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Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

zachholman.com

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Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#81

Post by mgkimsal »

aprescott wrote: post #24
Pewpewarrows wrote: post #10

He's right in that Facebook was helpful by auto-creating certain "groups" of friends for you based on profile information. Where this completely breaks down is once you move past the trivial task of auto-populating categories for your location, school, and work. As I see it there are three modes of sharing: The first is where my post is quite innocent and generic, so I just want to declare it to the world. This goes…

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 see a couple things needing to happen, then this sort of thing will largely be dealt with automatically.

1 - determining the type of content based on words, size, etc. based on the type of content the system would automatically filter it on the receiver's end. if the receiver has typically ignored or deleted 'history of unix' type stuff from me, the receiver/reading app will file it away, and note to the receiver that something's been received, but it's probably not important. Like 'spam/ham' filtering, but as another dimension. (yam? tasty for some, untasty for others?)

2 - using signals of other people in the ecosystem as more signals in the 'spam/ham/yam' algorithm. If I post something that all my geek friends read/share/comment about, those interactions should count towards an 'interest' score on that piece when it's presented (or not) to my mom, for example.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#83

Post by ryanwaggoner »

Pewpewarrows wrote: post #10

He's right in that Facebook was helpful by auto-creating certain "groups" of friends for you based on profile information. Where this completely breaks down is once you move past the trivial task of auto-populating categories for your location, school, and work. As I see it there are three modes of sharing: The first is where my post is quite innocent and generic, so I just want to declare it to the world. This goes…

So to prevent clogging the feeds of the rest of my friends, I submit it to a specific group like "Biking Buddies." Facebook can't learn this or automatically set it up.

I think Facebook already does this. No, they don't setup actual groups, but the ratio of stuff your friends (and pages you've liked) post to what ends up in your feed is probably 10:1. That might be way off, but the point is that FB is filtering the feed based on your relationship with the person, how often they post, the content of the post, etc. At least this is what I've gleaned from reading about this in various places, but I'd love to be corrected or get more detail if anyone has it.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#84

Post by joebadmo »

aprescott wrote: post #24
Pewpewarrows wrote: post #10

He's right in that Facebook was helpful by auto-creating certain "groups" of friends for you based on profile information. Where this completely breaks down is once you move past the trivial task of auto-populating categories for your location, school, and work. As I see it there are three modes of sharing: The first is where my post is quite innocent and generic, so I just want to declare it to the world. This goes…

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.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#85

Post by eric-hu »

> Some people still like shit work. They can spend an hour moving Twitter accounts to special Lists, and then at the end of it look back and say “Boy, I spent an hour doing this. I really accomplished a lot today!” You didn’t. You did shit work.

This made me laugh.

I half-agree with the post. There is an element of "shit work" that actually makes users feel engaged. For instance, my iGoogle homepage has feeds set up with sites I've had to hunt down an RSS for and manually enter. I've had to invest time into rearranging the layout to my priorities.

It's 'shit work' in that it's manual and somewhat trial-and-error, but it leaves me feeling more invested in the product if I'm ultimately more satisfied with the end result.

Disclaimer: I am a PC/ubuntu guy, so I understand that mine may not be the mainstream opinion.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#86

Post by sehugg »

dprice1 wrote: post #30

I use twitter lists, in part because Tweetdeck makes them easy to view. I like to follow the various food trucks around town, but usually I am only interested in them when hungry. Having them collected in a list keeps them out of my main feed. They are a pain to maintain, however.

One under-appreciated feature of lists is that they can also be followed. For example someone else could follow your carefully-cultivated list of food trucks! (I do this with someone else's list :) )

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#87

Post by henryprecheur »

Sometime shitwork can be a very good way to find new possibilities. A lot of people do shitwork that's immensely useful, like editors on Wikipedia, moderators on reddit and forums, people who enter all the data into imdb. I don't see how those people could be replaced by algorithms with what we know now.

Sometime shitwork needs to be done because you can't simplify. I'm doubtful that Facebook's auto-group feature would work for me. Maybe me doing shitwork on Google+ is what work for me, because I value my freedom to control my information online.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#89

Post by strager »

joebadmo wrote: post #59
bodegajed wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Just dump everyone in one Circle

To me, this is shit work (that the author was talking about).

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#90

Post by tensor »

scott_s wrote: post #47
dos1 wrote: post #12

For one, I don't really feel like the expletive in the title helped his cause at all. A better title would have been "Facebook suggests groupings of your friends for you!" I also thought his example was contrived. I mean, is there anyone who's so worried about their social networks that they will hem and haw over whether someone is a coworker or drinking buddy or whatever? And if there is someone like that, well than…

"Shit work" is a common enough phrase that it seemed appropriate to me.

A phrase is not deemed appropriate solely because it is common. There are and have been many inappropriate common phrases in use over the years.

The author had an interesting point, but I found his use of "shit work" over and over to be distasteful enough to not want to read his blog again. It is an overloaded and crass term that only served to hurt his otherwise interesting argument.

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