There is no cookie-cutter approach to all software products at once.
"I want classic sound / look / feel" of entertainment products like WoW is very different from, say, "I want old spreadsheet shortcuts / simpler UI" of office products where you have to actually balance many functional features that are in demand with simplicity and past product behaviour some of your users got used to.
Edit: I think I just rubber ducked myself with this comment into understanding that it is user segmentation which is key regardless of your product; real challenge is to try embedding and balancing all product features as a single package, instead of splitting core product into multiple different parts that fit different segments (like Blizzard did)
> as long as there are relatively good options of apps that do have privacy (and I think there are)
Once you have enormous network effect like TikTok has, you don't really have any free selection of alternative apps. You are free to use one, but you will be the only sad user over there.
Regulations are needed that would force large platforms like TikTok and Instagram to enable federation, opening them up to actual competition. This way platforms would be able to compete on monetisation and usability, instead of competing on locking in their precious users more strictly.
> MySpace is well on the way to becoming what economists call a "natural monopoly". Users have invested so much social capital in putting up data about themselves it is not worth their changing sites, especially since every new user that MySpace attracts adds to its value as a network of interacting people.
> "In social networking, there is a huge advantage to have scale. You can find almost anyone on MySpace and the more time that has been invested in the site, the more locked in people are".
Sure, but then everyone moved to Facebook. The monopolist changed, but not the monopolistic market and the lack of consumer choice.
And nobody gained privacy in the process (I rather think everyone lost even more of it).
The situation currently permits only a tiny number of winning companies at a time, and the userbase is locked in even as the site becomes wildly unpopular, until some threshold of discontent is reached, and then everyone moves, and then that new site also enshittifies and the cycle repeats.
Federation is a mechanism whereby people would be able to actually choose providers as individuals and at any time, instead of having to wait years for a critical mass of upset people to build up and leave [current most popular social media site], and instead of being forced to go to [new most popular social media site].
federation would never work. How would it work here? Either you are forcing tiktok to give pageviews to federations of spam, or you are letting tiktok decide which federations to work with, which essentially results in no federation.
Nobody stops spammers from creating websites, but we still have search engines and web. Nobody stops spammers from sending emails, but we still use SMTP.
It is just a matter of tools we build to rank and filter content. With open protocols platforms can actually compete on antispam tools, among other features.
Lolololol. No, not regulations. Regulators. With the people we currently have voted into office in the US the only regulations we are going to get are ones saying Sam and Peter must look at everything you do all the time.
Until we stop voting for more authoritarianism, expect ever increasing amounts of authoritarianism.
I would argue the only thing that does stop current situation from snowballing into something much worse are pre-existing institutions and regulations.
That's also why dismantling and challenging these is often the very first priority for authoritarian actors.
Because building complex product that is also useful is not quick and is not easy. Contrary to the idea that many people are floating around these days.
Some of us lack access to good physical bookstores which are curated and allow for casual non-biased exploration. Amazon and other digital players never picked up on curation or segmentation, their store fronts are hot messes similar to digging through a random bin of books at a second hand store. To top it off they skew your opinion with customer ratings visible next to every single title.
So a list like this is a somewhat working digital alternative to browsing books in a curated bookstore.
When it comes to tech topics this is an insiders discussion. When it comes to political topics, 99% of people in HN threads have close to zero insights, and circle around publicly known information. Big difference.
It is very dangerous to expect deep insights on every aspect of human life from a HN thread, regardless of how well educated and well meaning average HN commenters are.
> While I still have the twitch to check my phone when I'm waiting for a coffee, or in-between activities—because my brain's reward system has been trained to do this—I'm now rewarded with nothing
For those looking to drop a(ny) habit: this seems to be the key
This is an interesting thought model to consider, but whole article is very biased and opinionated. It reads like a "small companies do it better" manifesto without giving any real insights into operations of large companies.
For example, all of the goals quoted below are parametrized and tracked by most of large & mature companies, oftentimes daily, through NPS, cost/profit analysis, and many other "legit but inefficient" tools:
> Note that “shipping high quality software” or “making customers happy” or even “making money” is not on this list. Those are all things tech companies want to do, but they’re not legibility.
There is a premise that closing a blind eye on these makes companies "less efficient", but evidently there are large companies that do track achievement of such goals, and there are small companies that don't.
There is also insider information appealing as evidence ("Any practicing engineer knows how ridiculous this is.”), mocking ("Are they stupid? No.”) and survivorship bias (treating most small companies as "more efficient” by default) among multiple other rhetorical tricks and anecdotes. It captures the frustration engineers feel in large orgs, but then inflates that into a universal theory of how all companies operate.
You seem to have misunderstood the point being made in the section you quoted. The items are not on the list because it is a list of benefits that accrue to the company from work being legible. "Making money" is not a direct outcome of legibility, although it is a second or third-order effect.
What I am saying is that “making money” is one factor most of legibility processes directly revolve around in any modern company. Not a second-order side effect, as original article implies.
Innovation is very slow in photography world these days, X-T5 made a big jump in MP count compared to X-T4, but resolution aside image quality is pretty much the same, and other improvements were marginal.
I still use X-T2, and it has not really aged, even when compared to my X100V. Infamous Fuji AF is where they progress slowly but steadily, so that's the primary feature that I'd look into when choosing between generations.
Their first reply was "we have passed your question to a higher technical team", then they came back four days later with the above reply. I was enquiring about the A7R mark V, which introduced the much needed "lossless" option. I think I asked because I wondered why they kept the uncompressed option and because experts warned that Sony did that before with "lossless" formats.
Replies you get tell me it is more akin to Agile movement at this point. People are mixing “lines of code per minute” with tangible results.
Are you more personally ‘productive’ if your agent can crunch out PoCs of your hobby projects at night when you sleep? Is doing more development iterations per month making your business more ‘productive’?
It is like expecting that achieving x10 more sunny side ups cooked per minute will make your restaurant more profitable. In reality amount of code delivered is rarely a bottleneck for value delivered, but for ‘productivity’ everyone has their own subjective definition.
"I want classic sound / look / feel" of entertainment products like WoW is very different from, say, "I want old spreadsheet shortcuts / simpler UI" of office products where you have to actually balance many functional features that are in demand with simplicity and past product behaviour some of your users got used to.
Edit: I think I just rubber ducked myself with this comment into understanding that it is user segmentation which is key regardless of your product; real challenge is to try embedding and balancing all product features as a single package, instead of splitting core product into multiple different parts that fit different segments (like Blizzard did)