This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11.
I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was..
Case in point:
Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around.
And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.)
"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"
NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too..
It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...]
Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ...
Is it because we are out of space? I don't know,
every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ]
(because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.)
Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by
a spyglass.
So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for.
Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need,
apart from maybe the single spyglass icon?
Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have,
has been chopped up to unrecognisability.
It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".
The window handles, on the other hand .. this was correct in Windows 3.0 and there's basically no good reason to have changed it. There should be a title bar. Active window should have visibly contrasting title bar. There should be sufficient grab space all round a window to get hold of it.
Bonus points: move your mouse pointer very slowly around a bottom curved corner window handle on Windows 11. Ask yourself: how well does "place I am pointing at" line up with "where the curve is"?
Oh man. the complete lack of definition or contrast from window to window is terrible. Which window are you clicking on? Nobody knows. It's especially painful when you have like three or four nested RDP sessions going on.
Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.
I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.
>Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.
double pane with tabs would be handy so you could inspect or move files between two tabs. also, i'd really love two pane: filesystem and content viewer
Ya, I just started using them in File Explorer recently and I really like them because I frequently had multiple windows open within the same tree, this is much cleaner. I can't believe it took me so long to actually click the "+" and try it.
You can pull the File Explorer tabs from my cold, dead hands!
Also, I'm pretty sure the tabs were WinUI/XAML based, not WebView2 based. There are some "Electron" (i.e. web tech stack) components in File Explorer these days but I don't think most of the things you're complaining about are part of that.
Every time I was forced to use Windows 7, file browser tabs are something I missed dearly from Linux. But now that I'm forced to use Windows for work almost every day, I find that I almost never use file browser tabs on Windows. No idea why. The tabs show only the dirname, which is what I would want the tabs to do. The UX is mostly okay.
Not being able to grab the top left of the window and drag feels really strange. Plenty of apps encroach on the top bar, but they almost never encroach on the top left. That's where the icon lives, that's the sacred "move the window" space.
Slack has the same problem (hamburger menu in the top left captures clicks, plus a giant search bar in the center) and it's bothersome. But with Slack I don't notice it because I don't really move Slack around. It's permanently maximized on a secondary display. I move Explorer windows around constantly, so I notice it.
In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment".
People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job.
The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.
So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".
This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.
I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the ride and they're going where tech companies are driving, whether they want to or not. User need is no longer a driver in product decisions. Users are just the denominator in all the metrics everyone is chasing.
I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.
When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without hope for an endless stream of updates).
That in turn incentivized software companies to make products that were worth real money to people and to care about their reputation.
Once everything because free (sorry, not free, ad-driven), that whole calculus went out the window. What it was replaced with has a lot of upsides. If every app on my phone cost me $50 with another $20 for every upgrade I've ever gotten, I surely couldn't afford half of them, and I'm in a better income bracket than much of the world.
But it has as a huge downside that it no longer centers the experience of individual humans with agency. Instead, users are treat as a sort of aggregate stream of fungible attention units. A software change that alienates a million users but garners you 1.1 new users is a net win.
Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage. You exist only to be a drop in a bucket of liquid attention.
We stopped considering the user as a human being and started thinking of them as a spherical wallet in a vacuum. The user exists purely as a source of revinue and absolutely no other consideration is given.
> We stopped considering the user as a human being
Imho once you say "user" you are already halfway on that path. Look how impersonal your sentence is. Users are an abstract concept that belongs to the app, which in turn is created by the developer who has all kinds of dreams for that app. Just keep calling them people, persons, or specific stakeholder names that correspond to the role they have, and their identified needs. The app serves people, and not the other way around. Not calling people users is a step towards avoiding their disempowerment.
Thats because the user stopped becoming the customer from the point of view of the development team. The customer is now people who deal in data collection and analytics and gates and funnels.
> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it.
my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.
also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.
sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.
If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.
But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.
Yes. Definitely there's a sweet spot here, in terms of how locked in you are, tied into the ecosystem. A company may have time to course correct, if there is some pain for customers leaving.
At least, more room than if not.
I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.
An example of this was JetBrains' initial subscription plan.
Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).
Getting funding for meatspace projects is beyond what most VCs will do, and I'm sure this is adjacent to that. I literally have about 10 different hardware projects that are all viable, all leading edge, all minor to develop, along with a strong software component (which is where the juice is).
Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.
Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.
