Don't Give Your Users Shit Work • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#51

Post by danso » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 9:56 PM UTC

Timothee wrote: post #33

danso wrote: post #17

The author seems to be missing a gigantic point of order here. The reason why Facebook is algorithmically able to determine groups for you is because you, the user, have already entered in fields for Work, School, Location, etc. So the user has had to do a small amount of shit work for Facebook to do its magic. Of course, that's a very small amount of work relative to manually placing friends into circles. But G+ doe…

I think that the part where entering your info into Facebook appears less like shit work is that it's typically factual and structured: I worked there, I studied here, these people are family members. Google +'s circles are completely up-to-you, for better or for worse, and you hit ambiguous parts more quickly: is that guy a friend or an acquaintance? Should I put him in "Tech", "Ruby", both? But of course, as you go…

No disagreement there...I think it's just extremely difficult for Google+ to do auto-circling without either:

a) Creating a Facebook-like profile system, with more regimented fields and discrete data.

b) Totally disregarding users' privacy by doing it for them.

All of these are technically possible for Google, but they also have their major drawbacks. Where Google has been able to do it without downside - your private list of closest GMail and GChat contacts - it has.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#52

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 10:00 PM UTC

seigenblues wrote: post #48

I'd really love for a social network to correctly anticipate all the people i'd like to share something with, and to automagically categorize stuff like that. It'd be sweet. But it seems like the worst-case scenario if it gets it wrong could be pretty terrible. He's absolutely right, though, that a key problem with circles and lists and other shit work is that it's very rarely well integrated into the clients. (I als…

[deleted]

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#53

Post by pud » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 10:06 PM UTC

The problem is that the cost/benefit of creating lists & circles isn't high enough.

Many developers obsess over the edge-case of "how do I post secret information that is only shown to the correct list?"

When in fact, normal people just want to post "Going to Aunt Edna's tomorrow!" to their family list, because it's irrelevant to non-family.

It seems Facebook agrees, with their loosey-goosey smart lists.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#54

Post by jasonbarone » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 10:09 PM UTC

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #14

nchuhoai wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the point he is making is that users shouldnt have to do this work. The circle feature implies that they will automatically will take care of it when in fact it doesnt. It's a lot of manual labor as he elaborates.

So, it's not magic because it can't read my mind, thus it's a bad feature because it takes work to fully, fully utilize? I guess I'm still missing the point. It'd be nice if Google knew my relationship with these people or somehow knew my best friends from my colleagues or tech interests, but that's asking a bit much.

Google (or any network) could make it easier for us to use the feature. Facebook has figured this out and actively has some features to help.

The main ones that come to mind are the ability for other people to create relationships, whether personal or work related. This eliminates some of the work when building your profile. Then Facebook implemented the auto-grouping of lists depending on employers, previous interaction, locations, etc. And lastly, they monitor your graph on a daily basis and serve up possible additions to your friend lists which can be added with a simple click.

Google could have done a little of this using Google data such as Gmail lists and all, but they haven't (yet). Personally, I think Facebook's lists and grouping feature is far superior and I'm actually finding out from non-technical friends that they're actually using the friend lists. I suppose this has to do with Facebook automatically pushing a number of default lists to users...

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#55

Post by joebadmo » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 10:15 PM UTC

Griping about an optional feature? Really?

Circles have great utility for me for two reasons.

1. Like Twitter lists (which I use, thanks Tweetdeck), I want to see information from certain groups of people for different things.

2. I want to disseminate different types of information to different groups of people.

If you don't find either of these use-cases compelling, there is nothing stopping you from ignoring them completely.

I will never ever ever trust an algorithm to get this right, except for the most trivial cases, and if the case is that trivial, I will default to public.

I think ultimately the problem is that these features are trying to replicate offline social context, but only getting halfway there. I've written more about this: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/11670022371/intimacy-is-perfo...

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#56

Post by bodegajed » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 10:18 PM UTC

joebadmo wrote: post #55

Griping about an optional feature? Really? Circles have great utility for me for two reasons. 1. Like Twitter lists (which I use, thanks Tweetdeck), I want to see information from certain groups of people for different things. 2. I want to disseminate different types of information to different groups of people. If you don't find either of these use-cases compelling, there is nothing stopping you from ignoring them c…

Optional? I don't think so. Google Circle _is_ the main feature. That's everything Google+ is about.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#57

Post by pyrhho » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 10:22 PM UTC

And yet I still have to explicitly click the 'Mark all notifications as read' button after reading, and closing a pull request on github...

Edit: That probably came across more snarky than I intended. The point was that this is easily said, but hard to do right.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#58

Post by kelnage » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 10:22 PM UTC

bodegajed wrote: post #56

joebadmo wrote: post #55

Griping about an optional feature? Really? Circles have great utility for me for two reasons. 1. Like Twitter lists (which I use, thanks Tweetdeck), I want to see information from certain groups of people for different things. 2. I want to disseminate different types of information to different groups of people. If you don't find either of these use-cases compelling, there is nothing stopping you from ignoring them c…

Optional? I don't think so. Google Circle _is_ the main feature. That's everything Google+ is about.

But you don't need to use every Circle - you can dump everyone you know in one Circle and leave it at that.

I've got to say, this is very much a complaint that doesn't appear to have a good solution. Beyond any sort of simple AI that groups based on last name, school or employer (like Facebook does, I guess), there's not much to go on when it comes to automatically creating Circles.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#59

Post by joebadmo » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 10:24 PM UTC

bodegajed wrote: post #56

joebadmo wrote: post #55

Griping about an optional feature? Really? Circles have great utility for me for two reasons. 1. Like Twitter lists (which I use, thanks Tweetdeck), I want to see information from certain groups of people for different things. 2. I want to disseminate different types of information to different groups of people. If you don't find either of these use-cases compelling, there is nothing stopping you from ignoring them c…

Optional? I don't think so. Google Circle _is_ the main feature. That's everything Google+ is about.

Circle management is optional. If you want to use it like Twitter, you can. Just dump everyone in one Circle and spray your content indiscriminately to everyone in it.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#60

Post by taariqlewis » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 10:36 PM UTC

I think the list scope and features differ with respect to the nature of the type of followers. Twitter is a broadcast medium. Thus, Twitter lists are very different than Google+ Circles which are asynchronous sharing vs. asynchronous follow. There are also 2 types of shit work:

1. List Creation

2. List Maintenance

These are two different activities that in different networks require varying attention and utility out of the effort.