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Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

zachholman.com

111–117 of 117 posts

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#111

Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't understand the compulsion to post potentially embarassing information about yourself on the Internet. I can't believe people are arguing about the right way to do this. Twenty years ago, it was rare for someone to call everyone they ever knew and scream into the phone how drunk they were. I might have done that only once or twice in my life. (If I called you by mistake and woke you…

I think you are confusing push and pull communication. Twitter does not ring up every single person on the planet whenever I share something, but what I share does appear in their feed once they care to check.

If it were push communication, you'd be right to complain, but since it is pull communication, other rules of etiquette apply.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#112
This article makes no sense... You are rightly pointing out that it takes some effort to maintain your privacy and think about managing your circles of friends on G+ and then you compare it with nothing that provides that ability on Facebook. Yes, thinking is hard. If you are ok with saying everything to everybody then you don't have to do it. But Facebook making a few broad automated groups for you solves none of the problems you describe... How does Facebook know who you want to share your drinking stories with? At least Google puts it up front and makes it part of the whole fabric of their product... you always think about circles... just like in freaking real life.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#113
This is why I don't have any interest in buying an Android phone: everyone I know who has one, all the excitement I hear about is their fancy keyboard replacement, or the aftermarket launcher they found to replace the sluggish stock one. Now, I do understand the appeal, if that's what you want to tinker with. I tinker with Volkswagens — I know they're not the finest car I could get my hands on. But when it comes to a smartphone, I'd rather buy the best thing in the store. Even if you're excited that your platform gives you the "freedom" to replace its crappy stock components, that doesn't negate the fact that it's just the freedom to do shit work. So, y'know, flame away.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#114
Twitter Lists may not be popular, for exactly the reasons you describe, but they're really useful for two purposes: if you follow a LOT of people (for whatever reason), you can use Twitter for 'people whose posts I actually want to read' and if you use it for news consumption, you can make lists for that. I use it especially for the latter; being someone who follows iOS jail breaking, 99% of the time, Twitter is the original source for all of the news related to that.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#115
post #108

Funny, how soon we forget that shit work is what Myspace was all about. That was the use case. Typing in a giant, unstructured list of your favorite artists or installing some way-too-busy image as your profile background in order to impress your friends was the highlight of the "social network" as it existed in 2004. People, mostly women in my experience, loved that "shit work" the same way they loved putting on mak…

> People, mostly women in my experience, loved that "shit work" the same way they loved putting on makeup or shopping for uncomfortable clothes. Really?

It could very well just be the people I know. It isn't meant to be sexist.

My point is that people enjoy putting effort into their public persona and appearance, and put up with a lot of crap to perfect it.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading your three situations, I have another one which I've been thinking about: a post which is informative and in some way beneficial to the public, but which a significant portion of the people you know simply do not care about. For example, you may have an excellent piece of commentary about the history of Unix and the state of X, Y, Z in modern operating system design. Most of your non-technical friends, along…

I think the answer is what I call 'subscribable circles' in this blog post: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/12261287667/in-defense-of-the... Which actually works a lot like RSS. You have certain named feeds, e.g. "Unix." Then people looking at your profile can subscribe to that feed if they're interested in what you have to say about Unix.

Back in the day, we called that "Usenet".
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