#2. With Discord, I would love to have it move in the other direction, from being a game-centric network to more of interest-centric network. Parts of this already exist — there’s a way to search through open invite communities — but it’s not as explicit as I’d like: most of times to find a niche discord group, you first have to visit its respective subreddit and find the invite link beneath all the clutter. Sometimes, there isn’t even a direct subreddit: to find a summer intern group, I had to dig through numerous threads of r/cscq. The downside of this type of network is moderation: subreddits now can self moderate but with chat, it’s higher volume and no filter by upvoting enabled.
Products I Wish Existed
291–300 of 434 posts
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
>implementing a new backoffice suite by a consulting company is one third or less technical / IT project; and two thirds or more business process / transformation project. And the actual success / failure of these projects is almost entirely guided by the business transformation part. This 1000%. There's so much institutional friction with these projects for so many reasons; some of them political, some of them inter…
> They see tools not as a way to get more done or be efficient, but as something that's "moving their cheese" and they don't like it. In all fairness, this perception of tools is often entirely rational. Changing workflows incurs a high cost, and any new tool must supply a benefit in excess of that cost. If it doesn't, then opposing the new tool can be the correct stance. And in my experience, at least half of the ti…
Exactly. There's endless tooling out there, and you can contort software to whatever process.
Some of tools make claims that, if trivial to implement, would provide huge huge benefits. Unfortunately, there's a cost to learning a new tool, and then to implementing its use. Since you don't know the tool yet, you can only make educated guesses as to whether it will be easy or hard to learn, easy or hard to implement, make your process better or worse, help sell your product or make you more efficient, etc. You can't know for sure (unless it seems so much like something you already DO understand, and in that case, why would you use someone else's tool)? And that's only for yourself.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try new tools. To the contrary. It's just hard to know which ones are the right ones for your organization. Hence cargo-culting of tools that may or may not be a step backwards for your organization, or have all kinds of hidden-costs that are difficult or even impossible to foresee.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your overall point. However: > low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs? I live in Seattle. Package theft is a white swan event here. Everyone I know has had packages stolen. Most people are forced to come up with some strategy to deal with it: get things shipped to work, use Amazon lockers, get a camera on your porch and make sure to bring the package inside as soon as it shows up, etc. Yo…
> I literally have video of the dude grabbing shit off my porch, but can do nothing about it. In that case, what is the security system really doing for you?
Mainly it helps with my wife's anxiety. We didn't get it for package theft specifically. We have had a drug addict get into our fenced-in backyard and wander around for a while, others shit in the alley, and we sometimes hear screaming matches from addicts or mentally ill people. Having the cameras helps her feel a little safer from those kinds of people.
(Whether we are materially safer is a separate question. But given that I think we are actually quite safe in general, the product is worth it to us in terms of peace of mind alone.)
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
... along with how to write a good search query
Funny enough, I had a class on this in grade school, taught by the school librarian. It included quoting, AND, NOT and OR style stuff you could use in library search systems and it is pretty much all irrelevant now, but it was cool at the time and I wonder if it helped to be exposed to that kind of boolean logic early.
I was thinking more about the thought process for how to come up with the right words to begin with and for refinements to make to yield better results rather than the boolean operators although I think they are good for the young minds, too.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#295#2. I've had an idea I've mulled around for a couple of years now about a new social network. One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it. 25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the activit…
> We need a new social media focused on personal, tight-knit groups of people and interests Group chat: text/Messages/WhatsApp. The fewer frills, the better.
IRC is still kicking in some communities!
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#296#2. I've had an idea I've mulled around for a couple of years now about a new social network. One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it. 25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the activit…
Can’t that be achieved by simply Facebook offering an option for feeds of manually created group by you? Like you create a group called closefriends where you add your close friends and family upto 25 members. Then a feed for those people only shows up? Almost similar to where each user is a subreddit and you create a multireddit.
Facebook is a video game where you honor the groupthink for max followers and upvotes; something like the 25 followers can be emulated but if you're the only person playing the new game, its not going to be a fun game because everyone else will have higher scores due to no made up limitations.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, almost every non-Facebook social network has failed. I wouldn’t consider that to be proof that a limited social network can’t succeed but rather that social networking sites are difficult to produce.
No disagreement here. I just recall that guy being comically pompous (see also his penchant for carrying both a "day iphone" and a "night iphone") at the time Path launched.
Wow, what is it with anti-social people starting social networks? I long ago lost track of my collection of ridiculous quotes from the Friendster guy. But I still remember him being outraged that people were using it wrong by creating profiles for abstract things they loved (cities, parks, stores, brands) and then friending them. Like, buddy, when your users find new ways to use your product, run with it. Instead, he just got big mad and banned a lot of people.
Looking back, Friendster strikes me as the single biggest missed opportunity of that decade. He had a two-year lead on Facebook. In a network-effect business! But through careful focus and diligent effort, he managed to blow it.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#298+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…
This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - JS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
Agreed! But the trouble for me with Excel is that it has an incredibly low ceiling. There are so many people out there doing what is essentially app development but with terrible tools. Tools that give them the wrong habits and mental models for working at scale.
I would love to see the spreadsheet reinvented to be a) collaboration-oriented, and b) a good on-ramp to ever-growing programming skills. So that when Bob in the next department over makes that crucial internal spreadsheet, you can safely and usefully interact with it from your crucial internal spreadsheet. Basically, to make every spreadsheet a potential microservice.
I've spent some years failing to figure out how to make that work. So if anybody manages, please let me know.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#299#2. With Discord, I would love to have it move in the other direction, from being a game-centric network to more of interest-centric network. Parts of this already exist — there’s a way to search through open invite communities — but it’s not as explicit as I’d like: most of times to find a niche discord group, you first have to visit its respective subreddit and find the invite link beneath all the clutter. Sometime…
My challenge with Discord is that when you enter any established community, it's information overload. Established servers have a dozen or more channels, a slew of bot commands, sometimes mandatory rule review or approval requirements, and it can be hard to judge how healthy the community is.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#300#2. I've had an idea I've mulled around for a couple of years now about a new social network. One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it. 25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the activit…
I can already see it, imagine people who have their list full, removing people and replacing them would be a public passive aggressive "thing" people would do and the such drama that would follow. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I think this would actually be a selling point of the platform, however could possibly turn into a negative part of the social culture.