move it back to the original list. Both of these are, I’m sure you’ll agree, inferior to being able to just drag the damn thing to the position you want it — or, indeed, click a “send to top” button, which I’m sure also used to exist.
Modern software — be it stuff you run on your computer or that which powers billion-dollar ecommerce platforms — seems to be full of stuff getting “deprecated” without any real net benefit to the user. The usual interpretation of this is that the creators of said software want to discourage users from doing something in favour of doing something else with a similar function. But in Amazon’s case I’m really struggling to see why I might be discouraged from reordering my wishlist into whatever order I want… particularly as there is no real alternative, aside from the rather clunky options I’ve just outlined.
There’s a lot of discussion going on right now about how tech is genuinely getting worse year on year, and it’s not just people “getting old”. The writer, blogger and tech commentator Ed Zitron does some great work in this field, and I encourage you to check out his blog Where’s Your Ed At and his podcast Better Offline, because while both paint a bleak picture of the tech landscape as it exists in 2024, some of you might find it reassuring that no, it’s not just you, things really are getting worse in terms of usability and overall functionality.
As for me, well, I guess it’s time to go re-add some stuff to my wishlist so it gets pushed to the top!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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