I go back and forth on this. Maybe it is the right inclination with software development where there is a strong drive to keep pushing more features and trade offs in terms of “technical debt” or footprint can get pretty abstract at scale. But then I think of an operation like the Disney Parks and it really seems like the delight comes from constant, sustained effort. They’ve got people around attending to everything and fussing over every little detail around the park. They can emergency dispatch characters to an area if they see kids who seem like they might start to have a bad time. They have secret stashes of diaper changing kits and first aid materials so Mickey Mouse can show up and save the day if someone has an accident. There’s ways they’re not ruining it I guess, but the main impression I get is that they just never take their foot off the gas when it comes to making sure everyone is having a good time.
All of the things you described ARE "it". They're part of the Disney Parks "product". If they were to remove or change that active effort, that could be considered "ruining it". But continuing to operate in a way they've found delights their customers is exactly what Seth is arguing for, not a violation of it.
> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it.
So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.
Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
Its always been hard to know. "about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half." dates back more than a century
Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.
Except for targeted online ads based on browsing/search history or other spying, most advertising is just brand/product awareness, hoping to create a memorable impression.
What really baffles me is that among people my age in the sorts of circles I interact with, that memorable impression is overwhelmingly negative. Seeing an ad at all creates an immediate negative association. "This brand/company feels they have the inviolable right to assert themselves on me and forcibly take up my attention and time". It's wild that this sentiment either hasn't percolated up to advertisers, or (more likely) they just don't care.
General, non-obtrusive and non-targeted ads don't really bother me. Maybe because I grew up with ads in newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio and TV. The latter two were most annoying because they interrupt the programming, but I understood that's how broadcasters make money so that they could operate.
Deliberately annoying pop-ups, nags, auto-playing media, distracting animation, etc. in online ads does provoke the sort of negative reaction you describe. I block as much of that as I can. I would not really mind a website that had reasonable number of static, inline ads that didn't slow down scrolling or page loads and were relevant to the content of the site. But that's pretty rare.
I guess they can work when no one knows about you. After a certain point, there must be diminishing returns in comparison to just your current customers recommending your product to their friends.
I'd imagine so, yeah. Like, I can't imagine what value French's gets out of running mustard advertisements as an example. Feels like some of these companies have entire marketing teams whose main job is to justify their own existence because upper management hasn't yet figured out that they're not going to reach anybody who's never heard of mustard before.
> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.
>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.
Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.
> What if ads weren't about money in the first place and that was the excuse used for surveillance?
Care to explain, to pick one advertiser, how Nestlé is primarily running a surveillance scheme when advertising one of their products, rather than trying to get me to buy more of it?
Don't let the brevity of this post dissuade you from its value. I believe Seth is getting at a very good psychological insight.
By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe.
But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended you a little trust, or given you some time to learn your product, they will absolutely remember if you turn around and harm them.
It takes only a match to burn a bridge, but a year to rebuild it.
There is a meaningful design axis here, how one views one's role.
In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view their role as not screwing up God's work.
I look at my own work as a mixture of these two. Not interfering with the parts of the world and other people that are already providing their unique value, but also adding my own particular contribution as well.
I think codebases and optimizations are a lot like this.
A lot of people seem to think the way to make things work better and faster is to add elaborate caching layers and layers and retries and GPUs and multi threading and...
I find the opposite tends to be true. Make things fast and reliable by doing as little as possible. If an API is flakey, make it not flakey, don't cache the result and add a retry loop.
Sound systems do have an omnipresent "only as good as your weakest link" feeling.
A lossless source (or analog, whatever your preference) and great speakers/amps can't overcome a bad sounding room - or a piece of music that was mixed/mastered poorly.
As someone who works in marketing, this is extremely true. Right now, LLMs are causing a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.
I've seen this pattern a bunch:
1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.
2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.
3. They post the content
4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up
5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.
6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.
There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.
(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)
I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.
Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.
> I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to.
When I was younger, we had the Jetsons, the tail end of the space race, Star Trek, Carl Sagan, home computers took off, we witnessed increasing standards of living, politics were deescalating, the fall of the Berlin Wall and (effectively) the end of the imminent nuclear annihilation threat. Lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future and to see sci-fi-like technical progress as progress and empowerment.
Nowadays, we have no hopeful vision of the future--not even in sci-fi. We know tomorrow is going to be worse than today. We know technology advancements are meant to siphon our money and time away. We're not going to get flying cars, but we'll get costly subscriptions for everything. We're not going to get tours of Jupiter, but we will get mass-surveillance and phone addictions. Political extremism is increasing, with anger, belligerence, cruelty, and ignorance being major planks in political parties across the world. And finally, we know Climate Change is going to wreck everything, even if none of that comes to pass. Current generations no longer believe they will have it better than previous generations.
X is itself a massive cash-in of trust by the new owner.
But yes, a lot of the tech industry these days resembles people looking at a rainforest and thinking how much value could be derived from clear-cutting it. Massive one-time extraction of value, long term destruction of an ecosystem, resulting in harms distributed all over the world in ways that aren't obviously linked.
I just started posting on LinkedIn. It is a more niche audience, Finns, only 5 million of us. I know my posts aren't fake and the people there are one I know. What do you mean by fake? Do you mean fake as in "I am here to sell you my product, which is myself" kind of fake? Is that a feature of LinkedIn or the harsh reality of the "adult world" business? Like sitting in a bunch of meetings trying to figure which of the parties are trying to screw you the least when you're about to buy something. There's levels of fake and you just need to figure out the rest. In a sense yes, of course it's fake, but I'm not sure that the platform is to blame. Same as IG I guess, but I can't say I don't use it.
The product descriptions on audiophile equipment are always gold!
"Designed as the foundation of every great music system, our Power Plant AC regenerators embody an uncompromising commitment to excellence. By rebuilding power from the ground up with state-of-the-art engineering and meticulous precision, they deliver the stable, pure energy essential for revealing music in its truest form."
The product image for this "Power Plant" that no doubt costs tens of thousands has what appears to be a poorly Photoshopped "Improvement" factor meter on the front that goes from 1x to 1000x lol.
wow that's actually insane, the fact that they would have an "improvement" dial is ridiculous by itself, but also the picture looks extremely fake? is this a scam website? leaves me wondering what the product actually looks like
btw it costs $9,999 according to google
edit: I couldn't help researching it, the picture looks like that because the device doesn't actually have analog needles, it has an lcd screen with analog needles rendered onto it. I guess they had to cut costs somewhere, because their customers are very budget-conscious. so probably an actual picture of the device looked unpalatable to the marketers, and they decided that the crappy photoshop would be fine.
> Or perhaps: Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.
~no boss sets out to ruin employee satisfaction. It's a byproduct of having to integrate more realities into the smaller scope that employees usually care about, and that is just not easy.
Of course, most bosses are also not great at this – on average bosses are, like everything else, just average – but to assume that bosses "ruin" satisfaction and employees would be longterm fulfilled and create working companies if only left alone is polemic.
It is in the nature of capital to ruin it - if users feel great about a product it implies that there is more to wring out of them. The ideal product leaves the user with nothing but the utility the product provides with no extra pleasure. If your employee loves to work for you, you're paying them too much. They can't hate to work for you (unless they have no other choice) but if they feel really good about it, that is a sign of a problem.
Feels to opposite to me. GPT-1 would have exploded the word count to about 10x and made it sound way more breathlessly influencer coded. GPT-1 would have written something that was 180 degrees opposite of what the post is communicating.
Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?
This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.)
"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"
NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability.
It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".
The tabs are fine. Tabs in "cmd" are also good.
The window handles, on the other hand .. this was correct in Windows 3.0 and there's basically no good reason to have changed it. There should be a title bar. Active window should have visibly contrasting title bar. There should be sufficient grab space all round a window to get hold of it.
Bonus points: move your mouse pointer very slowly around a bottom curved corner window handle on Windows 11. Ask yourself: how well does "place I am pointing at" line up with "where the curve is"?
Oh man. the complete lack of definition or contrast from window to window is terrible. Which window are you clicking on? Nobody knows. It's especially painful when you have like three or four nested RDP sessions going on.
> Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs
Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.
I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.
>Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.
double pane with tabs would be handy so you could inspect or move files between two tabs. also, i'd really love two pane: filesystem and content viewer
>Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs
Speak for yourself. Tabs in file explorer and notepad are my favorite windows feature in decades. I can't believe it took them this long.
Ya, I just started using them in File Explorer recently and I really like them because I frequently had multiple windows open within the same tree, this is much cleaner. I can't believe it took me so long to actually click the "+" and try it.
You can pull the File Explorer tabs from my cold, dead hands!
Also, I'm pretty sure the tabs were WinUI/XAML based, not WebView2 based. There are some "Electron" (i.e. web tech stack) components in File Explorer these days but I don't think most of the things you're complaining about are part of that.
Every time I was forced to use Windows 7, file browser tabs are something I missed dearly from Linux. But now that I'm forced to use Windows for work almost every day, I find that I almost never use file browser tabs on Windows. No idea why. The tabs show only the dirname, which is what I would want the tabs to do. The UX is mostly okay.
Not being able to grab the top left of the window and drag feels really strange. Plenty of apps encroach on the top bar, but they almost never encroach on the top left. That's where the icon lives, that's the sacred "move the window" space.
Slack has the same problem (hamburger menu in the top left captures clicks, plus a giant search bar in the center) and it's bothersome. But with Slack I don't notice it because I don't really move Slack around. It's permanently maximized on a secondary display. I move Explorer windows around constantly, so I notice it.
every day i am more glad i cannot update to 11 because windows 10 seems to be better in every way
Maybe "don't ruin stuff" should be a KPI
Of the things that you could complain about modern Explorer and Notepad, you choose tabs? Really? A handy QoL feature that many have been requesting?
Gotta keep the “I’m such a greybeard, I do things more clumsily than others but look how techy and old school I am” act somehow, right?
In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment".
People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job.
The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.
So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".
This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.
I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the ride and they're going where tech companies are driving, whether they want to or not. User need is no longer a driver in product decisions. Users are just the denominator in all the metrics everyone is chasing.
> I'm not sure when it happened
I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.
When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without hope for an endless stream of updates).
That in turn incentivized software companies to make products that were worth real money to people and to care about their reputation.
Once everything because free (sorry, not free, ad-driven), that whole calculus went out the window. What it was replaced with has a lot of upsides. If every app on my phone cost me $50 with another $20 for every upgrade I've ever gotten, I surely couldn't afford half of them, and I'm in a better income bracket than much of the world.
But it has as a huge downside that it no longer centers the experience of individual humans with agency. Instead, users are treat as a sort of aggregate stream of fungible attention units. A software change that alienates a million users but garners you 1.1 new users is a net win.
Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage. You exist only to be a drop in a bucket of liquid attention.
We stopped considering the user as a human being and started thinking of them as a spherical wallet in a vacuum. The user exists purely as a source of revinue and absolutely no other consideration is given.
> We stopped considering the user as a human being
Imho once you say "user" you are already halfway on that path. Look how impersonal your sentence is. Users are an abstract concept that belongs to the app, which in turn is created by the developer who has all kinds of dreams for that app. Just keep calling them people, persons, or specific stakeholder names that correspond to the role they have, and their identified needs. The app serves people, and not the other way around. Not calling people users is a step towards avoiding their disempowerment.
I wish! Most companies try to make it extremely difficult for visitors to actually purchase their product online.
Thats because the user stopped becoming the customer from the point of view of the development team. The customer is now people who deal in data collection and analytics and gates and funnels.
It started when computers (and the Internet) became more affordable and widespread.
No money in the “computer hobbyist” version of reality, but all the money in the world in the “everyone is a potential customer” version of reality.
> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it.
my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.
also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.
sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.
I think it depends on what exactly happened.
If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.
But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.
> But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say
Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.
Yes. Definitely there's a sweet spot here, in terms of how locked in you are, tied into the ecosystem. A company may have time to course correct, if there is some pain for customers leaving.
At least, more room than if not.
I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.
An example of this was JetBrains' initial subscription plan.
Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).
Getting funding for meatspace projects is beyond what most VCs will do, and I'm sure this is adjacent to that. I literally have about 10 different hardware projects that are all viable, all leading edge, all minor to develop, along with a strong software component (which is where the juice is).
Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.
Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.
I go back and forth on this. Maybe it is the right inclination with software development where there is a strong drive to keep pushing more features and trade offs in terms of “technical debt” or footprint can get pretty abstract at scale. But then I think of an operation like the Disney Parks and it really seems like the delight comes from constant, sustained effort. They’ve got people around attending to everything and fussing over every little detail around the park. They can emergency dispatch characters to an area if they see kids who seem like they might start to have a bad time. They have secret stashes of diaper changing kits and first aid materials so Mickey Mouse can show up and save the day if someone has an accident. There’s ways they’re not ruining it I guess, but the main impression I get is that they just never take their foot off the gas when it comes to making sure everyone is having a good time.
All of the things you described ARE "it". They're part of the Disney Parks "product". If they were to remove or change that active effort, that could be considered "ruining it". But continuing to operate in a way they've found delights their customers is exactly what Seth is arguing for, not a violation of it.
> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it.
So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.
Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
Its always been hard to know. "about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half." dates back more than a century
Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.
Except for targeted online ads based on browsing/search history or other spying, most advertising is just brand/product awareness, hoping to create a memorable impression.
What really baffles me is that among people my age in the sorts of circles I interact with, that memorable impression is overwhelmingly negative. Seeing an ad at all creates an immediate negative association. "This brand/company feels they have the inviolable right to assert themselves on me and forcibly take up my attention and time". It's wild that this sentiment either hasn't percolated up to advertisers, or (more likely) they just don't care.
General, non-obtrusive and non-targeted ads don't really bother me. Maybe because I grew up with ads in newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio and TV. The latter two were most annoying because they interrupt the programming, but I understood that's how broadcasters make money so that they could operate.
Deliberately annoying pop-ups, nags, auto-playing media, distracting animation, etc. in online ads does provoke the sort of negative reaction you describe. I block as much of that as I can. I would not really mind a website that had reasonable number of static, inline ads that didn't slow down scrolling or page loads and were relevant to the content of the site. But that's pretty rare.
I guess they can work when no one knows about you. After a certain point, there must be diminishing returns in comparison to just your current customers recommending your product to their friends.
I'd imagine so, yeah. Like, I can't imagine what value French's gets out of running mustard advertisements as an example. Feels like some of these companies have entire marketing teams whose main job is to justify their own existence because upper management hasn't yet figured out that they're not going to reach anybody who's never heard of mustard before.
According to Cory Doctorow, P&G (Proctor&Gamble) canceled $200m of ad spend and saw no change in sales
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/pg-says-cut-digital...
> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.
>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.
Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.
What if ads weren't about money in the first place and that was the excuse used for surveillance?
> What if ads weren't about money in the first place and that was the excuse used for surveillance?
Care to explain, to pick one advertiser, how Nestlé is primarily running a surveillance scheme when advertising one of their products, rather than trying to get me to buy more of it?
> Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses?
Attempting to measure the effectiveness of ads is basically what drove the creation of the surveillance capitalism monster we all know and love today.
Aha, once you start seeing via negativa[0] you’ll likely see it everywhere.
[0] https://www.wealest.com/articles/via-negativa (or Antifragile)
Don't let the brevity of this post dissuade you from its value. I believe Seth is getting at a very good psychological insight.
By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe.
But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended you a little trust, or given you some time to learn your product, they will absolutely remember if you turn around and harm them.
It takes only a match to burn a bridge, but a year to rebuild it.
There is a meaningful design axis here, how one views one's role.
In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view their role as not screwing up God's work.
Beautiful metaphor.
I look at my own work as a mixture of these two. Not interfering with the parts of the world and other people that are already providing their unique value, but also adding my own particular contribution as well.
I think codebases and optimizations are a lot like this.
A lot of people seem to think the way to make things work better and faster is to add elaborate caching layers and layers and retries and GPUs and multi threading and...
I find the opposite tends to be true. Make things fast and reliable by doing as little as possible. If an API is flakey, make it not flakey, don't cache the result and add a retry loop.
Sound systems do have an omnipresent "only as good as your weakest link" feeling.
A lossless source (or analog, whatever your preference) and great speakers/amps can't overcome a bad sounding room - or a piece of music that was mixed/mastered poorly.
[delayed]
As someone who works in marketing, this is extremely true. Right now, LLMs are causing a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.
I've seen this pattern a bunch:
1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.
2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.
3. They post the content
4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up
5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.
6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.
There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.
(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)
> a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.
I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.
Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.
> I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to.
When I was younger, we had the Jetsons, the tail end of the space race, Star Trek, Carl Sagan, home computers took off, we witnessed increasing standards of living, politics were deescalating, the fall of the Berlin Wall and (effectively) the end of the imminent nuclear annihilation threat. Lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future and to see sci-fi-like technical progress as progress and empowerment.
Nowadays, we have no hopeful vision of the future--not even in sci-fi. We know tomorrow is going to be worse than today. We know technology advancements are meant to siphon our money and time away. We're not going to get flying cars, but we'll get costly subscriptions for everything. We're not going to get tours of Jupiter, but we will get mass-surveillance and phone addictions. Political extremism is increasing, with anger, belligerence, cruelty, and ignorance being major planks in political parties across the world. And finally, we know Climate Change is going to wreck everything, even if none of that comes to pass. Current generations no longer believe they will have it better than previous generations.
Path to X happiness:
- Eschew the "For You", Read tweets only from people you have chosen to follow.
- Only follow people who have a bona fide livelihood outside social media, avoid anyone for whom income is largely driven by "engagement".
X is itself a massive cash-in of trust by the new owner.
But yes, a lot of the tech industry these days resembles people looking at a rainforest and thinking how much value could be derived from clear-cutting it. Massive one-time extraction of value, long term destruction of an ecosystem, resulting in harms distributed all over the world in ways that aren't obviously linked.
>Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn
... You don't actually advise them to post on LinkedIn, do you? You know all the engagement on LinkedIn is fake, right?
I just started posting on LinkedIn. It is a more niche audience, Finns, only 5 million of us. I know my posts aren't fake and the people there are one I know. What do you mean by fake? Do you mean fake as in "I am here to sell you my product, which is myself" kind of fake? Is that a feature of LinkedIn or the harsh reality of the "adult world" business? Like sitting in a bunch of meetings trying to figure which of the parties are trying to screw you the least when you're about to buy something. There's levels of fake and you just need to figure out the rest. In a sense yes, of course it's fake, but I'm not sure that the platform is to blame. Same as IG I guess, but I can't say I don't use it.
The education quote is great, I wish selecting text on iPhone was not ruined by the Facebook icon popup.
The reverse can be true too.
Don't make a bad situation worse.
Wait, the example held up for "Stop ruining it" is a company that sells snake oil audiophile bullshit?
The product descriptions on audiophile equipment are always gold!
"Designed as the foundation of every great music system, our Power Plant AC regenerators embody an uncompromising commitment to excellence. By rebuilding power from the ground up with state-of-the-art engineering and meticulous precision, they deliver the stable, pure energy essential for revealing music in its truest form."
The product image for this "Power Plant" that no doubt costs tens of thousands has what appears to be a poorly Photoshopped "Improvement" factor meter on the front that goes from 1x to 1000x lol.
https://www.psaudio.com/cdn/shop/products/P20-Black-front.pn...
wow that's actually insane, the fact that they would have an "improvement" dial is ridiculous by itself, but also the picture looks extremely fake? is this a scam website? leaves me wondering what the product actually looks like
btw it costs $9,999 according to google
edit: I couldn't help researching it, the picture looks like that because the device doesn't actually have analog needles, it has an lcd screen with analog needles rendered onto it. I guess they had to cut costs somewhere, because their customers are very budget-conscious. so probably an actual picture of the device looked unpalatable to the marketers, and they decided that the crappy photoshop would be fine.
with blue LEDs, an instant demerit on any consumer electronic
Eh.
> Or perhaps: Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.
~no boss sets out to ruin employee satisfaction. It's a byproduct of having to integrate more realities into the smaller scope that employees usually care about, and that is just not easy.
Of course, most bosses are also not great at this – on average bosses are, like everything else, just average – but to assume that bosses "ruin" satisfaction and employees would be longterm fulfilled and create working companies if only left alone is polemic.
Sounds like subsidiarity to me
The irony that the packages system looks so obviously and clearly 'baseline claude' designed is a sign of the moment itself.
It is in the nature of capital to ruin it - if users feel great about a product it implies that there is more to wring out of them. The ideal product leaves the user with nothing but the utility the product provides with no extra pleasure. If your employee loves to work for you, you're paying them too much. They can't hate to work for you (unless they have no other choice) but if they feel really good about it, that is a sign of a problem.
I've read haikus that made more sense than this streak of random words.
Feels like an article generated using GPT-1.
Feels to opposite to me. GPT-1 would have exploded the word count to about 10x and made it sound way more breathlessly influencer coded. GPT-1 would have written something that was 180 degrees opposite of what the post is communicating.
Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?
I think it was hyperbole, and that the GP does not literally believe this was written by GPT-1, which did not produce coherent sentences.